The art of arousal
One of the most talked about exhibitions at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival, FECK:ART took shape as the area’s emerging artists toiled to answer one question: can art succeed where porn fails: to actually turn us on? Their diverse and dazzling output celebrates ‘beautiful obscenity’ while challenging pornography’s status quo.
Local producers of socially responsible erotica, Feck, are both funding and curating this visual riposte to predictable porn. They invited a panel of art world insiders to select 53 works for the show and put up $5000 of prize money to coax prospective entrants into creative action.
“We thought it would be interesting to fund a competition to see how Melbourne artists make us think and feel about sex”, says Richard Lawrence, founder of Feck, “and whether art can make porn obsolete.”
Amongst FECK:ART’s gems is the video that scooped the top prize, Jack Darling’s sexily comical Nose Job. It is, according to Darling, “asking us quite seriously to play with what’s presented, what’s predicted and take our expectations out of the equation.”
Click on the first image below to begin slideshow.
