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Matt Kalasky, speaking with us Oct. 17

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Based on the staircase and its use in numerous films, Laser has created a tumultuous piece of live action in which six actors recreate the famous scenes. “Flight,” is a very physical performance, with actors running up and down the stairs, chasing and cornering each other, weaving in and about the audience members scattered on the stairs. Choreographed and scripted but open to the vagaries and flow of an audience, which was entering with hot dogs, ice-cream cones and sodas for a quick lunch, it allows for interaction with the audience and poses an interesting challenge for the actors.

The stairs function as symbols of the changing dynamic of the scenes and the the multiple characters’ fortunes, and they form a wonderfully complex and ever-changing stage. The choreography routinely reverses the roles the actors play from that of the chaser to the victim, from the lead to the follower, the ascendant to the falling. As something of a mash-up, a pastiche of scenes from films of varying styles and dramatic genres, about a third of which were culled from horror films and the rest from classic dramas, all are chock-full of narrative meat. The audience, like some of the characters, feels the rush of impending action and dramatic confrontation. Given its name, “Flight” clearly represents that moment of motion – action, reaction and the unexpected result, leaving the viewer on the edge of identifying with the wrong end of the argument/chase/scene.

The dialogue was sometimes hard to hear – but the mid-day traffic of Times Square almost seemed to play like a movie sound track just slightly out of sync with the screen and the action on the stairs. The Times Square guards handed out a small postcard-sized table of scenes, and the audience could easily follow their favorite moment, or guess the scene/source from the action.

While culled from the 2D screen and performed in daylight, “Flight” gives an interesting twist to several of the scenes and to the idea of viewing. Not actually viewing, not the screen, the stage, or a mediated source,  it felt a bit like a new participation-ride theme park, and the tourists and onlookers of Times Square were up for the ride.

Surrounded by ads filled with models in swimsuits and sales pitches for everything from chocolate bars to cars, this performance was the best show on Broadway. And the price was just right.

Selected as part of the Times Square Arts program, the performance can be seen again on Friday and Saturday – weather permitting. Each performance lasts about 30 minutes
Liz Magic Laser “Flight” on the staircase in Duffy Square in Times Square, May 6 (7, 8, and 9 p.m.), and May 7 (1, 2, 8, and 9 p.m.)

Leah Bailis, Death in Venice, photo of the artist dressed as the movie character - pathos and longing before death

Leah Bailis has shifted from austere, architectural niblets of home sweet home to some seriously magical thinking about self-deluding romanticism. The shift from icy cold to ironic panting hot in her show Magical Thinking is shocking and fun and definitely a hit! People buzzing around the opening were delighted with Bailis’ self-portraits in drag, in which she takes a Cindy Sherman turn to capture the final moment of thwarted longing from the movie version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. The faux movie stills undercut the romanticism with foolishness and foppishness at the moment of death–a literal and symbolic heart attack.

Leah Bailis, gothic horror and romance in this sculpture based on the movie Ordet

Irony also infuses Bailis’ sculpture of two heads kissing and consuming each other in a creepy over-the-top romanticism. One head has a lively mirror ball surface, the other, a deathstar absorbent black finish. The mirrors scatter a protoplasmic array of circles on the walls of the gallery, bringing to life a quivering, delicate environment for the brooding life vs. death drama of the sculpture. The back story to this sculpture is also from films, inspired by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, but the sculpture stands on its own. Bailis was one of last year’s West Prize finalists.

Kate Stewart, Gotterdammerung, installation at Vox. The people are gallery goers. Photo courtesy the artist.

Kate Stewart also has done something new in her Götterdämmerung (translated – end of the world) installation. Enlarging on her familiar theme of domestic comfort and self-delusion amid environmental disaster, she sodded the gallery floor with a layer of dirt and grass that looks and smells like it comes from a city park. Real plants grow inside the walls patterned to suggest dense foliage and rococo decor.

Kate Stewart's installation before the people arrived. Photo courtesy the artist.

On First Friday, the grass was occupied, wall-to-wall, with gallery goers picnicking and relaxing on the lawn–apres diner sur l’herbe. The crush of humanity in the compressed space further clarifies the nature of the disaster, adding texture to the usual eco themes. Not your usual isolationist survivalism.

Kara Crombie’s animations in Mother’s Birthday are quite different from the live actors and realistic settings we had seen her use previously in her videos. We will shortly have a post by Edward Epstein about Crombie’s show. She just won a Pew fellowship on the basis of these animations.

Also at Vox this month, drawings and installation by Raleigh, NC artist Bill Thelen. He is the director and co-founder of the artist-run space, Lump. And in the Video Lounge, there is work by Brooklyn-based artist Sari Carel.

Rubens, Peter Paul The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus c. 1618 Oil on canvas 88 x 82 7/8 in (224 x 210.5 cm) Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Nowadays, erotic art is more of a niche player and the art market (the closest thing to a royal court that we have) prefers its sexy in air quotes. Marilyn Minter uses hard core porn photographs and transforms them into glittering, wet-and-wild bauble-fests. They are not so erotic when she’s done with them but way “sexy,” hip and commercially viable.

Marilyn Minter, Split, 2003, C-print

When I emailed a bunch of Philadelphia artists recently to ask what was the most erotic art they’d seen and why, mostly I got no responses. One artist, Christopher Davison, demurred. Davison makes pretty darned sexy works himself, (his drawings of male and female nudes interacting in dark, eerie forest settings were a staple at the former Jenny Jaskey gallery). “While it would seem like I would have something meaningful to contribute on this topic I am actually not the best person to provide feedback,” he said, adding “Strange but true!”

They're On Their Way Flashe, watercolor, acrylic ink, gouache on Rives BFK 22" x 30" 2009

Gabriel Martinez, a mischievous artist known for his autobiographical works — and for a recent series of sexually-charged masturbation photos featuring anonymous men’s legs and feet at moment of orgasm — wrote back “I will think (hard) about this one…” Then he slipped away into the ether never answering the question. But Proximity Gallery owner and artist Janel Frey responded immediately and directly naming Philadelphia artist, Pete Checchia who, she says, “captures women in a very sensual and complex way.”

Gabriel Martinex, Self Portraits by Heterosexual Men (Anonymous), 2007. c-print

Artist and FLUXspace co-founder, Chris Golas, sent in an anecdote from his own life. While a student at Tyler he did a performance that was arguably erotic. He stood behind a shower curtain half-naked while a woman slapped him after her hands in different colored paints. Golas said “My intent was not to make erotic work but as I reflect on the experience it clearly had meaning that bridged into a certain eroticism for me. This particular performance could border on fetishism as well.”

Pete Checcia, Photo collage

Chris Golas, photo from a performance

Artists now don’t seek to titillate per se, but still the erotic will out especially in work by those who court the unconscious mind, like Louise Bourgeois, Lisa Yuskavage, Pipilotti Rist, Patty Chang, R. Crumb, Paul McCarthy, Philadelphia artist Tony Ward, Andy Warhol (films) and Marcel Duchamp (Etant Donnes) for starters. There are more of course.

Louise Bourgeois, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982

These artists all work in a narrative tradition and use figures or figure fragments (Bourgeois) and their works might give off a pleasurable erotic charge along with whatever other message is there. Warhol is in a class all his own with experimental movies that are sensual (Blow Job, Sleep) and those that are sexually explicit and close to porn (Blue Movie).

Andy Warhol, Blowjob

But postmodern erotic art usually has a conflicted sexuality. Pleasure is subsumed under oozing gooey messes (Paul McCarthy, Santa’s Cholocate Shop); or it’s accompanied by embarrassment (R. Crumb). In the case of Duchamp’s Etant Donnes — on view in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection — the erotic is tempered by a dose of pure weirdness as you look through a peephole at the work and what’s portrayed — the lower half of a nude woman on the ground, her legs splayed, one hand holding aloft a lantern and an eerie waterfall in the background — is creepy and inexplicable.

R. Crumb drawing

Artists now might deny the erotic in their art. Louise Bourgeois said “I wouldn’t say my work is erotic, even though this side of it seems obvious to many people.” Tony Ward, on the other hand, in an interview with Corey Armpriester on artblog, embraces sexual imagery as a way to put human sexuality into the art history canon. But even this artist — who shows with Sande Webster Gallery — seems to waffle on the erotic charge of his works saying he’s “looking for a means to express the art of it (human sexuality) not the sex of it.”

Photo by Tony Ward

Feminism took some of the sexy out of art by attacking the male gaze and by empowering women to make works about their own sexuality. Many early feminist works are angry, and while graphic, not sexy. The Visible Vagina at Francis Naumann Gallery which Andrea told you about recently, exposes many feminist works focused on the female sex organ. But as with much feminist work eroticism wasn’t the point of it and it doesn’t seem to be the byproduct.

Marcel Duchamp, Etant Donnes

But even before feminism, abstract expressionism and minimalism — both about as sexy as Benjamin Moore paint chips — put eros on the shelf.

Lust Caution, Ang Lee's movie about the Japanese occupation of China has scenes that feel like they're based on Japanese Shunga drawings

Photography went where painting and sculpture wouldn’t go and nude photography is our latter day erotic art. But more than that, today’s erotic art is the movies. Films may be the closest thing we have to Rubens, Boucher, Caravaggio, Bronzino. Movies use narrative– often extremely over the top dramatic — and add romance and the erotic scene or two. Art house movies are full of that mixture. These movies deliver erotic content without irony. It’s seriously sensual stuff, just like the old masters used to provide.

So if movies are how we get our erotic art it’s not a bad thing. It’s just another example of pop culture taking over what used to be in art’s domain — or art ceding something it didn’t want to deal with to pop culture, which very much wants to deal.  Hollywood sells sex because sex sells.

>>Etant Donnes, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gallery 183, Modern and Contemporary Art, first floor. 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway Adults: $16 Seniors (ages 65 & over): $14 Students (with valid ID): $12 Children (excluding groups) ages 13–18: $12 ages 12 & under: Free First Sunday of each month: Pay what you wish all day.

>>The Visible Vagina, to Mar 20. Francis Naumann Gallery, 24 W. 57th St., Suite 305. NY NY 10019. 212 582 3201.