The Blowfish Blog

Fine Art

Sex has been a subject of art since the first caveman prodigy scrawled a picture of an erect penis on a rock wall. After many centuries of producing, disseminating, absorbing, and responding to art, however, things have gotten a bit more complex. Here a few choice bits of sex-related art — performance, conceptual, and visual.

Artist Amber Hawk Swanson has been exploring sexuality — and especially society’s complex and often unhealthy responses to female sexuality — in a number of provocative ways, especially video projects. For her most recent works, she paid $12,000 for a Realdoll — the high-end lifelike sex dolls — made in her own image, and has gone on to use her doppelganger in a number of projects, including recreations of rape scenes from movies, with both Amber and her doll dressed in the victim’s role. Oh, and a few months back, she married her Amber doll in Vegas. Read about the project here.

Designer James Auger’s Smell+ project purports to propose a “blind dating” service that highlights the importance of smell in human interactions, and it does so in a very weird and, dare I say, creepy way. A man and a woman stand divided by a wall, with hoses running from their armpits and genitals, through the wall, and to the other person’s nose and mouth — so each is literally inhaling the other’s . . . let’s just say “essence.”

Six industrial designers were asked to come up with “the ideal setting for losing one’s virginity,” and the results can be viewed as a slideshow at I.D. Online. Their ideas range from a crazily elaborate “Lost Virginity World” that covers a range of options, including an anti-gravity sex room, an elevator that always gets stuck between floors, and a tank full of cherries . . . to old standards like the backseat of a ‘55 Chevrolet Bel Air. Sometimes the classics are the best.

And, to get even more whimsical, an enduring favorite: Ellen Forney’s Lustlab Ad of the Week, where she illustrates a different personal ad from Seattle paper The Stranger every Wednesday. Makes me want to write really crazy personal ads in the hope that she’ll choose mine to illustrate . . . but that would be cruel to those people who really do want to get naked on a picnic table and rub each other with piping hot strudel.

Share This

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 8 August 2007 at 11:19 am and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.