Derek Hess takes the “soft” out of “soft porn” in “Derek Hess: The Playboy Covers,” his show at William Busta Gallery. The pop artist, whose first Busta exhibit in the mid-‘90s featured his rock ‘n’ roll posters, updates Playboy magazine covers from the ‘60s and ‘70s, maturing an iconography that in its time seemed liberating but now seems dated, if not quaint.
The Hess works, which cost $400 to $1,000, layer grease pencil over the originals, sexualizing and animating images of women originally presented as alluring – and passive. Some verge on the cannibalistic, as when Hess draws a woman screwing, mounting or engaging in oral sex with a Playboy original. But they don’t feel prurient.
Perhaps that speaks to our immunity to pornography in the age of the Internet, a technology that has definitely raised the porn bar.
Hess’ vigorous drawings are more muscular and skeletal than the pneumatic, soothingly smooth originals. Still, the overall effect isn’t that shocking; thought-provoking, yes, particularly in their blend of the informal and the purposeful. As he does with female body parts, Hess scrambles notions of power and position. The works intertwine the found (Hess bought the Playboys on eBay) and the organic (his drawings).
Hess says he was inspired by his dad’s collection of Playboys in the ‘70s. They were his first exposure to “the forbidden thing.
“To a certain degree, these images to a third-grader were extremely sexual, and I imagine they… had to be fairly sexual to the reader of the time,” says the Cleveland artist. “What I was doing with erotic kind of images was taking them to a more contemporary way without being graphic. Some are more suggestive than others, some reveal more than others, but I don’t think any are distasteful as far as the poses go. That’s open to interpretation, but I haven’t got anybody complaining ‘that’s just pornography.’ It’s hard to argue that it is. It’s not going for shock value.”
In January, he staged his first Playboy-related show – in Hamburg, the German port city known for the Reeperbahn, a famous red light district. “They definitely ate up these Playboys,” Hess recalls, noting the show almost sold out opening night. “The Reeperbahn is right there, the red light district is just up the hill from the gallery; a lot of American culture still has issues with sexual images in the media, but that’s another story.”
