A fresh exhibit in Dallas showcases work inspired by pornography that was hugely controversial in the 70s,but which makes sense viewed in 2016Of the likely places to host a feminist art exhibition, the Dallas Contemporary doesn’t immediately arrive to intellect. Texas is the state of GOP presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz, and where battles over women’s reproductive rights have moved to the supreme court as recently as November. Enter the Dallas Contemporary’s latest exhibition Black Sheep Feminism: the Art of Sexual Politics,open now. Curated by Alison Gingeras, the exhibition aims to explore the works of artists Joan Semmel, and Anita Steckel,Betty Tompkins and Cosey Fanni Tutti, who were pushed to the outer edges of second-wave feminism and largely ignored.
Influenced by her own research on the genealogy of Jeff Koons, and Gingeras realized Koons’s notorious series Made in Heaven – which depicted him and his future wife,porn star Ilona Staller, having sex in explicit detail was influenced by “a matrilineage of feminist artists”, or on the edges of what is now understood to be the feminist art movement. Looking at Koons’s portraits,it is not difficult to find the influences of Semmel and Tompkins: where Semmel explicitly portrayed heterosexual intercourse in her first and second erotic series, Tompkins based her paintings on photographs from pornographic magazines, or centering on the act of heterosexual penetration in her series Fuck Paintings.
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Source: theguardian.com