Rotterdam. »I don’t know what pornography is, but I recognise it when I see it«, as an American judge is said to have replied when asked to define pornography.
This point of view, as authoritarian as it is simplistic, was deftly disrupted in the exhibition at Witte de With curated by Thomas Edlinger and Florian Waldvogel, in that the artworks, films, historical documents and fanzines were used to create a pathway that did not give comparably straightforward responses as it took viewers through the exhibition. Instead visitors were confronted with three storeys of explicit depictions of sexuality, which illustrated the well-known and less familiar (sub-) history of pornography in great detail.
The show opened with a simulated »dark room«, in which a bronze figure by Olaf Metzel announces the imminent »forbidden glances« (to cite the exhibition folder). The »forbidden« element in Metzel’s piece was however not the focus on a naked female body but instead the conjunction of this with a headscarf, which the artist has fitted around the head of the naked woman. In the process a connection was established right at the outset between the body thus displayed and a social topic that has acquired virulent force, with Metzel attempting once more to conduct this struggle on the battleground of the female body.
The blunt provocation of the sculpture had little to do with current (post)pornography debates in which the emancipatory potential of the genre takes centre-stage, yet it did compel visitors to the show to consider a feminist perspective by rapidly leading them to consider the »organisation of the sexual as an arena of political debate. «¹. However even before visitors stepped inside the exhibition, the curators had already underscored the feminist slant with a work by the Guerrilla Girls: »The Birth of Feminism« was written in giant letters on a banner designed to resemble a film poster, covering both the entire façade of the house and the exhibition like a kind of protective anti-sexist mantle. The poster depicted three scantily clad Hollywood actresses, Pamela Anderson, Halle Berry and Catherine Zeta-Jones, joined in combat to attain »Equality Now!« in the fake film announced by the poster.
However, it also became apparent in the exhibition that the artists’ group was reproducing a hopelessly outmoded notion of pleasure-hating feminism with this work, for the show recounted considerably more differentiated approaches to female sexuality in early works by Carolee Schneemann, Dorothy Iannone, Martha Rosler or Annie Sprinkle. Whilst Martha Rosler also criticises the porn industry through her critique of the commodification of the female body in her series »Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain« (1966–1972), artists such as Schneemann or Iannone assert their right to self-determined female sexuality through their own images, and Annie Sprinkle’s significant contribution to the PorNo debates is generally recognised, for early on she gave a voice to women working in the pornography industry.
Amongst the materials documenting the history of the porn industry in the exhibition was a recording of Club 90 made by the former porn actress and some colleagues. The black and white recording shows a group of women, half of whom sport T-shirts with the words »Porn Star«, whilst the slogan on the tops of the other half is »Feminist«. Although individual women in the video interviews also on display do not necessarily prove to be feminists, the incorporation of this material presented a less straightforward image of the porn industry after all, an industry in which, as everyone knows, »Hustler« editor, Larry Flint, turned out to be one of the »good guys«: two covers of his magazine are presented in a showcase, one reacting to the reproach of exposing female flesh and the other promising to donate a million dollars to a charity.
Prevailing moral conceptions, which Larry Flint may well have been challenging with his donation, are also the focus of a room devoted to the Lolita phenomenon: newspaper clippings and film posters tell the story of ten-year-old Brooke Shields, who played a twelve-year-old prostitute in the film »Pretty Baby« (1976) by Louis Malle. Shields herself later took her mother to court over her role in the film, whilst the photographs of her as appropriated by Richard Prince do the rounds as an artwork today, entitled »Spiritual America«.
This was not the only work to be given short shrift in the context of the exhibition, which concentrated more on collecting and presenting the entire canon of »queer« avant-garde art (from Jean Genet via Kenneth Anger right up to Tom Burr or Henrik Oleson). For example Andrea Fraser’s Video »Untitled« (2003), in which she slept with a collector for 20,000 dollars, was only mentioned in an information sheet and the film »Fingered« by Richard Kern, difficult to watch because of its violent scenes, was banished from visitors’ immediate field of vision and was screened on a monitor set on the ceiling. However curatorial »correctness«, which did not wish to exclude any images, became most apparent in the last two rooms, for here the accumulation of sexually explicit depictions came to a head: in Room 11 pages from the gay/lesbian magazines »BUTT« and »Girls Like Us« were on display, along with a bumfuck video by the queer artists’ group »Panik Qulture«, whilst in Room 12 hegemonic, and hence primarily heterosexual, pornography predominated. On one side of the room, on several screens, piled one upon the other, excerpts from porn videos created a swirling carousel of fucking that was virtually impossible to assimilate even in merely visual terms, whilst on the other side several monitors were placed on the floor next to each other, screening artists’ videos by Lawrence Weiner, Natalie Djurberg and others. These also used explicit sex scenes, although in his 1976 film »A Bit of a Matter and a Little Bit More« Weiner chose instead to concentrate on the appeal of not-showing, and in her animated »ménage-à-quatre« Djurberg takes the questionable approach of offering a fairly unexamined depiction of the sexual power structure in which a domina and a black slave are entangled. Due to the dense lay-out of the exhibits, it was however virtually impossible to view the videos shown in this room separately and as a consequence the overall effect was probably more likely to support the American judge’s »insight« rather than fostering a more nuanced and thought-provoking elaboration of the various strands in the current pornography debate.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

---