Gender and queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick write about how gender and sexuality are performed, and the behaviors and rituals that define social roles. In this regard, as part of the expected ritual of sexual behavior, sex workers perform emotions that facilitate connections between them and their audience/clients. These acts and emotions are fundamental to the transaction of their societal roles as sex workers. However, it is a mistake to correlate these behaviors to actual intimacy, since the ritual of the affection, sexual gesture, or the performance of an orgasm is often just that – the affectation that is part of a fiduciary transaction dictated by the desires of a client in the consumer exchange.

The two communities that I have been investigating are porn performers and prostitutes. Each of these professions, while similarly exhibiting or exchanging sexuality for financial gain, differ in that the workers perform emotions in different ways, with varying boundaries between themselves and the client/audience. Porn performers describe what they do as everything from “making porn widgets” (producing a product that is defined by the porn market as a desirable porn object) to a romantic on-screen connection with an actual off-screen partner. In prostitution, the performance is for a single client or set of clients. Whereas a porn performer has a faceless audience to amuse and stimulate, a prostitute must convince single or multiple clients of their sincerity in an intimate encounter, which can range from the performance of an orgasm to feigning of an actual relationship, known as the “Girlfriend Experience.”

My work examines how these sex workers construct their identities in relation to their performances of emotion and their private lives. I also consider cultural expectations that might inform and shape their performances, as well as the cultural reception of pornography, prostitution, and the place of the sex worker in cultural and economic context.

PEEP SHOW – Installation of three “peep show” booths, video interviews and projections of appropriated pornography

The first section of my installation is inspired by the lobby and peep show booths of the Lusty Lady in San Francisco where I had my first experience with sex work. There will be a counter, manned by a gallery sitter, who will act as the attendant for the space, making sure that the patrons can get correct change for the booths.

PEEP SHOW is an interactive installation space, mimicking a real-world peep show. Viewers will enter a room draped at the rear with red curtains,  behind which they will see the flashing lights of a stage and hear music and announcements as different strippers start their shifts. In front of the curtain, there will be three “talk booths,” spaces suggestive of the compartments where a client at a peep show pays to interact with a “live nude girl” on the other side of a plexiglass wall. Each booth is 8’ x 4’ x 4’, containing a faux “stage” behind a plexiglass barrier. On the stage are a monitor and projector, triggered by a bill acceptor. When the viewer inserts a dollar, the monitor shows video interviews, while the projector throws images onto the viewer.

The video interviews are 2-5 minutes each and feature a different sex worker’s story. The projections are the same length as the interviews, and star the same sex workers, but in their roles as sexual performers, performing their jobs.

The three points of engagement in this installation are the immersion, the gesture, and the reflection.

The immersive aspect of the space establishes an expectation of sexual commerce in the mind of the viewer, who might recognize the space, whether from personal or cultural experience.  Recognition is subverted inside the booth when the interview with the sex worker shifts from the expectation of what is supposed to happen on the “stage” and what happens on the body of the viewer.

The gesture occurs when the viewer puts a dollar into the bill acceptor, an action signifying a ritualized element of sex work: “paying for it.”

The reflection refers to the complicity of the viewer in the consumption of sex, and the shifting of reality between the confessional nature of the interviews and the performance of the pornography. The doubling of the image, on the screen and reflected on the body of the viewer, complicates the reception of narratives regarding sex work.

Viewers can then move behind the curtain to the second installation:

CROSSING THE STAGE – installation of a peep show stage, a mirrored room with a stripper pole in the center. Audio only.

Viewers next cross the peep show stage, moving from the space of observing sex workers to immersing their bodies in the space of sex work, sexual labor, and seeing themselves reflected on the stage walls. As there is no performer to observe, viewers see themselves only in this sexualized space.

Behind the stage, a door, labeled DANCERS ONLY leads to the third installation:

BACKSTAGE – installation of a peep show dressing room. The room contains a dressing table with mirror and lights, a couch and a bank of six lockers. 

After passing through the spaces of implication and action, the viewer moves into a space of rest, reflection, and preparation. A more intimate, private space, the dressing room will be populated with the objects belonging to the absent working dancers:  bottles of water, packs of cigarettes, a hoodie, a pair of sparkly underpants, etc. Each locker will be “inhabited” by one of the sex workers I have interviewed, with each one donating an item that they link to sex work and to intimacy. In addition, inside each locker there will be a small monitor, triggered by an Arduino when the locker door is opened. The videos shown on these small 10” screens will suggest an intimate confessional, with the sex worker talking about an aspect of her private self not normally shared publicly.

Through a door or opening, the viewer will then enter the final area of the installation:

 MONUMENT TO THE RISEN – Gallery installation of four to six large-scale mixed media drawings of appropriated pornographic images. Shown with projection of INTIMATE video.

This room serves as my monument to the women I have interviewed, celebrating the work that they do. This room will contain an exhibition of large scale images of the sex worker “in action,” and are graphic depictions of her sex acts  rendered in pen and ink and watercolor.. My aim is to bring the odalisque, or harem woman, into a modern context.

Shown with the “long video portraits” of sex workers, I refer conceptually to how the object of the gaze looks back and the odalisque observes the viewer. These drawings are the following questions: How are emotions being performed and reflected? What do we project onto the subject in these long video portraits, with the sex worker invoking a moment that might either be genuine or contrived?

The video portraits will comprise an entire wall of several Odalisque figures, namely reversing the viewing context such that sex workers observe and consume observers.

As artists, we are taught to observe and reflect; we draw the negative spaces between shapes, tracing them out of the air, acting out the signifiers of visual desire while sublimating our own. We document each experience and installation with exacting attention or studied nonchalance. We subscribe to the idea that the site of artistic transformation is always located elsewhere, in the field of the other. If we turn this lens on ourselves, “othering” our own experiences, we run the risk of being accused of a lack of perspective, the cultural distance needed for an ethnographic or anthropological critique. With this in mind, I examined my own practice – in particular, my documentation of sex workers and the sex industry – to see how I could place myself alongside the “other” I documented, hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the world I document while continuing to explore my own complicated feelings about the feminist and social implications of sex work. By putting avatars of my own body in the space of the sex worker, I am attempting to capture the blurring of sex and sexual commerce as well as interrogating the complicated notion of “the artist as ethnographer.”

As a feminist, I support sex workers: women have the right to explore and capitalize on their sexual agency; however, I also wish to take into account the economic realities that shape women’s lives along with the racial inequities, abuses, and exploitation of those who labor in sex industries. To this end, I decided that I needed to go deeper into my exploration of this work. Influenced by Hal Foster’s essay “The Artist as Ethnographer,” I decided to explore the world of the sex worker in a closer way. To confront the “othering” of my subjects, I chose to place my own body into the equation. To be able to claim the distance necessary for an ethnographic examination, as well as to honor my own boundaries, I chose to mimic the transactions and commodification of sex work with certain restrictions and conditions.

I created avatars of my body in the same manner that porn actors do, creating sex toys based on replicas of my genitalia using an industry-standard molding process. I have designed packaging for these pieces that resembles the way these sex toys are presented to be sold in stores and on the internet. To get “clients” to interact with my avatars, I advertised them on Craigslist in the way that escorts advertise themselves on similar websites. In setting up sessions with these “clients,” I have to screen them in the same way that an escort does, taking precautions to ensure my safety. To further push the boundaries of my examination of the sex industry, I manipulated these replicas. I added male genitalia to my female pieces, both to play with the idea of the gendered sex toy, and to comment on the heteronormativity of the commercially available mainstream sexual objects. In this way I can comment on the advertised natural and unnatural nature of these replicas and disrupt the narration about the “naturalness” of this kind of sexual exchange. There is nothing natural about silicone, nothing natural about Cock Mouth and pointing out these discrepancies thoroughly places it into the realms of fantasy and pleasure. Disrupting gender norms about beauty, pleasure, and about what orifices provide pleasure and to whom opens up a dialogue with the viewer about sexual identity and the economics of pleasure.

The exhibition was broken down into three parts: manufacture, economic object and interaction. I documented and presented the molding process to show both the physical discomfort that is involved in the process, as well as to connect my relationship to the finished pieces in the viewer’s mind. The sounds of my breathing further cements this relationship, as well as the position of the video to the finished pieces. I am presenting these objects on lighted pedestals in isolation, in the manner of classical sculpture, invoking the pristine nature of the museum space. To contrast that, the packaging of the finished pieces are presented more haphazardly, invoking the retail space of a “porn emporium”. The boxes themselves are battered and taped together, with stickers declaring their lack of worth in this economic space. This comments not only on the place that these objects are found in, but the reactions of the mainstream manufacturers that I contacted in an effort to work with them on this project. As I am not an actual porn performer, their economic interests were not met, and they were not interested in a collaboration. The boxes also serve another purpose, it allows me a way to speak directly to the viewer through the text on the boxes. This text is blended into what on the normal boxes would be the legal boilerplate, but instead acts as a running commentary on my experiences in this project.

The final space of the exhibition documents the interactions between myself and the people who responded to my call for participants. In one video, I display both the emails I sent and received from my posting on Craigslist, as well as photos sent to me by respondents as long as it would not compromise their anonymity. The other videos, photos and drawings are the result of the actual interactions, where I turned my pieces over to respondents to interact with in any manner that they wished. Setting up these interactions helped me recognize my own privilege in this space – I had a choice in how I could or could not interact with the respondents. If they made me uncomfortable, I could choose to not let them interact with my pieces, whereas if I were dependent on this transaction for my living, I would have to assess these risks and navigate interactions with clients in a very different way.

In crossing the arbitrary boundaries between myself as observer and as subject, I am continually observing and measuring the gap between myself and the “other” I am emulating. This gap is where I recognize my own abilities to capitalize on my sexuality. My own identities as an artist, as a feminist, as a former stripper who supports sex worker rights coalesce here as I interrogate the meaning of sexual agency for myself and my audience. The work I have engaged in is moving me beyond an interrogation of sex work to an interrogation of sexual identity in the 21^st century, challenging myself and my audience to think about sexual identity, consumption, sex, pleasure, economics, and how we package ourselves on a daily basis. This work blurs the line between porn and subjectification, between object and art, in a way that reflects my own life history.  Delving headfirst into how to be a feminist and engage the sex industry, how to be an artist and engage my own body in the discourse, and how to communicate these ideas to a contemporary audience.

For this piece, I chose to mimic an everyday activity on the Las Vegas Strip – I recreated the act of passing out “Hooker cards”, the advertisements for illegal prostitution that are distributed on the Las Vegas Strip. I created my own hooker cards, rented a truck with a banner advertising my phone number and website, and hired workers to give out my cards to passerby.

In this action, the decision was made to illustrate key differences between the authentic activity on the Strip and the one created for this project: the depictions of available sex workers were illustrated, not photographed; the “card flippers” were Caucasians instead of Hispanic day laborers; actual sex workers were depicted on the cards instead of using appropriated pornography. Beyond the experience on the Strip, when a participant utilizes the telephone number/website advertised, they are invited to reverse the traditional interaction between sex worker and client by listening to interviews with the women featured on the cards.

CARD COLLECTING

These collections are my way of categorizing the areas of desire in Las Vegas. Hooker cards are passed out in both private and public spaces. In the public space of the Las Vegas Strip, the cards are mostly false representations of sex workers – appropriated or stolen pornography with fake names, nipples and vaginas barely covered by Photoshopped-on stars. The phone numbers and website addresses give the impression that there are hundreds of agencies operating in Vegas, when in fact there are less than a dozen.

The cards passed out in the private spaces (such as taxicabs) are different – removed from the restrictions of public view, the cards tend to represent sexual desires not apparent on the Strip. Ethnicity as fetish, erotic desires outside of the mainstream, real sex workers pictured without the stars as a barrier to access.

PLEASE WALK A MILE IN MY SHOES

In February 2009, the Las Vegas Review Journal published a front page story on the “50 Most Prolific Prostitutes in Las Vegas”, illustrating the story with the mug shots of 24 women who had been arrested for “trespassing” at the Strip casinos. “Trespassing” is the Las Vegas Metro Police Dept. default charge when they do not have an actionable case, but wish to remove an individual from the Strip. Casinos know that hookers operate on the premises, and often will invite sex workers to VIP rooms and suites to be available for “whales” or important customers. The issue is not that these women were prostitutes, it’s that they were the wrong prostitutes.

These women were not charged with or convicted of prostitution, but the newspaper had no problem with publishing their personal information on the front page, along with their photos. I have decided to be more circumspect with their right to privacy, and added the black bars before including them.