The 1310 Gallery at Sailboat Bend Artists' Loft is not exactly easy to find. Not a big place with tons of public parking, but more a cozy enclave of working artists. Perhaps it's fitting that the Red Light Art Exhibit's explicit images of male and female genitalia are slightly tucked away.
"The main thing I want to know is, have these undies been
worn?" I ask my friend who's now holding both our plastic wine cups
as I scribble notes. "And if not, does that make it not art?"
When
we first walked in the gallery was pretty empty but it's starting to
get crowded. I finally find the curator, Laura Marie Peterson, or rather
she finds me. She's a tall woman in heels and I'm short so the vagina
necklace she's wearing is right at my eye level. It's not an artistic
representation of a vagina either. It's anatomically correct in every
way. I'm trying to pay attention to the very important and relevant
information she's giving me, but I've finished my plastic cup of wine by
now and have spent the last hour looking at breasts, vulvas, and
ejaculating penises. All I can think as I write is, "Vagina, vagina,
vagina."
Laura points out the burlesque dancer who's working her
way up the stairs to the third floor for the performance art portion of
the evening as she simultaneously explains that they're trying to work
out a better parking situation. I ask her about the mass of plastic
hangers hooked together in the center of the room with panties dangling
precariously from them.
"Well, this was part of a performance piece."
"These panties been worn?" I really need to know this information.
"Well,
the artist wore them while she did, like, a strip tease, and then she
washed them with that washboard over there and then hung them on the
hangers."
OK. They've been worn. I feel I can now safely classify this as art. But what was the point of all this?
"It's
about identity and fully accepting yourself," she say and starts
rearranging some of the "interactive art," pictures mounted on magnets.
It's
two faces, intensely close up and mounted on magnets so they can be
rearranged. I find it strangely jarring. After all the impersonal body
parts, the faces, lips, and eyes are intensely intimate, as if now I'm
finally seeing someone's most private parts.
So, yeah, I guess it was art after all.
Oh, and there was a penis cake.
"In that one he wants it..."
...and in that one she wants it," says my companion. Clearly, the inexpensive wine in plastic cups is already working.
that you're going to an art exhibit full of genitalia. On the other
hand, what is there to expect besides genitalia?
Vagina necklaces...
Breasts under glass...
Pixilated asses...
Drawings of naked female forms being attacked by ejaculating penises...
I admit, I'm no aficionado. Seems to me, art needs to be old and/or have received authoritative approval
by being allowed to hang in an illustrious museum. So at exhibits like
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this I tend to ask myself one question over and over, "Is this art?"
Still, I can appreciate it -- even in the farthest
reaches of its weirdness.
But underwear hanging from plastic hangers in the middle of a room? This isn't Bimini Bay Bar.
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