Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew Hamlin Joint

 

You Can Leave Your Hat On Dept.: Andres Serrano at Greg Kucera Gallery through last month; Erika Langley, The Lusty Lady: Photographs and Texts (Scalo). Andres Serrano is big and fleshy, not the man himself I mean (who shunned having his own picture taken after the "Piss Christ" debacle) but of course his photographs which land on your head boots first with, first of all, sheer size, I don't think there's a single print smaller than four foot square. I'm looking at the naked woman with her arms around her naked boyfriend and her strapon hoopajoo in his butt; one half of a real couple says "cut if off here [slashes across waist level], it'd be cute," as indeed it would.

It's the show's last weekend, I'm pacing up and down--Jenna the gallery manager grins, says you look like you're excited. She's right. I haven't made my mind up about Serrano, admiring the contradicting smolder of his Klansman series, pink eyes sunk in slopes of white or ceremonial green even, but skeptical of the "History of Sex" series as porno writ large and priced high (is that my inhibitions? His cynicism?). But it's good to be in a strange place and run into people you know and have conversations and the sun pumps enough light and heat for the Gallery to take down "Piss Discus" and stand it against the wall in protective shade, and how synchronously infectious to be looking at naughty pictures (a beautiful woman who once stripped down to a bikini next to me at a softball game comes in with her boyfriend and his leather jacket--turns out she's got her own photo exhibit), an illicit thrill in doing something the person you're spending the evening with is going to disapprove of, in this case my oldest friend in the world who back in the days vowed he'd rip down any poster of the "Piss Christ" that I might put up and who will at the non-drop of a hat discourse on the uselessness of contemporary art total occlusion of vision the need nay duty of the government to get out of the business of supporting degenerate filth, and in his car that evening, promising summery smell furtively wafting though open Volvo windows, I casually mention where I've been and--it's been awhile, I grant--he almost doesn't remember who Serrano is. Then two words piss and Christ rub together in memory and from there a blaze builds in a time immemorial manner.

As it happens, no Piss Christ poster exists, just the limited edition of four prints. (My friend Ryan saw the show before I did, noticed that the Christ's card read "private collection, Bremerton," and being from Bremerton himself, laughed himself silly that someone from Bremerton could possess the Piss Christ.)

Jenna showed me the poster that got censored in Amsterdam--yes, it wouldn't play in Amsterdam, can you believe that?--a woman pissing into a man's mouth; incidentally, one of those little cards next to one of the photos seems contemptuous of the artistic defense of the Mapplethorpe showing a similar bit, contemptuous of Mapplethorpe or at least of the reasoning used there, and I'm thinking well, what is the difference? Time-worn hip versus revitalized hip? One woman writes in a little book about each picture, the man and the woman and dildo, various Jesuses in piss, a Jesus in milk like a clotting heaven, the Klan figures, the feet of a baby who died from meningitis, feet which still retain the imprints of socks recently pulled off. A bigger book shows photos from the "The Morgue" and "History of Sex" series not featured at the gallery. I love the lady in clown makeup receiving oral pleasure. But I have a thing for ladies in clown makeup.

You wouldn't want to run into anyone you know at the Lusty Lady, not too far up the street from for the Gallery, close enough for the two ideas to happen upon me in a row on a sunny day late January. Hesitating at the door, finally following a big beefy fellow flinging the door wide, I find two feet in the talk booth, where you go one-on-one with a naked lady behind glass, talking to her through a speaker. (I don't think any of the booth doors lock, a safety measure I'm sure but does set up potentially embarrassing situations.) In the booths along the big tank, splayed with mirrors on its inside, you look in through two-or- one-way glass, depending on the booth you enter; I take a corner booth with an extra large glass, and the solid curtain cranks up to show two young women naked from the ankles up. The one on the left-hand side is cute, short, small breasts and a tattoo I am now at a loss to pinpoint the location of, south of the waistline is about all I can manage. She's my type, in that way that you may not be able to explain your type except by pointing, you know, but there's no one to look at me pointing and she's engrossed in entertaining whoever's behind the middle window on the left-hand side.

So I'm looking at her, looking past the second cocoa-butter colored one who moves in successive slurps of the dollar slot from a window right next to mine to mine, and then the third woman who comes bounding from stage left--black heels and a lace bra, is obviously several months pregnant. And that, it flashes inside me, though I have no plans to visit here again in no small part for fear of then visiting on a regular basis, is what I love about this place.

No, really. I find a nonchalantly pregnant naked woman--who has no trouble, by the way, discovering a willing open window--subversively wholesome the way King of the Hill is subversively wholesome. You recognize the candy bar (nihilistic subversion in Beavis and Butt-head, facile perversion in your basic strip bar) unwrap it, and find a surprising candy. Two guys walk in with backpacks, gawking and they're not even in the booths and still wild on sunburst I coach them on in what happens in the business.

They mumble and leave.

For the $4 spent in the booth I keep the sunglasses I can now wear thanks to contacts flipped up (on my only other visit a boa-festooned lady grinned at my chipped plastic Poindexter specs, pointed at my head and said "I've got glasses just like that," just as the curtain slid shut). Easy enough to flip them down and give the tank women only a Joel Goodson stance, but he was actually freaked out and so am I, and my inability to pretend otherwise forms a foremost reason I'll likely not go back to the Lusty Lady. Foremost second reason is simply that you go into those booths to whack off, and I do not think I can manage that.

I've functioned that performance in some reasonably outré places and in the interest of just the right amount of information I'll leave it at that, but in the booth situation for various concerns of control, the illusion of control, and probable levels of self-loathing upon returning home, I do not find it wise. All of which dovetails and stream-feeds into the third and foremostest reason, Erika Langley's The Lusty Lady: Photographs and Texts. During my initial meeting with Ms. Langley, at a Kiss convention we both covered, while we shared a Budweiser and discussed her stripper-photographer career, she mentioned that a certain prominent Seattle columnist was probably a regular at the Lusty Lady. True or no, I live in deathly terror of ending up like him.

Having known several women who made a career of prancing nude or nearly so in front of men, one or two as close friends, the others more casually, I must before continuing make my next absolute pronouncement: Ms. Langley, who I know only slightly, is the only such woman I have ever met who seems unbesieged by a significant personality disorder or three. Mine is not a representative sample, surely, and I have no idea what a "representative sample" might mean in this case, but The Lusty Lady functions partially as a peep show behind the peep show, photographic and journalistic glances backstage, and her tankmates run from uptight to inscrutable to mystical, street-roughened young women to defiantly crusty older ones such as Candy Girl, sister to one of the businesses' all-female managers. Langley asks Candy Girl if she does the talk booth anymore. "Ahh hell no. After ten years I can put up with men's shit about this much.' She holds up a fist"--and my mind windsprints in its inimitable fashion back to the Serrano catalog, a female-to-male fisting, no rear shot, grimacing, or extreme close-up, just two people on three hands and four knees, the missing hand vanishing seamlessly, effortlessly inside the man.

A friend of mine knows folks who work at the Lusty's San Francisco twin sister, which recently unionized, and "it's not the feminist paradise it's made out to be." Certainly a business where men masturbate to naked women dancing will never be a feminist paradise without several cultural revolutions; the codification via handouts of "exploring your sexuality" by management makes mirth--"I try," Langley writes about an early shift, "to keep a straight face and `respect and enhance' the experience of the man who sprays the glass ropes of viscous funk." Sadder to me, more puncturing, is the inevitable boss-employee leg-wrestling. Gypsy slips on a pole in the tank, slicing her knee; wheeled into the emergency room in "high white boots and a white bra," the Lady lets her go under some pretext; she files complaints and gets her job back, but notes, "I know that the first time I'm late, or screw up, I'm on final warning." Joey moves from the stage to the back office; when asked if it's hard to fire her friends, she says, "I don't get too involved with that stuff. I don't have a lot of friendships there, although there are people that I'm fond of."

The photography came first, though, the pictures that Langley had to become a dancer to get, and while her black-and-white prints may project much less naughtiness than Serrano's in-your-face behemoths, they radiate more warmth. Blu-Silk and Cinnamon grasp in an almost-bareassed hug, their g-string tops forming one continuous waist-level loop; Jordan squinches her eyes down the sight of a pistol she's pulled from a holster around her bare belly button; April drapes a trench coat over her birthday suit as a cigarette hands from one corner of a gangster smile--these moments are arrested motion, scenes with conceivable pasts and futures and the strong notion of play, where Serrano's work, with its hugeness and flaring fleshtones, seems more like a series of arrested visions. He's preserving mountain ranges where Langley preserves a parade.

(special thanks to Sheri Hinshaw for reboots both technical and spiritual)

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