Porn Of Plenty

 

 

 

Lithe bodies lie dormant in pastel post-coital bliss as porn stars fuck quietly nearby. No, it’s not the opening of a new sex club, it’s Pornucopia at Allegra LaViola Gallery. And with its new show, the Chinatown gallery has amassed an abundance of artists responding to the darker side of indulgence.

 

"We have so much and are always being prompted to get more, but most of what we are offered is empty," LaViola says. "What are we using to fill the void?" Pornucopia, which opened Feb. 4, answers the question in extremes, from Kara Maria’s explosively political mash-up paintings to Ryan Alexiev’s shiny, happy "The Wizard of O’s," and is populated by the icons and sexual proclivities of late capitalism. The artists are thoroughly aware of their artistic ancestors, and the juxtaposition of Old Master influence and perverted fantasy highlights how far the culture of sinful indulgence has come.

"Three Graces," a large painting on paper by Tom Sanford, adopts the traditional Charities painted by everyone from Botticelli to Jean Arp. Here, Splendor, Mirth and Good Cheer are portrayed by a corpulent, baby-toting Britney Spears, a topless and narcissistic Paris Hilton and Tila Tequila, uncorking champagne that spurts out onto the painting like Dash Snow’s "Fuck the Police." The grotesque caricatures are something out of MAD magazine, and comment more on current celebrity than sanctity.

Also topical are Kara Maria’s wild collage paintings of adult film stars, military personnel and corporate logos. "Dystopia," the most graphic painting in the show, is an orgiastic composition of five female stars performing, two soldiers brandishing guns and a gas nozzle hanging provocatively before one actress’ open mouth. The painting isn’t some kind of porn-for-oil program; it takes the momentary satisfaction of a full tank and a full bust, and proves it a quick fix, a false panacea. "Real porn is just about that one thing," LaViola says. "Once we are done indulging there is nothing left over."

The erased-porn genre of art is well represented in Pornucopia, with works by the late Stephen Irwin and Duncan Hannah. Irwin’s "Choke 1" depicts a man clearly engaged in fellatio, but the penis is rubbed out of the image and the man’s face is left twisted in an unnatural gesture. Irwin utilizes the gravure printing process, an industry standard in the 1980s, making it easy to rub away desired sections.

Contemporary sexual mores are on display in Daniel Lyons’ "The Market Place," 12 small canvases with photographs of men, found on the Internet, against whitewashed backgrounds. Lacking context, it first appears that they’re photographing us and it’s only in the mirror glare that the viewer realizes that each is photographing himself. In the isolation of digital vulnerability, this is a Grindr screenshot in the making. Duncan Hannah’s "Jane" points to the semiotics of desire; a cover girl’s midsection is blocked out, and the object of desire is hidden behind a pussycat, but the true cause of desire is a hand reaching in from off screen.

An abundance of unnecessarily opulent foodstuffs is another common thread. In Alexiev’s hilarious video, "The Wizard of O’s," a poor Bulgarian farmer is shot while trying to escape across the border. He wakes up in an Oz-like world made (plants, roads, everything) of sugary breakfast cereals. John Harvey Kellogg instructs him to defeat the "evil, artificially colored" Frankenberry monster, who has enslaved the cereal-eating public. "Because they can have a different cereal at every meal, they think they’re free," Kellogg says. The Frankenberry monster is shown in a panoptical tower, looking out over hundreds of screens showing people singing the "Milk & Cereal" song that was a popular YouTube meme. It is his purity and strength in the face of "artificially constructed choices" that allows the farmer to triumph, whereupon we realize it’s all a commercial for a new breakfast cereal called Bulgar Bites.

The realization is disheartening amid Pornucopia’s nubile bodies and sugar-sweet irony. Even the merest hint of humanism is lost in the ubiquity of late capitalism.

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Pornucopia
Through Mar. 11, Allegra LaViola Gallery, 179 East Broadway (betw. Jefferson & Rutgers Sts.), 917-463-3901.