Erotic Art in Seattle, February 2000
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| Art Show | Bemis Building Valentine Show |
|---|---|
| Location | 55 S. Atlantic, Seattle, Washington |
| Sponsor | Allison and Ross Inc. and Of The Earth |
| Date | Closing party Sunday, February, 13, 3 to 6 p.m. |
| Cost | Free |
I caught the opening of an erotic art show on Thursday, February 5, 2000. The show is open by appointment for the next week, when there will be a closing party on Sunday, February 13, from 3 to 6 p.m.
The First Thursday Art Walk is a Seattle institution. Art galleries hold show openings and the Seattle Art Museum opens its doors to the public for free. When I received an email notice for an "Erotic Art Show!" I didn't immediately connect it to First Thursday. Eventually I caught a clue, as I wandered through the labyrinth of the Seattle art world.
The email included directions to what turned out to be the Bemis building in SoDo, a former paper bag factory abandoned in 1993. It's the kind of place artists will immediately colonize: four story brick, large offices, in a neglected part of town. This building has a security door, you have to be buzzed in. I conquered the four flights of stairs to find myself in a long hall of closed doors, wandered into the first suite with an open door, and stumbled into Jennifer Spear's opening of show party, complete with a classic wine and cheese buffet and techno on the sound system.
Spear works in acrylic on illustration board, creating large lush images of semi-naked women with seductive, come-hither expressions and full pouty lips. She describes her work as pin-up art in the tradition of Vargas and Olivia. Spear shared her show with photographer Lloyd Shugard, who displays Victoria's Secret-like shots of women in lingerie.
Down the hall, the Allison/Beeman studio boasts a wall full of images. While Spear has a number of pieces, this studio showcases many artists with only a few pieces each in a variety of media: photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Some examples: a Michael Ziegler photo shows masculine hands resting on feminine, curving buttocks. A five panel drawing by Daniel Allison titled "Story of O" depicts a woman reading, the book drooping, a hand sliding into her lap, and then her complete surrender to the moment. Another photo, Mel Curtis: slats of shadow fall over an erect penis.
I noticed that both men and women were portrayed, but that the artists I'd looked at so far had been men. I searched for women's work and found several, including Kara Costa's kinky photo, almost abstract, called "Conductor", an arrangement of handcuffs and hands, some confined, some confining.
On the front desk I found a flyer which described the display as the "Bemis Building Valentine Show", promising "art that is sensuous, delicate, erotic and bold". David Allison, the show organizer, chatted with me a bit while he made signs to put in the hall. He told me that this was the second year for this show, it's just fallen together each year.
The poster board he was marking with magic marker directed me to the floor below. There I wandered by accident into another art opening, a hall lined with 1. Thom Ross' large canvases with civil war images and 2. people holding glasses of wine looking at the canvases. One of the wine-sippers said, "Looking for the Valentine show? It's down the hall to the right."
In suite 305 I found another whole side to Kara Kosta, completely different images than the black and white hands and handcuffs. Here, large limited edition color prints portray the housewife as a sullen sex object, in lingerie, holding household tools, against kitchen and bathroom backdrops. In contrast, Paul Havas has perhaps the most classical offering, oil on canvas, "June", an almost Fauve nude, bold color and soft focus.
As I waited outside deserted Safeco Field for the bus to take me back downtown, I reflected on the state of erotic art. Who was it who said that erotica is what I like and pornography is what you like? I move in a milieu both on the web and in real life which portrays real people having real, sometimes fierce, physical interactions. These images had a softer focus than that, sometimes serious and sometimes playful, sometimes idealizing, romanticizing, the human figure.
The card I picked up at Jennifer Spear's show mentioned that she also had pieces at the Lusty Lady. As long as I was heading down First Avenue, I thought, why not? So I popped off the bus and headed into the lobby of Seattle's famous peep show. There I once again ran into the artist herself. She chatted with me for a few minutes.
I asked her, why the Lusty Lady? "I answered an ad," she said. It's a regular venue for art shows. "The Lusty Lady has been so good to me." She's had a show there previously, among several in the last half year as her career takes off. "For the last show they put my name on the marquee," she said. I told her, "I thought I saw your name there when I came in." So we trooped outside and looked up at the "Jennifer Spear" letters on the reader board. She jumped up and down and laughed. "Oh my gosh! My name in lights!"
The Lusty Lady pieces are finished, polished art, glowing and lifelike. I wanted to touch the women's lips, stroke their hair and their golden skin. Jennifer and I talked about the piece of hers that was my favorite of the show, hung in her Beemis Building studio, titled "Am I Old Enough?", a young woman in black boots and thong clutching a pink teddy bear. "I just finished that at three this morning," she said. The style is more relaxed and playful than her usual polished perfection. "I'm learning to have more fun with it."
Being in the Lusty Lady reminded me that the Seattle Art Museum had finally hung some of Erika Langley's work, so I popped across the street to take a look at it. Langley had approached the Lusty Lady asking to make photographs of the models. The proprieters told her, you have to dance to understand the dancers. She took up the dare and worked at the peep show for a number of years, clicking away. Eventually she published her experiences and her photos in a book, The Lusty Lady, published in 1997. At the time of publication the Seattle Art Museum offered her a one-woman show, and then caved to a feeble public outcry and cancelled the show. Now they've hung some of her work among a good many other local photographers in a Poncho show, "Hereabouts: Northwest Pictures by Seven Photographers".
A card at the door to the gallery informs viewers that they might find some of the images offensive. "Viewer discretion advised". The twenty photographs include candid shots of sometimes nude dancers dressing, resting, posing, not for the camera and not for the customer, just women going about their lives.
Another gallery on the floor contains more photographs in a show titled "Painted with Light: Photographs by the Seattle Camera Club". There are nudes in that show, too, photos by Frank Asakichi Kunishige, brownish salt prints. In "The Broken Bowl", a woman kneels over a shattered pot. "Butterfly", made in 1925, shows a woman in a see-through filmy gauze spreading her arms to display her body. She's sweet, shamless, less self-conscious and more contemplative than many nudes made in this era.
There was no card warning people that they might find Kunishige's art offensive. I wondered why his soft-focus nudes were inoffensively included in the show, while Langley's sweet candids, no more hard-core than his images, were marked off as possibly upsetting to view. Is it because she does not idealize the moment? She shows the women, not as the sultry fantasies of the men peeping through the windows, but from the other side of the glass, as one of the dancers?
The art I saw on Thursday night is not commercial, not intended strictly as jackoff material. Much of it is sweet and soft and glamorous. Some, most notably Kosta's and Langley's, is hard-edged, thought provoking, personal and revealing. All of falls into an in-between realm, bridging the world of the sex worker and the world of the museum patron, bringing sex into art.
The Bemis Building Valentine Show is open by appointment. Contact Allison and Ross Inc. at (206) 682-8580.
Jennifer Spear's studio is also open by appointment, (206) 624-5161. Her show at the Lusty Lady runs through March 1 and is open 24 hours. You can also view her website, Girly Girl Art.
Erika Langley's work is on display at the Seattle Art Museum until March 12.
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