What I meant to say in the last entry was “When is the last time you went to an art show – and didn’t get stabbed?” My new answer to that rhetorical question is now “Why last Friday night, of course.”
A few people (well, no one) wrote in to express their concern that in an increasingly violent art world, especially an installation in which porn stars would be revered in whimsical textual displays such as those created by Margie Schnibbe (aka Vena Virago), they might get caught in the crossfire of one of that savage demimonde’s many feuds, or that they might go on a punching, stabbing, and boot-kicking spree themselves.
But no such thing happened Friday, as Schnibbe’s “Honey Bunny” show opened to a packed but peaceful house of milling hipsters, poseurs, Germans, New Romantics, old queens, and angry young men.
I usually arrive at such gallery openings shaking my fist and mumbling about the various ways in which my vision has been repressed by h8ers. But something about the comforting pastels and intricate swirly patterns juxtaposed with large, bare singularities of wall, cushions, and a sign that read “Today is a good day” made me gently place my broken bottle down with the plastic cups of white wine.
Schnibbe’s show contains a stylized wall of AVN Hall of Fame inductees, and the entire exhibit will serve as the backdrop of the upcoming Vena Virago porn outing Honey Bunny, which will star Page Morgan as a woman obsessed with the art of a woman named Vena Virago, rabbits, and having sex.
But it was strange to walk through a gallery and not be confronted with violence around every custom-painted corner. There were no ear-slicing mobs, drunken honor killings, or installation-related bloodletting, like the time when I shaved off my nipples for my performance piece “Xiphoid Process” at Soho’s Gallery Elephantiasis, of which David Bowie remarked, “They grew right back” (and they did).
Schnibbe attended CalArts in the mid-1990s after a career as an artist and a dominatrix in New York. She currently lives in Silver Lake.
Hollywood’s Circus Gallery is the art gallery arm of the venerable GLBT bookstore Circus of Books. The gallery has operated since last April, and “Honey Bunny” will be up until June 14.
Previously: Rebelle Rousers preview
See also: Vena Virago, Circus Gallery
you need to go further east for the stabbings.
And, oh, is the wall in a hall or is the hall part of the wall of fame?
would’ve gone with you but, alas, too far west was I.
harpblower