Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art

Sex work is a controversial topic, often associated with shame and stigma. However, the representation of sex workers has taken on an important role in the contemporary art scene.

Artists use various media such as painting, photography or performance artto draw attention to social problems.

An example of this is the work of the American artist Jeff Koons. In his series “Made in Heaven”, he shows himself together with his then-wife Ilona Staller (also known as Cicciolina), a former porn actress from Italy.

The images are explicitly sexual and provocative – but they also show the contradiction between the ideal image of love and sexuality and its commercial exploitation by the porn industry.

But it's not just male artists who critically examine this topic: women like Tracey Emin and Nan Goldin have also addressed their experiences as sex workers. Their works are personal in nature; they offer insight into the lives of people on the margins of our society – porn actresses, prostitutes, dominatrixes, escorts (Erobella), and others.

But why are so many artists still preoccupied with this topic today? One argument is that there is still far too little public discussion about prostitution – even though it is practiced worldwide!

Artistic works can address topics without having to make direct moral judgments.

Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art

In 2020, Bowdoin College graduate Mackenzie Philbrick, as part of an honorary thesis for the art department of the US educational institution, examined the representations of sex work in contemporary art since 1973.

Philbrick, Mackenzie, “Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art Since 1973” (2020). Honors Projects. 202. This open-access work is made available to you free of charge and openly by the Student Scholarship and Creative Work at Bowdoin Digital Commons . It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of Bowdoin Digital Commons.

This commemorative project examined how and for what purpose the identity of the sex worker has been used in Western contemporary art.

The term "sex worker", , refers to a person who receives money or goods in exchange for sexual services and also includes those who participate in the filming of pornography for money.

The term “sex work” is used in this project when referring to the work of sex workers in a contemporary context, while the term “prostitute” is used to draw attention to the historical identity and myth of the “prostitute” .

Philbrick's analysis covers several periods from 1973 to 2018 and is divided into three chapters. The works fall within the postmodern period, when the poststructuralist emphasis on discourse gained importance in the 1970s and reached its full force in 1980.

This historical moment signaled a departure from the idealism of modernity towards something entirely new, as shaped by the effects of capitalism, widespread globalization and further deregulation.

According to the author, this period was categorized by a loss of faith in overarching narratives such as religion or science , indicating a kind of lack of depth in the world in favor of an obsession with superficial appearances.

In this context, the French philosopher Michel Foucaultthat discourse is power, which led to a subsequent shift in focus. Although postmodern theorizing has had various effects on feminism, according to him, one of the most notable was the way it opened up dialogue to the “others” of feminism in order to mitigate the suppression of certain narratives and ultimately promote diversity.

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which belongs to you most and yet is most often taken away from you.”

Quote from Catherine A. MacKinnon from “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory”, in Signs 7 no. 3, Spring 1982, translated from the English.

Although in recent times the views of individual artists on sex workers and the connections between feminist art and performative interpretations of prostitutes have been discussed, Julia Bryan-Wilson the only art historian who has addressed this topic across the entire oeuvre of various artists.

Her article “Dirty Commerce: Art Work and Sex Work Since the 1970s” examined the different ways in which artists have dealt with sex work since the 1970s and highlights the economic similarities between the artist and the sex worker in late capitalism.

Her argument does not address the advantages and disadvantages of different media or the way in which postmodernism has influenced these representations of the sex worker, but draws meaningful parallels between the artist and the sex worker by comparing their working conditions under capitalism.

In her article, she postulated that artists turned to the figure of the sex worker because it made more visible a number of developing conditions such as the professionalization of the art market, the increasing instability of class formations, and the increase in affective labor.

Based on Bryan-Wilson's work as well as Marxist and Foucaultian theory, Mackenzie Philbrick the position of the sex worker among artists in capitalism, as these identities have interacted and overlapped while contemporary artists responded to the modernist origins of the female nude and the commercialization of the art object.

Pornography in contemporary painting and photography

Since the successful avant-garde nude in Western aesthetics traditionally required a careful balance between transmuting the artist's sexual urges and controlling the risk of being too graphic, these women subverted this unspoken rule and instead nudes that were overtly erotic and pornographic.

Art historian Lynda Nead suggests that meaning can be questioned and challenged at the margins of these socially constructed categories. A number of artworks do precisely that, and due to their medium and cultural context, technically fall into the category of fine art when recording or depicting pornographic images.

Betty Tompkins' Fuck Painting #6, 1973

Betty Tompkins' Fuck Painting #6, 1973, takes a graphic scene from pornography by enlarging and cropping it to include only the genitals, depicted in soft, airbrushed monochrome tones.

Marilyn Minter's Porn Grid #1-4, 1989

In Marilyn Minter's Porn Grid #1-4, 1989, she shows a dot pattern of pornographic "money shots" while men and women service erect penises.

Merry Alpern's photo series Dirty Windows, 1994

Merry Alpern's 1994 photo series Dirty Windows documented illegal activities in the bathroom of a private lap dance club on Wall Street, where men exchanged women for money and drugs in exchange for sexual acts

Each of these works depicts the sex worker naturalistically – through photography or photorealism – and thus responds to the modernist obsession with the female nude by making it explicitly erotic through the visual rhetoric of pornography, which prioritizes realism over abstraction

The representation of the female body as a call to discourse

In “The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality”, art historian Lynda Nead postulates that the female nude not only sets standards of beauty, but also reinforces and normalizes certain dynamics of perception.

Given its repetition as a significant aesthetic motif and its associations with value and desire, Nead argues that

The representation of the female body can therefore be seen as a discourse on the subject and forms the core of the history of Western aesthetics.”

Art's obsession with processes of separation and order, which led to the containment and regulation of the female body and sexuality, is indicative of how these were suppressed in Western culture.

Drawing on Foucault's post-structuralist approach, Nead further stated:

Power lies at the margins of socially constructed categories

which suggests that artists can challenge meaning by engaging with and disrupting these classification systems to show how unstable the boundaries of these categories are.

A large part of her argument revolves around the second-wave Western feminist art movement and the various ways in which feminist art can expose traditional dynamics of perception. This should critique existing values ​​and open up new meanings for the female body.

Her research aims to understand the interactions between visual art and obscenity , and ultimately concludes that these are two completely different spheres: pornography and art are

trapped in a cycle of mutual definition.".

Photographer dismantles the stigma surrounding sex workers

Let's shift our focus from Nead's theoretical postulates and theses to an internationally acclaimed and decorated photographer: Julia Fullerton-Batten sex workers through her lens while they were working on her new book , "The Act ." With stunning photographs, she dismantles the stigma surrounding sex workers.

Few industries are as controversial as the sex industry. And few workers are judged, stigmatized, and subjected to the preconceived notions of others as much as sex workers.

It was these ideas that led London-based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten to focus her lens on women who use their bodies to earn a living, in order to understand what might motivate a person to engage in sex work voluntarily.

The resulting photo book, titled "The Act," features escort ladies, porn stars, lap and pole dancers, a stripper, a webcam girl, sex "slaves," a dominatrix, a burlesque dancer, aerial acrobats, and a ping-pong girl. Each person is depicted on a stage to emphasize that their work involves an acting element.

Curiosity was the main trigger that inspired me to make 'The Act',"

She tells this story in an interview with The Independent.

I was curious what motivated women, some of whom were well-educated and had university degrees, to give up this normality and voluntarily enter the sex industry, risking social stigma and the disapproval of their families.”

Julia Fullerton-Batten is a world-renowned and award-winning art photographer. Fullerton-Batten's work comprises twelve major projects spanning a decade of her career in the field.

Julia's use of unusual locations, highly creative settings, and street-cast models, accentuated by cinematic lighting, are hallmarks of her style. She suggests visual tension in her images and imbues them with a mystique that entices the viewer to reconsider the picture again and again; each time, something new is revealed.

These qualities have established enthusiasts for her work worldwide and at all ends of the cultural spectrum, from casual observers to connoisseurs of art photography.

Fullerton-Batten has won countless awards for her commercial and artistic work and is a Hasselblad Master.

She was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London to take portraits of leading figures in the British National Health Service. These portraits are now part of the gallery's permanent collection. Further images are also part of the permanent collection of the Musei de l'Elyseein Lausanne, Switzerland.