Guts are spilled on the floor, blood is splattered across the walls, and skin is stretched and flayed. This is sensual, sexual art, but not like Botticelli or Schiele: this is Hardcore.
All that gore is spread across an exhibition filled with vicious, confrontational, feverish explorations of the limits of physical intimacy and desire. It starts with Carolee Schneeman’s mini-visual history of the vulva before you enter a world of leather and sweat. There are bodies contorted together in thirsty, bloody paintings by Miriam Cahn and in cool semi-abstraction by Maryam Hoseini. Joan Semel paints tender, broken aged, solitary nudity. Cindy Sherman photographs dolls to capture explosive, grimy physical ecstasy; Barbies and KEns spreading and bursting.
Leather is everywhere. A huge whip made of belts by Monica Bonvicini thrashes against the ground. A coat by Elaine Cameron-Weir is suspended by chains. It’s all sweat and spit and lust.
A huge eviscerated carcass hangs from the ceiling
The line between pain and pleasure gets remorselessly blurred. A weight tugs on genitals, a body is pierced by arrows. Most affecting is Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s installation where they put themselves through a series of S&M ordeals to get closer to the poetry of Brad Johnson, an ex-naval officer who died of Aids complications in 2011. It’s an intense, brutally visceral use of physicality to come to terms with sensuality, sexuality and loss.
Then King Cobra/Doreen Lynette Garner suspends a huge eviscerated carcass from the ceiling, letting its insides spill on the ground, and the cycle is complete. Even though the work is originally about the slave trade and historic racism, in this context it acts as a final violent splurging of feelings and fluids. Birth, life, death, all laid out before you, all presented as various forms of sexual abandon.
Art's job is to reflect the contemporary discourse, which is why so many exhibitions these days are about identity and climate change. Combine that with cancel-anxiety and an increasing sense of puritanism in Western society and you start to feel like a show about sex in 2023 isan incredibly uncomfortable thing to pull off. But the thing is, nothing here is actually especially sexy. Instead, it’s political. It’s the body as battleground, the bedroom as trenches, orgasm as rebellion, bondage as freedom. Who knew horniness could be so powerful.