Black Pussy

[neil]

Just opened at the new Hauser & Wirth Gallery (a former bank) in London's
Piccadilly, is an exhibition by LA artist Jason Roades titled 'Black
Pussy... and the Pagan idol Workshop'.

Adrian Searle, reviewing it in Tuesday's Guardian G2 observes:

"The Black Pussy of the title has nothing whatever to do with cats. It is
the vagina by anything other than its proper name: sprangalang, jelly roll,
the choo-choo train and many other ribald, ridiculous, affectionate, obscene
and offensive names, written in ultra-violet neon, an eerie black light that
makes your teeth fluoresce and your dandruff sparkle.

The 427 pussy-words (selected from a much longer though by no means
exhaustive list) are hung and dangled like so many Christmas tree baubles
about a mountainous accumulation of stuff.

The words themselves are a philologist's wet dream of gangsta rap, hip-hop,
Creole, African and street jive euphemisms. Alone, these darkly shimmering
signs would be no more than a mildly entertaining, if ultimately depressing
record of the male mind-set. No one uses the word vagina in workaday
intimate speech. But in the context of a work that also draws its
inspiration -- if that is the word -- from the idols that were once housed
in the Ka'bah in Mecca, before Muhammad cleared them out, their presence
here gives one pause."

--Neil Crawford