About three minutes into Barbara DeGenevieve’s video, Steven X and Barbara C (1999-2000), her male subject gets nervous. Steven X, a middle-aged bald guy with a thick, black mustache, pauses in the midst of recounting an experience that both distresses and arouses him — a chance encounter with a 12-year-old girl at a public playground that ends with her stroking him to climax in the bushes.
“You’re going to mask this so people can’t see who I am, aren’t you?” Steven X asks DeGenevieve, who sits off camera. Surprised, she agrees, and he keeps talking.
On the tape’s other half, a middle aged woman — implied to be the 12-year-old girl grown up — retells the story from her perspective as a precocious seductress who used Steven X for her pleasure.
DeGenevieve’s video — disturbing, engrossing, and full of ideas about sexual agency and responsibility that rub the wrong way against prevalent sexual mores — is a cornerstone of Explicit Content, an exhibition opening Saturday at Mindy Solomon Gallery in St. Petersburg. As regular observers know, taboo-busting shows are nothing new at the gallery. Past exhibits of ceramic sculptures and photographic works have toyed with gender and eroticism, inspiring Solomon to bubble-wrap her storefront windows to block out under-age curiosity.
Explicit Content takes the gallery’s commitment to sex — as thematic territory for exhibitions — to a whole new level. In addition to work by DeGenevieve, a big-league button-pusher and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibit includes photographs by Scot Sothern, an LA-based artist known for his portraits of prostitutes (and I don’t mean high-class call girls), and new work by Tampa-based Becky Flanders, who garnered attention four years ago as a student in USF’s MFA program for photographic self-portraits that depicted her urinating in graphic detail.
For Solomon — who plans not to admit anyone under the age of 18 to the exhibit without parental accompaniment — the works in Explicit Content transcend profanity and titillation to probe questions of sexuality that mainstream culture would prefer to sweep under the rug.
“The point is not to offend,” Solomon says. “It’s really about the honesty in the work.”
Such honesty can be shockingly revealing and ethically complex. (Perhaps that’s why relatively few artists make such risky work and why relatively few viewers and collectors seem to demand it.) One of Flanders’ vivid color photographs, “Daily Meditation #3,” offers a gynecologist’s view into the artist’s spread legs, a tiny painted target — eerily suggestive of an eye — nestled between her parted labia. The image emerged from considering non-romantic sex as “something that you do over and over again in hopes of enlightenment,” Flanders says. Though it seems to serve up her body as a visual object for consumption (against a backdrop of hot pink light channeled from a brothel or strip club), the photograph leaves a powerful, even traumatic, impression of the artist’s upper hand in compelling a viewer’s gaze. This meditation leaves nothing of the illusion of enlightenment behind.
In Sothern’s project, represented here by a group of black-and-white photos shot in the late 1980s, honesty meant documenting a population of people — LA street hustlers — invisible to mass culture except as stereotypes and statistics. In literary vignettes and interviews, he candidly describes his documentarian’s lifestyle: shooting while high on crack, having sex with some subjects, and counseling others about using condoms. The resulting images make for bleak commentary on social conditions (no one should have to sell their body for a Big Mac and a fix, as Sothern puts it), but they also evince a perversely noble search for beauty in the shit-filled gutter of life.
As for DeGenevieve’s Steven X, his tale of quasi-pedophilia — which might strike a lot of people as outright pedophilia — never took place. The man depicted in the video made up the confessional tale and presented it to DeGenevieve as fact when she was collecting stories of erotic encounters during an artist’s residency. The story so disturbed her, and the man’s convincing telling of it (he’s not a professional actor) so impressed her, that DeGenevieve decided to make the video. She plays the female character who reminisces about being the 12-year-old seductress. Though constructed, the story’s truthfulness as a fantasy (and the woman’s reply as a serious proposition of female agency) prompted her to bring it to light.
“We live in this culture that sexualizes everything, especially young girls, so how can anyone get through life without somehow being attracted to young girls?” DeGenevieve says.
Join DeGenevieve, Sothern, Flanders and sculptor Christina West for a panel conversation about their work at the gallery on Sunday. Saturday night’s opening reception will also feature an informal talk with the group. Other artists in Explicit Content include Bart Johnson, Georgine Ingold, Leopold Foulem, Anne Drew Potter and Bonnie Marie Smith.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2012.