Week In Art #2
Art I saw and loved
Jimmy DeSana: The Dungeon Series, 1978-79 @ P·P·O·W
One of the most significant forms of performance art, one that has truly stood the test of time is sex. My recent visit to P·P·O·W to see the exhibition Jimmy DeSana: The Dungeon Series, 1978-79, crystallized my sentiment. This exhibition displayed his earliest photographs that capture his collaboration with the author and dominatrix Terence Sellers. DeSana’s distinctive style of capturing fetishistic performance is placing a single light source on his bound subject within a traditional, domestic space. After all, where else can one luxuriate comfortably when fulfilling their desires? Home is where the dungeon is <3.
In 1973, DeSana moved from Atlanta to New York City where he became a fixture in the downtown social circles, most notably the burgeoning New Wave and punk scenes in the East Village. Through the people he met within these scenes, he was able to pick up various editing and photography jobs, which led him to meet Sellers. Today, East 51st street is far from being considered a sexy area of the city, but one of the beautiful traits of New York is that so many perverse acts hide in plain sight! This is where Sellers had her dungeon and would invite DeSana to photograph her sadomasochistic engagements with clients.
As DeSana focused on the technical aspects of the photograph (lighting and angles) while Sellers handled the costuming of herself and her client that would shape the narrative for their act. The images created in this series celebrate the various power dynamics between the voyeur, the dom, and the sub within domestic spaces.
The images of true amalgams of dominated domesticity feature a male client dressed in a satin bralette and matching underwear with his hands and feet nested into two different sets of women’s shoes. First position: tabletop over the kitchen sink and counter, acting in service to his owner Second position: back arched up to the cabinets, arms outstretched in front as though he is bowing two his mistress and honoring (what we may presume) her footwear by exposing them to DeSana’s lens. I would love to summon Freud from the great beyond to hear his thoughts on these!
Another visual signature of DeSana’s I noticed while taking these photos was the close framing juuust cropping both Sellers and her John’s face out of the image, leaving her expression to our imagination. Personal favorites include her sub carefully worshiping the tip of her heel with his tongue, Sellers in shadow with only an inch of skin exposed between her leather skirt and tall back boots standing on her bound subject with his face planted into the couch, and her books getting cleaned while the shine of her leather pants steals the show.
Honorable mentions include: Sellers carefully putting out her cigarette on the naked edge of her sub’s body. What drives me the wildest about this composition is the contrast of the participants' dress/undress: him nude with a leather mask peaking out of the bottom left corner as she rests on the beach clad in a white blazer and pleated skirt with black strappy peep-toe pumps. Another love of mine was the sub’s splendor in the grass. The figure is the focal point among the lush greenery but especially pops in the foreground as he is dressed in all-white lingerie, sheer stockings, and a grommeted gimp mask.
Fun fact: these images were going to be used to illustrate Sellers book in progress titled The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern, a how-to manual for sadomasochistic practices. However, this never came to fruition.
Beatrice Bonino: If I did, I did, I die @ Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery. After climbing three steep staircases, rounding a platform, then finally ascending another set of stairs I reached interior decorative bliss. Have I ever had a vision of what I would like my home to look like? Not quite. Despite endlessly inundating myself with #inpso every single day, I haven’t sat down to consider the ways that I could bring everything I love into one space that also illustrates and materializes my essence. However, after reaching the pinnacle of 52 Walker and entering Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, my ultimate vision was laid out in front of me.
Their current exhibition If I did, I did, I die is comprised of works by the Italian-born, Paris-based artist Beatrice Bonino. This presentation is monumental as this is her first time exhibiting in the states and it is the gallery’s first presentation of a dedicated body of work by a singular artist. On display are over twenty works that include sculpture, seating, and vessels, including a semi-opaque sheet of nude latex printed with small clusters of print roses, lit from within under a sink.
In her wide range of objects, Bonino explores ephemerality and memory, in addition to the way materials, ideas, and sensations are brought together through fastening presented in closures, disclosures, and the tenses that naturally occur within these forces. Objects that are typically crafted out of soft materials, like bows, are rendered in lead and decorate the edges of the gallery’s display shelves and hold a latex room divider in place. Latex, the ever-utilitarian and mischievous material, dresses knee-high side tables, benches, and vases. The chicest object I have ever seen, yet “blink and you’ll miss it’ is a latex sheet cloaking an outlet. This is a style of babyproofing I could only dream of if I were to bear children. One of the hardest working closures in clothing, the tiny yet mighty humble hook and eye, encircle one of the vases on display. The vessel, dressed in its finest little black latex sheet seductively entices the viewer by allowing the material to drape along its edge.
Other industrial materials are worked into objects that highlight their softer traits, while their durability shines. Shielding the gallery office from public view is a light nude curtain decorated with steel wool bows, creating a delicate scalloped effect in the fabric. Steel wool is also woven into a plush bench covering, although I believe this would be best to only look at and not subject one’s posterior to.
Adding the sweetest glimmers throughout the objects are rhinestones. Just outside the gallery door are nails hammered into the wall spelling out the title of the exhibition, each capped off with its own special sparkle. They also form a delicate constellation around one of her Simone Rocha-esque “dressed” vessels. The fashion parallel to Bonino is undoubtedly Ms. Rocha. The title of the exhibition appears sprinkled throughout the show in small, brilliant gems throughout the show, like a visual incantation by Bonino to everyone who comes to visit her rooms filled with curiosities
