Dorit Cypis, The Rest in Motion 1, 2002, C-print.

Joshua Harris’ book I Kissed Dating Goodbye starts with a nightmare: Anna stands at the alter in her white dress in a pictaresque chapel facing her soon-to-be-husband, David. She’s holding his hand. Then, as they begin to recite their vows, a girl walks up the aisle and takes David’s other hand. Another girl comes too, and takes hold of the first girl’s hand. Then a third girl comes, and so on, until a chain of six girls stand there. Anna wonders if it’s a joke. “Who are these girls?” she hisses.

“These are the girls from my past,” David says. They don’t matter to him now, he assures her, it’s just that they’ve each taken a piece of his heart.

“I thought your heart was mine,” says Anna.

“It is,” he says. “Everything that’s left is yours.”

A scenario like this, Harris will go on to argue, can be avoided. If you kiss dating goodbye.

His book, now sort of a millennial abstinence movement classic, came out in 1997. My mother, who still sometimes warns me to “save my heart” as if it’s a depletable resource, read it before I did. The heart part was only half the story, of course. The body part played a bigger, though less explicit, role. You had to save that too.

Dan Finsel, The Space Between You and Me: You borrow her dress, she borrows your boyfriend, 2012, Black and white photograph.

I picked up a newer book by Joshua Harris recently, called Sex is Not the Problem, and read something that I had heard directed toward women in some form or another during all my growing up years: “The way you dress can either help or hinder men around you who are trying to resist lust.” I mean, clearly there’s truth to that. But here’s what else Harris says: “Sure, guys can resist the temptation to lust, and it’s our responsibility to do so, but your dressing immodestly makes this very difficult.” And he adds, “There’s a difference between dressing attractively and dressing to attract.”

Is there? And is it the difference he thinks it is?

I must have still been an undergrad when I first started experiencing nude exhaustion. Already I’d been in art schools and the art world long enough to have seen too many so-so nude performances, photographs and paintings.  It was impossible to still think nakedness itself was seductive. But what I loved, and still love, are those beautiful, bodily movements that materials — fabric, clay, even industrial stuff like metal armatures and aluminum — can make. Dorit Cypis took a photograph in 2002, called The Rest in Motion, in which the billowing fabric of a curtain looks like a body’s bent-forward backside. You look at it and feel volume, softness. It attracts.

Installation view of Formwandler, Richard Telles Fine Art, 2012.

Another photograph I saw recently had a similar effect. It’s Dan Finsel’s, it’s installed in Richard Telles’ current show Formwandler and it’s called The Space Between You and Me: You borrow her dress, she borrows your boyfriend (2012). A black and white image, it shows a dark cloth over what must be a tall mound of clay. The cloth wrinkles, ripples and falls down, in some places past the wheels of the dolly that the clay rests on.

Finsel knows his large clay mounds, covered or not, look like bodies, and he uses bodies to shape them, often just hands. (“It’s like a romance,” he said in a video interview, while he and a dark-haired woman massaged the clay, their hands next to each other. “We’re barely touching each other, but you have to act like we’re thinking about it.”) Then, in some images and videos, a nude blond woman lays on red clay, shaping it with her weight. But in The Space Between You and Me, there’s no flesh visible. There’s not even clay visible. It’s fully dressed and the fabric alone suggests its bodily weight. It’s better, more sensual and suggestive, than any sheer skirt or spaghetti-strap top I’ve ever seen.

]]> https://www.dailyserving.com/2012/08/dress-attractively-or-dress-to-attract/feed/ 0 https://www.dailyserving.com/2011/02/perversity/ https://www.dailyserving.com/2011/02/perversity/#comments Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:45:13 +0000 http://dailyserving.com/?p=13939 L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Dorit Cypis, "The Nervous System: Mother and Child," 1987. Courtesy Jancar Gallery.

When Workspace, a Lincoln Heights storefront with a gallery the size of a living room, hosted a reading last Sunday, only one of the four featured artists actually read, and he read the work of someone else. It was Tyler Coburn, who sat at the front of the room in bow-tie and jacket, looking very readerly and comfortable in the way a teacher does when sharing something he believes in with students who believe in him.

The someone else he chose to read, Sam D’Allesandro (who changed his name from run-of-the-mill Richard Anderson in order to pose as son to fringe superstar Joe D’Allesandro), had a neutrally inquisitive voice, somehow self-involved without being solipsistic; in a review, Joanna Petrone called it “calm and heatless.” In reading D’Allesandro’s Electrical Type of Thing and Jimmy, Colburn had some of that heatless calm. The first, a story about wanting what doesn’t want you—at least not in the same way—and being wanted by what you don’t necessarily want, wonders whether people could really want wrongly. The story’s explicit sexiness, while tangled up in what the protagonist does and doesn’t desire, seems so subsumed by that question of the rightness or wrongness of wanting that the it loosens itself from its own perversity.

Angela Ellsworth, "Untitled," 2011.

It’s difficult for perversity to hold its own when the parameters that define what’s expected or proscribed are undercut (could “proscribed” and “perverse” be antonyms?)—“Perversions are often phantasms spun by jurisprudence,” wrote Wayne Koestenbaum, in the same essay in which he posited perversities as “a continuum of harmless grays.” There are a good number of grays in D’Allesandro’s stories and even more in Jancar Gallery’s current exhibition, Narratives of the Perverse – II (I occurred in 2008), a show that’s intergenerational and amorphous. Despite its title, Narratives functions more as a list than as a story, an enumeration of perversions, some political, pornographic, decorative, exploitative, explicit, and all somehow tied to how you assert or lose yourself while trying to connect with others. With thirty-eight artists and work hung upstairs, downstairs, in the alcove between desk and wall and in the stairwell, it’s a promiscuous exhibition. But it doesn’t feel overfull.

In Dorit Cypis’ 1987 photograph The Nervous System: Mother and Child, a pink, frilly, sinister image, a toddler holds her dress over her mother’s face in a way that connotes either precocious murder, or a forced pedophilia. In Angela Ellsworth’s Untitled, two girls with heavy braids, who could’ve come from Yearning for Zion Ranch, are about to gently kiss, putting the conservative, repressed wholesomeness of their appearance into intimate contact with the liberation tied up in girl-on-girl loving. There’s no shame in Ellsworth’s image, but there is in Elana Mann’s 2009 video Ass on the Street, where the artist wears an ass’s head and feels her way down a South L.A. street. Her body’s timidity and the simplicity of her black outfit makes the expression of perversity (she’s openly being an ass) seem wrong, like a Scarlett letter, and, as moving through the world with an ass head makes it difficult to see where you’re going but easy for everyone else to tell, Mann places herself at the mercy of others even though she can’t really engage them at all.

Elana Mann, "Ass on the Street," video still, 2009.

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens can and do engage one another in their collaborative Ecosexual, a kitschy, defiant image of Sprinkle with legs spread and Stephens standing above. The couple has now been married six times and hosted six different weddings in the past six years, ever since their planned legal one was denied. This print corresponds with the most recent. It’s a performance of promiscuous commitment–wanting the right kind of togetherness but wanting it wrongly.

“I did not want comfort,” wrote Sam D’Allesandro, not in the story Coburn read but in another, titled Nothing Ever Just Disappears. “I did not want to be comfortable with not seeking comfort or predictability . . . I wanted to be challenged, but not in pain.” The most heartening trait of Narratives of the Perverse II‘s is its ability, as an unweildy collective, to be comfortable with the discomfort of wanting and not wanting in ways that aren’t sanctioned, destabilizing perversity as taboo while still allowing for the confusion of a series of “harmless grays.”