In 2011, I graduated from the College of Santa Fe with a self-designed degree I titled “Sexual Liberation as Art,” which had taken months of meetings, essays, and conversations with department heads to accept. As I walked across the graduation ceremony stage once my degree had been announced, I received a raised fist salute from feminist art writer Lucy Lippard 1, our commencement speaker. I devised my degree title from the radical porn films of Emilie Jouvet² and Richard Kern³, the sexual musings of Susie Bright⁴ and Annie Sprinkle⁵, and the explicit early work of Cosey Fanni Tutti⁶, whose “art as life/life as art” mantra broadened my perspective on creative process.

Since then, I’ve developed a language of art/life melding with Red Cell⁷ and founded The Product Division⁸. Based around the William Burroughs/Brion Gysin “Third Mind” concept⁹ of two entities birthing a third, creatively autonomous force, we traveled through Tangier, the Azores, and Berlin as tech-nomads to live out our philosophies. Although Red Cell and I have differing sexual orientations, we both found sexual desires, identities, and histories informed our process as a unit and strived to see the aesthetic hybrid that would come of two diverse art partners. The queer and feminist philosophies I’ve explored promote a broad range of ideals; one may call for complete separatism and another for total inclusivity. Working so closely alongside someone with a completely different sexual identity demanded an empathetic and open-minded review of sex, art, and life.

Once we were in Berlin I attended its 9th Porn Film Festival¹⁰. The outstanding program inspired me to join the committee for an emerging porn festival in New Mexico, USA. Cutely named Pornotopia¹¹, the small film fest caused a huge political uproar that lead to the state’s supreme court to battle out its right to exist. Luckily, Pornoptia won¹² and 2015 looks promising. While I am based in USA, I strive to be globally minded. Navigating the underground gay scene of Morocco wildly shifted my perspective on what it means to be a working queer artist and culture hustler. The privilege of open venues for queers is a luxury not often granted, yet is necessary for visibility and progression. Context is everything and it is important to view the complex and subjective realm of lust from multiple angles.

In the world of Sex Art, there can be drastic divide amongst orientations regarding exploitation, visual agency, representation, and so-called profanity. How each artist’s own, unique sexual energy informs their work is as equally valid as any other internal or external force. The more we as art critics and consumers include sex in the conversation the less daunting those taboo, hot-button issues of identity and exploitation become. This facet of desire, while undeniably influential, is often relegated into a separate category like pornography. If porn is deemed too conceptual or too smart, it gets lumped into the art world. The converse is the same. Sexually charged work can be dismissed as porn, and cultural discourse is often lost. The physical and particularly sexual is typically separated from intellectual pursuit, and the controversy surrounding sexual entertainment is an extension of this socially constructed ideology. For Dandy Dicks, I am showcasing a hot lineup of emerging and established artists from around the globe who openly meld their sexual identities with their art.

1.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_R._Lippard, 2.    http://www.emiliejouvet.com/, 3.    http://www.richardkern.com/, 4.   http://susiebright.blogs.com/, 5.    http://anniesprinkle.org/, 6.    http://www.coseyfannitutti.com/, 7.    http://theendofbeing.com/red-cell/, 8.    http://www.theproductdivision.com/, 9.    https://realitysandwich.com/139040/perilous_passage_third_mind/, 10.    http://www.pornfilmfestivalberlin.de/, 11.    http://selfservetoys.com/pornotopia/, 12.    http://www.abqjournal.com/262285/news/high-court-rejects-pornotopia-ruling.html