- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
Tickets for ‘Destricted: Art and Sex’ were sold out to an eager over 18’s audience weeks ago. Its popularity was no doubt due to the warnings of ‘real sex’ and ‘highly explicit’ pornographic content. The proposition is a 180 people strong collective viewing of the most explicit films ever to be legally rated 18, all this whilst sat cheek-to-cheek in Tate Moderns’ sumptuous red Starr Auditorium. Evidently this was not going to be a normal screening. The majority of people would much prefer to test their moral and legal boundaries of sexual explicitness in private. This factor makes Destricted: Art and Sex knowingly experimental, the enforced communal viewing transforms the screening into a participatory audience experience, one that performs unwritten codes of accepted social and sexual behaviour. According to a Tate source, in spite of the implicit ‘no touching’ rule imposed, the first screening saw one person forcedly removed from the front row “whilst enjoying themselves too much”. It did not bode well for the faint-hearted.
Squashed into the auditorium it isn’t clear whether people are attending as social experiment, as a test of moral and artistic boundaries, or simply looking for cheap thrills. Each of us warily eyes the person sat next to us as the lights go down. Pitch black. The first film-Matthew Barney’s ‘Hoist’- is slow to surface on screen. We hear dripping. The drops resonate as if falling inside a wet cave. Still dark. Our brains scramble for any recognisable signifiers. Drip. Drip. Surfacing slowly out of the blackness is a damp moss, on rock. The perverts will be disappointed. Where is the porn? Drip. The moss rustles slightly. Up, then down. Out of the darkness an extreme close-up on a large black slug puts the surrounding landscape into a naturalistic context. The whole scene continues to slowly rise and fall. It is only as the face-end of the slug ejaculates on camera that a perfectly choreographed moment of recognition arrives and the sexual narrative pieces of Barneys’ puzzle fall into place. The slug is a dark glistening penis, standing proudly out of its foreskin away from a crust-covered body with a moss of matted pubic hair. The monster penis lurches closer towards the camera, threatening to break out from the confines of the screen. It has penetration on its mind.
The opening shot of ‘Hoist’ completely de-familiarises the anticipated sex. With it, Barney brings us to a visual blank slate, a cleared palette on which to better experience the oncoming hardcore. ‘Hoist’ also forces an important aesthetic jolt: the recognition that our expectations of explicit visual imagery are heavily ingrained within the narrative, pace, content and camera techniques of web, DVD and television sex. As viewers we are so saturated in the porn industry’s on-screen presentation of what sexual explicitness looks like, that despite the art gallery scenario, we literally cannot see the wood for the trees.
The aim of Destricted: Art and Sex is to trouble the fine line between art and pornography. Its’ inclusion in the Tate programme represents an attempt to revisit complex discussions of explicit sexual imagery in visual art in light of feminist art historical discourse of the last two decades. A number of films succeeded in refreshing those narratives. Amongst them Marina Abramovich’s ‘Balkan Erotic Epic’ in which women re-enact ethnic fertility folktale rituals while dressed in traditional Balkan garb. In one scene women are situated on a hillside vigorously exposing and massaging their naked breasts in order to scare off unseen enemies. Abromovich brilliantly mocks a mythical fetishisization of the sexualised female body, her comedic distancing strips these women of any sexual objectification. She manages to present sex, and the meat of sex: the body, as un-erotic. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine anyone being aroused by such ludicrous antics. Larry Clark’s ‘Impaled’ uses a combination of documentary and interview techniques to take a frank look at the porn industry itself. It is a fascinating insight into the motivations of porn actresses and the desires of young boys who aspire to bed them. In filming the porn actress interviews: the ‘casting couch’ scenario, and the subsequent on-the-spot sex between the successful candidates, including the unappealing moments where their anal sex goes unexpectedly wrong, Clark shows a troubling and rarely seen side of porn that is not usually caught on camera.
Richard Princes’ ‘House Call’ was a low point in the eight-film screening. Prince attempts to lift his footage out of the generic 1970’s style of ‘big cock, big tits, cum-shot’ porn simply in virtue of his positioning as a visual artist. Knowledge of Prince’s previous output is necessary in order to distinguish him from the low-fi, colour soaked visuals and any kind of considered comment or implied irony completely fails. Lodged between the borderline art porn and raw eroticism of the other films Prince’s ‘House Call’ is an inexperienced and over-excited juvenile spurt.
The initial hard-core penetrative scenes of Destricted: Art and Sex were extremely uncomfortable to watch. Yet half way through there came a saturation point past which nothing could have moved the audience, not sexually, legally or morally. The sheer amount and duration of the explicitness eventually eroded any excitement, shock or eroticism from the pictured sex. Clearly, with prolonged exposure to graphic imagery both individual and collective limits are reached, tested, then breached thus boundaries of acceptable conduct are shifted. This is how porn de-sensitises attitudes toward real or ‘domestic’ sex and successfully performs its own version of skewed sexual or violent urges.
In the context of Destricted: Art and Sex the absence of any sort of gay or same-sex explicit imagery is a real omission. Explicit gay imagery is recognised to be at the forefront of innovation within the related fields of performance, cabaret, visual art and porn. Specifically, gay porn also makes up a huge percentage of filmic output both on the web and DVD. One can only speculate as to why it was omitted but for ‘Destricted: Art and Sex’ on screen gay hard-core was a missed opportunity to test some real boundaries. After all, it’s just sex.
Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer with ‘Writing From Live Art’, a Live Art UK initiative.
