In Rob Reiner’s fictional ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap (1984) the dunderheaded guitarist Nigel Tufnell is told that his band’s forthcoming album, Smell the Glove, is being withdrawn from sale because of its sexist cover art. His hearing impaired by a lifelong proximity to amps that ‘go up to 11’, the scandalized Tufnell replies, ‘What’s wrong with being sexy?’ This question, in a sense, was at the heart of Tate Modern’s round-table discussion on ‘Destricted’, a series of seven sexually explicit films by Marina Abramovic, Marco Brambilla, Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince and Sam Taylor-Wood, which received a nationwide cinema and DVD release this autumn. For the assembled panellists – Clark, ‘Destricted’ curator Neville Wakefield, critic Bruce Hainley and Art Press editor and author of the erotic memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001), Catherine Millet – the answer seemed to be ‘nothing, or not much’, although whether the ‘Destricted’ project, marketed like Tom Dixon’s Brancusi-esque £199 ‘Bone’ vibrator as a luxury aid to arousal, was actually sexy remained another matter entirely.
The evening began with a screening of Bambrilla’s film Sync (2005), a two-minute montage of money shots swiped from hundreds of pornographic movies that was as utterly fatuous as it sounds. (Was it this work that Clark was referring to when he commented that ‘one of the artists in “Destricted” didn’t try very hard, but I won’t say who’?). Next came Clark’s own Impaled (2005), a kind of porn-idol documentary in which he auditioned young American men for a starring role in a gonzo skin flick (the winner, whom we saw buggering an ageing Adult starlet, resembled a country-cousin of The Strokes). If one could get beyond Clark’s well-rehearsed pervy uncle routine, the film had astute points to make about how the Internet generation’s sexuality has been shaped by pornographic tropes: each of the ‘contestants’ shaved their pubic hair, fantasized about anal sex and routinely ejaculated on their partner’s faces or breasts. Later Millet opined that ‘Larry’s film should be sent to sociologists to disprove the notion that pornography kills desire’. Maybe, but on this evidence it sure turns its users into (unevenly depilated) zombies.
The screenings over, the debate began, although perhaps ‘debate’ was not the right word. Beyond its cheap perfume of faux controversy (and its bargain-basement curatorial conceit), ‘Destricted’ provides little to talk about, so instead the panellists prated about whatever aspect of art, porn or sex was closest to their hearts, or loins. Clark waxed nostalgically about ‘when I was a kid, all you wanted was pussy’, Millet called for a non-negotiable defence of sexual expression, Wakefield sat in curious silence and Hainley provided a characteristically brilliant disquisition on Brokeback Mountain (2006) as a film about shame, the ‘possibility of eulogizing a straight man’s cherry’, and the link between the mainstreaming of anal sex and our diminishing visual privacy. (His best line? ‘One last word about the asshole …’) Equally, the audience’s contributions weren’t so much questions as statements: ‘I’m a dominatrix’; ‘Edo Japan produced highly explicit prints’; ‘The films are rubbish!’ In the end, this odd Babel reflected nothing so much as a ragbag of on line personal ads, perhaps the truest picture of contemporary sexuality: this is me, this is what I want, take or leave it.
