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Paul McCarthy The Garden, 1991-92
‘I made a piece, The Garden [1992], with two animatronic men, an older one and a younger one, in a large fake garden, fornicating with nature. They’re self-consumed. They don’t look outside the garden. Prior to making the piece, I’d watched a program on television about Belize in Central America. There was a segment on the Chicago Cubs fans living in Belize. It seems that local Chicago TV is broadcast in Belize, and the segment of the program was about how it was affecting Belize. I was thinking then that Belize watches Chicago, but Chicago never thinks about Belize. As a body, the American population is self-absorbed. The populist TV news in America now is only about Trump. If there is anything about the outside, it’s only in relationship to Trump.’
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Brian Weil Sex, 1980–82
‘Coordinating “deviant” sexual assignations in the pre-Internet era was no easy matter; doing so required magazine subscriptions, stealth, postage, and patience. This was how it was in 1980, when photographer Brian Weil began placing ads in fetish periodicals seeking participants for a project titled “Sex,” 1980–82. The result was a haunting series of some two dozen photographs of alt-erotic revelry.’
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Jean-Xavier Renaud Le Pontet, 2010
aquarelles
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Nelson Henricks Life Session, 2016
‘Life Session is based on the first two minutes of a 1970s gay porn film. Shot on Super8, the original 10-minute film takes place in an artist’s studio: we see an artist drawing a live model, close-ups of the charcoal drawings he is executing, and shots of the model looking back at the artist. With the aid of several assistants, Henricks has made pencil drawings of every second frame of this two-minute excerpt. The installation features a 16mm loop of the redrawn animated sequences intercut with the live action footage from the original film, as well as a series of preparatory drawings.’
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Perseas Kostopoulos Untitled, 2012
Ink on Paper
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Clayton Cubitt Various, 2003 – 2009
‘“Erotica is using a feather,” wrote Isabel Allende, “pornography is using the whole chicken.” Clayton Cubitt takes Allende at her word.’
Untitled, Blue
Flesh For Fantasy (Girl #5), Cream Series
Untitled, Blue
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Nan Goldin, Clemens Entering Jens, 2001
Cibachrome Print
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Anna Uddenberg Journey of Self Discovery, 2016
‘Anna Uddenberg’s sculptural figure takes an intimate selfie of her butt with the aid of a selfie stick. As though unable to exist without an audience, Uddenberg seeks to capture the aspirational persona—as opposed to the people—that dominate social media. Offering amusing yet critical observations about the presentation of the self, the viewer is left to answer the question of whether these works pieces are satire or homage to contemporary lifestyles.’
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Jesper Fabricius Stellungen, 2011
‘Jesper Fabricius collages vintage pornographic images into this 24-page color booklet. Snippets from images of genitalia and other naked erogenous parts are pasted over full-page sex scenes to bombard the reader with raw, frenetically positioned imagery. The chopped and screwed images have the odd effect of removing the reader’s typical shock or titillation at such explicit sexual imagery, instead breaking down the sexual act into component parts and harmless pixels.’
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SUKA OFF BLACK BOX LAB ver.07, 2016
‘Inside Flesh is a project founded in 2007 by artistic collective called SUKA OFF. Its members are Piotr Wegrzynski, the founder, visual artist, performer, and Sylvia Lajbig, classical philologist and performer. This collective presented artwork in many art festivals, theaters and galleries all over Europe, in the US, Japan, Brazil, and so on. In 2007, they launched the Inside Flesh project that ”has always been focused on human carnality in all its aspects.” These experiments in the field of art, theater and the possibilities of the human body eventually led them into pornography of its own kind.’
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Cindy Sherman Untitled, 1992
photographs
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Dash Snow Untitled (Dakota Smoking), 2003
Digital C Print
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Van Lieshout Domestikator, 2017
‘According to the New York Times, the Louvre has decided to cancel an installation called ‘Domestikator’ by Dutch art and design collective Van Lieshout, which features two buildings having sex with each other (made ostensibly in order to show “the power of humanity over the world and its hypocritical approach to nature”). The exhibit was scheduled to open on October 19 in the museum’s Tuileries Gardens.
‘According to Le Monde, Louvre president Jean-Luc Martinez expressed concerns about the sculpture’s “brutal aspect,” pointing out that it risks being misunderstood by visitors to the gardens.” The museum was reportedly also concerned at having the 40-foot sculpture located near a children’s playground.’
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Sam Jackson Various, 2009
‘The fast-emerging UK artist Sam Jackson often depicts scenes of explicit sex in order to highlight their scarcity in more ‘conventional’ areas of art such as painting.’
Mother, 2009
The Ebony Clock, 2010
The Blue Dream, 2009
Vaginal Freedom, 2009
It Will Happen
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Marlene Dumas Fingers 1999
‘Marlene Dumas has produced studies taken from mass produced pornographic images. This grants them, what Dumas calls, an ‘amoral touch’. It is interesting that she painted porn and not a life model in order to convey neutral morality. Just as ‘amoral’ stands directly between good and bad, and so, it seems, Dumas, refuses to pass judgement.’
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Will Coles Untitled, 2016
‘I keep making these kind-of collages because it’s still relevant. ‘Investment Art’ is destroying art, the art world has become completely financialised. It wasn’t like this until a few decades ago, even then it’s taken several decades to get to the kind of bullshit art prices we have now.’
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Marc Quinn Maquette for Siren (Kate Moss), 2008
Sculpture, Painted Bronze – 24 Gold Leaf on Bronze
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Stuart Sanford Ouroboros (Sean Ford), 2018
Epoxy resin, 24k gold leaf
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Nicole Wittenberg Various, 2015
‘How do you describe a form? Traditionally, you do it by accentuating the lights and darks, which Nicole does in a kind of brutal way. People think everything’s been done, but that’s not true. Wittenberg dares herself to do precisely that which scares her.’
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Joan Jonas Mirror Piece I, 1969
‘Mirror Piece I (1969) featured performers carrying oblong mirrors in slowly choreographed movements before the audience, alternately reflecting their own bodies and the surroundings, and offering the audience a flattened view of itself as an image within the performance.’
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Jeff Burton Various, 2014 – 2018
‘Drawing from his experience as a photographer on adult film sets, Jeff Burton shoots scenes of gay sex from the obliquely suggestive to the pornographic with a surprising nonchalance.’
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Narcissister The Face (Performing male facial features), 2019
‘Performance-driven sculpture, activated by the artist and other performers.’
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Stephen Irwin Various, 2007 – 2009
‘The late Lousiville-based artist Stephen Irwin began making the works for which he would become most widely known in the early 2000s. A lifelong heart patient working always in the shadow of his own poor health, Irwin was intensely focused on the aesthetic quality of ephemerality, particularly as it might be staged and performed through interaction with the viewer. In his “rub-outs,” Irwin would select pages from vintage pornography, undoing the lusty plastic polish of the magazine by rubbing out the sheen and often much of the image itself. Through a variety of astringent processes, he would soften the blunt sexuality of the found image, abstracting the depicted scene and invoking a more suggestive and expansive erotic landscape of tenderness and perversion.’
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Marilyn Minter 100 Food Porn, 1990
‘These videos were played on late night TV commerical slots purchased by the artist Marilyn Minter in 1990. You would have seen them on breaks from Letterman or Arsenio mixed in with commercials for M&Ms or frozen dinners.’
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Mark McKnight Various, 2021
‘McKnight serves us editorial sex. His photographs depict, in high-contrast black-and-white, moments of beatific calm in the midst of carnal frenzy.’
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Evelyn Bencicova Ecce Homo, 2012
Sculpture, installation
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Christopher Hartmann Various, 2019 – 2020
Oil on linen
Big Butt (Don’t look at me)
I will heal.
Untitled.
Untitled.
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Robert Gober Untitled (Man Coming Out Of Woman), 1993 – 1994
Wax, human hair, sock, leather shoe.
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Vivienne Maricevic Various, 1981 – 1986
‘When I see a chicken in a swimsuit, I think swimming. When I see a chicken all plucked, I think dinner.’
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Takashi Murakami My Lonesome Cowboy, 1998
‘Traditions of American mythology-The ideas and stereotypes of the American cowboy (using his own ejaculation for his cowboy lasso) but combining it w hyper sexualized male figure that’s speaks to animated traditions.’
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Sergei Eisenstein Various, 1931 -1948
‘Sergei Eisenstein made drawings more or less constantly from the time he was a child until the end of his life, with only a short break in the 1920s when he was making his first films. Among the thousands of preserved drawings is a large collection depicting people (and animals, and various anthropomorphized features of sexual anatomy) having sex. Rarely discussed or analysed, the sex drawings are usually seen in a purely biographical context, but they were thematically and aesthetically fundamental to Eisenstein’s artistic and theoretical writing, which explores the diverse ways that perception, consciousness and creativity originate in the body.’
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Raymond Pettibon Blowjob, 2001
Pen and ink on paper
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Unknown Untitled, unknown
‘This girl is real artist. She have a lot of fun with her boobs so as her lover. Hard big and young those boobs are great tool for painting.’
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Betty Tompkins Fuck Paintings, 1969 – 1975
‘The story of Betty Tompkins is one of the prime examples of the exclusion and repression of female artists in contemporary history. In New York between 1969 and 1975, she realised a series of large format photorealistic paintings in black and white entitled Fuck Paintings. Smuggled and brought back from Thailand by her husband, these heterosexual, pornographic scenes were created from close up images of intercourse. Invited by the auctioneer Guy Loudmer to show her work in Paris in 1973, she watched as her works were immediately seized by customs officers, an act of censorship that led to a long legal battle and the disappearance of the paintings until 2002, when they were finally shown by the dealer Mitchell Algus in New York, then at the Lyon Biennial in 2003.’
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Merci to you! And thank you for the extra added info. ** Misanthrope, Ah, one hellish day a week. Could be worse. It’s a very rare thing in the sky that cant be identified or, I guess, mistakenly misidentified. My weekend holds promise, thanks. Nice, I love finding abandoned writing that turns out to at least seemingly just in need some sprucing up and such. Enjoy that! ** Tosh Berman, Yes, I saw that the GIF inventor died. Count me high among those who owe him a ton. ** _Black_Acrylic, Congrats on your DVD reconnection. How was ‘Tigers Are Not Afraid’? I plan to keep ‘House of Gucci’ at a many barge poles distance. ** Brandon, Oh, no. Why does that so often seem to happen. At least your head let you see through it clearly. I will not test ‘Dark Water’, and thank you for the warning. How did you like ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’? Film stuff is progressing, but there’s not really any new news to share. We’re searching for a Production Manager, and once that job is filled, Zac and I can go to LA and start actually getting stuff underway. Otherwise, things are A-okayish. Hopefully my (and your) weekends will fill our respective coffers with anecdotes and stuff. Enjoy Saturday and even Sunday! ** Bill, If you remind me, I will. Are you fully back up to speed and ready to make the weekend your can of worms? (What a strange saying). ** Steve Erickson, Ha ha, yes, that is curious. I remember thinking the equation you proposed was more than possible when I was on acid. Everyone, Steve has ‘reviewed the ’80s rom-com throwback THE LOST CITY’ — aka the movie where Sandra Bullock’s cosmetic surgery reaches the mildly grotesque stage — ‘for the Nashville Scene’ here. Enjoy finalising the album! Great! ** T. J., Hi, T. J. If you liked ‘DDP’, you’ll like ‘Headless’, his second book of stories that I published through my imprint Little House on the Bowery years ago. I think (?) it’s still in print. ‘Loony Porn’ sounds pretty doable in your description. Okay, I’ll spring for it. Thanks. ‘Drive My Car’: I thought it was good, but I didn’t think it was remarkable by any means. The first hour is really drawn out and kind of tiresome, but when it gets to Hiroshima and he’s putting together the play, it finally becomes what I guess it was meant to be, which is something more conventional, and is pretty well done. It wasn’t bad, but I certainly don’t get what the big fuss about it is. Hm, ‘Camp Hollywood’ almost sounds intriguing, but … maybe on a very slow night. I remember not knowing what to think about Ruiz’s ‘Treasure Island’ in a kind of charmed way. How’s your weekend? Any input (or output) of special note? ** Rafe, Hi, Rafe. Good old Kyler James. I want him to do his thing for me in the park someday. I’ve never been there when he was there unless I’m spacing. Nice about the play reading. I went to a poetry reading last night by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, and they were hilarious. I did not expect them to be so funny at all. Indeed about Benjamin’s cross-practice influence. I’m happy because he’s finally, finally getting close to finishing a new collection of stories. I Zoom with him every couple of weeks, and I’m doing everything I can to schmooze his nose onto that grindstone. My ‘DMC’ review, such as it is, is just up above this. Did you see it? What did you think? Have a great weekend! ** Okay. You might not want to look at this weekend’s post if you’re at work or at school or sitting next to your grandma, but I suppose it’s a little late to warn you about that, isn’t it? Oops. See you on Monday.
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