The Art of Seduction at CCAS

By Benjamen Judd

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A new exhibition at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space that challenges the way art arouses us opens up this July and it’s going to be a compelling doozy of a show. Dubbed the Art of Seduction, the collection turns voyeurism on its head and plays with ideas of spectatorship and social constructs of desire.

The barrier between art and pornography has always been a thin one – the controversy surrounding Manet’s Olympia, for example, now seeming rather passé in the face of artists such as Tracey Emin and Karen Finley and the NEA Four. But one of the most telling elements of works dubbed pornographic is the fact that in each of them, from Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe to Emin’s My Bed installation is the agency applied to the subject – that is, seduction comes from the art to the viewer and not the other way around. In the Art of Seduction, three artists have come together to challenge the way that sensuality is used in art – the subject of the art itself suddenly has the power and not the spectator.

Art that is “seductive” is often spoken about like it’s a bad thing. Desire on the other hand is the overworked territory of philosophers and theorists (such as Kant and Lacan) whose deconstructions of film, literature and art have imbued such concepts with a certain artistic authority. Desire, however, is also central advertising and propaganda, and seduction the means to its end. In this context of shameless promotion our subject matter might be contaminated by thought of commerce.

In the hands of these three artists, however, the notion of seduction need not simply be an easy way to engage an audience, it can also include highly critical analytical explorations of the ways that desire and seduction might work together in framing encounters with art.

Art of Seduction opens at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space on Friday July 4 and will run until Saturday, August 9.