Seeing Sex: An Artist’s Notebook

I met Poy on a revolving carousel bar in the middle of a pedestrians-only alley off Walking Street, near Pattaya’s central beachfront.

She was sitting on a high stool, sipping a beer and staring blankly straight ahead. She was small, round-faced and pale, with long black hair piled high into a brittle, hair-sprayed beehive. A denim mini-skirt barely covered her short, brown legs and there were large Japanese-style tattoos on her thighs and on her back and arms where they emerged from beneath an abbreviated, silver-sequinned halter-top. She had silver studs in her nose, lower lip and tongue, and looked like a cross between a psychotic geisha and a 1950′s cheerleader gone wrong – Gogo Yubari before she graduated to O-ren Ishii’s yakuza gang.

I had the same conversation her that I did with nearly every Thai girl I met on the streets:

“What’s your name?”

“Hazel.”

“You staying long?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“What hotel?”

“One near here.”

“I think I know it. Where you from?”

“Australia.”

“Ooh, Australia! I have a boyfriend in Australia.” (The boyfriend was always from wherever I was from, even when I said I was English or French.)

“Really?”

“Yes, but I’m very sad. He’s not here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, but you’re here.”

“Yes I am.”

“You are very nice. I like your short hair.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Yes.” Pause. “Umm, what’s your name again?”

Later, back at my hotel, she became shy as she’d stripped. It wasn’t her nakedness. Somehow, exposing the full extent of her intricate, blue-black tattoos seemed suddenly very intimate. She stood still, smiling faintly, eyes closed, as I drew her – as if my pencil was a finger moving lightly over the ink outlines on her skin. She covered her bare nipples with a fore-arm and cupped her shaven pussy with a tiny hand.

Sex pervades my art. Unfortunately, art that’s overtly sexual is too often overlooked by the traditional cultural establishment, which likes inference – after all, what artist hasn’t dealt with sex at some point? – but nothing too real (especially from women). In state-run institutions, collections of erotic work are often hidden away, revealed only to approved scholars by appointment.

Last year, in an interview about an exhibition covering 2,500 years of erotic art – titled Seduced: Art And Sex From Antiquity To Now – at the Barbican Centre, in London, the Centre’s Head of Galleries made sure she defined the show as everything but sexual. “This is not an exhibition about sex and it’s not an exhibition about pornography. It’s a serious work of art history and curatorship,” she declared. “It’s an exhibition about how artists presented sex as a fundamental experience which connects everybody.” It was the country’s biggest exhibition of erotic art and yet in every reference to it, the institution tried to distance itself from the real stuff of it, dumbing it down with pseudo-intellectual Newspeak and pretending it was all about context, not content. No sex, no emotion, no sticky mess.

The greasy rut of real intercourse, the squish and ooze of shared and singular bodily fluids, troubles curators and critics – literally and metaphorically. Intimate self-expression of any kind is especially difficult for them to take in the autobiographical context of a young woman. It’s almost as if something sacred, something taboo, is transgressed when women depict themselves fucking.

I’m repelled by the empty, amateur, exhibitionistic porn that women post on the web: graphic, self-conscious humping – “Look, Ma, I’m fisting!” – with hairy-arsed husbands or spotty boyfriends or bovine girlfriends (or all of them together) intermingled with happy snaps of their pets, suburban mall shopping and ten-pin bowling. The photos, like the clumsy MySpace-like pages to which they’re posted, are neither expressive nor sexy. There’s no thought, no reflection, no deeper narrative.

I paint and draw graphic sex. Like the suburban hausfrau, I am almost always a ‘character’ in it. But what I’m doing – and why I’m doing it – is different. I’m offering up my psyche and my self within the act. (I’m also just a tad better on the technical side of things). In the context of my work, sex is a symbolic device to demonstrate just how starkly I’m ready to reveal myself. It has nothing at all to do with exhibitionism. It’s intimate and reflective. Each painting or drawing is an excerpt from an ongoing, multi-tiered (think hypertext) narrative of my life, offering different, sometimes contradictory, facets of my self, my sexuality, my emotional experiences.

The only way work like this can be effective is if nothing is held back – ever. To hide any part of my self or my story simply because of shyness or discomfort – not least the discomfort of others – would be wrong. The work would be leached of the very qualities that distinguish it as art.

When I was growing up, erotic images of women were everywhere in our house.

My father owned early editions of a cult comic, Vampirella. They had breathless, pulp fiction headlines – ‘Will Vampi Succumb To A Death Cult’s Orgy Of Destruction?’ was one – and covers featuring images of sexy women that were obviously drawn from life. Unlike the women in the conventional DC or Marvel Comics art I became familiar with later, the women in these earlier comics looked loose and languid, even when their poses suggested aggression or struggle. The buxom expanses of skin they revealed were alluring and yet always somehow ‘accidental’.

My mother owned books on the work of Egon Schiele. His drawings and paintings were executed in easy lines with delicate washes of colour but the women were more passive and victim-like. They also wore ordinary clothes instead of sexually fetishistic costumes. Nevertheless, the bodies of Schiele’s women were just as much on display – more so, showing pussy, ass and blushing breast.

The one thing all these images had in common was that they were made by men. Male artists make erotic art for other men, not women. From lowbrow, comic-inspired illustrators (such as Robert Williams) to the respected makers of ‘high art’, there’s not one man – neither Picasso nor Matisse nor Jeff Koons (his erstwhile muse, Cicciolina, was a porn star, for pity’s sake) – whose sexual imagery doesn’t rely on graphic renderings of breasts, ass, pussy, or fucking. It’s not that their works aren’t beautiful or even that they don’t arouse me – they are and sometimes, they do – but there’s no sense of foreplay, no attempt at emotional or intellectual stimulation underpinning their raw depictions.

I was raised a feminist but by my late teens, I was totally confused by feminism’s contradictory messages. What was acceptable and ‘correct’ when it came to female sexuality? The graphic depiction of sex (in words and pictures) was exploitative if it was created by men but not when it was created by women. If it also featured unshaven legs, armpits and pubis, it was liberating.

Over the last few years, I’ve discarded most of the values I grew up with. I have gone from satirising aspects of the objectification of male-oriented female stereotypes in advertising and entertainment to delving into the rawer, more visceral entanglements of my own sexuality. I’m intrigued by how and why we respond to sexual provocation and why it is that, after nearly half a century of feminist revolution and more than a decade since the deep penetration (excuse the pun) of individualised, uncensored media-on-demand into our everyday lives, it still manages to unsettle and offend.

Glossy, sanitised images of sex in mass entertainment and advertising media insinuate themselves into the way we shape our sexual identity. Despite (or, maybe, because of) its slick ubiquity in our consumer-driven, image-conscious culture, they’re still one of the last effective forms of cultural (and in these conservative times, political) subversion.

In the past, women used it as a defensive weapon against men who held power over them. In the future, women will no longer need men for either bonking or breeding. In the meantime, images of sex – what used to be thought of as pornography, a term that’s becoming increasingly irrelevant as it turns into just another niche of acceptable suburban distraction, like smoking dope or reading trashy celebrity gossip – have become expressions of an ambiguous, morally unresolved freedom.

One young writer, profiling my most recent work, called it Shock Pop, a phrase I think he glommed from a critique of the Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami. I can see how, in obvious ways, it applies to my paintings, especially those in which there are unavoidable encounters with violence and graphic sex. Now, I’m exploring how to take it even further, to tap-dance between the slippery wet patches where the chemical-smelling perspiration of art commingles with the sticky fluids of sex, spiritual yearning and consumer culture.

I always use myself as a model in my work, even when the work isn’t autobiographical.

It began during my teens. Lacking a life model, I taught myself to draw by looking into a mirror. I felt a certain detachment from my body, which has increased as I’ve grown older. Drawing was (and still is) a way of connecting myself to it, of convincing myself that I actually inhabited it. I used to wish that people could consist only of mind and shadow so that physical appearance wouldn’t be such a distraction.

Like many things, I think this was related to the area where I grew up: lonely little places that didn’t care much about the intellectual or creative – and didn’t trust them, either. In school and later, at university, it infuriated me that ideas were reduced to mere competition. I think this is what drove me to try and make my body a starting point for something more.

The first mature work I made that used my own image incorporated a full-length mirror. Onto the mirror, I lay coloured vinyl to create a simple, glamorised silhouette of myself. The game was for the viewer to try and fit the reflection of their body into the stylised outline of mine. Of course, no-one did, not even me. I was doing some fashion modelling then, so my profile was very tall (which it still is) and lean (which it is no longer).

The work pissed a lot of women off. The notion of women working with their bodies but striving to undermine the objectification of them is essentially feminist. But it became clear that my work would be accepted as feminist art only if I was shorter and heavier. My own inescapable physical reality somehow excluded my work. (That didn’t stop feminist lecturers at university making objectifying remarks about my body unrelated to art.)

A year or so later, I started playing with perspective to force the viewer look up to, rather than at, the figure I created– a figure based, as always, on myself. I wanted to create a kind of feminist idolatry (or heresy) although, in retrospect, I’m not sure I was successful at communicating that.

I am still both artist and muse. Because of my feminist upbringing, I used to interpret the role of muse with skepticism. It was, I used to think, related to looks, not intellect, and so inevitably ephemeral and ultimately destroyed by time.

Now I’m not so sure. In the muse that is myself, I am only just beginning to penetrate layers of 20-something years of tightly woven emotional, psychological and intellectual fabric that are enriched, not eroded, by the slow decay of the physical self.

Women tend to value foreplay more. The erotic art women make is more often about what happens within them during the process of arousal rather than an external act or anatomical location. Its power lies in the suggestion or, more precisely, the narrative of suggestion created through small gestures.

The best erotic artwork by women has yet to emerge so this makes it difficult to analyse properly. Women are just beginning to explore and express openly what turns them on, rather than wasting energy trying to figure out what turns men on and worse, expressing themselves only through what they think men want of their gender.