Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. If the great bogeyman of art history is the commodity, his complicit mistress would no doubt be the prostitute. This mythical figure is frequently made the emblem of modern capitalist social relations, in which sex is rendered a service crudely shoppable in the marketplace โ not unlike petty merchandise.
The impressionists were famously keen not only to capture this cultural flux of economic value but to replicate it visually, too, its canon full of blunt representations of courtesans who, in some warped attempt of masculinist allegorical critique, are reduced to passive but alluring objects of consumption rather than what they actually are: workers.
Reba Maybury, Used man , Here, Maybury directs these questions to the political economy of art itself: the value forms implicit in artistic labour and the institutional frameworks supporting them.
The John is most often alluded to in a car pulling up at the corner, a just-vacated hotel bed: a sexual performer who, in his absence, leaves his female counterpart with the cultural shame. The John performs โ yes, works โ willingly under Mistress Rebecca to produce sculptures and, while the latter also works, she is the only one who is paid.
This is a sculptural proposition with an effect nothing short of titillating. Denied access to these explicit acts, viewers are instead invited to re-construct the John in their minds by inspecting his underwear up close, safely re-branded as artwork. This dungeon monumentalizes sex work as artwork to compare economies of labour, but the joke ultimately ends with the audience itself.
