Porno-graphing. Where Pornography Meets Art
At the end of last autumn, while I was under a downpour on a grey day of a cold and windy Athens, I found shelter in the Telecommunications, Telegrams and Post building in the city centre: it was time to start my first Athens Biennale. I won’t dwell in telling you about my explorative and speculative days within the different venues that form the Biennale. I write this article when a lot of time has passed since the event, and much has already been written about it. However, I wish to write about AnnaMaria Pinaka, an artist and theorist that I met on that occasion; or rather, that I first met through her works: murals and drawings.
As soon as I entered that room inhabited by primitive and stylized figures in perverse sexual acts or attitudes, I felt disorientated and at ease. Those strange sketchy creatures seemed immersed in their confused practices and simultaneously exposed to looking at you. I felt in that strange position between voyeurism and self-objectification. For a moment I didn’t understand if it was I who disturbed them by catching them in fragrant – enjoying a little for this – or if it was they who felt the pleasure of performing in front of the visitor. On the one hand I wanted to immerse myself in that mud, on the other hand I wanted to enjoy the scene.
As you can clearly see, I immediately interiorised that context.
Violet, fuchsia, black, different shades of liquid brown, the wall-world expressed in vivid colors. Intimacy, obscenity, confusion, coiti, portraits, self-masturbations, all faded into a unitary body that reflected difference.
At that time I was starting a hermeneutic research on the TV series (drawn by Chris Kraus’ cult book) I Love Dick through the use of a mythographic lens – useful to cognitively and philosophically interpret the different performative existences that populate the scenario; after a few months I realized that that time in that room in Athens unconsciously directed my search.
At first glance I understood that something had struck me, but I was caught by a feeling so pervading that I did not question its nature.
In my head, those figures painted on the wall immediately lost their figurative dimension; they began to reveal themselves as echoes, sounds of an ancient world that reminded me of itself, unintelligible linguistic swarms to be deciphered.
I began my own hermeneutic research journey backwards into mythology paradoxically to look for signs of meaning in the future, and I soon forgot about that first epiphanic visual contact I had thanks to the murals of AnnaMaria.
By chance, a few months later, at a small art-book fair in Barcelona – after starting an email exchange with the artist and featuring AnnaMaria in Cactus’ S/S issue 8, published in April 2019 – I ran into her book Porno-Graphing. What do ‘dirty’ subjectivities do to art? I started to reading it. And everything made sense.
“By using the term porno-graphing I am to draw attention to the embrace of sexual vocabularies in art that are sufficiently sexually explicit, low-tech, challenging, suggestive, taboo, permissive and open-ended enough to be associated with pornography”.
The definitions that AnnaMaria gives of the term porno-graphing are remarkable: the term connotes a certain type of body, but not only: it always implies an action applied on those bodies. “The foundamental premise of porno-graphing actions is artists considering a sexual situation or a set of sexual dynamics present in their life independently and outside of their art-practise as potential material for art-making acting and acting upon it with the aim to make art”.
Using domestic space and private life to make art with pornography: where intimacy meets performance for artistic purposes.
Through several examples and cultured quotes, Annamaria traces a common thread to visualize the constellation of the porno-graphing language in contemporary art: considerations of Feona Attwood, Chris Kraus, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, Kelly Dennis, Gary Needham, Lynne Segal, Linda Williams, Bojana Kunst, Sianne Ngai along with artworks of Leigh Ledare, Kathy Acker and Alan Sondheim form an articulated, meticulous and revealing porno-graphing path.
According to Annamaria, through this active practice artists have the chance to meet their “relational self”. Porno-graphing represent a key-concept to understand the role and domain of subjectivity, its nature and its non-autonomy in the realm of Identity.
After reading her words, I mentally retraced my experience in that room full of murals, on that freezy day in Athens.
The relation among subjectivities in that rooms collapsed. For the depersonalizing nature of the building, for the sense of intimacy provoked by a painted room, for the pornographic creatures that filled the walls… all this produced a significant semantic and visual short-circuit.
Pornography was all around me, to the point of doubting my own status as a visitor: I felt like pornography, too.
Today I feel that I have made some progress in my studies on identity and performative subjectification: my research on I Love Dick has materialized in a postgraduate thesis entitled In POV. I Love Dick through Narcissus and Pygmalion’s gaze; but the status that caught me in that disorienting Athens room still pervades me today: it keeps me unresolved, allowing me to resume my studies right away. And I can only be grateful to those bizarre creatures that animated that room, and that now excite my mind.
(A larger selection of these murals can be found in Cactus #08, paper issue).
