Imogen Haisman

REVIEW

Skin murmurs, fur erects, organs simmer, teeth empty then genitals dazzle.

Sadie Coles’ upstairs haunt on Kingly Street became an arena of carnal erotic imagery that toes the lines of perverse pleasures and pain.

“Sexuality and violence co-exist along a knife edge of the human condition”

In a boundless exploration into the parameters of sexuality where sensationalism is subjective, we consider the abject and the allure of hardcore. We become complicit to this playground, unsure whether to indulge in its paradise or abhor in its disturbances.

Before digesting the wall pieces, we first must appreciate the full BDSM get-up demanding our attention in the centre. From the slowly swinging mechanical whip to the full S&M leather ordeal..whips, belts..axes…we truly get everything.

Amongst this battleground is Doreen Lynnette Graner’s / King Cobra’s deeply discomforting White Bread.

The more you piece this butchered carcass together the more that meets the eye. The icky, coarse black hair that coats its exterior only develops further into the gut-filled and gut-wrenching centre. Amongst the contortions of bodies upon the wall, her unflinching engagement with flesh and the abject quickly places us at odds with these notions of pleasure and beauty. 

In her recent showing of White Meat at JTT in NY last month she opens a conversation to the ownership of the abject. “White Meat reveals itself as a cathartic laboratory for unveiling, reckoning with, and dissecting whiteness.”  She questions how the abject white body has been so effective in eliciting strong feelings of revulsion – because whiteness is so inextricably tied to humanity. So whilst her work is typically a political confrontation of racism and whiteness as “neutral” body grounds, here it is the final act of the corporeal experience. We witness pleasure, pain, violence, ecstasy and then finally the bodily spillages that ultimately signify death.

Following in suit of these visceral materialisations of the flesh, it feels only natural to jump into Carolee Schneemann’s Vulva’s Morphia. Her wall panels read as a witty and equally educational narrative of the Vulva. Tussling with feminist constructivist semiotics and blatant satirical rage against the patriarchy, there is nothing ambiguous about this piece. Schneemann’s wrought engagement with the female form offers no space for passive acceptance, she demands our disdain.

In a similar vein Cindy Sherman’s contribution again probes into the dynamics of the female body through the sickly green hue of her mannequins. Capturing the essence of hardcore, blurring the line between delight and disdain, her prints grasp the teetering agency between the powerful and the powerless. 

And frankly these prints are important to the balance of this show – as without we are defining the essence of hardcore through an abundance of tangible materials and objects. The sensations defined in Rosa Maybury’s text could be lost without this injection of human experience. It cements the crucial emotional context amongst the BDSM hardware.

Even with Tishan Hsu’s wall piece, we again must physically navigate his green panel of fleshy controls, orifices and nipples. But we need the supplementary grounding of emotive narrative. 

Nevertheless, in rejecting the niceties of intimacy and indulging into this sublime chaos we fall free of morality. Both viewer and subject remain at odds as to who holds control. And there is a liberating indifference in that respect, as essayist and dominatrix Reba Maybury points out, “These works are not seducing you, because they are not about you.” 

– Imogen Haisman