There is greenwashing – when companies try to make it seem as if they’re not really destroying the environment – and there is pinkwashing: pandering to sexual minorities for their business and votes. But we also have artwashing – the practice of using art as a means of gaining social and cultural capital; access to certain refined social circles and a cultured sheen to your brand. If you want to see one example of what artwashing can look like in practice, head to Maccarone in Boyle Heights.
Gallerist Michele Maccarone gives over her space to The Pleasure Principle, an exhibition commissioned by Pornhub. One of the world’s most popular internet porn sites, Pornhub has had a lot of bad press. It has been accused of monopolizing the porn industry and destroying the porn actors’ abilities to earn a livelihood. To make its brand more palatable, Pornhub is engaging in philanthropy for many causes from boobs to bees – although some of its advances have been rebuffed. So what about backing an all-women art exhibition? Pornhub is associated with visions of men jerking off alone, bathed in the blue glow of their screens, but female desire – especially in the elevated art context of an L.A. gallery – may have appealed to Pornhub as solid brand expansion.
It’s a small wonder that Pornhub pulled off the project. The art world is on high alert at present, checking the origins of dollars received. This summer, the Louvre in Paris removed the Sackler name from its Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities after artist protests, as some of the family money is from producing the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. The Whitney Biennial saw artists drop out of the exhibition due to a board member’s tear gas business. You’d think, given the circumstances, that art institutions –even commercial galleries – would shy away from accepting money from Pornhub. In Michele Maccarone, Pornhub found a gallerist willing to risk compromising her art world respectability.
I wanted Maccarone’s risk to be worth it.
I have now seen The Pleasure Principle twice, and it is a strange animal. At first glance, it reads like an ambitious group show exploring female desire and the edges where art bleeds into pornography and vice versa. Among the 20-plus artists, there are impressive names: Louise Bourgeois, Tracy Emin, Marilyn Minter and Laurie Simmons.
But then take a closer look, and the exhibition falls apart. I find myself missing subtlety and intellectual acuity. Maccarone puts together pieces that deal with sex on the most unimaginative level: there are the expected body parts, lingerie and lack thereof, the standard (and, well, less standard) sexual acts. But pleasure – even just sex! – is so much more than that. It’s overt messages and subtle, seductive hints. Animal lust and and intellectual stimulation. The Pleasure Principle is a) a very popular name for art exhibitions, b) Sigmund Freud’s term for the human instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain; in essence, it is one of the main organizing principles of human life. The theme opens up to so many interpretations and complex associations, but the exhibition chooses not engage with many of them on any interesting level.
The artists in the show are not to blame. The exhibition includes delicious moments, such as Nao Bustamante’s video “Rosa Does Joan” (1992), in which Bustamante poses as an exhibitionist on the Joan Rivers show. Through deadpan humor she shows us how voyeuristic and obsessed with sex we are, glued to our screens, refusing to believe that something is too good, funny or sexy to be true.
Renee Cox’s blurred photographs make you think about private photos most of us have taken – ill-advised or not – and her image of a muscular body straining against a garter belt, a g-string digging in the flesh, reminds you of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work with Lisa Lyon. Annie Sprinkle is a pioneer with one fetish-heeled foot in art and another in the sexual politics camp. She is as funny and direct as ever.
The exhibition includes also some mind-boggling moments, like when the list of works is not helpful assigning a name to the red textile sculpture of a stylized vulva hanging from the ceiling. Turns out it’s not an artwork at all: it is a piece of red carpeting that the gallery decided to hang in the corner, possibly as a visual counterpoint to Trulee Hall’s installation in the opposite corner. It doesn’t fix the underlying problem, however. The gallery space is partitioned into two, and especially the cavernous back space is packed with too many small works hung on the walls without a clear focal point. E.V. Day’s sculptural piece “Saarinen’s Mother” (2008) with it’s resin-dripping panties is intriguing but it isn’t big enough, commanding enough to pull the room together. Bettie Page’s and Bunny Yeager’s cheesecake pin-up photos seem a little lost, too – more naughty memorabilia than art.
Aside from the carpet, the exhibition is at its most enjoyable when it confounds the viewers’ expectations. Front and center there is a row of video displays featuring a range of contortions and insertions and bodily fluids. It looks like a sampler of Pornhub’s own videos and made me clutch my proverbial pearls. So brazen to feature your own porn in an exhibition you have commissioned! But it, too, is a work of art; Ann Hirsch is a young video and performance artist who is interested women’s sexual self-expression and internet culture.
Curiously enough, in the same building, in an unofficial, unnamed exhibition space, there is another show, this one curated by Maccarone’s young gallery manager Luke Hall. Called “Bred to Death” and accessible by appointment only, the exhibition features nine artists, most of them born in the 1990s.
Opening with John Henley’s drawing of two men caught in flagrante delicto, this exhibition, too, deals with sex and desire, but in a much more nuanced, diverse and rough way. Miguel Bendaña’s tiny bronze cherry, so perfect and deliciously displayed, makes you think of all the signifiers we associate with sex, and Bri Williams’s enigmatic, soap-encased whip titillates more than the heaving bodies downstairs.
They say intelligence is sexy. I wish Maccarone’s show had been sexier.
The Pleasure Principle
Maccarone
September 21 – November 23, 2019
300 South Mission Road, Los Angeles