Some rather nice art has fallen my way recently, falling around something that might become abjection. Of course it induces controversy, squeamishness and nervous laughter, the kind that says, ‘I don’t understand this and maybe I don’t want to.”

I wasn’t sure how to write about all this. At first I thought I’d make a separate post for each one, then thought the two exhibitions with trans* people in them should go together, though awkward because of the dogmatic and shrill noise from a couple of trans* blogs. One of the pieces – Buck and Allanah – I discovered on the blog of a trans porn star, which in a roundabout way comes over to alien tentacle rape. To avoid more confusion, I decided to throw it all here.

Emile and I sit somewhere in Berlin talking about art (well, mostly making noises, and sometimes talking about art). Tentacle porn comes up, thinking of Hokusai and my wondering where this might exist now. Emile sends me some links. Genki Genki. I wonder how nice this might be to do while suspended upside down.

I’m not sure when I started reading Danielle Foxx’s blog, but I enjoy rather a lot. A long time ago I wrote about Buck Angel and Allanah Starr making porn. A trans man and a trans woman, both quite huge in the porn world getting it on for the cameras. I thought it was beautiful at the time and still do. Reading Danielle, I find they have been cast in bronze.

Then I discover – same day even – an exhibition by artist Andrea Cano and photographer Manuel Antonio Velandia turning Barbie and Ken into trans* women and men. (The whole thing is more interesting in Spanish, because it got hijacked by a bunch of english-speaking, right-on trans-activists who started out by calling the work a product of straight, cis- fetishists until it turned out Andrea is a trans* woman, so then without missing a beat went on to loudly decry her for stereotyping trans*women as hookers whores and streetwalkers with a plastic surgery obsession. Blah. No wonder I prefer trans* porn to trans* (pseudo) academics.)

I like the statues of Buck and Allanah, part of an exhibition by Marc Quinn. I don’t find his attention to particular bodies so easy to reconcile though, and the gallery statement is a bit awful also. It smacks of sensationalism and gawping idiots, “Looka tha freeeks mama!!!”. But equally, the strident victim speech from some trans* blogs on the Andrea Cano exhibition, the current heavy obsession with trans* guys in the queer scene, along with a not unproblematic indulgence into femme play make it all a bit heavy and burdensome.

Aaahh… problems all around. So.

I think the Genki Genki porn is brilliant, bringing to the world of internet porn a lineage in Japanese and asian art that goes back at least to Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. Buck and Allanah is poignant on its own, but a little empty in a post-Jeff Koons Cicciolina when seen in the milieu of exhibition and gallery. Barbie and Ken, part of Invisibles: Natures transgressive it likewise so. I smile, it makes me happy to see such things at all, but its worth comes more from the weight of theory loaded on to interpret it. And mostly that theory is decidedly lacking, asinine.

In and of itself, the latter two are not especially interesting. What causes such a work like Buck and Allanah to exist in the first place is the profile of their lives as both porn actors and trans*, and how these interact. I was thinking of Jenny Saville’s painting, Passage here. For me also, I find them more interesting as people, and what they publicly say about their identities. Perhaps then this work is something of a public service announcement, or political art in the vein of Jenny Holzer? Hmmm… no.

If they would do a film with Genki Genki, the universe would be perfect.