The myriad connections between sex and war have always been a
ripe topic for artistic exploration, from Homer’s portrayal of Helen of
Troy to the soldier boy porn site activeduty.com. At North Portland’s
Rocksbox gallery, German artist Benedikt Ender contributes a frenzied,
X-rated, and bombastic vision to the Eros/violence genre with World
War III: The General of Freedom, which is as ambitious and
provocative as any gallery show you’ll find in Portland this year.
Three rooms are in play at WWIII: The front gallery is split
between a twisted vision of a soldier’s makeshift
barracks—littered with thousands of porn clippings and makeshift
soldier dummies, each bearing gaping anuses and Ender’s face—and
a faux-recruitment center for the artist’s War of Freedom. A mural
reads, “We are fighting for the freedom of the planet, the freedom of
mankind, and the freedom of art.” Next to it is a drawing of a woman
ejaculating.
The gallery’s middle corridor is a series of connected tents that
the viewer must crawl through to watch Ender’s three videos inside.
Also within: tons more porn, war magazines, a strobe light, black
lights, and a mind-rattling soundtrack of automatic gunfire. This
assaultive, overwhelming tunnel can be read as both the birth canal
(the vaginal references are explicit), and the archetypal hero’s
journey (see, again, the Iliad).
Once through, the relatively spare back room is dominated not by the
monstrous, inflatable camouflage sculpture of lumpy blobs clinging to
the wall, but by the deafening roar of the air compressor that inflates
it. The bulbous beast feels like an abstraction made real: the Force of
War, an intimidating, cancerous, and howling monolith, largely
untouched by the chaotic and pornographic “war” in the rest of the
gallery.
Did we arrive in its relatively calm and clean presence because our
participation in the gun-happy, dick-tugging war allowed us access to
the inner sanctum of power? Or did it make us accomplices to that evil?
The noisy lure of flashing lights, fisting pics, and gunfire can’t be
entirely to blame for our corruption: We considered Ender’s recruitment
pitch with open eyes before making the decision to see what lay in that
sordid corridor.