Alex Bag and Ethan Kramer, Le Cruel et Curieux Vie du la Salmonellapod, 2000; (video still); 11:48 min.

With artworks cutting across history and displayed in groups of abstract logic, Aquatopia could be described as a conceptual survey; it explores its theme from diverse historical angles and artistic perspectives. Here, the ocean is a filter, a site for interpretation, a toolbox of images and relations, and a stage for the sexual, spiritual, scientific, and narrative imagination. Firmly framed in the fantastic, artworks and objects are relieved of their descriptive duties and instead evidence their author’s fears, dreams, and wonderment. The brilliant antique copper diving helmet, the set of biological scientific etchings, the eighteenth-century map—each inspires new associations beyond their original purpose.

Contemporary works seem in their element. Located in a handsome video cluster, Le Cruel et Curieux Vie du la Salmonellapod (2000), by Alex Bag and Ethan Kramer, is a double riff on the nature documentary format and the fantastic violence of romance (in the dreamed-up world of the disgusting, hilariously chimeric Salmonellapod), playing this subjectivity to amazing ends. Ashley Bickerton’s nylon-equipped Orange Shark (2008) is perfectly fits the exhibition, as does Spartacus Chetwynd’s squidlike fabric construction. Shimabuku’s Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokyo to the octopus from Akashi (2000)—one of my favorite artworks in any circumstance—exactly captures Aquatopia’s double exposure of the ocean as both unfathomable phenomenon and site for personal experience. Nearby, Herbert James Draper’s A Water Baby (1895) leaps out of its circular frame, absurd and absolute in its sea-foam sentimentality.

Liz Craft, Old Maid, 2004. Bronze, 9 x 53 x 24 in.

While lacking a seeming sense of order—none of the works are grouped according to type, subject, medium, or arranged historically or by origin—Aquatopia’s construction feels highly considered. At first, the exhibition’s historical leaps caused me to fear that the curators had chosen to rely too heavily on spurious juxtaposition. I was scared that the exhibition would simply be a collection of Interesting Things (related to the ocean), much like Leckey’s The Universal Addressability and other scattered, perhaps too fashionable, contemporary modes of curating. To a certain degree, the curatorial choices reflect a similar gesture: many works included in Aquatopia were not meant to be exhibited in this manner—or at all—and part of the pleasure of examining works like the aforementioned copper diving helmet comes from examining it as art, placed as it is in a display context. However, the majority of works in Aquatopia are proper contemporary artworks, built as such, and those not in this category were chosen carefully and seemed to become more of themselves in the context of the exhibition. Often, the works appear arranged in unmarked clusters, patterning between contemporary and historical: in one room, Guy Ben-Nar’s homemade interpretation of Moby Dick (2000) plays a few meters from Gustave Dorés’s prints from Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1876); in another, the lapping waves from the Otolith Group’s quest for the undersea Drexciya, depicted in its film Hydra Decapita (2010), wash over the small huddled body of Liz Craft’s bronze Old Maid (2004), lit from above through emerald and azure gels.

JMW Turner. Sunrise with Sea Monsters, 1845; oil on canvas; 36 x 48 in. Courtesy Tate, London

Aquatopia is perhaps a perfect summer exhibition for a museum of the size and scale of Nottingham Contemporary. It offers as much to devoted followers of contemporary art as it does to children, as the exhibition’s content and breadth is rich territory for the museum’s educational directors. While it included a number of powerful and hard-edged works, Aquatopia remains one of the most enjoyable museum exhibitions I’ve attended. It is full of drowned wrecks, humor, and irony, and functioning almost like a postcard for the show, one of James Turner’s finest paintings, Sunrise with Sea Monsters (1845). An unfinished work, it was titled only by its interpreters, who discovered monsters in Turner’s waves.

Aquatopia is on view at Nottingham Contemporary, in London, through September 22, 2013.

Helio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida, "Cosmococa 5: Hendrix - War CC5-11," 1973 / 2003 C-print mounted on aluminum. Courtesy Michael Benevento, Galerie Lelong, NY and Joshua White Photography.

A friend of mine, a sculptor with immense brown eyes and a long figure that that always looks both cautious and comfortable with itself, was standing next to her brother’s Ford Explorer outside an Illinois gas station. They’d just been to see their grandfather in a rest home and it was the morning of Louise Bourgeois’s death, so my friend felt reasonably subdued. A man in a black sedan with windows down drove by and slowed to a crawl. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?” he said to her, sort of jauntily. She dropped her eyes, turned and rammed her head up against the Explorer’s doorframe, keeping it there until the sedan drove off. She has no idea why she did this, and I’ve made her describe it to me, blow-by-blow, three times at least. Her behavior feels vulnerable, resistant, violent and yet weirdly liberated. It’s a reaction against sexy—or at least the breed of sexy the man in the sedan felt he could access. But it’s also sexy itself, the spontaneous assertion of an inexplicable instinct.

Spartacus Chetwynd, "Hermito’s Children," Video (color, sound), 2008. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Everlasting Gobstopper at Michael Benevento, an exhibition that’s more reflective than its title suggests, is sexy expressly because of the sexinesses it rejects. The show has a grittily commemorative mood, like the setting for a party that’s bound to be oddly romantic, Disco-indebted, yet still somber. The entry way walls are painted black—it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust—and a dark purple poster of a howling wolf, painstakingly drawn by Eva Rothschild before she moved on to Cold Corners and other wonky minimalist projects, hangs opposite the door. Next comes a posse of paintings from Spartacus Chetwynd’s Bat Opera series; Rothschild’s triangular black Perspex tower; counterculture queen Lil Picard’s terrifyingly delicate burnt polka-dot bow-tie; Michael E. Smith’s dry black paintings and crusty floor pieces; and Cindy Sherman’s piquantly pink autumnal death scene. But all these mostly serve as the supporting cast for Chetwynd’s Hermito’s Children, a three part video installation that plays out on 14 stacked monitors at the back of the main gallery space.

Like a filmic novella spawned by a Truman Capote – Jack Smith marriage, Hermito’s Children presents characters who are obsessive, articulate, eccentricity prone, and vested in one another’s sexuality, though only vaguely interested in sex. Watery graphics dance across the screen to the sound of portentous woodwinds as act one, The Case of the Poisonous Dildo, commences. Less mystery than cameo, The Case features a matronly protagonist who wears a zig-zagged muumuu and sounds like Edgar Oliver with a lisp. She tells viewers not to be frightened as she introduces her unconventional, androgynous family: an ex-husband who runs a raucously happy Jewish restaurant, an absent daughter, and a deep-voiced assistant with a hog’s nose. In act two, an innocent girl in a body suit listens to a worldly “puppet master” who tells her “a dancer who relies on the doubtful prospect of human love will never be great.”

Halfway through act three,called Helmut Newton Ladies Night, the muumuu-wearing matron reappears and refers to a tomboyishly debonair troupe of women. “You are seduced by these women,” she says. “[But] what they’re doing is not that dangerous. Your imagination exaggerates it.” Then “these women” ritualistically dance to experimental metal, spoofing on Helmut Newton’s iconic 1981 image, “They’re Coming,” in which four svelte figures advanced toward the camera.

"Everlasting Gobstopper," Installation View, 2010. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Newton once said he couldn’t work pornographically because he didn’t do rough: “Rough stuff is real; it’s not posed. The trouble with my pornography, it’s too chic.” The bodies in Hermito’s Children aren’t posed or chic, but they’re not rough either. They’re somewhere in between. One of my favorite moments comes near the end. A group of nude women form a  sculptural rectangle. It’s stoic, formal and literally objectifying. But then a face breaks from the group and erupts in an inaudible, punkish yell. I like the idea that incongruous, fiercely independent bursts of emotion could be a way to claim sexiness as your own.