press - dazed and confused

DAZED & CONFUSED Tracey Moberly
Moscow, Russia
In a joint exhibition, artists Bill Drummond and Tracey Moberly explored the significance of the female sexual organ in Russia
by Bill Drummond and Tracey Moberly
October 2006

TM: Why take a vagina to Russia when there are a great many resident ones there already? However, we did, and it was not only any vagina, it was the vagina, and this vagina opened up a mass debate on the female orgasm. We did this as part of an exhibition entitled 'death & Desire'. BD: Obviously, I wasn't even taking one vagina to Russia, but I was party to the process, and ready to report what I saw, heard and felt. TM: My section of the exhibition consisted of three large canvases, each with 'sonograms' of an individual womans orgasm displayed on it. In another room , I had rows of washing lines - pegged to them were 118 pillowcases, and sewn on each was a word. Together, these words made a poem I had written on the female orgasm with a dark twist and undertow. BD: My bit was about the Russian language launch of MyDeath.net, which I have written about elsewhere. What I want to tell you here is what it was like being a bloke standing and watching a bunch of Russian womenfolk go on about their quims, while I tried to hide my embarrassment behind a smile. TM: It did open up debate and we did learn a lot about a culture where one woman dies every hour through domestic violence, and the vast majority regard as a truism the much-used phrase 'Biyot znachit lyubit', which translates as 'To beat means to love'. We also discovered that male-to-female oral sex is severely frowned upon, and outside cosmopolitan circles is not even spoken about - however fellatio holds no such taboos. BD: Actually , I don't think I learned any of this. Tracey just told me what she had learnt, which made me feel I had to take the position of Devil's Advocate. I wanted to know what practical purpose the female orgasm served in evolution - I was laughed at. I offered a theory that if women didn't want to be beaten up by their partners, they should stop being attracted to men that were bigger and physically stronger than themselves. There was a lot more to this theory than the rather flippant line that I have just used, but there is not enough space for it here - and anyway, I was told I would put the womens movement back 200 years.
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