Satoshi Fujiwara
VENUS@OnlyFans

Curated by BBC (Berlin Book Club lol)

“Eternal justice may inhabit the star Jupiter, eternal love inhabits Venus. On the star Earth, selfishness, power, jealousy, and struggle rule.” -Hedwig Dohm

In his Venus Series the Kobe-born and Berlin-based artist Satoshi Fujiwara documents the spectacle of the annual Venus Erotic Art Fair in Berlin with his camera. Blending into the crowd of spectators of the numerous live shows he presents the viewer with an extremely uncomfortable environment: wherever one turns, they find themselves confronted with an account of pov-like images of intense voyeuristic quality.

The spectacle of the erotic art fair is divided into the group of the performing artists and the audience. By paying a monetary price upon entry, the audience not only pays for access to the show, but also to be in the privileged position of keeping their protection (clothes) and arms (cameras). Right from the start, this hierarchical structure dictates an imbalance of power, which culminates in the sheer number of spectators: clearly separated by gender, age, clothes and in some cases ethnicity, the single nude female is subjected not only to the hundredfold gaze upon her body, but moreover loses the right to her image. By being trapped on image and film these imbalances are reproduced.

Being a male witness to the spectacle, the artist inevitably sees himself confronted with the male gaze. However, he does not try to avoid this subconscious mechanism, but deliberately uses its fetishized focus on the female nude body to its utmost limits. In combination with Fujiwara’s stylistic editing and cropping, the materialistic quality of any details is stretched to an almost unbearable extent, transforming humans to commodities in an anonymous spectacle of desire, lust and brutal power dynamics. Conditioned by the constructed closeup compositions that lack any background or vanishing points, the viewer finds themself visually trapped in an uncomfortable virtual proximity to the explicit subjects. Unable to look away and escape, the artist forces his audience to share his gaze and testimony. Contrary to the original intent of the show, gaining any erotic or sexual pleasure seems impossible here.

Though a very useful tool of analysis, no notion of gaze can fully elaborate the totality of the spectacle. In order not to fall prey to partial oversimplification, it must be considered that power dynamics always work simultaneously in all directions. Thus, “contrary to the commonplace according to which, in pornography, the other (the person shown on the screen) is degraded to an object of our voyeuristic pleasure, we must stress that it is the spectator himself who effectively occupies the position of the object. The real subjects are the actors on the screen trying to rouse us sexually, while we, the spectators, are reduced to a paralyzed object-gaze” (Slavoj Žižek).

Consequently, the artist continues the process of deconstruction of the spectacle by shifting the focus to the audience. By means of the seemingly documentary view behind the scenes, he is evoking an image of surveillance. Whereas these images of the spectators are also shocking in their explicit nature, it is no form of nudity of the commodified and objectified body that confronts the viewer. It is the sheer ecstasy, greed and lust that is mirrored in the spectators faces as they stare and record the female performers, no doubt in a very similar way to that of the artist, that is so appalling to the viewer. While to some extent disbelief or disgust might be expected first reactions, there is also an almost intimate quality in the images that derives from the straightforwardness of the unfiltered emotional expression of these individuals. The viewer realizes that neither of these individuals are aware that they are being recorded themselves and most certainly would not consent to being presented in this way. They are dragged into the public sphere against their will, violated they stand clothed, but emotionally utterly naked and defenseless before our gaze. Treated in the same editing style as the group of the performing artists, the single individual becomes an objectified part of the collective frenzy and no longer has any identity other than the coded expressions mirrored in their face. Confronted with the awkward reality of bearing witness against the subject’s will, the viewer is likely to experience an overwhelming feeling of shame.

While lens-based documentation of the contemporary adult entertainment industry is conditional to its existence, most of its recordings are pornographic films and nude photographs produced for the consumer market. And although this flourishing economic sector contributes to approximately one quarter of all global internet traffic, surprisingly many things are unknown about this opaque multi-billion dollar industry. This caused artists such as Thomas Ruff to study the subject, which resulted in his Nudes series. But whereas Ruff works with images produced by the industry itself as source material and edits them in the private space of his studio in a Richter-like manner to become blurred and inoffensive, Fujiwara’s approaches the subject from the opposite angle: For his Venus series the artist set out to experience the physical spectacle which constitutes the images we consume. Instead of blurring the images, Fujiwara is sharpening them, evoking a distinct realism and thereby forcing the viewer to believe in the reality of the spectacle he witnessed.

The Venus Series challenges any simple notions of witness, victim and perpetrator, involuntariness and complicity, in favor of a more complex view of the spectacle, in the event as much as in our personal lives. We find ourselves addressed by the artist as members of a society that worships the gaze and which is more often than not guilty of oversimplification and not questioning the means of production of the visual images we consume and witness on a daily basis. It is a reminder that in the society of the spectacle, the spectacle itself “[…] is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals” (Guy Debord).

Unlike the prior physical and sculptural installments of the Venus series, this now presents a full account of the collected images of the artists visits to the Venus Art Fair in Berlin of the last 10 years. It has never been exhibited in full due to restrictions caused by explicit nudity and subject matter. The decision to collaborate with the newly founded BBC (Berlin Book Club lol) for the exhibition frees the artist of any such restrictions and allows him to continue his choice of appropriating platforms and present his works in contexts outside of the general art discourse.

It must be stated that this series and the choice of appropriating the platform OnlyFans by no means aim to degrade or exploit sex workers. It is an account of the physical spectacle the artist encountered and transferred to the seemingly immaterial realm of the internet: The platform of choice is appropriated since it is one that resembles some of the structures encountered in the physical spectacle in terms of paid access to explicit adult entertainment content. There is no intention to gain any material benefit by exhibiting these images online, the prices set on the website are of symbolic nature to contribute to the immersion of the spectacle. It is neither strictly criticism nor mere documentation, more than anything it is a document of our contradicting moral values in a time of rapid social and technological changes. What we are left with is a guilt-ridden world, a world of seemingly free choices, a world of pleasure and a world of inequality and injustice. Or, to illustrate these ambiguities in the words of another posthumously fallen icon: For better or for worse, “Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus” (Stephen Hawking).

The online exhibition will run on the platform OnlyFans from June 8th till August 31st, 2024.