Monday, September 30, 2013

Judging the Women's Erotic Prize, June, 2013


My fellow judge was Susana Medina.

Here are my reviews of some of the winning pieces:

Consumed Debauchery by Lauren Kelly
Consumed Debauchery 
by Lauren Kelly 
Lauren Kelly's sculptures cannot help but draw you in with their sheer madness and sense of abandon. The sensuality and physicality of Kelly’s work recalls that of Louise Bourgeois, whereas the scale and humour reminds me of some of Claes Oldenberg’s early works. We chose Kelly’s Consumed Debauchery for the top spot because of the clear vision, insight and consistency of this artist’s work. I feel she knows what she wants to say and how to say it; there is a single-mindedness here that is utterly compelling. I found myself unable to stop thinking about Consumed Debauchery, and kept returning to it to look at it over and over. Her pieces are not simple or straightforward, they attract the intellect and then swiftly bypass it, taking the viewer somewhere odd and strange and peculiarly pleasant. There is a pop art sensibility in Kelly’s pieces which brought to mind the Pop Art mantra of the sixties: to make the ordinary extraordinary. I feel with Lauren Kelly there is an element of making the extraordinary even more so through a timeless recreation of the physical world, which is by no means ordinary in the first place. This is partly what sets her work apart for me. She takes our physical world and gives it back to us in a form that makes us see our physicality afresh. Although perhaps not strictly speaking erotic, this defamiliarisation is indeed exciting.


Hand by Gloria Oyarzabal
Hand 
by Gloria Oyarzabal
Of all the works in this competition, ‘Hand’ by Gloria Oyarzabal was one of the more erotic ones. This layered and evocative photograph shows a hand, which could be either male or female, hovering tantalisingly over the blurred triangular sex of a woman. The image is repeated twice alluding to the repetition of erotic strokes, while celluloid sprockets along the side of the photo emphasise the filmic nature of the piece. The placing of this hand, an almost classical hand from ancient Greece or Rome, with a vague hint of hair under its palm takes one into the realm of self-pleasure as much as into the realm of pleasuring another. The artist, who works with found photos, has recontextualised clips from pornographic films shown in an outdoor cinema in Bamako, Mali. She has taken them out of the porn cinema and brought them into daylight, thus giving them an extra—and very different—lease on life. The cinema, which is close to shutting its doors for want of business, is ironically only kept going through the showing of illegal porn films. This anomaly lends the piece a political dimension as well: can porn be the saviour in this drama?

Because of the obsolescence of the 35mm format in favour of the colder, flatter digital aesthetic, this photo harkening back to the heyday of celluloid contains a strong melancholic and nostalgic element. Inherent in this beautiful, textured image is also a sense of danger. The artist has smuggled these frames from their illicit environment (pornography is illegal in Mali) and has brought them out into the scrutinizing light of day. These images exist originally to satisfy those in search of sexual fulfilment and have become images for those in search of perhaps much more. I found this piece of work exciting formally, aesthetically and erotically. It is a stunning homage to the power of cinema and its historical links to desire. Who has not witnessed or experienced a celluloid encounter and not felt the pang of longing for love, sex and cinema? Oyarzabal’s ‘Hand’ is a powerful piece of work that resonated with the judges on several levels and was always a contender for recognition as a strong piece of work in the competition.

Of all the works in this competition, ‘Hand’ by Gloria Oyarzabal was one of the more erotic ones. This layered and evocative photograph shows a hand, which could be either male or female, hovering tantalisingly over the blurred triangular sex of a woman. The placing of this hand and the vague hint of hair under its palm takes one into the realm of self-pleasure as much as into the realm of pleasuring another.

The artist, who works with found photos, has recontextualised clips from pornographic films shown in an outdoor cinema in Bamako, Mali, where ironically porn is illegal. She has taken these images out of the porn cinema and brought them into daylight, thus giving them an extra—and very different—lease on life. The cinema, which is close to shutting its doors for want of business, is only kept going through the showing of illegal porn films. This anomaly lends the piece a political dimension as well: can porn be the saviour in this drama?

Because of the obsolescence of the 35mm format in favour of the colder, flatter digital aesthetic, this photo harkening back to the heyday of celluloid contains a strong nostalgic element. I found this piece of work exciting formally, aesthetically and erotically. It is a stunning homage to the power of cinema and its historical links to desire. Who has not witnessed or experienced a celluloid encounter and not felt the pang of longing for love, sex and cinema? Oyarzabal’s ‘Hand’ is a powerful piece of work that resonated with the judges on several levels.


Detail from Sieve Boobs
by Sarah Fordham
Sieve Boobs 
by Sarah Fordham
This installation of hand-stitched tapestry moulded onto kitchen sieves and arranged on a wall is both humourous and deadly serious. The variety of colours and shapes of these breast-simulacra reflect the variety of the female form and calls into question the idea of the perfect breast which daily bombards us in the form of badly made porn, MTV, Hollywood movies and advertising. There is almost no part of the body more contentious, more vilified, more desired, more argued over, more airbrushed and Photoshopped than the female breast. Beyond their beauty and eroticism, breasts are also supremely functional. Their milk can keep an infant alive, which is in itself an area of discord. Is breastfeeding a shackle around a woman’s ankle or simply a way for nature to allow a mother to feed and bond with a child?

Through the symbolic resonance of the sieves and their association with cooking and the domestic realm, the artist enters head on into the debate around the female body and the boundaries, limits and abilities surrounding its function and eroticism. Can the two exist simultaneously?

The hand-stitching contrasts beautifully with the mass-production of the kitchen sieve, thus heightening the rhetoric around the fabrication of art and its place in the production line of history. These Sieve Boobs are beautiful and useless objects—they function not as erotic objects, nor as kitchen implements and yet their totemic quality is imbued with both function and eroticism. This piece is also alive with an element of surrealism much like Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined tea cup, saucer and spoon. And like much art that takes on issues of female sexuality and posits it within the sphere of the domestic and the mass-made, this piece is a reminder that art can and should function on many levels, and in the best of all possible worlds is also capable of asking questions that have yet to find answers.