Sexuality

Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art

by Amelia Jones (Editor)

Tracing the identification of art with sexual expression or repression, from the era of the rights movements to the present. It has been argued, most notably in psychoanalytic and modernist art discourse, that the production of works of art is fundamentally driven by sexual desire. It has been further argued, particularly since the early 1970s, that sexual drives and desires also condition the distribution, display and reception of art. This anthology traces how and why this identification of art with sexual expression or repression arose and how the terms have shifted in tandem with artistic and theoretical debates, from the era of the rights movements to the present. Among the subjects it discusses are abjection and the “informe,” or formless; pornography and the obscene; the performativity of gender and sexuality; and the role of sexuality in forging radical art or curatorial practices in response to such issues as state-sponsored repression and anti-feminism in the broader social realm. Artists surveyed include
Vito Acconci, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Gerard Byrne, George Chakravarthi, Judy Chicago, Vaginal Davis, Wim Delvoye, Elmgreen & Dragset, Valie Export, Félix González-Torres, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Harmony Hammond, Claudette Johnson, Mary Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Legorreta, Paul McCarthy, Sarah Maple, Shirin Neshat, Lorraine O'Grady, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Orlan, William Pope.L, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Semmel, Barbara Smith, Annie Sprinkle, Alina Szapocznikow, Del LaGrace Volcano, Hannah Wilke, David Wojnarowicz Writers include
Malek Alloula, Norman O. Brown, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Angela Dimitrakaki, Michel Foucault, Daniel Guérin, Eleanor Heartney, Jonathan D. Katz, Rosalind Krauss, Julia Kristeva, Paweł Leszkowicz, Herbert Marcuse, Kobena Mercer, Laura Mulvey, Lawrence Rinder, Jacqueline Rose, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Stephen Whittle

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Sexuality, Theory, Academic

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Amelia Jones is an American art historian, art critic and curator specializing in feminist art, body/ performance art, video art and Dadaism. Her written works and approach to modern and contemporary art history are considered revolutionary in that she breaks down commonly assumed opinions and offers brilliantly conceived critiques of the art historical tradition and individual artist's positions in that often elitist sphere.

Amelia Jones studied art history at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Phd from UCLA in 1991.

Jones has taught art history at UC Riverside and is currently the Pilkington Chair of the art history department at Manchester University.

Jones received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000.

Amelia Jones is the daughter of Princeton Psychology professor Edward E. Jones.

Reviews

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like books that help me think of things I haven't thought about.

Our formidable challenge is to rehumanize, repoliticize, and recolonize our own bodies - Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Culturas in Extremis (2005)

Sexuality can be understood as a motivational force determining the shapes and forms of all visual experience and all visual representations and perceptions, from how we identify in everyday life to the making and interpretation of the so-called masterpieces of Wester art, as well as Hollywood film and other mass cultural images. Such inevitably sexually driven investments are seen as profoundly conditioning the making, distribution, display and reception of art and visual culture in all forms, making it undeniably clear just how important it is to explore the development of beliefs about sexuality if we want to gain a full understanding of Euro-American modern and contemporary art and art discourse. - Amelia Jones

Renoir: I paint with my prick.

The ever-expanding numbers of sexualized images of women in mass culture and within European modernism, the latter coupled with a discourse of artistic 'virility and domination,' confirm the structure of belief that the visual arts were particularly strongly informed by ideas about the key role of sexual drives for the individual, ideas conditioned by patriarchal, heteronormative, classist, as well as nationalist, racist, and colonialist biases.

Creative (male) prowess came to be firmly identified with the production of sexualized images of women, with racial, class, and sexual difference working in tandem to fetishize desired bodies in representation.

Art seduces us into the struggle against repression...

Rilke presents art as a way of life, 'like religion, science, or even socialism,' 'distinguished form other interpretations of life by the fact that it is not a product of the times and appears, so to speak, as the Weltanschauung (world view) of the ultimate goal,' and as 'the sensuous possibility of new worlds and times.' - Norman O Brown

Daniel Guérin
William Reich Today//1968

William Reich took a long time to become popular. First of all, his entire work is a denunciation of the evils caused by sexual repression, especially in youth, and it exacts the vivifying, stimulating role of free love, the liberatory discharge of orgasm. Secondly, given his double training as a Marxist and as a former pupil of Freud, Reich has ended up as the coupling, as it were, between Marxism and psychoanalysis, until recently a very uncomfortable position that earned him the sarcasm of the zealots of both churches. But it is today his chief title to fame.

Reich shows that sexual repression, in primitive societies, is closely connected to the development of private property and patriarchy. He accuses bourgeois sociologists of having gone so far as to falsify history in order to support the idea that monogamy has always existed, and to hide the fact that polygamy and sexual promiscuity have had an important place in primitive societies.

Condemning both Stalinism and Fascism, Reich is driven to announce the advent of direct democracy. He looks forward to the emergence of a new man.

Carole Schneemann

Fuses wasn't programmatic. The fuck was inseparable from an intimacy, an erotic generosity that was evident.

A depiction of woman's pleasure, authentic pleasure, created by herself of her lived experience is rare.

It is suspicious that male culture is so comfortable with the feminine brutalized 'abject' -- the abuses of sexual experience, the erotic victim. And an abused body requires its defences.

Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro
Female Imagery//1973

Georgia O'Keeffe's oeuvre opens up the possibility of a human expressiveness heretofore unavailable, particularly to men. Implicit in this is a suggestion that just as women have suffered when measured by male standards, so men might be found lacking when measured by the standards of that work by women which asserts softness, vulnerability and self-exposure.

George Chakravarthi
In Conversation with Tina Jackson//2007

Chakravarthi Hinduism is very much about transformation, and all the deities are pretty androgynous as they take on different forms to achieve different goals.


Tee Corinne and Martha Shelley
Cunt Coloring Book (1975)//1981

In 1973, I set out to do drawings of women's genitals for use in sex education groups. I wanted the drawings to be lovely and informative, to give pleasure and affirmation.

As adults many of us still need to learn about our external sexual anatomy. Colouring is a way for the child in each of us to revision and reclaim this portion of our bodies form which we have been estranged.

Welcome once again to the original Cunt Coloring Book (with a few additions). May you colour it with pleasure.

David Wojnarowicz
Idol Worship: In Conversation with Owen Keehnen//1991

I wanted to put it down on paper because I'm feeling mortality. I wanted a record of what I cared about, what I was attracted to, what I did in terms of self-destruction, all that stuff.

I don't see anything wrong with anger. I think it's a healthy and transitory emotion. It leads you to other things or to action or whatever.

Shirin Neshat
In Conversation with Arthur C Danto//2000

An important aspect of Turbulent is that women in Iran are prohibited from singing in public, and there are no recordings by female musicians.

We're taught to be disgusted by our fluids. Maybe it's related to a fear of death. Body fluids are base material. Disneyland is so clean; hygiene is the religion of fascism. The body sack, the sack you don't enter, it's taboo to enter the sack. Fear of sex and the loss of control; visceral goo, waddle,
waddle - Paul McCarthy, in conversation with Benjamin Weissman, 2003

During the band's sets, GB Jones would have the entire audience under her spell. This night was no exception: she quietly commanded all the men in the audience to remove their clothing and do helicopters with their penises. It was a beautiful, glorious moment to behold, looking on as they all complied. - Vaginal Davis, LA Riot: On Jabberjaw, 2012


In a culture that acritically glorifies the stylized bizarre, the human body is understandably at the centre of it all, for all the wrong reasons. The body is 'hot' again, but the spectacle of the altered or wounded body is much hotter. Guillermo Gómez-Peña

[Mills College Library]

704.9493 S5189 2014