Xxijra Hii is pleased to present an exhibition of all new works by Laila Majid + Louis Blue Newby at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ.
Turning to their extensive image archive, the imagery in this new body of work originates from a vast array of sources including, but not limited to, fetish and pornography magazines, wildlife encyclopaedias, cinema SFX / VFX journals, anime drawing manuals, iPhone photographs and images mined from online forums.
Alongside image-based work, the artists are producing an editioned series of cast sculptures, focussing on objects that bear a connection to the corporeal. An inflatable ergonomic sex pillow reimagined in jesmonite prompts speculation, leaving us to imagine the possible ways in which this object may be used. Colour-matched to the fleshy hues of shapewear and lingerie, these objects become analogous to the body. Gently undulating forms, seam lines, and protruding inflation valves morph into stand-ins for bodily orifices, curves and wrinkles in the skin.
—
Exhibition essay | The skin’s the limit | by Donna Marcus Duke
1.
You, being a degenerate, know the importance of magazines. Aged sixteen in 2012, you’d buy gay
lifestyle magazines from the Marylebone WHSmith to read on the train on the way to see your Dad
in the Midlands. They weren’t porn as such but erotic enough to be placed on the top shelf of the
store, enough that you’d edge yourself in a game of chicken up and around the shop before
mustering the courage to admit to the cashier you were buying it. Shoving the glossy bulk in your
bag, you run onto the train, find the emptiest carriage, and hope for some public privacy. This rush,
this shoot of affect, would return with lace panties in Primark and sex shops in Soho: objects,
powerfully charged, acted on and in your skin, the presence of which altered your body — they can
change you or worse, confirm you. This wasn’t about arousal. This was about the terrifyingly
affirming realisation that your desires were not the norm, that you were no longer the public; you’re
a bonafide dissident, a member of the counter public.
*
2.
You’re watching porn on your phone in bed and Marshall McLuhan is about to fuck Michael
Warner. Michael glances seductively over his shoulder, his arsehole blowing kisses. He explains
that counter publics are not just different or alternate to publics, but are viewed with hostility or
derision by the dominant public it counters. “One enters at one’s own risk,” Michael winks at
Marshall. 1 Camera cuts to arsehole: it winks too. Marshall is stood next to a table upon which rests a
range of anal contraptions, intentionally lain out to maximise clarity of display. Marshall ponders
over which device to choose: “The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and
controls the scale and form of human association and action.” 2 His voice is camp and husky. “Don’t
you mean a massage?” Micheal smirks. Marshall sniggers; his fist plunges into a vat of Crisco.
Micheal kneels waiting on an ochre chaise-longue, reminiscent of chic mid-century furniture,
the kind advertised on billboards or in magazines with a suited man reading a book, or magazine,
smoking cigarettes — with something of a satisfied grin plastered over-face. Like all good seats, it
invites the pleasure of reading. But in this context it triggers the colour of stained white briefs, like
those currently wrapped round your ankles. Swiping to a new window, a subreddit dedicated to
identifying furniture in pornos tells you it’s a cheap sex pillow. WarnerDad96 includes a link for
purchase: NEWEST INFLATABLE SEX Aid Pillow Toys Magic Position Cushion Love Position Set
£51.34. It’s modelled by a skirted woman, knees on floor, waist held by the pillow’s head, and torso
slumped chest-down thrown across the inflatable’s lap. Her head pooled at the bottom, neck twisted,
face off from camera with only her crown of hair visible. You fantasise about reading like this: the
body dribbles down the curvature of the seat into the open pages of a magazine flattened on the
floor, a slow ooze into the open jaws of stapled paper; oh the pleasures of pulp and varnish!
The thought finishes you off. You save Marshall and Michael for another time.
*
3.
You’re at Ram Books in Highbury, a private archive of pornography magazines and erotica dating
back to the start of the 1900s. Past the racks of pert breasts and wet bulges is a confectionary of
subcultural desires displayed at the back of the shop. You’re drawn to the forced feminisation mags
from the 80s: their illustrations of forced sissies are Biblical, nay, Catholic in their imagery —
elements of the Carracci and Caravaggio are in the porn’s violently seductive drama, blacks and
reds flash on the flimsy matte print, the folds of which glide over each other, and your hands, with
each soft rustle of a turning page. A catalogue on the back page listed a range of hormone suppliers
and surgeons who, for the right price, could make you a woman.
You consider the power this object held over its original audience, how it united disparate
strangers through their desires and urges for womanhood, how relied upon it was to those seeking
access to other embodiments, skins, ways of being in the world, how dramatically this object
changed the body of its audience and the agency at which it did so. What might a first time reader
have thought when they encounter the object, perhaps by chance, perhaps after a long yearning
search? What would have been the feeling of seeing your internal world in front of you, of seeing
your internal world possible, of seeing others like you?
Kevin Killian, who runs the shop, peers over your shoulder: “Sex writing differs from other
forms of representation in that it has some kind of chemical effect on the reader. I get hard, I can’t
contain myself.” 3 He shrugs and giggles. You give him £20 and swiftly exit the shop before offering
any further chance of interaction — you, being a degenerate, have a complicated relationship to
magazines and would rather some privacy with the object. Whilst one might publish to find
comrades, the pleasure of the magazine is in the vicariousness through which those comrades are
found — to have the knowledge of anonymous others, with only the object knowing you. 4
*
4.
Home, you place the new zine amongst your collection of porn, erotica and special interest mags,
comparing its form to the rest. You always know its porn when pictures overlap in the layout of the
page: images, too irresistible to one another, are compelled to reach across their bed’s sheets and
touch. Reading, you notice the similarities between page and skin — gloss runs smooth under finger
like freshly shaved arse, a gleaning film of sweat; matte irregularly, microscopically, bumps like the
subtle wrinkles of leather, or the gentle lines on flat skin, hardly discernible to touch. Maybe that’s
why reading feels like a massage, maybe thats why reading holds you.
But you’re aware this is not unique to print. You once heard an author claim paper was flesh
and screen was metal, but these connotations are hardly fair. 5 Film and video touch us too like skin
— television with its static lines, cinema with its grain, both textured but smooth to touch, both
holding fictions that hold us, both bags, or slings. These skins as media all touch, but are unique in
the styles, attending varying desires. You prefer to think of paper as leather and screen as rubber,
skins with different moods — leather, as paper, is atavistic, preindustrial and romantic; rubber, as
screen, is futuristic, technological, science fictional. 6 Both, however, enshroud. Capacious of desire.
*
5.
You consider the skin of digital media as you scroll through Tumblr, rubbing your thumb up and
down the screen whilst rubbing apace your crotch upon your new sex pillow. A motivational quote
appears over particularly horny yiff content of a dog fursona bound and gagged— “Pornography is
what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you.” 7 You're all subs
to porn: porn is the leather daddy cracking the whip and spanking your arse, the dom who teases
and pleases, the dom who holds you post-fuck. This is known no better than in the counter public,
where the skin of pornography is instrumental to the exchange of information that make desires, and
thus their public, possible. Without the independent, unregulated media — of mags, films,
subreddits, Tumblrs (rip) — a counter public could not be; without media, holding you all together,
each dissident remains alone and obscure.
*
6.
“Identification is always with an image. But ask anybody whether they’d actually like to be a JPEG
File. If identification is to go anywhere it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the
image as thing, not as representation.” 8 As a member of the counter public, you know the fetish of
the image lies in its thingness, in its tactility, in its touch. For the medium holds you, grants your
desires, offers you peers, confirms what you are: the medium makes you object. When you’re
turned on, it’s you who is moved — and by what? The fetish. The medium. The thing. It was said
all tools and engines on earth are extensions of the human body’s limbs and sense, but you, a
degenerate, know better: things find agency in their own skins. They are beautiful girls on top, we
are but subby simps below. 9
__________
1 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 2002
2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
3 Kevin Killian, ‘Sex Writing and the New Narrative’, Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative
Writing 1977-1997, 2017
4 André Breton, 1920, quoted by Gareth Branwyn, Jamming the Media:
A Citizen’s Guide Reclaiming The Tools of Communication, 1997
5 Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print — The Mutation of Publishing since 1894, 2012
6 Pat Califa, Public Sex, 2006
7 Andrea Long Chu, Females, 2019
8 Hito Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You and Me’, The Wretched of the Screen, 2013
9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870
