The Porn Identity

Expeditions into the Dark Zone in Vienna

If you’re too conservative or under 17 forget about it. You cannot visit this exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Vienna. The Porn Identity is strictly addressed to open-minded adults who want to explore the phenomenon of “pornetration” that has infused the media, which, in their voyeuristic character and greed for bodily signs of excitement, act in a latently pornographic manner –always on the search for taboos that may be exhausted, broken, and nevertheless maintained at the same time. Having this in mind, go and have your Expeditions into the Dark Zone, as the show’s subtitle suggests, until June 1.

But, what is porn? Some say that porn is what you do not want to be caught with, or at. And yet it is everywhere. Pornography has conquered the mainstream and is booming in the niches, pervades everyday life, pop, and the arts. For years, artists have been exploring phenomena such as voyeurism, stimulation, transgression, sexual orders of space, gender constructions, and the relationship between power, gaze, and the body.

The exhibition The Porn Identity confronts the proliferation of pornography with motion pictures, sculptures, and installation works reflecting sexual desire. The transfer of indecent pictures into the art institutional space not only transcends the porn-typical context of market-oriented publication and reprivitized consumption, but also questions the similarities and differences between art and the visual culture of stimulation through the attendant complication of the pornographic identity.

The tour through the exhibition branches out into mixed woodlands of images revealing a variety of subterranean connections. Artfully wrested from moving images, the avant-garde filmmaker Martin Arnold’s body and mime studies on the unconscious oedipal horror of the Hollywood cinema, for example, relate to a video about masking faces by Terence Koh or a US soap powder company’s suppression that had made the porn actress Marilyn Chambers of all people the star of its promotion campaign. It was her scandalous movie Behind the Green Door that inspired Johannes Wohnseifer to develop his installation of a green door behind which the typically pornographic interplay between concealment and revelation, taboo and transgression can be continued.

Besides explorations of the repressive relationship between power, gaze, and the body (such as in a work by John Miller on the variety of sexual relations, William E. Jones’ adaptation of a 1962 police surveillance video showing homosexual encounters in a toilet, or Katrina Daschner’s  lesbian-feminist appropriation of the Lolita story), some conceptual works’ pivots reveal a purposely indirect handling of the erotic charge of materials and objects.

This holds true for Tom Burr’s black stable sculptures, the polished minimalist “powerless” architecture of Elmgreen & Dragset’s http://www.klosterfelde.de/sites/artists/elm-drag/ar_f.html Queer Bar, or Tatiana Trouvé’s oppressive, subtle references to fetishism in her sculpture Totem. These works’ tendency toward aesthetic abstraction is not only opposed to the objective of utmost pseudo-documentary visibility in the standard commercial pornographic phantasm but also to the manifold fictions enacted in the alternative porn filmmaker Eon McKai’s movies with their Punk, Gothic and Industrial clichés, the garishly black humor agit-pornprop dramas by Bruce LaBruce, Tobaron Waxman’s self-reflective sadomasochist scenes, and Panik Qulture’s anarchic gender farces featuring heftily employed dildos.

Thus, the common definition of pornography as the depiction of sexual acts with the sole intention of stimulating the viewer does not seem adequate any more toward the end of the tour, where the indefatigable pornographic repetition compulsion in form of a video installation of porn scenes arranged by color keeps joggling. It is not always art, but is it still porn?

Curators of the exhibition are Thomas Edlinger, Florian Waldvogel and Angela Stief.