Eroticism is an expression of delight, joy, pleasure. It relates to sex, is its friskier sister and twin brother. The erotic in art has to be seen and viewed. It becomes dangerous when it slips from the private to the public. And it is just this intersection wherein it becomes most challenged. Obscenity as a concept had tight legal restraints in New Zealand right up until the late 1980s. But probably an informal censorship – a sense of what was allowable – was as powerful. In such a culturally conformist country as a one-time colony, the unsayable became the unviewable.

The French philosopher Foucault talks, by way of contrast, of the ars erotica in the cultures of ‘China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies... Truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience... evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.' A master held these secrets and the initiate underwent trials in order to experience ‘an absolute mastery of the body, a singular bliss, obliviousness to time and limits...' In our primarily Western culture, Foucault posits the view that science problematised this erotic view of life: allowing only the confession to remain as the space within which eroticism could be articulated. Sex became a subject of ‘great suspicion... the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us: a general signifi cation, a universal secret, an omnipotent cause, a fear that never ends.'

Sound familiar? This is the feverish imagination which lies embedded in so much contemporary art. Eroticism, the pleasure principle, fi nds it hard to enter this suspicious, darkened, polluted arena. It could be the smudged background of a Séraphine Pick painting. As for the ‘entire glittering sexual array, refl ected in a myriad of discourses', this could be a whole raft of contemporary New Zealand artists. But pleasure? The body? Forget it.

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