When viewing “Sexy and the City,” a new group photography show at the Yossi Milo Gallery, one may be tempted to trace the historical arc of sexiness. To accomplish this, one need only view the photographs chronologically, paying particular attention to shifts in the popular conception of ‘sexy’ as they occur. Since the photos in the show span the last fifty years, one may walk away feeling as if he’s gained a rather good idea of what Americans find titillating.
Before the 1960s, sexiness meant making out in theaters and subway cars. Thus we have Weegee’s 3-D Lovers in a Movie Theater, circa 1955, a delightful bit of golden-era smut, and Leipzig’s Subway Lovers, 1949. Such images are not sexy in the contemporary sense. Indeed, the oldest photo here, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic V-J Day at Times Square (1945), is less a symbol of sex than a celebration of America’s post-war vitality. The image summons ideas of national innocence just as it stirs thoughts of vigorous procreation (this, after all, is the kiss that sparked the baby-boom). The couple in the picture belongs to the last pre-sexy generation of Americans; that is, unlike Gen Xers, they have not been taught to believe that sexiness (today a marketable commodity) is inextricably linked to their quality of life. It is a blissful image, and makes this reviewer pine for old-fashioned romantic precepts like commitment, modesty, and love—none of which are particularly evident in the rest of the work on hand.
After the Sexual Revolution, we find that expressions of sexuality have become increasingly self-conscious, theatrical, affected. Note, for instance, Garry Winogrand’s Untitled (Topless Woman in Central Park), 1968, whose eponymous subject bares herself to a crowd of attentive men like an aspiring showgirl in a deodorant advertisement; or Arthur Tess’s Man on Bridge, N.Y., 1979, in which a shirtless fellow straddles a suspension cable as if it were…well, you know what. The common thread here is attitude: sexiness is no longer a naturally occurring quality, but a cool expression to be mustered and worn. Looking at these later photographs, one feels that sex has been drained of its spontaneity. Instead of couples in flagrante, we have poses and postures.
Charles Taub’s The Met, New York (2008) serves as a good illustration of this. A matronly tourist contemplates the dangling marble genitals of a Greek kouri. It’s as if the statue’s frank immodesty belongs to antiquity rather than to the woman’s own jaded age, when glimpsing an unselfconscious nude means first traveling to a museum. Of course, the Greeks’ idea of sex was not so removed from our own; they, too, were irrepressibly bawdy (see, for instance, the frescos at Pompeii, which likely gave visiting Victorians heart palpitations), and, if their mythology is any indication, tended to associate sex with power. But whereas the Greeks saw the kouri as representing the ideal of physical perfection, adored as much for its aesthetic appeal as for its Platonic immutability, the modern viewer sees nothing but a comic foil—a figure positioned in stark contrast not only to the unsexy tourist who blanches before it, but to the contemporary sex icon, who can summon his sexiness on command. When viewing The Met, New York we snigger as much at the tourist’s priggishness as at the statue’s lack of pretense.
Most of the pieces in the show were taken before 1980, suggesting that New York experienced a general detumescence during the Koch years from which it has not yet recovered, despite the best efforts of Nan Goldin and Lisa Kereszi. When we look at Mitch Epstein’s Untitled, New York (Woman in Midtown Taxi), 1995, we find a person completely alone. Is her isolation sexy? Is the fact that she can pleasure herself, without resorting to human contact, meant to stimulate our own sense of erotic independence? Can sexiness really be experienced alone? Many of the later photographs in “Sexy and the City” seem to suggest as much, although their self-conscious appeal to solipsism renders the argument unconvincing—if only because there’s no one there to hear it.
