- Venue
- Matt's Gallery
- Location
- London
A room so dark it feels like a womb. Not that I can remember what that felt like. Maybe a vagina then. Maybe it felt like the womb’s whorish precursor, it’s enticer of seed to enable the harbinger of life to nurture its fruit. No. Wait, no, Jordan Baseman’s ‘Blue Movie’ at Matt’s Gallery didn’t feel wet and squidgy at all. And I’ve got no great desire to visit it whenever I get lonely or horny or miss my mum or whatever.
There were teasing clips of young ancient vaginas on one wall. And heels and stockings and hair I think. There were definitely vaginas too. I remember those. I’ve seen one before you see.
Except I couldn’t hear them, for they were silent vagina projections. Imagine such a thing. No squelching, no queefing, no moist-ridden utereal utterances of any kind.
There was a woman talking though. She wouldn’t shut up actually. Incessantly nagging at me in both ears. In my right ear the horny devil on my shoulder was describing the scene with the vaginas. Each decision whether it be the hairstyles of the two females to the heels they were wearing (I noticed them, I like heels) to the surrounding chair to the forced narrative of domination and subservience apparently reinforced some sort of historical context which I guess was meant to be interesting. I was glad of the description though because the vaginas kept cutting to a blank screen. This was frustrating. Sexually I mean.
The same woman sat on my left shoulder detracting from what I was seeing even more. The footage was old apparently, from the Second World War, and had cultural and historical interest in the canon of pornography. She only used these particular vaginas as a starting point to tell me about various cultural critiques that have surrounded such vaginas up to the modern age. Second wave feminism, Jenna Jameson’s plastic vaginas, Mulvey’s male gaze etc it was all there and I guess would have been interesting to someone who wanted to or didn’t know about that stuff.
And then it looped and I knew it was time to go. I mean who stays for the same scene straight away, right? What’s the point? Not that I came out needing somewhere to dispose of some neatly folded tissue paper or anything of course. Please don’t get the wrong idea about me.
Maybe it’s because when I see porn it’s for a purpose. It requires a resolution, if you get my drift. Well normally. Sure there is plenty within pornography about the collective desires and societal repressions of the cultures that make it. And how they make it. And what it is. And why.
The porn industry now makes more money each year than Hollywood feature films. It is a subject matter absolutely rife for exploration culturally. But artistically there lies a problem that pornographers are responding to a demand that has very little to do with any overarching agenda beyond the next largest gang bang or the widest possible gaping asshole. If artists are to delve the murky depths of porn they have an obligation to explore beyond this titillating onscreen consumption.
I came out of ‘Blue Movie’ being both frustrated, and slightly more educated. While this is a marked change from my normal activities from viewing pornographic material, on balance I wouldn’t say it warranted an especially successful visit to an art gallery in terms of engagement and interest. Like a lot of pornographic material it was dull and depthless. The cultural intellectualisation of the voice over’s added interest and nothing more to me. It wasn’t anything more than a confusing presentation of the sum of its parts. Yes porn is significant for this, that and those reasons. So what? I prefer to find more out about the human condition in a discarded tissue of dreams than a sociology lecture.