Lisa Yuskavage’s new color-infused paintings of naked sloe-eyed girls with melon-like breasts, erect nipples, and contorted bodies have the presence of lap dances. While they’re alluring and taboo, they are also self-conscious, extremely calculated, and repetitive. Women who work in strip clubs tell themselves they’re “turning the tables on men” and that they “have the power”; the men meanwhile pretend the lap dance is a chaste way of “not having sex with that woman.” As one lap dancer recently put it in The Guardian, “There’s no intimacy. One person is there because they’re being paid; the other is paying for sexual kicks.”
This is happening with Yuskavage’s recent work. Not only is it becoming repetitious, but Yuskavage is using women as bait. This is fine; all is fair in love and war and art. The problem is her viewers aren’t taking away anything other than momentary kicks.
more from the Village Voice here.