Heat rises in shimmering waves off the barren white plains. A thin crust of translucent salt coats the racetrack surface where motorcyclists gather to compete at the Bonneville Salt Flats. A young woman, her face turned toward the sun, poses against a waxed-down 250cc motorcycle. “I was out there racing and just happened to look good in a bikini,” Frances Stark laughs. “I was really a weirdo, not some hottie.” The photograph, titled Total Performance (1988), was the artist’s ticket into art school. “If she looks like that, then let her in,” was her mentor Mike Kelley’s verdict. “I don’t know if that’s true,” Stark says now, “but it’s a good story.”
Never one to hold back, Stark exhibits online sex chats she had with strangers while wasting time in her studio. Osservate, leggete con me (2012) displays the racy exchange from a cybererotic tryst. The cursive white text from nine different sexual encounters is projected in a dark room with an L-shaped sofa for the viewer to recline on. “U want see my cock? Not very big, but very hard” is comically set to a score of strings, woodwinds, horns, trumpets, and trombones from Mozart’s Don Giovanni that resounds throughout the gallery. As the online conversations digress into politics, philosophy, and art, the banal and the sublime become woven together.
“Frances Stark: Intimism” is showing through August 30 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3600, artic.edu.
