In the thuggish heat of late February, three events of note were taking place in Brisbane: Griffith University and the Institute of Modern Art hosted the international Erotic Screens conference; the Brisbane Emerging Artists Festival happened at level two Metro Arts; and Yes Yes Space opened, for a nanosecond, in a disused shopfront space at Stones Corner in the inner city. Each of these events was powered by an urge, simultaneously creative and professional, to explore and exceed the limits of convention and so to generate new thoughts. Their experiences, however, were rather different.
Interrogating the theory, practice and aesthetics of screen erotics, the conference, organised by academics Jodi Taylor and David Baker, featured not just the usual ‘sages on stages’, but an array of colourful para-academic characters: feminist strippers and porn stars, transvestite activists, Open Source sex bloggers, Marxist sex workers and a BDSM panel. Though collocating academics and intellectuals with industry agents is a long established conference practice, particular frontliners in the Erotic Screens program provoked a minor flurry of fear amongst some university decision-makers in the nerve-wracking days before the delegates were due to converge. A dramatic downscaling of the event and its casting-out from the University’s College of Art location were at one point proposed as solutions to the management of such ‘sensitive issues’ as presentations from the flesh industries. Fortunately, the organisers were able to convince the powers-that-be of the folly of last-minute program changes, and that any slights to middle-class morals would indubitably be mitigated by the discursive climate forged by the formidable battery of high-profile international speakers.
Others weren’t so lucky. As the South Brisbane campus resonated to the sounds of clomping platform boots... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Anastasia Booth, It’s not Arousal just a Parody, 2011. Detail, installation view. Photography Tess Maunder.
Anastasia Booth, Oh Yes, 2011. Felt, leather, pine and rope. Photography Travis Dewan.
