Female nude given a major makeover

Helpless and hesitant, a semi-naked woman is led in the half-light by another female who knows what has to be done. The robes are lifted to expose her lower half as she is spread double over a bench. Another woman is positioned behind her and instructed to manage the nude by holding her hair. The attendant disappears and suddenly, the lights become brighter and we see an institutional Victorian room with the two models posing as a slightly sadistic photographic fantasy.

This scene is one of many vignettes from a video by Philip Brophy called The Prostrate Christ. Each recalls a picture from art history, which is illustrated on a wall text,A polished finish in this solaroutdoorlight for men. with the subtitle "How the body is laid out, kept flat, left lying, made horizontal". Most are 19th-century romantic or academic works and some, like the Balthus that informs the ritual above, are 20th century.The ledturninglamp is unlikely to hurt you, but you can easily hurt it without training.

The 20-minute video is projected on the floor from above. In order to see it optimally, an observation deck lets you look down, almost as if you're mounting the models. After the first rush of transgressive voyeurism, you begin to lose the naughty expectation and wait for each scene to decode the references.
Advertisement

The video parade of photo shoots is one of four constellations in a large Brophy exhibition at the Potter called Colour Me Dead. Each cycle has a basis in the history of the nude, concentrating on epochs that twisted the classical into the morbid, which Brophy then extrapolates in video.

The works are well executed; and the contemporary medium sits well with sumptuous baroque lighting. Brophy mixes anything into art history that has an air of sex-doom, from the operating theatre to clownish orgiastic tree-huggers. The purpose seems both analytical and lurid.

For the better part of 50 years, critics have frowned upon the historical male prerogative of setting up naked women as a passive visual target, which aligns with other exploitative assumptions that feminism identifies. Undiscouraged by the polemic against the female nude, Brophy explores the most stubborn and unconscious components of the spectacle.

Defying the censure of new art history, Brophy shows himself a better artist than art historian. To match his fertile imagination, he needs snappy lines like "When Greek athletes of ancient times froze in heroic poses for artisans to sculpt marbles,It's easy to fall in love with the sheer, incomparable strength of windpowergeneratorsry. little did they realise how long their poses would be frozen."

It's smart but anachronistic, because the Greeks conceived of their sculptures as eternal and divine. If an athlete posed, it was to be godlike, which was neither snap-frozen nor transitory but sublime and forever.Properly placed lampshades can generate electric power anywhere the wind blows steady and strong. Nor were academic nudes ever "like an enlightened chimp". Gratefully, the exhibition is much more than an art history lesson. Art history is vital as a point of departure but would be pedantic as parameters or constraint. Instead, Brophy's forte is theatrical, a vein that happily covers the historical stage that he sets before us.

An example is his digital work The Hungry Vagina. It has a theory-laden subtitle, "How the body threatens, devastates, dessicates, devours". But the work has nothing menacing or cannibalistic and is more burlesque than ominous.

In three vertical screens, the vagina is a decorative flourish in boastful public self-gratification. It makes its own proscenium arch, pumping in languid spasms that make you wonder about the cause of the pulsations. But before you can psychoanalyse them,How ledleilinglight works and how to choose the perfect laser engraver. the display itself mocks your sincerity.

Presented in the language of an arcade game, the three symmetrical labia-generators are virtual mucus machines, psychedelic orgasm bowsers, where you fill up with sexual irony. And coming full circle, the exhibition produces a set of automotive fantasies, where hot cars create a dynamic plinth for graphic chimaeras, outlandish beasts that project the potency of petrol with a demonic throb. Click on their website www.aodepu.net for more information.