Punk Performers & Theories Of Ideology ('Punk Mass' 1970 - )

Erotica was an intrinsic part of New York's art punk scene long before Madonna arrived from Bay City, Michigan to patent it. Pop artist Andy Warhol of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was the art punk scene's godfather, a natural voyeur with an eye for lurid detail.

Like Warhol, portrait artist Robert Mapplethorpe is often recalled for his images of masculine bulges and aggressive male members, but he photographed a lot of different subjects during his lifetime. Surrealist Jimmy De Sana created psychedelic images that distorted dimension and rendered gender as amorphous form. Transgressive filmmaker Richard Kern developed longstanding artistic relationships with Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth who composed music for some of his photography collections and art installations.

The Museum of Sex, now commonly known as MoSex, opened its doors in 2002 and was immediately condemned by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. It's an adult museum dedicated to restoring, preserving and exhibiting New York's sexualised artworks of the modern era, located at 233 Fifth Avenue at the corner of East 27th Street in Manhattan, New York City. I've not been there myself, but its work has been eagerly covered by 'The Daily Mail' tabloid newspaper here in England, notably during a court case involving a giant installation known as the Big Boob Bounce House.

The crossover between art scenes in New York's concise, distinct districts is perhaps best encompassed by the work of roving photographer Roy Stuart, a somewhat mysterious punk figurehead who's become one of the world's premiere eroticists and is the author of several grounbreaking collections of erotic artworks. Stuart played drums in Pigeons Of The Universe and Numbers, two of the New York underground's more notorious outfits. These groups were connected to the Plasmatics whose controversial live shows evolved from Rod Swenson's adults-only revue, Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater, in which Wendy O'Williams (still a redhead) performed as part of an anarchic burlesque troupe and displayed a predilection for mooning.

In the 1990s, Stuart's photography career took off while he was living in Paris, France. He'd built a studio there and assembled a small but loyal company of models, performers and technicians. His work mixed a New York sensibility with French impressionist techniques to create a highly individualistic style all his own and he remained an advocate for captured images of shapely behinds. Like Richard Kern, Stuart directed films too; his movie 'Giulia' (1999) became the extended centrepiece of Tinto Brass' project 'Erotic Short Stories', a celebrated 12-story film compendium compiled for Italian television which has since been released internationally to dvd.

The visual artistry of Stuart and imaginative staging of Swenson are both said to have been inspired by European cinema of the 1970s. Stuart is noted for his images of sophisticated ladies taken from behind. A return to this most trusted of civilised artistic formats took hold throughout Europe in the 1970s. Indeed, the hunt for ladies' bottoms was depicted in comedies like Cliff Owen's 'Ooh … You Are Awful' (1972), Sven Methling's 'Tact And Tone In The Four-Poster Bed' (1972), Henning Ornbak's 'Me And The Mafia' (1973) and Franz Josef Gottlieb's 'Bottoms Up' (1974). Women's backsides were envisioned as tools of seduction, counterpoint and distraction in comedies like Lucio Fulci's 'The Senator Likes Women' (1972), Gianfranco Baldanello's 'The Ingenue' (1975), Raoul Foulon's 'The Groper' (1976) and Alberto Lattuada's 'Oh, Serafina!' (1976). Obsessive male tendencies and privately held desires were explored in comedies like Joel Seria's 'Cookies' (1975), Maurizio Liverani's 'The Fishing Hole' (1975), Lucio Fulci's 'My Sister in Law' (1976) and Andrea Bianchi's 'Dear Sweet Nephew' (1977). Paintings were reproduced in cinematic terms in Jean-Francois-Davy's 'Clockwork Banana' (1974), Jean Rollin's 'Fly Me The French Way' (1974), Walerian Borowczyk's 'Immoral Tales' (1974) and Alois Brummer's 'There's No Sex Like Snow Sex' (1974).

Such comedies frequently drew inspiration from ideas observed within a well-documented history of scandalous European art. These traits have been rigorously explored by art historian Caroline Pochon whose extensive research and ability to access interview subjects have led to the creation of several keynote academic texts (these studies are said to have formed the basis for her 2009 publication 'The Hidden Side Of The Bottom' which she co-authored with Allan Rothschild).