THE SNARLING DOG astride the handily engorged cock by Jimmy De Sana; the puckered chapeau of Ryan Wilde; and the sign by Lizzi Bougatsos advertising "For Sale-My Pussy" all felt like a tasteful beginning to another Miami Art Week. Lugging a cotton candy pink backpack, I went straight from the airport to the Tuesday night opening of "Hard Art: Unruly Work from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection" at the Snøhetta-designed Museum of Sex downtown.
Painted sometime in the Rameside Period (1292-1075 B.C.E.), the fragments above-called the "Turin Erotic Papyrus" because of their "discovery" in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Italy-only hint at the frank versions of ancient sex they depict (see a graphic partial reconstruction at the bottom of the post-probably NSFW). The number of sexual positions the papyrus illustrates-twelve in all-"fall somewhere between impressively acrobatic and unnervingly ambitious," one even involving a chariot.
Murni or I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, to go by her full name was a Balinese artist who shrugged off all the norms and expectations that life chucked at her and instead made art with total abandon. By the time she died aged 39 in 2006, taken by ovarian cancer, she'd left behind a body of ultra-simple, mega-bold, hyper-colourful painting that functions as a testament to a life lived honestly, independently and very, very hornily.