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The influences between art and the sex industry have always been closely intertwined. Historically, sex workers were the muses and models of nude paintings, which could be understood as a form of regulation and control of feminine sexuality. From the 70s, women performance artists have sometimes appropriated sex work as commentary within their art.
From Marina Abramovic’s Role Exchange (1975) where she swapped places with a sex worker in Amsterdam’s red-light district and the worker performed on her behalf in an exhibition, to Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003) where her sexual encounter with an art collector was recorded and the video purchased by the collector. Other artists including Nan Goldin, Cammie Toloui and Cosey Fanni Tutti, also used sex work both to sustain their art practices and as source material within their work. All these examples, coined by Julia Bryan-Wilson as ‘occupational realism’, present the labour practice as conscious or unconscious forms of art practice.
I recently read Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023) where she defines an art monster as someone who centres the body in their practice by creating a language that is unruly, surprising, and sometimes grotesque – sexual, but not sexualised. According with Elkin, we can find some of these ‘art monsters’ in female artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Eva Hesse, Betye Saar, Kara Walker, Sutapa Biswas, and Ana Mendieta.
The exhibition WORKING GIRLS! – which was on view at Gallery 46 in Whitechapel until the 11th of August – is rooted in this notion of unruly bodies, hypocrisies and anxieties surrounding sexuality. These anxieties are particularly prevalent when it comes to the idea of sex work. Referencing Melissa Gira Grant’s term “prostitute imaginary”, the constructed idea of what sex work is and the fear of being labelled as a ‘whore’ works as a powerful regulating force for sexuality. Sex workers are constantly imagined and appropriated but rarely given the space and platform to express their own experiences and unravelling its complexities.
While curating WORKING GIRLS!, one of my main aims was to delve into the question of agency, choice and autonomy. As often happens in the art world, there is a tendency to praise pioneer “art monsters” in hindsight. In response to this, the exhibition aims to offer a platform to contemporary voices that are today pushing boundaries and speaking honestly about their experiences in sex work. Through various facets of the industry and different mediums, the artists included in the exhibition are an example of commitment despite facing potential censorship and impact on their personas.
The exhibition title references Sophia Giovannitti’s title Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex published in 2023, which argues that art and sex occupy similar positions under capitalism, being deemed inappropriate for commodification. Despite this, both are lucrative industries founded on the commodification of creativity, desire, authenticity, performativity, and intimacy. The famous porn star turned academic Annie Sprinkle, noted that for most top women performance artists, the sex industry was a bigger funder of the arts than the NEA (United States’ National Endowment for the Arts). Especially considering the limited access to public funding for the arts and the exclusion of sex worker-led organisations from funding applications, sex work remains a viable avenue for sustaining art practices within the gig-economy. London, despite these challenges has a rich cultural scene of artists, creatives and performers who work in the sex industry. Examples like Sexquisite events, One Night parties, Sex & Rage, and ELSC (East London Stripper Collective), all champion creative expression and de-stigmatisation through creativity and art.
WORKING GIRLS! begins with the film Narratives and Counter-Narratives by Glasgow-based artist Chao-Ying Rao (aka. Femme Castratrice) exploring the complexities of objectification by dissecting the persistent fetishisation of Asian women referencing the representations found in popular Western films. Accompanying this film is The MILFsters, a photographic work featuring the artist and evoking the absurdity of desire, excessive consumption, racial and bodily fetishisation, and abject femininity aiming to disarm and charm the audience.
Themes of community, activism, and friendship are found in M.J. McAlpine’s Hookers and Other Angels. This wall of 84 photographs documents showcases various aspects of the sex industry over 15 years. Through this documentation of colleagues, friends, and community, the artist tells their stories which have remained almost entirely unseen and unpublished until now. Archive and personal stories are also explored through objects and artifacts in two large vitrine cases displaying Working Girl Microcosm and Archive Eco-System by ASWAC (Anonymous Sex Worker Art Collective). The first features an intricate ecosystem with a laptop and a sex worker terrarium, symbolising the layers of identities and experiences by imagining an alternative world of utopia and dystopia. The second includes a collection of items gathered from the community over the years. Including condoms, medicines, a dog collar, or a tooth, their aim is to explore the interconnectedness of creativity, labour, and desire within the sex industry.
Archive, photography, activism, and writing are equally explored in the work of Whoretographer (aka. Poppy Pray). Along these, the display includes a pair of well-used pleasers with film roll inside of them and a book of photographs featuring friends and community members within sex working spaces such as brothels and strip clubs. Celeste The Hooker similarly uses photography to document their experiences, their work the Incall Series provides insight into the intimate moments between them and the client, with written captions exploring the mundane aspects of sex work, performed intimacy, and client relationships, by turning the lens of their camera on them.
Kink, fetish, fantasy, and pleasure are evident in the black-and-white photography of Modest Gold, who uses photography to unapologetically portray multiple aspects of human sexuality. In Vex Ashley and Four Chambers’ Internal Desire Machine, the work transmits and replicates emotion across multiple screens in a simulation of desire. This piece explores the connection between art and pornography, performance and authenticity, and technology and sex.
Labour, sexual currency, and the sex industry are investigated in Ozziline Mercedes 666’s work AUTO-SEXPLOITATION, reflecting on the complex realities of being an erotic labourer. The work was supported by the performance WEAPONS OF MASS ERECTION that premiered at the exhibition opening. A performance where the artist presented the stripper as the contemporary hunter-gatherer by using Pleaser heels as weapons. DaddyBears explores themes of glamorisation and stigmatisation in sex work through soft blue textile sculptures, drawing inspiration from the interior spaces of sex work and exploring a desired delusion and broken fantasy by reappropriating one man’s interior into a new and fantastical room of her own. The sculptures are accompanied by AJ Bravo’s bright red paintings, which explore themes of erotica and self-pleasure. Bravo’s work is concerned with the materiality of paint and how it can provide a haptic erotic experience for its audience, questioning the age-old antithesis between sight and touch, creating an intimate proximity between the work and the viewer.
The artists in WORKING GIRLS! speak on far broader topics than sex work. They delve into deeply human aspects of friendship, community, beauty, pleasure, humour, darkness, and light, presenting often overlooked representations of the sex worker community and experience. It also aims to present sex-working artists as central to contemporary queer art practices. Their art disrupts order by blurring the boundaries between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of intimacy, challenging hegemonic structures and questioning binaries of low and high culture, queerness, gender, race, and sexuality, while questioning the performance and authenticity of sexuality. These artists are the new ‘art monsters’ we will look back at in future art history, for turning the gaze and representing their experiences, reaching after the truth of the body and revealing to the audience a language far beyond it.