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LES FRAISES DUCHAMPS

''La roux'' DuPlessis, Mme Champoo-Lévesque et Mme Champagne ''Mister --Z--"

Hot Art: Explorations in Erotica

Scientists have been trying to rouse the libido of the male panda by showing captive, inexperienced and eligible bears porn flicks. The listless panda, it would seem, prefers to lie around sucking bamboo over humping a female. Not that the human being is necessarily in the same predicament, but Jenny Block, the Fox reporter with her finger on the pulse of the panda story, suggests that a little porn for human beings might inject some spice into tired sex lives.

Standard pornographic fare, however mainstream it might be, presents a number of problems. From cheesy images to moronic story lines, the exploitation of minors to the titillation and bad education of same. Erotica feeds our imaginations, but the intimacy of the coital act and associated pleasures makes some of us shy away from the explicitly sexual image.

Quebec has long shrugged off its strait-jacket on sexual mores: at least two generations have gyrated their way through the sexual revolution that followed in the wake of the public renunciation of the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. Yet positive, broadly representative, love-inspired sexual imagery can still be a challenge to find. Rather than opening the door to a freer sexual ethos, some would argue that the infiltration of pornography into popular culture and advertising has converted sexuality into yet another soulless commodity to be bought and sold.

Schneeman, Risk, Mapplethorpe, and Fischl were amongst the first contemporary American artists to openly mine the root chakra to create sex-inspired works that were thought-provoking, unconventional, and a challenge to the “male gaze”. This is the modest goal of this collection of works: to create a setting where erotica and the arts can meld together into something warm, stark, arousing, moving and mysterious, where the pleasures of the senses and the human body are honored and not vilified.