Sex at its most Hardcore: pain, pleasure and provocation

Before entering Sadie Coles HQ’s latest exhibition, Hardcore, you’ll hear the sound of clanging metal beating against something hard. Once in, you’re confronted with the source: a belted whip suspended from the ceiling, its tail dragged repeatedly against the concrete ground.

Monica Bonvicini’s Breathing (calm) whip installation is the drumbeat to the exhibition, showing alongside work from 18 provocative artists including Cindy Sherman, Monica Bonvicini and Bruce LaBruce. Hardcore explores the power dynamics of sex and all its nuanced complexities of pain, pleasure, perversity and provocation. Simply put: it’s not for the faint-hearted.

“This exhibition has no straight lines and sex is never identical, it is always unique,” says Reba Maybury, artist, writer and political dominatrix, who works under the name Mistress Rebecca and wrote the exhibition’s accompanying essay. ​“To make work from the position of a subjective sexuality is not easy. It takes a hardcore to swerve the inevitable variations of sensation that others choose to project upon these artists. Choosing to create from this place could be considered a vulnerable decision but vulnerability is, after all, the ultimate power.”

Hardcore was curated by Sadie Coles and John O’Doherty, who also collaborated with Climax Books, the cult distributor of ephemera, erotica and transgressive counterculture. The ground-floor bookshop is dedicated to a selection of rare and limited-edition books available to buy, with titles by Kathy Acker, Annie Sprinkle and BDSM duo Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose (who also exhibit). Below, we break down five stand-out works from the show.

Main image credit: Bruce LaBruce, Female Liberation Army, 2005. © Bruce LaBruce. Courtesy of The Artist. Photo: Katie Morrison /​Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Carolee Schneemann, Vulva's Morphia, 1995. © Carolee Schneemann Foundation. Courtesy Carolee Schneemann Foundation, Hales Gallery, and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo: JSP ART PHOTOGRAPHY

“Vulva reads biology and discovers she is an amalgam of proteins and oxytocin hormones which govern all her desires,” are the words inscribed on a slat beneath Carolee Schneemann’s installation. ​“Vulva decodes feminist constructivist semiotics and realises she has no authentic feelings at all.” The first painting you see walking into the exhibition is the late American artist’s 36-panel photo grid recounting the story of the vulva, with each of the scanned, hand-painted illustrations documenting multifarious depictions of female genitalia: from realising her place in a biology textbook to seeing herself in erotic primitive artworks, from palaeolithic carvings to childhood drawings. The last panels explore her subjection to the male gaze; abstracted warped images of the vagina are accompanied with the words, ​“Even her erotic sensations are constructed by patriarchal projections, impositions, and conditioning.”

Placed next to Schneemann’s Vulva Morphius, questions surrounding bodily autonomy (or lack thereof) are probed by Tishan Hsu’s Double Interface. A rectangular sheet of turquoise expanse which concaves and convexes on a cybernetic grid is punctuated with silicone touchpoints of porous skin, fleshy holes and eyes to convey dislodged body parts – a material body of the digital age. Hsu’s Double Interface speaks to our current generation of cyborgs, robots and avatars, which have further embedded themselves into the experience of what it means to be human today.

On a long black desk, photographs are scattered between a ball gag, a razor, a caning stick, a black rope and a rubber flagellation tool – all McClodden’s own belongings. Eight framed pieces of text hang above the desk, inscribed with excerpts from the writings of Brad Johnson, a gay African American poet and writer. McClodden’s own tears, sweat and blood soak these texts and the navy T‑shirt which hangs above her installation. ​“Sweat changes, when desire, threat, pleasure, or pain is present,” she writes, in a letter left on the desk. ​“I wanted to collect this residue as a portrait of smell.” Rose petals are scattered on each surface – a scent, McClodden reasons, that should be inviting, but instead disgusts. ​“I would be so taken by the smell of dying roses, and this time I almost had a bit of a repulse to the smell. I vomited twice (…) It made me fully understand how close fetish and abjection are and how close I am to it.”

A triptych of Cindy Sherman prints hang together in the corner of the exhibition space. The three works make up Sex Pictures, a pornographic series which depicts plastic toy dolls engaged in various sexual acts. Whilst two of the prints depict these toys with no heads and just close-up shots of body parts, the third image, which sits between the two, displays the head of a figure between a set of legs and a penis hanging above them in the foreground. Such images are some of Sherman’s most explicit amongst her repertoire. But her notable explorations of turning the conventional into the unconventional are at their most potent here. By giving them penises, bending them over and making them cum, Sherman toys (quite literally) with the plastic dolls, to show how modern society can sexualise almost anything and everything.

Saint Sebastian is tied up against a tree, three arrows pierced into his body. Stanislava Kovalcikova’s oil painting St. Sebastian or the competition of sensibilities sits in the exhibition behind King Cobra’s In the Feast of the Hogs; a gem-encrusted pig carcass dangles from the ceiling, its silicone intestines piled beneath. The undercurrent of Hardcore’s artworks is almost too obvious to warrant explanation: sadomasochism and erotic martyrdom are inextricable, and both lie at the centre of the artists’ practices. Emphasising that point is Cameron-Weir’s hairshirt, a three-part sculptural installation comprising of a suspended black leather trench coat, its cruciform positioning flanked by two steel-studded sacks, with a scarf of horseshoes draped over the shoulders, bound together by cilices: metal chains employed throughout history to induce pain and bleeding during prayer as a sign of repentance. Notions of BDSM practice and acts of religious punishment circle the nexus of Cameron-Weir’s sculpture, asking us to consider how far we are willing to yield to pleasure before it becomes a practice steeped in pain. How hardcore would you go?

Hardcore is now showing at Sadie Coles HQ until 5^th August 2023. Free admission.