Eelko Moorer’s “Peep Show: Vessels” window display is the first in 2018 at the YKK London Showroom, featuring a range of objects intended to awaken curiosity and excitement. The window display runs between 15th January - 23rd February.
PEEP SHOW vessels by Eelko Moorer Studio
‘A zip is always so exciting as it reveals something hidden’ (Moorer)
As children we all have memories of glimpsing sexual manifestations in every day life and being shrouded from them. The used condom on the street, the flasher in the park, the hooker on the corner. It is this awakening curiosity of not exactly knowing what one is being shrouded from became a springboard for Moorer.
Growing up in Holland from a young age he remembers being intrigued by the red light districts; the hidden yet well known aspects of the cities. It is these memories that he references for his installation. A show entitled Peep Show: vessels.
Whilst working on the project and its function Moorer explores the Foucauldian concept of heterotopic spaces. Heterotopia’s always pre-suppose a system opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. Moorer found these concepts related not only to the function of the zip but also to the ultimate function of the peep show.
In his last trait on heterotopias Foucault explains that heterotopic spaces have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived).
It is this deprivation that interests Moorer- the death of the erotic in the public domain. In a world where advertising and the internet have rendered pornography mainstream. Pornography, no longer exiled, now sits inside society as opposed to the outside. It’s lewd connotations literally disappearing as it has become integrated within.
This pervasive use of pornography has killed off eroticism. Now that the open/secret nature of sexuality is no longer deemed transgressive Moorer questions what is taboo?
It is this departure from the hidden yet open secrets of the city that interest him. In this window display installation the viewer is invited into a space where the objects are not necessarily placed to create sexual arousal, but rather to bring back the excitement of encountering the unexpected/ forbidden. By exploiting the scopophilic nature of the peep show which draws on man’s compulsion to gaze at what is hidden/ forbidden, the experience is juxtaposed. Closing and opening spaces reveal unlikely objects of desire.
The use of zips brings this interior world into the exterior. It is through this interplay that Moorer creates what he calls an ‘erotic intervention’, in which he attempts to reinstate what was once hidden in plane sight, in plain sight.
But what does the erotic mean to him? For Moorer the words of Bataille are in keeping with his own thoughts: love is too soft, sex too hard. Only eroticism produces fantasies and fiction.
These ideas are not new to Moorer and have been central within his work; the use of the uncanny and erotic being placed within it. It is in fantasy and fiction where he chooses to get lost. Here he becomes cartographer of dreams and new landscapes.
Text by Zoe Bedeaux
FLORA CURIOSA (2015)
Material: urethane and silicone rubber
TITTY VASE
3D Modelling by Antonio Hernandez Arocho
Material: urethane rubber and polystyrene
FOUND FOOTAGE: shoe vase
3D Modelling by Antonio Hernandez Arocho
3D printing facilitated by Digital Anthropology Lab, London College of Fashion
Material: PLA
