Andrea Fraser - Still from Untitled (2003)
'In the art world, especially over the last few years, Fraser has been known for flaunting her body. This time she went all the way. The Petzel show consists of an institutional-looking TV monitor resting atop a white waist-high pedestal in the otherwise empty gallery. By now, almost everyone in the art world (and “a half million viewers, probably not in the art world,” as a Scarborough staffer informed me) knows what’s on this monitor: Fraser’s unedited one-hour videotape, called Untitled, of her having what she calls “just regular sex” with an art collector who paid $20,000, “not for sex,” according to the artist, but “to make an artwork.”
I’m no sexpert but to me the sex looked far from “regular.” More accurately, it felt stilted and rote and detached and strained (although I must say it looks as if she gives an attentive blow job). She’s in excellent shape for a 39 year old (various resumes have her older, but no matter). The collector, co-artist, commissioner, John or whatever you want to call him is a sturdy-looking if hirsute, 30-or-40-something-year-old white man. They sit on a bed in what looks like a hotel room. They talk, and talk some more. He awkwardly touches her thigh. She kisses him. She then removes his trousers, then her dress. She pleasures him, he her. They have intercourse in a number of positions. There is no visible “money shot.” He apparently ejaculates inside her (which seems pretty intimate to me). Afterwards, the couple lays in bed, talks, cuddles, talks some more, then each partner leaves from either side of the frame. The camera, which is where the overhead light fixture might be, never moves. There is no sound, no gynaecological detail, or anything especially hardcore. People who love porn won’t get off on Untitled; those who abhor it may find the video improbably neutral.'
From Super Theory Woman by Jerry Saltz
'Since sexuality is as much a social fact as it is a human one, it will therefore change its nature according to changes in social conditions. If we could restore the context of the world to the embraces of these shadows [i.e. porn "actors"] then, perhaps, we could utilise their activities to obtain a fresh perception of the world and, in some sense, transform it. The sexual act in pornography exists as a metaphor for what people do to one another, often in the cruellest sense; but the present business of the pornographer is to suppress the metaphor as much as he can and leave us with a handful of empty words.'
'But what can porn do in a world pornographed in advance?...Except bring an added ironic value to appearances? Except trip a last paradoxical wink - of sex laughing at itself in its most exact and hence most monstrous form, laughing at its own disappearance beneath its most artificial form?'
From The Perfect Crime by Jean Baudrillard
