And since the registry recently went online I've
poked around
in it, invariably drawn to the work of friends, most of them deceased, and usually with
pleasure.
That was the initial idea for «Visual Orgasms»; cataloging and
poking fun at the ways Hollywood represented sexual
pleasure under the Hays Code, a censorship act
in effect from approximately the 1930s to the 1960s.
This figure, often fragmented, sometimes even completely abstracted, takes on various forms, from the human face, at once raw material and object of symbolic representation, as with Benglis's objectifying caresses, to the full body as place and tool of the trial and
pleasure of repetition, as with Nauman's amateur choreography, bordering on the absurd, to the traces and physical prints left by the artist - creator (or the «art worker»
in his service), as with the irregular random geometry of LeWitt, to the peers (Donald Judd) and tutelary figures
in the history of art who inspire Flavin's evanescent structures... Now a disenchanted statement «Double Eye
Poke» offers a challenge to the being of perception and thought.