action! sex and the moving-image.

the second floor of the museum of sex is hosting an exhibit entitled ‘action! sex and the moving-image’ which traces the development of sex in film. spanning over a hundred years, sex in the moving-image underwent a variety of transformations mediated by regulatory codes and laws at different points in history.

the room of ‘action!’ was illuminated with a dark blue. tiny television screens adorned a wall in the room’s center and the surface of raised blocks functioned as screens for other video clips. the visibility and audibility of films with adult content and porn queered this curatorial space by rendering indistinguishable the public and private. brianne and i navigated this perverse space by viewing close-ups of blowjobs, anal sex, and the like with complete strangers. we strangely felt discomfort and allure at the same time and as the same sensation, in the time and space we shared with others. this queer intimacy in which not a word circulated amongst strangers while erotic sensations did brought together normally and normatively private matters into public spaces while leaving each experience irreducibly singular. a heterotopia to the dominant society of sexual control, ‘action!’ thus enacts a politics of sexual aesthetics reconfiguring the proper place of sex and the curatorial to queer the traffic of bodies walking through and stopping still in a proximity too close for comfort yet too far for commonality.

on experiencing moma.

the museum of modern art (moma) may feel like a space of consumption. vast numbers of tourists breeze through the exhibits without extended looks on displays. purchases of memorabilia and miscellaneous trinkets may be made at several different locations throughout the museum. a cafe is located on the second floor. even the queues for bag checks wind through and out of a corridor. this disneyland experience subtracts the spectacular and sensational thrill of amusement park rides; a father answers to his impatient seven year-old son, ‘we’ve only been here for half an hour!’

nonetheless, moma also invites critical reflection across. divided amongst the museum’s six floors, iconic masterpieces and contemporary works offer a variety of styles, temporalities, and genres. accordingly, an/aestheticizing experiences inhere not in the artworks themselves; rather, they function as so many resonances between art and its viewer, thereby shattering any definitive delineation between those terms. here are several works that worked for me due to their carceral thematics.

Whilst navigating curatorial space may direct our attention inward to exhibited pieces, it simultaneously distracts us from one of the greatest exhibits of all: the city itself. this tendency to confine the proper place of aesthetics to the museum may disable a scrutiny of cityscapes themselves and how they re/structure perceptions, sensations, and experience itself.

But not everyone misses out.

a note on the politics of aesthetics.

a conception of politics which contents itself with those subjects eligible for participation necessarily ignores the exclusions afforded by those qualifications framing eligibility.  such ‘politics’ is not politics; it is a practice of policing. jacques ranciere describes the police as ‘an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task.’ as generally conceived, ‘politics’ concerns itself with already-formed subjects who merely participate within an already-formed world accordingly, it is a matter of policing an established order, preventing it from becoming anew and more accommodating to those who have no place.

politics is always adverse to the police order. it is what exists after the police attempts to assign everything and everyone a proper place. politics not only opposes what is sensible within the order of police, it seeks to reconfigure sensibility itself. ranciere: ‘political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. it makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise.’  politics thus never takes place within a world; rather, it is the very process by which the world emerges.

art has the capacity to birth a new world. it captures our attention where nothing should be seen and enables us to perceive anew; it lends to us new ears with which to understand what was once mere noise. ranciere argues ‘artistic practices take part in the partition of the perceptible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular.’ art confounds what appears as and through our so-called ‘common sense’, a sensibility imposed by the police order; its primary aim, therefore, is the enactment of politics.

this is the politics of aesthetics.