‘Everybody Watches Porn’: Dealer Michele Maccarone on Why She Teamed Up With PornHub For Her Explicit New Show in LA

On Saturday night at Michele Maccarone’s Los Angeles gallery,
visitors waited in line, taking turns to peek inside a mysterious
plexiglass window that had been cut into the gallery wall.

The surprise waiting on the other side was the artist Delia
Brown sketching a nude model reclined on a purple velvet chaise
lounge. When visitors peered inside, some chuckled and quickly
moved along, possibly having recognized Brown’s subject: Asa Akira,
the award-winning adult actress who has starred in such films as
“Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure,” “Sailor Poon,” and “Asa Akira
is Insatiable” (installments one, two, and three).

This was the opening for “The Pleasure Principle,” a group show
about female eroticism curated by Maccarone and sponsored by the
Canadian adult-video website PornHub, which describes itself as the
“premiere online destination for adult entertainment.” The show
includes numerous sexually explicit works, such as Tracey Emin’s
neon-wrought aphorism “My Cunt is Wet With Fear”
(1998) and Lynda Benglis’s nude, dildo-flaunting 1974
Artforum ad. But what really raised eyebrows was the
show’s financial backer.

News of the Pornhub sponsorship provoked mocking titters on
social media, and one newspaper suggested it was a
“gimmick,” but Maccarone says she’s brushing it off. “‘Oh
my god, porn!’” Maccarone mock-exclaimed. Her aim, she said, had
been the inverse, to reclaim a subversive mood from around 1991,
when the publication of the book Angry Women introduced
her to the work of feminist artists like Karen Finley and Carolee
Schneemann.

“In the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about doing
exhibitions that remind me of when I was younger. Somehow in the
art world you get caught up and you get further and further away
from the things that originally inspired you,” she said. “In the
late ’80s and early ’90s I remember seeing the Whitney Biennial and
feeling a sex-centric, body-centric presence. I’ve been thinking,
is that still happening? For some reason, I think there’s been a
bit of a regression. I feel like now there’s a shame-based veneer,
and a lot of content cleansing.”

It seemed true that some visitors at the opening felt a sense of
shame watching porn while others were watching. Anne Hirsch’s
compilations of online pornographic clips, for example, had
commentary playing through the headphones attached to the monitors,
but many opted to simply watch the screens from a safe
distance.

The show posited a lineup of female, intergenerational artists
that challenge “the censorship of sexual imagery,” including Emin,
Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Marilyn Minter, Trulee Hall—all
pioneering women artists of minimally intersectional scope. “To do
something that was pansexual, including men, women, and
transpeople, I would have added two years of research,” Maccarone
said.

The representation of women of color was also scant, limited to
a television playing Nao Bustamente’s 1992 performance Rosa
Does Joan, in which the artist successfully fabricated an
exhibitionist persona to get on to The Joan Rivers Show,
and Narcissister’s The Face (Performing male facial
features) (2019), a monumental, mechanical assemblage of a
moving eyes and mouth that required activation from a live
performer.

Per the agreement between the gallery and the website, Maccarone
“would choose the art—some 50 works in total—and Pornhub would
‘commission’ the show,” and pay for production and installation
“with minimal interference,” according to Bloomberg.

“There’s always been a desire on the PornHub side to be seen as
a patron of the arts,” brand manager Alex Klein said of the site’s
interest in sponsoring the show. “I hope that this encourages other
artists and creators to approach us to help support them.”

PornHub’s financial backing made paying for performances by
Narcissister, Akira, and others possible, and for that, “Maccarone
appreciates Pornhub’s initiative to commission a curatorial
dialogue between pornography and art,” according to the show’s
press release.

Maccarone expressed an interest in future collaborations with
the site, including the possibility of a scholarly book, letting
detractors think what they may. “Everybody watches porn,” she said.
It’s just that “no one admits it.”

The post ‘Everybody Watches Porn’: Dealer Michele Maccarone
on Why She Teamed Up With PornHub For Her Explicit New Show in
LA appeared first on artnet News.