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PERFORMANCES AND PRESENTATIONS
Kresge Art Museum: Freedom
of Sex
reviewed
by Michael Dura
MSU’s Kresge Art Center has always
found ways to draw people into their facility and shock them
with the explicit, boundary-pushing material they
keep hidden somewhere in the catacombs of their back room.
Their latest presentation, “Poetics
of Sex and the Pornography of the Invisible: American Avant-Garde
Film of the 1960s,” meets the criteria of explicit and
shocking, but at the same time it is eye- and mind-opening.
“If you are at all squeamish about explicit sex…you
should leave,” was the first quote of the night from
Michigan State University professor Jennifer Fay.
It was a fantastic forward to what was to come.
Kresge showed the audience four films:
the late Stan Brakhage’s “Wedlock
House: an Intercourse” and “Cat’s Cradle,” followed
by “Eye/Body,” Carolee Schneemann’s feminist
response to Brakhage, and the late Andy Warhol’s “Blowjob.” All
of these films can be labeled anti-Hollywood, anti-capitalism
and somewhere on the sliding scale between free-speech and
obscenity.
But no matter how you label them, these films are controversial.
 Brakhage’s films displayed not only
sex, but also the fear of love and marriage. Filmed silently
on black and white, 16mm or 8mm film, his “Wedlock House:
an Intercourse,” (1959)
was shot and produced right after the time of his marriage
and focused on the claustrophobia and the terror that his wife
instilled in him. While watching the film you can feel his
terror when the love of his life turns around every corner.
The film is filled with fearful romanticism and a lyrical sense
that keeps you from blinking. Upon further researching Brakhage’s
work, I found the final shot in the film was to be of his own
body hanging from a noose in his attic. This film is far from
Hollywood fakery.
“Wedlock House: an Intercourse” did not end with
Brakhage’s death. Instead it focused on how he made love
to his wife to cope with these pains in his head. His second
film focused mostly on the same topic except his claustrophobia
had now turned to witchcraft of the mind and anguish put into
him by his love.
“Cat’s Cradle” took place
on a vacation and focused not on explicit sex like his previous
film, but on the everyday things that love and anguish will
burn into your head. Instead of focusing on what
you and your love are arguing about at the time, you are thinking
about what color the drapes are in the room. Where did this
spoon come from? Who opened this window? Where is the cat?
All of the underlying things you focus on to keep your mind
off of love are displayed in this movie—along with explicit
sex and other things that help couples make up after arguments.
Carolee Schneemann felt strongly
that Brakhage had an enormous sex bias. Critics go after Brakehage’s
films for always having the man on top of the woman during
sex and having a man control the bedroom and the mood of the
film. Schneemann released her feminist response to Brakhage
in 1963 with everything that he did—only backward. Her
films focused on the beauty of the woman’s body and her
control of her partner. The woman owned the bed and her partner’s
body, penis and mind. Schneemann’s films show open sex
as something like a battle in the bedroom. However, this is
the first time in film where the woman is no longer a sexual
muse but instead the controller of the mood, the owner of the
man and his member. Despite the new message of woman power,
obscenity laws pushed most copies of this film into the dark
and copies rarely surface.
While Brakhage and Schneemann focused
their films on explicit sex and romanticism of the male and
female mind, Andy Warhol focused his films on minimalism
and everything typical pornography does not focus on – emotion
and feeling; the humanistic side to sex. His meta-porn “Blowjob” did
just that.
His camera fixated on the face of
a man apparently receiving oral sex, Andy Warhol set out
to capture the emotion found during sex—whether or
not this task was completed is up to the viewer. Many see
this film as having a surplus of emotion, feeling and meaning
while others find it to be a nonsensical lack of anything
artful.
All the films push the First Amendment
as far as possible. Are these films simply upholding free
speech and free expression or do they cross the line into obscenity?
That is left up to the viewer.
The Kresge Art Center is still focusing
on their recent exhibit “Blast
from the Past: Art of the 60s.” You do not necessarily
need to catch a film presentation to understand what these
filmmakers, photographers and ordinary people were thinking
and trying to do. If you have some free time I suggest anyone
go to Kresge and see what it’s
all about.
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