I was standing in front of Vanessa Harris’s video God Bless This Mess when a fellow gallerygoer stopped dead beside me. “Nude!” he said. I looked at the video, in which a woman’s bare torso is smeared with frosting, sprinkles, and other assorted foodstuffs, and agreed that, yes, there was nudity there. As the video proceeded and the woman shook and slapped her breasts, my interlocutor exclaimed, “This is my favorite piece!”
Ruby Thorkelson‘s Spit Mixer perhaps best sums up the show. A strawlike tube sticks out of one side of a tall, standing board; on the other side, the tube curves down to a white base, where colors spread out as on an artist’s palette. The piece is an obscurely functioning but otherwise obvious system for transforming bodily fluid into creative effusion. Like the show itself, it imagines that porn is art, that art is the world, and that the world is gross and ridiculous and sexy, swollen with meaning.
Through 8/12
Woman Made Gallery
685 N. Milwaukee
womanmade.org Free
