The Brooklyn Rail: "Erotic City"

There’s more to Erotic City than just cheap thrills. Bringing together over forty artists whose work collectively spans some seventy years, this is that rarest of group shows, at once compelling in its “take on things” and seemingly unconcerned with theoretical correctness. This is made all the more remarkable given its focus on erotic art, a subject that never ceases to arouse both fury and delight. In truth, sex is often messy and best when improvised, and such is the case with Martha Edelheit’s curation of Erotic City. Nonetheless, at ninety-three years old, Edelheit, a pioneering feminist artist in her own right, still has a few things to say on the subject. In her statement for the show, Edelheit jumps right into the fray, asking, “What is the difference between pornography and erotic art?” Does Erotic City answer this curatorial provocation? Not quite. Instead, Edelheit, in bringing together the briefest of historical surveys, lays bare the way these competing terms—erotic and pornographic—are wholly unstable, bound as they are to the prevailing social and cultural values of a particular era.

Among the earliest works in Erotic City are William Christopher’s tempera on Masonite composition, Side Show (1953), and Lee Lozano’s untitled phallic study in charcoal from 1962. As his title suggests, Christopher takes on the subject of a carnival “freak-show” and gives it a mythological bent: Medusa, complete with crown of snakes, is flanked on one side by a young couple in lusty embrace, while on the other an older woman in a burlesque two-piece straddles a stool, her age manifest in sagging, sallow skin. Voyeurism, the “Othering” of the object of desire, bodies on display—it’s all there. Of course, “the gaze”—the active role of looking at another—has long served as a theoretical means to distinguish the erotic from the pornographic. What are you looking at and, just as importantly, to what end? The “male gaze,” in particular, has been central to feminist critiques ever since Laura Mulvey coined the term in 1973, and Edelheit’s inclusion of Lozano’s priapic-focused charcoal gets to the root of the matter. Read one way, Lozano’s monumental cock is not a celebration of phallocracy; rather, it underscores the primacy of men within the matrix of spectatorship and objectification. Edelheit’s inclusion of Christopher and Lozano in Erotic City is a clever choice, drawing attention to early examples of contemporary art that tests the eroto-pornographic divide, bringing attention to both the mechanisms of spectatorship and the gendered power dynamics which underpin it.

What unfolds, then, in Erotic City is an exhibition that aims to separate pornography from the erotic through this lens, but which actually ends up underscoring the impossibility of pin-pointing where one begins and the other ends. Recalling Andrea Dworkin’s equation of pornography with physical violence, Edelheit qualifies the pornographic in her opening statement as including elements of “Stomping, spanking, beating, binding, hitting, exposing, choking, submission to a dominating person, or dominating someone else.” One wonders how she would qualify Robert Mapplethorpe’s S/M heavy “X” portfolio? Does Edelheit’s inclusion of Sal Salandra’s needle-point piece Present It (2023)—a gay gang-bang mise-en-scène replete with leather daddy and multiple partners—count as pornography or erotic art? And what of graphic depictions of the sex act itself? Is the proverbial “money shot” ever just erotic? Betty Tompkins’s Fuck Painting #60 (2019), also included in the show, is as graphic a depiction of hetero coital penetration as it gets.

Erotic City ultimately does little to codify the worlds of the erotic or the pornographic. What it does make evident, however, is the mutability of the two terms—evolving, slipping, shifting over time to reflect changes in the zeitgeist, most notably in depictions of queer and non-normative sexuality. The arc from Paul Cadmus’s masc-acting pretty-boy fascination in Reclining Nude NM137 (ca. 1974) to Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s tender display of queer affection in hooded lover, and their palace (2023), traces the movement away from the closet as site of furtive delight, towards full-throated celebration of queer intimacy. If Erotic City has one lesson, it’s that, no matter how you like it, sex is nothing to be ashamed of.