The most delightfully outrageous show in town this month focuses on a classic taboo: the vagina. At least outside the porn industry, overt images of the female reproductive organ are usually considered too racy, too sexual and even too perverted for open public consumption.
Jointly organized by David Nolan and Francis M. Naumann, The Visible Vagina is an exhibition that comes in two parts, featuring elaborate installations in Chelsea, as well as on 57th Street. The curatorial concept was much inspired by Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, the popular play that premiered off-Broadway in 1996 and has seen many productions since.
The exhibited talent at Nolan and Naumann is extraordinary. Besides early feminist artists, such as Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, and Yoko Ono, The Visual Vagina includes many modern and contemporary masters, ranging from Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, André Masson, Man Ray, and Robert Mapplethorpe to John Currin, Wangechi Mutu, Kiki Smith and Nancy Spero. The paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs here are as eclectic as the list of artists. Depictions of the subject vary from explicit and detailed to poetically abstract. It is thanks to this impressive diversity that the show succeeds in establishing a multi-faceted, as well as unpredictable exploration of the matter.
However scientific one’s approach to viewing the works on display, or however at ease with intimate portrayals of the human flesh, The Visible Vagina will certainly make most visitors blush - at least at first. This is largely due to the mesmerizing amount of this phenomenal display of dark triangles, pink flesh, folds of skin, pubic hairs, and open portals. Allyson Mitchell’s “Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism” sums up this sentiment. Her mixed media installation manifests as a cozy vagina room, well equipped with wildly patterned cushions. The inner and outer labia are wavy curtains and the vaginal opening is an entranceway (or a possible exit). Mitchell is not the first to envision the vagina as a point of transition or transformation. It is a concept most famously realized by Niki de Saint Phalle in her 1966 large-scale sculptural installation, "hon-en katedral" ("she-a cathedral"). The work consisted of a giant, reclining female figure, which the audience was encouraged to enter from between her legs. Many of the works in The Visible Vagina follow a similar notion. So much solo attention is given to the vagina, which sometimes is even detached from other body parts, that one gets the impression that the outer part of this organ indeed symbolizes the ultimate starting point of human existence.
Besides providing aesthetic pleasure, the installations at Nolan and Naumann achieve two things in particular. On the one hand, we are presented with the fact that the vagina is no longer just a fetishistic image created exclusively for and by men. More importantly however is that the overwhelming number of the vaginas on display enforce an environment that shakes off conventional prudishness. After only a few minutes in either installation of The Visible Vagina, visitors will see their blush subside and instead, find themselves immersed in a beautiful new terrain that is at old as life itself.
Exhibition Information:
The Visible Vagina
Through March 20, 2010
David Nolan Gallery (527 West 29th Street)
Francis Naumann Fine Art (24 West 57th Street)
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Anna C. Chave, Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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