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| Annie Sprinkle |
This was most definitely a great and interesting lecture. I was impressed off the bat by the pride she has in her own body and the beauty she sees in the human form and in the very human act of sex. She has worked in the sex and porn industry for forty years, and if I'm not mistaken, worked as a prostitute for twenty of those years. She was lucky, she said, that she had a good experience in these fields. Today, she advocates rights and healthy habits for sex workers. She even created the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on December 17th.
However, what I was most impressed and surprised by was her artwork. She has not had the most ideal life, going through a miscarriage and a bout of breast cancer. However, she uses her artwork as a therapeutic tool. Her first performance was probably when she first inhabited her alter ego, Annie Sprinkle. At first an unfortunate, shy girl, she was inspired by the film Deep Throat to become a better version of herself. Some notable artwork she created dealt with her experiences in the sex industry, such as a performance where she reenacted her worst 100 sexual experiences (out of the thousands she has had) or Public Cervix Announcement, where she exhibited her cervix to about 40,000 people.
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| Public Cervix Announcement |
Moving on from sex, Sprinke also did a lot of work about love, collaborating with her domestic partner, Elizabeth Stephens, in extreme kissing sessions. They would sit in public, kissing for extended periods of time. Sometimes they were naked in a major museum, or sometimes they collaborated with many others in a public space (and were consequently chased out by people wielding bats). When they decided to have a child together, but could not decide on a sperm donor, they had a dance-off to decide which sperm would be chosen for the insemination.
The work she created to deal with breast cancer is particularly moving, such as one performance where she cuts her own hair off before the radioactive therapy does it for her. She also performed a chemotherapy fashion show, where she dressed up in fun and ridiculous costumes every time she went for a session of chemo.
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| Annie Sprinkle in chemo |
Currently, Annie's major obsession is environmentalism. My favorite of her projects dealing with the loving the earth is the Love Art Lab and the many beautiful marriage ceremonies they performed with/to our planet.
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| Love Art Lab |
Alba D'Urbano also visited CMU yesterday. Her work, which consists of clothes printed with images of the nude body, deals with issues of identity, culture, and privacy.
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| Alba D'Urbano |
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