ART CITIES:Copenhagen-Art & Porn

Art & Porn is a large group exhibition boasting the participation of 40 Danish and international artists. It highlights the relationship between art and pornography, offering visitors an opportunity to consider and discuss sexuality and open-mindedness. There are numerous ways of experiencing and interpreting the exhibition with its many parallel narratives.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthal Charlottenborg Archive

The ban on visual pornography in Denmark was lifted on 1 July 1969. The legalisation sparked off a tsunami of images which we, for better or worse, have been inundated with ever since. One of the questions that the “Art & Porn” exhibition raises is this: What are the implications of suddenly stretching the boundaries of what citizens may lawfully experience in public spaces? The exhibition “Art & Porn” is based on a number of themes that revolve around the historical development and the cascade of events that have occurred from the lifting of the ban to the present day. The complex relationship between sex, pornography, art and society is the leitmotif of the exhibition The exhibition opens with the famous artwork “Sex-Paralysappeal” (1936) by Wilhelm Freddie. The discussions that followed in the wake of Wilhelm Freddie’s work contributed significantly to Denmark, as the first country, lifting the ban on pornography in 1969. The work illustrates the awkwardness that characterised the general attitude to sexual and erotic images at the time. Freddie was far ahead of his time, for the work was soon seized and the artist given a mitigated sentence for pornography. 30 years later Wilhelm Freddie made a new version of the piece, and despite the fact that it was again confiscated, the debate that followed led to Denmark becoming the first country in the world to raise the ban on visual pornography. Another well know work of the exhibition is Valie Export’s “Action Pants: Genital Panic”, a set of six identical posters from a larger group that the artist produced to commemorate an action she performed in Munich in 1968. The posters show Valie Export sitting on a bench against a wall out of doors wearing crotchless trousers and a leather shirt and holding a machine-gun. Her feet are bare and vulnerable, as are her genitals, and she holds the gun at chest level, her hair stands up in a wild mop above her head, emphasising the strangeness of the image. The action that gave rise to the photograph “Action Pants: Genital Panic” has become the subject of apocryphal art historical legend. Valie Export performed “Genital Panic” a movie theater in Munich. Wearing trousers from which a triangle had been removed at the crotch, the artist walked between the rows of seated viewers, her exposed genitalia at face-level. The posters were then fly-posted in the streets. ‘” wanted to be provocative, to provoke, but also aggression was part of my intention…I sought to change the people’s way of seeing and thinking”, the artist has said. One Sarah Lucas’s recent works “Eros” (2013), is among her best, a m onumental objects halfway between a penis and a banana balance on crushed cars. It has  strong art-historical connections, most immediately to “Disagreeable Object” (1931) by Alberto Giacometti. The work also brings to mind Lynda Benglis’s infamous double-dildo self-portrait in a 1974 issue of Artforum, due to the way it seeks to upend the monumental-masculine art object through the use of a large penis. Cindy Sherman “Untitled #253”: In 1992, Cindy Sherman produced a series of photographs entitled “Sex Pictures” in which she photographed artificial body parts, fake genitalia and dismembered medical dummies in lewd poses. Sherman was responding to attacks on the freedom of expression by the Christian Fundamentalists and extreme right-wing groups in the United States. The American government had recently passed laws prohibiting the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from providing grants for art work considered obscene. Sherman’s “Sex Pictures”, in which for the first time in her a career she does not feature, mock conventional conceptions of obscenity and defied those demanding increased censorship. Another work of the exhibition is Jeff Koons’ “Blow Job-Ice” (1991) part of the series “Made in Heaven” in which Koons made works with the Italian porn-star Ilona Staller, also known as La Cicciolina, who would later become his wife. These provocative works show the naked couple in explicit poses and reference paintings by artists, such as Edouard Manet, to examine the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons employed Ilona’s regular photographer and backdrops, to create the distinctive aesthetic associated with glamour imagery. Blurring the boundaries between fine art and pornography, Koons challenged the conventions of artistic taste, encouraging his audience to make their own decisions about what is acceptable. The exhibition includes a number of new artists: Vika Kirchenbauer, who challenges the viewer’s gendered perceptions of sexuality, as well as Kuki Jijo and Zanele Muholi, whose works help direct attention to the hugely restrictive censorship still applying to most of the world. Also, the exhibition showcases a number of younger women artists such as Maja Malou Lyse, recently featured on Danish TV with her show “Sex with Maja” in which she uses her gender and some of the devices and tropes of pornography in her fight for women’s right to their own bodies, including how they choose to display them. Social media often form the battlefield of such struggles as artists regularly challenge the censorship exerted by large private companies like Instagram and Facebook.

Participating artists: Marina Abramović, Matthew Barney, Katja Bjørn, Monica Bonvicini, Mike Bouchet, Marco Brambilla, Jeff  Burton, Tee Corinne, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Larry Clark, Elmgreen & Dragset, Valie Export, Jesper Fabricius, Biba Fibiger, Tom of Finland, Wilhelm Freddie, Suzette Gemzøe, Susan  Hinnum, Kuki Jijo, William E. Jones, Vika Kirchenbauer, Per Kirkeby, Jeff Koons, Arthur Køpcke, Peter Land, Hans Henrik  Lerfeldt, Linder, Sarah Lucas, Maja Malou Lyse, Zanele Muholi, Gaspar Noé, Bjørn Nørgaard & Lene Adler Petersen, Pipilotti Rist, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Annie Sprinkle  & Beth Stephens, Sam Taylor- Johnson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Betty Tompkins, Anna Uddenberg, Amalia Ulman and Lawrence Weiner.

Info: Curators: Erlend G. Høyersten, Lise Pennington, Gry Stangegård Schneider, Rasmus Stenbakken, Anne Mette Thomsen and Michael Thouber, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Nyhavn 2, Copenhagen, Duration: 5/10/19-5/1/20, Days & Hours: tue-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat-sun 11:00-17:00, https://kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk