'Kamasutra Spoon' Looks at Sexual Energy in Art

All of the posters advertising the new “Kamasutra Spoon” exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art have the same discreet yet intriguing disclaimer: “Dear Visitors, the ‘Kamasutra Spoon’ exhibition is not recommended for children under 16 or easily disturbed people.”

With that kind of advertising, it’s easy to see why visitors to MMoMA’s Petrovka location whisper in furtive excitement as they buy their tickets.

“Kamasutra Spoon,” on display as part of the “Qui Vive?” Second Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, certainly has shock value. Curator Andrei Bartenev, an artist himself who is also known as a designer and flamboyant dresser, described the exhibition as “a flat panorama representing different observations on the subject of sexual energy.”

Visitors to the five-week show are presented with numerous explicitly sexual artworks, such as Russian artist Alexandra Frolova’s sculpture project entitled “Sextum Sextorum: Male/Female Part,” in which two gallery rooms are almost entirely filled by giant models of male and female genitalia. Although “Kamasutra Spoon’s” artworks all relate to the notion of sex and eroticism, the exhibition, organizers say, is not merely meant to be provocative or controversial — the museum’s web site warns that “obscene details torn out of context will produce an erroneous interpretation of the scope of this study.”

“Kamasutra Spoon” explores the theme of sex and sexuality through a variety of mediums, including painting, video art, photography, performance art and installation. Some of the artworks on display, such as well-known Russian male model Danila Polyakov’s cutting-edge “Sacred Popcorn” piece, combine several of these mediums. The distinctive scent of freshly made popcorn that hangs in the air of the “Kamasutra Spoon” gallery wafts from the room that houses “Sacred Popcorn,” where a sea of real popcorn is coupled with nude video and photography of the artist himself, as well as several other individuals. During the opening of “Kamasutra Spoon,” Polyakov also introduced an element of performance art into “Sacred Popcorn” by lying nude in the popcorn itself.

Polyakov is just one of the 35 young artists who have come together to create “Kamasutra Spoon.” Several of them, like Polyakov, hail from Moscow, but their native countries range from Austria to Indonesia, and this regional diversity is reflected in their work. No two “Kamasutra Spoon” pieces are exactly alike, with each one dealing with the issue of sex in a unique manner.

Bartenev’s experience teaching young people at the Norwegian Theater Academy inspired him to seek out young artists for an exhibition united around the theme of sexuality.

“I noticed that a powerful energy source for young artists was sex,” Bartenev said when asked about the origins of the exhibit. “The artist either agrees and accepts this sexual energy or tries to subdue it. This is the context an artist works in. I thought it was time to speak up about this subject and discuss what an artist lives through, how he works with this passion, this drive … or, on the contrary, with no such drive.”

Bartenev talked about one artist at the exhibit, Timofei Caraffa-Corbut, telling of how, as a child, Caraffa-Corbut painted all over his body with markers and then showed the finished product to his parents, who “were shocked and thought he needed the help of a psychiatrist. In [Caraffa-Corbut’s] opinion, though, it was a first attempt to study his own body through art, to find out why there are so many openings and protrusions. Through this painting on his body, he was trying to feel and understand his own forms.”