According to 93-year-old artist Martha Edelheit, this is the definition of porn. “It’s sensual, nonviolent, voluntary, warm, seductive, and sometimes funny, witty, and fun. Erotica assumes a common connection, touching, touching, licking, looking, playing, nude. It digresses, teasing, laughing, awakening without being hurt.”
All this is further and vivid “Pornographic City,” Group exhibitions of more than 40 artists from the 1950s to the present, including Joan Semmel, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Cadmus and Tom of Finland, Finland, until April 26 at the Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, on April 26.
The show was curated by groundbreaking feminist artist Edelheit, whose work in the 1960s involved women’s desires, bodies and skin as canvases for tattoo images. (The few are watching on the show.) Imaginative, playful, invasive and highly erotic at a time when female artists are unacceptable (“Radical Pornography”, As art historian Rachel Middleman later said, her work by default challenged the social expectations of women and the traditional concepts of symbolic painting and nude.
Martha Edelheit, Table set as dessert2015
Martha Noble in the studio
