Belfast: Under your skin at
Catalyst
It's
what I saw, what I liked about it and then what it meant
to me. What I think the implications are and the reality
that is formed by that information. Where it pointed to
in my fantasies, my desires and tastes.1
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Richard
Kern: Untitled Images, cibachrome photographs;
courtesy Catalyst Arts
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Under your skin
at Catalyst Arts presented the work of Richard Kern and Annie
Sprinkle as means to develop dialogue on issues of sex, sexuality
and place. The show itself was accompanied by a publication
dealing with these issues, a public discussion held at the
Ormeau Baths Gallery, and a series of films screened by Cinilingus
at various venues in Belfast.
A more developed discussion
of place emerged outside of the gallery show, as was perhaps
likely considering that the artists hailed from the U.S. The
gallery work dealt with sexuality in what seemed initially
a more concentrated way. This may however be deceptive, as
the places occupied by the work are perhaps only less visible
due to their ubiquity. American popular culture, from which
both practitioners develop and play with their respective
aesthetics or modes, can easily be passed over as scenery,
as a given - the imperial implied as empirical; the triumph
of quantity.
Issues of quantity
and quality are crucial, considering the artists' wilful use
of modes of representation churned out in industrial quantities.
Kern's work displays a fashion/fetish photography gloss, while
Sprinkle, as avowed multimedia whore, mutates pornography.
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Annie Sprinkle:
Annie Sprinkle Playing Cards, detail;
photo Deirdre McKenna; courtesy Catalyst Arts
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The extent to which
the work negotiates the spectacular and illusory cornucopias
of fashion and porno industries to engage with sexuality in
a more expansive and fluid way could be considered a measure
of its success (in the context of Under your skin's
brief). This is perhaps unfair to Kern, whose photographs
are tailored to a particular genre, appealing primarily as
pin-ups. The images are coherent but lack the enduring energy
of his earlier film work, in which an implied presence of
the voyeuristic lens (and occasional cameo by the evil cameraman
himself) creates a more engaged and engaging dynamic.
The negotiation cited
is, however, exactly the challenge addressed throughout Annie
Sprinkle's sexual evolutionary path. The videos and books
that comprise her substantial presence in Under your skin
provide an extensive overview of her career, encompassing
incarnations as prostitute, porn star, performance artist
and sex educator. All these facets remain apparent in her
current role as educator, particularly in a demonstrated understanding
of the continuing educational importance of showing sexual
acts. Her awareness that demystification is a continual process
displays an astute recognition that tendencies towards bodily
ignorance and social repression are also continual. The work
operates at this presentational level, exercising a social
and educational function, dealing primarily with sex not sexuality.
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Annie Sprinkle:
Herstory of Porn, video stills; courtesy
Catalyst Arts
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This question of sexuality,
our sexuality, its intrusion into the visual, its liberatory
reality and resistance to colonisation persists under the
skin of the show, an incomparable leviathan. The total universe
proposed by this reality2 is
offset by awareness of the regulatory function of these images
and their selection. The exhibition functions as one manifestation
of a pattern of regulation and control of sexuality. Hierarchical
power employs the simulation of consensus, eschewing crude
prohibition, as method of control:
it
integrates little by little every deviation in its own heart.
So everything is in peace, opaque in the flat norm. Everything
is equal, and the dialogue dies away (for lack of opposition).3
Strategies for liberated
sexuality could well be envisaged as flows and relationships
of energy, as proposed by Annie Sprinkle - this applies to
embodied practice though, not to conceptualisation and discourse.
It is the criminal and the obscene that allows sexuality to
flourish in these modes, as realised by Bataille and Genet,
amongst others. Under your skin perhaps then provides
a pleasurable precursor of debates yet to come on these matters.
1Peter
Sotos, Index, Creation, London, 1998, p.172
2Compare
Susan Sontag, The Pornographic Imagination, in George
Bataille, Story of the Eye, London, Penguin, 1982,
pp. 111-115
3Jean-Pierre
Turmel in J.A.Rapoza (ed.), Thee Psychick Bible, San
Francisco, 1994, p.37. See also p.163-169.
Under your skin,
Catalyst Arts, June 2002
Article reproduced
from CIRCA 101, Autumn 2002, pp.
84-85.
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