Big news, my dearies! Remember that post I wrote a while back about porn is and is not art at the same time? Well I wasn’t just examining the nature of art for fun… although really it is a fascinating subject. No, I was brainstorming. For what? Well, folks,yours truly has been asked to curate an art exhibit in TriBeCa, NYC, next March-May… on the subject of “video sex”! Am I the bomb or what, folks? I won’t give away too many deets just yet, as I’ve still to sign the contract and settle on a specific set of ideas, but check out apexart.com for more information on the space, and check out… well the rest of my writing on the internet… for info on me!
Right now my major thoughts are focusing on the difference between how we all perceive our own personal experiences with pornography and how we exhibit our ideas and feelings about those experiences to the rest of the world. To my way of thinking, for many of us on both the consumer side and the production side of video sex, there is a gulf between what we show to the world as our “public face” about porn—we laugh it off, make fun of it, denigrate it, overthink it, pretend we don’t use it, get all vehemently against it, love it too much, modify our bodies or behaviors to fit into what we see in porn, hate porn stars for their bodies… The list of ways in which we behave toward porn in public conversation is almost neverending. But it is not nearly as nuanced or interesting, I think, as the real, unfiltered, unchecked response that we have privately to this material. The interaction that goes on between us and our TVs or computer screens or romance novels or what have you, the stuff we don’t talk about that happens in our hearts and minds when we encounter porn… That’s the good stuff. Not the masturbation—that’s boring. The thoughts and feelings and ways in which we reconcile the ones we don’t like with the ideals we hold. The ways we ignore or fixate on those things we hate and let ourselves be bared completely, physically and emotionally, to what we DO like. And even more interesting than these private thoughts and experiences or the outward displays we show each other is the space between. If we can assume that people’s public faces with regard to filmed sex, whether we take a positive or negative or somewhere-between stance, are held an arm’s length away from the real experiences we have with pornography when we’re alone in our intimate spaces…. Then what happens between point A and point B? How do we get to point B at all?
I want to examine this idea. I want this to become art. I’ll keep you all updated!