There won’t be any sex at “Sex Party,” says Rebekah Levine. But it will be a party, with beer and dancing and music. Levine and Vincent Darmody, members of a four-person collaborative called Law Office, have asked male artists with some knowledge of pornography to build “fantasy spaces that they find they identify with sexually.” The four resulting porn sets, which can be viewed and entered, will provide the decor for this 21-and-over art event taking place Saturday from 11 PM to 2:45 AM at 1542 N. Milwaukee.
A Grease Monkey’s Wet Dream is the title K.C. Welch and Timothy J. McGuire have given to their collaboration. Their set will be shaped a bit like a theater stage, with McGuire’s motorcycle–a 1967 BSA 650 Lightning–as its centerpiece. It will have mirrors and fur on the walls and black vinyl on the floor. Small phallic cones will hang from the ceiling, and “dirty magazines” will be held in a space under the stage. “Some of the mirrors will be convex,” says McGuire, “so they give you a full-body perspective. There will also be motorcycle mirrors. You’ll be able to walk in and see your sexual organs, your breast, your penis, just be able to check yourself out. People get off on themselves every day looking in a mirror.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
His set, titled Boff, “will have objects from my everyday life. Some are pieces of furniture that I own. I work in art packing and got a real nice museum-quality crate that will be turned into a bed. I have a chair that had been in Hugh Hefner’s mansion that I’m going to cover with vinyl. There’s going to be a couple of road cones, kind of big phalluses. I’ve been purposely buying drinks in unusually shaped bottles to create almost dildolike objects, and I’m dipping the tips into latex to create a nipplelike or penislike cap. It will be kind of surreal because it takes everyday objects and heightens them.”
Talsma wants the long bed to suggest a boy’s anxiety about his growth, but it’s also “a place where you could line ten people up and have a big orgy. You could fit a lot of people on there in many ways. Rebekah and Vince asked us to keep in mind the question, ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’ That’s another reason why I built the bed long: it’s long enough for two people to sleep end to end. Sleeping next to somebody means that you’re in agreement over what has just happened. It’s something that wouldn’t necessarily happen after a porn shoot.”
“But with porn our expectations are never fulfilled; even though you do have control over the person on the page while you’re looking at them, it’s like you don’t have control because it’s just a picture. When you close the cover, all you have is a very lonely moment of masturbating to a magazine.”
