The Porn Identity - Expeditions into the Dark Zone in Vienna

Porn is, so they say, what you do not want to be caught with, or at. And yet it is everywhere. Pornography has infiltrated the mainstream and is booming in the niches. It pervades everyday life, pop, and the arts,  flooding the media.

The Porn Identity confronts the proliferation of pornography with the moving image, sculptures, and installation works reflecting sexual desire. We like this transfer of indecent pictures into the institutional art space – but it doesn’t really shock us.

Besides the theme of the oppressive affairs between power, sight and the body, (as for example with John Millers’ piece on the multitude of sexual relationships, William E. Jones’ recently edited police surveillance video in 1962 of homosexual toilet sex or in the lesbian-feminist tinged Lolita material by Katrina Daschner) several conceptual pieces predominantly consciously deal with the use of erotically charged material and objects. Examples include Tom Burr’s black horse stable sculptures, the smooth “powerless” architecture of Elmgreen & Dragset’s Queer Bar and the frigidly placed fetish reference in Tatiana Trouvé’s Totem sculpture.

The tendency to abstract aesthetically not only contradicts the notion of achieving a pseudo-documentary with maximum visual impact, but also the numerous fictional aspects, which are played out in the punk, goth and industrially charged films such as the alternative porn films by Eon Mckai, Bruce LaBruce's flashy agit porn pop dramas and their gallows humour, Tobaron Waxman's self-reflexive sadomasochist scenes or the anarchic gender bending comedies with the delightfully fierce application of dildos by Panik Qulture.
 
At the end of the line, so it seems, where the gluttonous pornographic necessity to repeat itself in form of a video installation consisting of pornographic scenes sorted by colour - juddering along, the commonly used definition of pornography as a mere depiction of sexual acts for stimulation does not fit anymore: It is not always art, but is it still porn?

The Porn Identity
Expeditions into the Dark Zone
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien,
+43-1-52189-33, www.kunsthallewien.at
Open daily 10am- to 7pm, Thursdays 10am – 10pm
until June 1, 2009