Sperm Count: Naked in Toledo

A lot of people are just bored and can find nothing more thrilling to do than pull down their pants There's a thrill to watching porn when you’re in a listless mood, but it’s even more exciting to make it and anyone can do it. Those who are exhibitionistically inclined need no longer confine their activities to undressing in front of their dorm or bedroom windows. All you need is the capacity to record yourself and you're off to one of those sites where you'll have your moment of fame. Imagine that you're just sitting listlessly in the one room you rent in Toledo, with the peeling paint on the wall, the kind of apartment that David Lynch might have used in one of his movies.There's nothing but the local Irish bar with the red faced guys sitting cross legged on stools with their veiny bulbous noses, the kinds of barflies who  have nothing better to do than to look indignant as you walk in to drink by yourself. But now just unzip your fly or let that skirt drop to the floor, click your heels three times chanting “there is no place worse than this prison”and you're on your way to a new life in which you can freely show your body to like minded individuals. A lot of people feel daunted when they think of the giants of adult cinema like Ron Jeremy, John Holmes, Sasha Grey or La Cicciolina, but you have to start somewhere and there’s no better place than in front of your own Airbook. Who knows how many people will eventually see your dick or pussy? We live in a new D.I.Y. universe where everyone has their 15 minutes of fame. You no longer have to be Steven Spielberg to run a studio. Twitter, Facebook have created promotional opportunities for everyone. Put one foot in front of the other and take it a day at a time and before you know it, you'll have more "friends" than you know what to do with and you'll never be bored.

Love in the Time of Cancer

So great is the power of infatuation or what we might call romantic love that even a dying man or woman might succumb to its torments and delights. Let’s say the end is nigh and a chronic condition has reached a critical level where a patient’s days are numbered. If they’re Catholic, their priest has been alerted and last rites will imminently be read. However, let’s say the knight in shining armor, in the form of a hematologist, or La Cicciolina, in the form of a fetching hospice nurse, saunters into the room. While the senses of the sufferer may be dulled, it’s love at first sight. The dutiful husband or wife who has loyally trudged from doctor to doctor, from one hospital to the next, ever faithful to the beloved whose condition has reduced him or her to being a faint shadow of their former selves, finds his or herself summarily cast off by an invalid who dreams only of escaping into the embrace of what John Donne once described as “Oh my America!my new-found-land.” Love, as we all know, is a temporary form of insanity. It’s nature’s way of creating the idealization which enables sexual attraction to surmount the shoals of consciousness—with its built in reality checks. Now it dabbles with a very dangerous substance which is hope, hope that love will conquer all, and, in specific, debilitation and disease, hope that some romantic agony itself with its diminution of the present and familiar and its “love” for that which has yet to be will metastasize through the body causing the dying and dead to be resurrected from their own ashes. Remember the title of  Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, Love in the Time of Cholera?

Thinking Retrospectively About the Jeff Koons Retrospective

Jeff Koons has two things in common with the great Renaissance painters like Rembrandt and Titian. He maintained a studio filled with helpers and he produced self-portraits. Where Koons differs from a Renaissance painter is in his use of the assembly line approach to both painting and sculpture in which individual artists are only involved in a small part of the final product. Marx wrote about alienation resulting from this kind of division of labor and it is hard to figure out of if many of Koons readymade sculptures can be classified as commodities of the type that are produced en masse in a factory or artistic works that are reflective of a brooding sensibility characterized by a singular vision of the world. This is, in fact, what separates them from Duchampian readymades which never quite seem to attain the status of commodities. However, just when you're about to dismiss Koons, you begin to realize this very dichotomy between commerce and art poses itself as one of the aims or dialectics of the work and you're somewhat calmed into an acceptance verging on pleasure. It’s easy to say that neither the early vacuum cleaners nor the famous "Play-Doh" sculpture are art, but then you become fascinated by the production of a piece which looks like plastic, but is actually heavy metal. One of the guards manning the recent Whitney retrospective of Koons’s work fenced off with a spectator who insisted on her right to touch and test one of the sculptures to make sure that indeed what she was seeing was not what it seemed to be. Koons elicits this kind of theater. “Made in Heaven” is the pornographic series featuring his former wife the Italian actress and politican La Cicciolina (aka Ilona Staller) and comprising paintings like “Exaltation,” (1991) where Koons comes on her face and another “Ilona’s Asshole,” which is self-explanatory. Koons says about the series, “It’s not porn. Made in Heaven dealt with the shame of masturbation in our society. It was a metaphor for cultural guilt. I wanted to reproduce the Garden of Eden, and sexual penetration like a hummingbird encounters a flower.” The series is introduced by poster for the film that Koons was originally going to make with his former wife. She’s in his arms, but he’s staring out at his audience. Again you are caught up short. Could it be that the artist is saying that he cares more about himself than his lover and that the imminence of a potential product trumps emotion? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Narcissism is a much bandied about word, but can we say that for good or bad Koons is caught in the narcissistic delusion that the world is indeed real?

Yet Another Shade of Grey

Artists like to get attention and what better way to get it than to drop their drawers. Confessional works which reveal demons hidden in the closet say like Susan Cheever’s memoir, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction about her sexuality are, of course, attention getters. Marina Abramovic the performance artist has done many works where she has either been naked or invited audience members to attack her body. In one piece the actual performance art was to become a prostitute and accept money for sex. Hannah Wilke used both her naked body and her death as the subject of her art. Annie Sprinkle and the Italian porn star La Cicciolina both started in the world of pornography and went on to have careers respectively in performance art and politics. Sasha Grey is the latest example of a porn actress who went on to build a career as a serious artist. Grey is not a fly-by-night porn actress. She took her porn seriously. The scenes she performed were extreme and alternately acrobatic, aerobic and always punishing, with gagging and anal penetration being two specialities de la maison. She then retired from pornography and has appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, HBO’s Entourage and other independent films. She’s also played in the band Telecine. In her book Neu Sex she made herself the auteur of her own filmic experience, using her camera to record herself becoming the object of her audience’s fantasies. Grey has always been interested in French New Wave cinema (she'd toyed with adopting the name of one of Godard's early actresses Anna Karina, according to Wikipedia, and could easily have been a character in Vivre Sa Vie--Godard's film about a prostitute). Watching Sasha Grey's pornography can be harrowing, as she invites suffocation and abuse, and yet she ironically falls into that category of artist whose life threatening brushes with reality become the substance of their life’s work. Despite her fascination with film, can we look at her as a female Hemingway, egging on her male counterparts, the way Hemingway incited his readers to run with the bulls at Pamplona?

Stonewalled II

Early feminists had railed against pornography and the objectification of women, but feminism was evolving and succeeding generations began to reevaluate the role of the women in the context of  Enlightenment notions of freedom and liberty. It would be hard to consider the famous Italian porn star and politician la Cicciolina, who was the wife of the sculptor Jeff Koons, to be an example of a woman who was exploited by men even though she might, in fact, be the object of their fantasies. Entrepreneurial personalities like la Cicciolina and Madonna marketed their own bodies without the need of exploitative male pimps and were in control of their own destinies. By the 1980's Vagina envy replaced penis envy as the manifestation of covetousness between the sexes. As Camille Paglia would point out in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nerfertiti to Emily Dickinson women had superior powers, both physically (genitally) and metaphysically, of which men were in awe. Men’s need to compensate with increasingly violent pornography centering around the notion of submission, in particular gagging (deep throating) and defiling (facials), were signs of male jealousy rather than male desire (and ultimately exemplified the higher regard in which females were held by their male counterparts). Within the short period of time from 1969, in which the Stonewall riots occurred and gays had begun to assert their rights, heterosexual men and women had begun a journey of their own, characterized by a new dialectic in which self-realization and self-expression challenged both classical feminist and male chauvinist ideals.