|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
Story by Jack Foley
THE
fine line between art and pornography is currently being explored in two new
exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London which
seek to reveal the increasingly complex collaborative relationship between
artist and model, and recall a period when art, media, fashion and music were
cross-fertilising.
Entitled ARTIST <-> MODEL, the exhibition showcases the work
of photographers Richard Kern and Fergus Greer/Leigh Bowery, artists who consistently
flirt with eroticism in their work and who seem fascinated by the naked female
form.
Kern, in particular, has been 'operating for 20 years at the boundaries of
the art world, the music scene and the sex industry without really belonging
to any of them', according to Time Out, New York (on the ICA's website), while
the Independent has referred to the Greer/Bowery collaboration as 'astonishing...
bold, ballsy images'.
The upper galleries of the ICA have been turned over to the American, Kern,
and the predominant theme running throughout his work is a fascination for
the aesthetics and problematics of voyeurism and pornography.
According to the ICA, the New Yorker's 'subtly subversive and seductive photographs
of young female models show them posing in a variety of domestic settings,
often in the middle of daily routines such as bathing, squeezing spots or
using eye-drops'.
But is it art, or merely an artistic excuse for pornography... and what type
of viewer is the ICA exhibition likely to attract - the voyeur or the enthusiast...
or, indeed, both?
Likewise, in the lower gallery, visitors can take in a selection of colour
an