visited the 'sex through the ages' exhibition at the barbican yesterday - a great selection of erotic sculpture, painting, film & photography from antiquity till today, and featuring the great and the good: rodin, warhol, araki, turner, louise bourgeois, hokusai, marlene dumas, bacon, koons, mapplethorpe, picasso, thomas ruff, tracy emin, rembrandt, etc etc etc.
the sex is graphic & the variety breathtaking (explicit ancient murals, an 18th century Arabic manuscript illustrating 10 men having group sex, a photo of a transsexual with a leek up her behind, gorgeous etchings of gods indulging, ...) and the exhibition does make you wonder why we never get to see much sexual imagery of such quality, why there still is such a taboo about sex when at the same time we're flooded with boring, warped and ugly porny images.
I also enjoyed how the show illustrates that the concept of erotica existing purely for the delectation of a heterosexual male audience seems to have been a western/christian idea, and once you move away from western/christian societies you find pornography made to be enjoyed by everyone. (which in my opinion is much more logical and should be common practice everywhere...)
If you go, I recommend you take along your lover - mine was away so I went with friends, but I must say I was glad I wasn't there alone as we went during the day and the place was mainly populated by late-middle-aged men studying the art closely and breathing heavily.
highlights:
Carracci etchings
Warhol's Blowjob vs. k r buxey's Requiem
japanese pop-up shunga woodcuts
an antique photo of two dressed men in the bathhouse in the most elaborate frame-book (gold, glass, velvet, everything)
that nan goldin slideshow portraying couples in love in everyday (including sexual) situations - I'd seen the piece at her solo show at the whitechapel a couple of years ago and the photos were still beautiful and very moving, while the specially created björk soundtrack was even more irritating than I remembered.
No comments:
Post a Comment