Flowers And Meat Cleavers
Menachem Wecker
"If some people had their way, we’d be all bundled up with only our noses sticking out," said David Quammen from behind the reception desk of the Washington DC Museum of Contemporary Art in Georgetown. Quammen, 66, is the director of MOCAdc and founder of the Figure Models Guild of Washington, DC. He paused and rethought his comment on censorship. "They might see the noses as too similar to penises," he decided.
Three such people quit Quammen’s email list when they saw postings foretelling "Erotica 2006" which hung for the month of March at MOCAdc. Quammen was not surprised by the quitters; three deserters out of a list with upwards of 1,700 subscribers hardly sent him to the resume drafting board. For his part, Quammen sees eroticism as a God-given thing. "Eroticism was given to us so we could procreate," he said. In an interview with www.Artist-Perspectives.com, Quammen further invoked a religious tone. "I think that Western mores regarding nudity are a bit overdone and a bit prudish. For those who believe in God, we are supposedly made in His image. If that is fact, then it strikes me as hypocritical to be ashamed of His image when it is presented in an artistic endeavor."
In a time where censorship for God’s sake seems to have gotten the better of artistic freedom of expression, "Erotica 2006" seems all the more edgy for its claim that erotica is an exercise in religious devotion. But some of the pieces would not strike even the most conservative of viewers as erotic if not for the context of the show. Suzanne Ludlum-Loose’s circle print of a flower recalls much of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower work. The print is mostly a study in white with some magenta and yellow about the flower’s stigma. In the context of an erotica show the image reads as a human form. But change the context of the exhibit and the image could just as easily represent a face with a long nose (the stigma and sepals read as a mouth) or a bird flapping its wings as it could a vaginal form.
Venus N. McCrea’s acrylic Solitude literally depicts a nude woman sitting in (or from the look of it, more upon) water. Her back is to the viewer, and the image is surreal in palette and content. The water, which hits the horizon about two thirds of the way up, is a light blue, with much white mixed within. Some plant-like forms occupy the sides of the painting framing the figure. The plants recall Dr. Seuss’ ambiguous fantastic plants that could just as well be aliens or figures with poor hair days. A pomegranate lies beside the woman’s right hand, and part of it has been cut loose of the fruit. The sky is a glorious sunset (or sunrise), a variegated wash of blue, purple, ochre, bright red and white.
But the most interesting part of the image, if it can be said to have one, is a square window–surreal in temperament–sliced straight through the woman’s back. Horizontal bars line the woman’s back from her posterior up to the window, and the bars recall steps up the bark of a tree house. A miniature version of the women sits inside the larger woman. The woman literally has her innards bared, but the image reads as cold rather than erotic and tempting. A good friend of mine, who is also a painter once told me that he liked paintings that he could take to bed with him, paintings in which forms appear as if they would be warm to the touch. McCrea’s forms are decidedly cold, which raises the question: Can a nude that looks dead and cold to the touch be erotic?
Erik Sandberg’s study of a man is also somewhat of a cold, scary renegade at "Erotica, 2006." The painting is a nude, but it has far more of the Twilight Zone in it than Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The painting shows a male nude holding his left foot (foreshortened in the extreme foreground) with his left hand. In his clenched right fist, the man holds a meat cleaver. Whether he could not find nail clippers and has opted to upgrade his nail cutting machinery or whether he has intentions of amputating his toe or self-castration, the image is unsettling. Arguably, the image is also unsettling because it is a male nude rather than a female who poses with toes and meat cleaver. Indeed, the model modestly covers his nakedness with his right ankle. The coloration is naturalistic–it recalls Lucien Freud’s visions of the entire color spectrum within skin intonation–and the deadpan palette, coupled with the violence of the knife and the nakedness of the man create a frightening yet familiar mood. Quammen sees a bias of Western culture which privileges female nudity over male nudity. He cited bird plumes as a natural example of male erotica. But even if the view of female erotica as beautiful and male erotica as dirty is not inherent, Western culture has forged such an artificial distinction.
The rest of the pieces at "Erotica, 2006" are more of the regular props, magazines and images one would expect of an erotica show. Sitting in a gallery space, these pieces appear abducted from their usual contexts. It is too obvious to simply place pornographic magazines and sex toys in a gallery show about erotica. "Erotica, 2006" is successful when it is complicated. Sandberg’s nude with meat cleaver is unexpected. It is erotic and dangerous. The model’s gaze is so intent that his act seems like some sort of religious ritual. This complexity also surfaces in the flowers and in Solitude. These images demand that viewers reconsider their forms. A powerful dissonance surfaces when intellectually the viewer tries to interpret an image as erotic, while the eye interprets it as flowers. Thus, paradoxically, "Erotica, 2006" is worth seeing for the pieces that are only ambiguously erotic, while the ones that are too literally erotic are better seen on the magazine rack or in the sex shop.
