"Power to the Penis, Erection Day" Ion Birch @ Bellwether Gallery by James Kalm

The male member, cock, dick, prick, Johnson… shocked yet? A friend recently asked me what the differences are between art you might see in Manhattan and that in Williamsburg. My explanation was: In the Uptown galleries you would see a painting of a boy holding a chicken, in Chelsea you would see a huge glossy photo of a boy stabbing a chicken, and in Williamsburg you would see a picture of a boy humping a chicken, with ‘conceptual’ underpinnings. Okay, so it’s a crude analogy, but to anyone who knows the contemporary scene it’s not just hyperbole.
With a spat of current shows, Williamsburg has acquired the manifestation of a regular penile colony, and we’re not talking Kafka here. Shock has its value. Baudelaire’s thesis was that the measure of ‘avant art’ is its power to shock, that is, its ability to transgress bourgeois tastes and mores. In France in the 1850’s that didn’t take much. It used to be that you earned your bohemian credentials by sitting in figure drawing classes studying various naked people for hours, private parts and all, and to paraphrase Sylvia Plath, ‘Men’s genitals are about as attractive as chicken giblets.’ Barbara Rose has said that we’re now living in an avant-garde society. So where does that leave us?
Courting scandal and controversy is a quick way to get noticed, especially in our media saturated world of nano second attention spans. Sexualized or erotic depictions are perhaps the oldest surviving form of figurative art. All cultures, classes, creeds, and preferences have spawned their own versions, and perversions. With the help of better living through chemistry and the popularity of Viagra, no male need ever slip into the state of flaccidity again. It might be uncomfortable but it seems society expects men to live in a perpetual state of arousal. Who hasn’t been beseeched by their email spam that “size matters.” Well, if you can’t always have a hard-on, at least you can have a painting that does.
Becky Smith may have baited the most irresistible invitation to those addicted to the puerile, when on the front door of the gallery she hung a “Parental Notice, Extreme Content” sign. The title of Ion Birch’s drawing show, “The Young Penis,” doesn’t mince words. These intimate graphite drawings are firmly in the tradition of the ‘nasty picture’. Engorged penises and vaginas are visible everywhere, glistening and threatening the world. Flutes are played and inserted in orifices, cum drips from faces. An energetic world of De Sadian debauchery is depicted. Breasts are pumped up, and nipples are as pronounced as gumdrops. Some female characters are pictured with hips that seem double-jointed, like the jaws of a python. There is a discordance between the gonzo sexual fantasy and Birch’s effeminate style. The figures have a wide-eyed child like quality; pubescents with grotesquely enlarged adult genitals that seem grafted on. Bunnies, butterflies, and angels with boob jobs share in the action. Compositionally the works are varied and interesting. In some pieces there are letters and text hidden in the backgrounds. (The conceptual underpinnings?) Technically the drawing is accomplished and succeeds on its own merit. This kind of artistic license is applauded, and as a believer in the power of figurative art, I must compliment the effort. Abstract art just doesn’t have the ability to posit these kinds of questions. The show is a sell out, but what does one do for an encore? How far can you push sexual outrageousness before it becomes a cliché, and engenders apathy? What new taboo must you violate to get a rise out of an ever more jaded public? How far down in the psychic muck of ultra perversion are we going to dig, and what does it mean to a culture that seems to accept almost anything if it’s done in the name of high art? What are the new standards that will be set, and by who? Dear God please bless us all, amen. Shocked yet?

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