The New York Times: July 29, 2005

Airborne Sex and Wicked Wallpaper: Sensual Samplings

By GRACE GLUECK

RIDGEFIELD, Conn. - The Romans did it. Rembrandt did it. Japanese masters did it. Picasso, especially in his dotage, did it. They all made erotic imagery, the kind that has been chiseled, carved, painted and drawn the world over since even before picture-making segued into art.

That tradition of visually celebrating sexual love and desire is carried on in a titillating show, "Contemporary Erotic Drawing," at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum here. The lively Aldrich is one of the few mainstream American art institutions I can think of that would, in the current censorial climate, dig into the topic. (Two museums devoted to the history and culture of human sexuality - the Museum of Sex in New York and the Erotic Museum in Los Angeles - don't count because they are, after all, specialty acts.)

At the Aldrich, the news is that erotic art hasn't changed a whole lot. To be sure, it is not an art to which movements like, say, Baroque or post-Minimalism would bring sweeping new concepts.

A little abstraction may have crept in, and some of the technology used in presenting the art may have advanced - video, animation, overhead projection and such - but the basics remain the same: the human body and its sensual appetites.

Harry Philbrick, director of the Aldrich, credits what he calls a renaissance in erotic drawing partly to the growing revival of interest in representational imagery.

Casting their nets perhaps too wide, the show's organizers - Mr. Philbrick; Sara Kellner, the executive director of Diverse Works , an alternative space in Houston that first exhibited the show; and Stuart Horodner, an independent curator who hatched it - have come up with 34 artists, from the no-holds-barred raunchmeister R. Crumb to the tender abstractionist Lynne Woods Turner.

Others in the show include Alice Attie, Cecily Brown, Leon Golub, Chris Ofili and Anita Steckel.

But how does such a rarefied concept as erotic drawing surmount the barrage of sexual material we get today from television, films, the Web, advertising, sex shops and the street?

For one thing, it is done by artists, and therefore possibly presents a more human, more idiosyncratic, more ingenious and less hackneyed view of sex than the more hucksterish outlets. Mr. Philbrick writes in the catalog that the show provides "an essential reclamation" of erotic drawing "from the context of the commercial mainstream."

He is seconded by Mr. Horodner, who writes in his catalog essay, "Erotic drawings return to us the richness of matter, diversity of touch and the slowness of creation and reception that are often lost in our age of digital immediacy." Well, O.K.

The points of view in the show range from romantic to raw, reflecting factors of age, gender, ethnicity and, naturally, sexual orientation. Much of the work is funny or at least wry.


Religion, custom and cliche are treated lightheartedly by, among others, Scott Burns, two of whose brush-and-ink drawings show a meditating Buddha harassed by a nude female devil. She slyly lifts his robe from behind with a long stick and dangles upside down from a tree branch to plant a kiss on his bald pate.

A hilarious all-over lampoon of pop culture is Mark Dean Veca's pastiche (which will go titleless here). It takes the form of cartoony wallpaper, in whose repetitive motifs he sends up everything from phallic lipsticks to Japanese erotica. In one vignette the Seven Dwarfs rip the dîllet?odice off a horrified Snow White. A wallpaper format is also the device of Su-en Wong, who repeatedly depicts herself on hands and knees with come-hither looks, though in one instance a giant wad of bubble gum that balloons from her mouth rather spoils the effect.

There is plenty of other down-and-dirty stuff in the show, too, bottoming out in R. Crumb's brutally indelicate but - let's face it - funny cartoons, one of which depicts an airborne coupling involving a nerdy male and a steroidal superwoman. As companion works, there are the group gropes by Tracy Nakayama, Anita Steckel (who tweaks the poses of Ingres into some he wouldn't recognize) and Ion Birch, whose ultragraphic girls and boy could curl a cat's whiskers.

New strategies of presentation include Cecily Brown's rapid-animation film of body parts and conjunctions; Cristina Lucas's overhead projection that sends images of boys flying in the air, propelled by their whirling penises; and Scott Teplin's drawings on a mattress cover (fitted to an actual bed) that suggest the disconnected sexual imaginings of a sleeper in the REM stage.

Is abstraction possible here? Yes, in the drawings of Alice Attie, whose biomorphic shapes are made of tiny written words from James Joyce's writings, including Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Then there are the delicate pencil drawings of Lynne Woods Turner that give bare hints of bodily bumps and orifices.

And not to worry; the joys of romantic sex are not neglected. In her slight drawings, Danica Phelps gives an account of a lesbian love affair, leavened by written notes detailing her more mundane daily life, and Georgia Marsh's series of drawings, "The Artist and Her Model," touches lightly on foreplay and orgasmic pleasures.

By and large, and at the risk of condemnation by the Sexual Police, it can be said that the show - financed partly by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts - has a lot going for it. But don't forget to leave the children home.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company