Totally my ass. - Piotr Uklanski's Untitled GingerAss

PIOTR UKLANSKI Untitled (GingerAss), 2002

PIOTR UKLANSKI took a photograph of my ass. My naked buttocks are shown in full frame--a stretch mark here, a freckle there; my curves are far from heroin chic. The rest of my body is almost entirely cropped out, save a bit of upper thigh. From the arch of my upper back, it is obvious that I am slightly bending over, flashing my ass to the camera as if begging for a good smack, or perhaps longing for something else. It is certainly an inappropriate pose for a museum curator to assume in front of an artist.

Just another white girl's ass? Purchasing three pages in Artforum in order to publish this image along with a text that bluntly acknowledges my professional identity makes it impossible to write it off as such. With its various flaws, it neither offers the airbrushed perfection of a Playboy spread, nor the tasteful standards of an academic nude. This image courts the immediacy and accessibility of porn. Deliberately frontal and flat, the hackneyed subject of a girl's ass is designed to arouse the viewer by convincing him or her that this ass is real, credible, and obtainable while corresponding to a particular sexual fantasy.

Uklanski likes porn. It offers a clear-cut formula for how to create visual titillation using banal subjects and cliched techniques. His ongoing preoccupation with sunsets, flowers, full moonlit skies, city lights, and shimmering water goes beyond their photographic depictions in his signature series The Joy of Photography (1996 to present).

Other works such as his torn paper collages, paintings made of pencil shavings, as well as sculptural installations (e.g. water spilled on the gallery floor Untitled (Wet Floor), 2000), all reference the same prosaic themes while utilizing extremely simplified techniques or formal devices. The shared affinity in this eclectic body of work lies in a crass, if not arrogant ambition: an earnest attempt to capture "beauty."

Untitled (GingerAss) pushes this calculated crassness to another level. It is not an art project inserted in the magazine on the invitation of Artforum. A museum or gallery did not purchase this space. This is an advertisement paid for by the artist. Money buys visibility. Visibility caters to ego. Publication of this picture displaces it from a wall to a double page spread (closer to porn). This text ensures that my identity as the sitter is exposed. Without leaving it to gossip, it divulges a charged liaison--potentially beneficial for the artist, problematic for the curator.

Making it public in Artforum confronts the projection of taboos, concepts of professional climbing, vanity, and artistic/personal conviction that are part of the relationship implied by the image. This crass gesture offers the image the possibility of retaining its autonomy. This is totally my ass--striving to be beautiful.

Alison M. Gingeras is a curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Piotr Uklanski is an artist.

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