The words “erotic art” mean different things to different people. Ideas of just what that entails might range from ancient Greek statues of sex goddess Aphrodite to Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde to the semi-abstract paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. The category is quite pliable and open to creative interpretation, a fact that curator and artist Martha Edelheit has put to good use at the new exhibition Erotic City, opening at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York.
The show, which incudes over 60 pieces ranging from paintings to photos, sculpture and other media, is wide-ranging and impressive, spanning decades of creativity. They have all been selected for their sensual pleasures, which may or may not exactly include forms of gratification that are explicitly sexual. In fact, the question of just what makes up the category of erotic art is an open and slippery question, one that Erotic City raises but does not necessarily want to answer, at least in so many words.
Exhibition curator Edelheit is something of a story in herself – after having a long and fascinating career creating works of art, she now, at 93 years of age, has tried her hand at curating for the very first time. Her participation in Erotic City came about when she met with art dealer Eric Firestone while living in Sweden. “Eric found me, which was sort of astounding,” she said. “It was lovely. The opportunity to curate the show was was a real gift. It came very unexpected.”
Edelheit traces her own experiences with erotic art back to roughly 1959 – it was around that time that she was shown a friend’s copy of a Japanese pillow book, which transformed how she thought about erotica. “The first thing I ever saw that was really erotic was this Japanese pillow book,” she told me. “I was absolutely blown away by it. It’s still the standard of what really gorgeous erotic art is for me.”
The experience that Edelheit had with the pillow book demonstrates one of the interesting things about Erotic City – namely, the multitude of forms that erotic art has taken depending on era and cultural context. For instance, artist Jane Kogan’s 1978 work Parable for the 70s feels very of its time, sporting a naked, androgynous mermaid floating before a New Age-esque background. Contrast that with Marilyn Minter’s very abstract 2016 piece Thigh Gap, a piece that conjures feelings of rain dripping down a window, and which is all about texture and the emotion rippling off of the canvas. And then bounce over to Rose Nestler’s installation piece Ballet Bag, which features the titular object with two feminine legs jutting out of it, the whole thing suspended off the ground by an aluminum bar and done up in a blaring pink. Three very different artists with three very different depictions of what erotic art can look like.
For her own part, Edelheit shrinks from defining erotic art, instead preferring to see it as a very malleable construct that depends very much on the milieu that surrounds it. “Erotic art is cultural, it’s political, it’s religious, every culture and every age has had a different set of rules,” she told me. “And even in the same culture, the rules can change from one set of people to another.”
One thing that erotic art is not, however, is pornography. While curating this show, Edelheit was very careful to distinguish between the two, as she sees pornography as quite inimical to any artistic practice. She in fact associates it with words such as “cold, abusive, nonconsensual, painful, humiliating, mean, degrading, and clinical”, whereas she sees erotica as a complete contrast – all about being “non-violent, consensual, warm, inviting, sometimes funny, witty, amusing”. The difference for her is quite evident: she had no problem dismissing the many submissions for the show that felt to her much more like pornography. “I did very clearly reject images of bondage, damaging another body – that to me is pornography.”
First and foremost, Erotic City is meant to inspire aesthetic pleasure in a viewer on multiple levels, another thing that Edelheit believes distinguishes erotic art from pornography. Like all good art, erotica should provide experiences of deep engagement that pull a viewer out of the flow of day-to-day life. “I don’t make that strong of a distinction between erotic art and art,” Edelheit told me. “Art always has a sensual aesthetic to it. All great art gives a combination of many different levels of pleasure.”
Beyond feeling that aesthetic pleasure, the experience of viewing Erotic City is one of abundance and enlargement. It is to appreciate how any one view of what is erotic is in fact only a very slender slice of the enormously larger spectrum of everything that humans might construct as such. It is to appreciate how much more there is to erotica than just sex, than simply the sexualized bodies repeatedly fed to us by countless engagements with media, be they on apps, movies, advertisements or the multitudes of other ways that our culture seeks to stimulate our sexual proclivities.
It is also to remember that erotic experiences occur across the lifespan, and not simply in the two to three decades that we like to construe as sexually potent. Edelheit in fact is a staunch believer in having great sexual experiences regardless of age, a cheerfully sex-positive presence with a refreshing view of the sexual potential of mature bodies. “One of the myths that’s prevalent in western culture is that older people don’t have sex lives,” she told me, then went on to share about the sexual experiences of herself and her peers. “One of my closest friends, when she was in her late 80s and early 90s, she was on Match.com, and she had some wonderful partners. She was getting responses from everybody from 45-year-olds to 85-year-olds.”
It is that kind of refreshing energy and enthusiasm that make Erotic City a success. Through eight decades as a painter, Edelheit has remained fascinated by human bodies and their creative potential – her ability to continually renew that fascination and examine it from so many perspectives makes this show worthy of attention. “My dialogue has always been with art history, going back to cave painting, and the way the human body is portrayed,” she said. “I hope viewers will get a lot of aesthetic pleasure, as well as a lot of sensual pleasure.”
