‘LIMP’ was an exhibition addressing the thorny issue of how artists can engage in sexual politics without turning sex into spectacle, a form of titillation in the gallery, or without reifying sexual acts so that one is only queer if one is taking desire to the extremes. This matter has preoccupied queer thinkers including Michel Foucault, Tori Smith (see: Lesbians Talk Queer Notions), Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts) and artists like James Richards, but never been explored in the exhibition format. ‘LIMP’ entailed extensive archival research on artworks and events that have sought to disrupt or parody the idea of non-normative sex as spectacle or transgression, from the 1960s works of Viennese Actionism, to General Idea in the 1970s, Robert Blanchon’s responses to the AIDS pandemic and contemporary artists including Richard John Jones and Liz Rosenfeld. From Foucault onwards queer thinkers have argued that bourgeois culture does not repress but encourages perverse desires, because this provides the access to the thrills of rule breaking, whilst maintaining the divisions between normal and not. Richards argues that queer art can be instrumentalized to excite an audience, whilst becoming divorced from matters of oppression. Building upon this theoretical and art historical research the exhibition also contributed to curatorial knowledge by inviting curators to examine their own reliance upon erotic effects: their appeals to sensation, scale and thrill, affect driven performances and technologies. How does one curate a show on sex that intentionally invites disappointment? Archival materials included contemporary accounts of Germaine Greer disrupting an explicit ‘action’ by artist Otto Muehl, and General Idea’s rarely exhibited Orgasm Energy Chart (1972) a parody of Wilhelm Reich and conceptual art’s ‘aesthetics of administration’ (Buchloh). A seldom shown 1995 video, from the Estate of Robert Blanchon, displayed non-sexual scenes from 1970s gay pornography, both mourning that era’s promise of sexual freedom, lost in the era of AIDS, and acknowledging new forms of intimacy that the pandemic made possible. Alongside these were works by Michael Curran, Lisa Holzer, Liz Rosenfeld and Richard John Jones.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28854