CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/25/2014

Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms

"Any artist will tell you: there is probably nothing more difficult to try to make art about than sex. Sex is the ultimate earworm, that song or musical phrase that we, our species, can't get out of our minds. It's more like an earworm on steroids, with a special gift for working its way into our thoughts, trumping and crowding out the other useful, charitable, or productive thoughts we might otherwise be thinking. And yet few experiences are less possible to translate into image or language. The body parts and the sensations have been pirated by pornography. The postures and the attitudes have been commodified by advertising. Literature is full of good attempts gone horribly wrong. You can't describe or show what it feels like. You can't even remember, exactly, because the body's memory doesn't quite interface with the brain's. So what is left to say about sex that could possibly seem new?
In Jo Ann Callis's black and white and color photographs from the 1970s, she has managed to convey the complexity and the mystery of sex by communicating something of its complications and its mysteriousness. Her angle, so to speak, is oblique; physical pleasure – and anxiety – is suggested rather than enacted. What we see is either the prelude or the aftermath of an imagined act: the flesh indented by the physical memory of bondage; a naked back striped by red welts, or for all we know, parallel lines of paint; an empty bed with pillows scrunched suggests the presence of two lovers, or of a solitary sleeper trying to find some comfort. On the other hand, it's hard to put another construction other than the sexual on the chafing below the black binding on the neck of the thin, androgynous torso with black armbands and black paint applied to the nipples. Why would you get yourself up like that, if it didn't, in some way, feel good?" Excerpt from Francine Prose's essay and featured image, "Legs on Dresser" (1976-77), are reproduced from Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms, published by Aperture .