Cosey Fanni Tutti's 'Magazine Actions' in New York revisits themes from her controversial past as part of the performance art group COUM Transmissions. Featuring framed spreads from magazines she posed for between 1972 and 1980, the exhibition reflects on her identity within the realms of pornography. Unlike typical portrayals of sex in art, Fanni Tutti's work critiques and inhabits these themes without moral outrage or modern self-exploitation narratives, instead emphasizing her raw, unfiltered engagement with the medium. Nearly five decades later, her art remains a powerful reflection on personal identity and societal perceptions of sexuality.
Fanni Tutti's engagement with porn as a medium is refreshingly straightforwardâabsent both Dworkin-esque Second Wave moralizing and the false self-empowerment rhetoric typified by Onlyfans millionaires.
Each work contains a single spread; to move from one to another is to watch Fanni Tutti's identity traverse all the genera of trite sexual fantasy.
The title suggests a twofold embodiment of the work on display; framed pages from the porn magazines that Fanni Tutti posed for between 1972 and 1980 act as the physical traces of the performance.
Unlike many artists then and now, she is not merely utilizing the conventions of pornography in a fine art context but inserting herself into one end of a machine.
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