No matter how hard I try, I cannot think of a form of art where sex is absent. You will find more blowjobs and butt fucks in Antiquity, Ancient Egypt, or the Middle Ages, than on today’s city walls. Throughout history, all artists have represented sex – except for street artists. Yes, there are small amusing dicks drawn by lanky adolescents, and the cute doggy-style by Keith Haring drawn in five lines. But in terms of sex that owns up to itself, that treats itself like sex in all the other arts – realistic, dirty and/or beautiful, a subject like any other for the artist – we’ve got nothing.
When I say sex, I’m not talking about close-ups so close that little children don’t understand, or the limp dicks graffitied on a wall in Brussels – these are organs no more sexual than a cirrhotic liver. From street artists, there has been nothing at all; not a lousy fuck in any shape or form, not even a penis that doesn’t try to protect puritanical symbolism.
There are two sides to every wall: the outside and the inside. Inside it's private, outside it's public. On the outside, street artists do not depict sex, or the erotic, or the pornographic, or respond to sexual violence or abuse – but on the other side of these same walls, in the private homes of the bourgeoisie, people are having all kinds of sexual encounters. Outside it's clean because street artists respect bourgeoisie rules and morality. While inside, the bourgeoisie seem to respect fewer rules and morality than the street artists outside.
Why is it that street artists do not feel free to explore sex in their work? Where is this self-censorship coming from? Pavement rebels, spray gangsters, emancipated from the law, the risk-it-all underground tunnel pros, the vandals, the wild and free you say you are – where are you?
On the other side of the white wall you do not dare to sexify, the bourgeoisie – the bourgeois – is pinned to the wall and is being fucked by their colleague and lover, while you, on the other side, on the street, leave their walls virgins. Sex-free. Why? Because we can’t? Gear up, fuckers!
All photographs ©Julien de Casabianca.
Julien de Casabianca is an internationally renowned visual artist and filmmaker. Since 2014, his Outings Project has seen him liberate paintings from the walls of museums, to paste them – often on a monumental scale – on city walls, giving art back to the people, and creating rich new visual landscapes in poorer areas of the city. He has been invited by many museums around the world to play with their collections, and to exhibit photographs of his street-based work.
This paste up series and photo essay were produced exclusively by De Casabianca for Nuart Journal. This new body of work follows the same ethos and method as the Outings Project, but has a particular focus not often seen in the work of street artists, but is often the subject of art within the walls of museums: sex.
De Casabianca has also pasted a manifesto for this work in the streets of Paris. The following paragraphs are an excerpt from this manifesto.
