Pat Kane: Creative Scotland 'sex acts' funding row shows double standards at play

These lines haven’t left my head throughout this week’s stramash around Leonie Rae Gasson’s proposed video-installation Rein.

Initially funded by Creative Scotland, the public body is now seeking the return of its grant, due to “the central role that ‘non-simulated’ (i.e real) sex acts now play in the project … [marking] a significant change to the nature of the work presented in the original application.”

Not only the Sunday Post, but also MSPs Angus Robertson and Douglas Ross have clutched their pearls. Lots of institutions supporting the artist – and the artist herself – have pulled down web material relevant to the artwork.

But it’s easy to use archival software to return them to our gaze. So, I’ve been gazing… The first thing to note from these pages is how much Gasson has already been embraced by the Scottish cultural establishment.

An innovator in residence at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, she has also worked with the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) and leading dramatists like Cora Bissett.

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In a November 2020 interview with the Traverse theatre’s podcast, Gasson describes her show Death Becomes Us (done with the NTS, for a series called Dear Europe). Blindfolded audiences listen to Theresa May – and a dominatrix – riff on the phrase “Take Back Control”.

As Gasson puts it: “This is quite a good example of my work, because it involves a little bit of sex, a little bit of digital techy stuff, some immersive thing and some sort of conceptual participation.”

Seems like Gasson’s aesthetic is embraced when it hits the conventional targets (eg. a Remainer mentality). But to be consistent, her words describe her benighted Rain project pretty well too.

The “non-simulated” sex acts, enacted by a bewildering variety of “dykes”, look as if they were to be filmed at the heart of a Scottish forest, like some libido-boosted Brigadoon.

The artwork’s audience would watch these giant installed screens under comfortable conditions, the space supporting a diverse range of bodies and neurotypes.

Again, Gasson is only being consistent in her aesthetic: she’s previously worked at the junction between theatre/performance and digital/virtual media.

The other partner in Rein apart from Creative Scotland, the Glasgow performance-festival Take Me Somewhere, makes a virtue of combining different modes of experience (and marginal identities) for their attendees.

But as Orton says above, it’s the fucking that truly infuriates them. We’re definitely one document short here – which is the original proposal from Gasson to CS.

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The recovered web pages describe, with great detail, how the non-simulated sex scenes would be devised and co-designed, with much advice from “intimacy co-ordinators” and “somatic care practitioners”. Creative Scotland’s “support” for this “R&D” process (which seems to have produced a nine-minute test film) is explicitly proclaimed from the top of the page.

Yet the deeper question, of course, is this: what does it mean to watch actual sex on a screen, in any case? From one angle, considering the ubiquity and accessibility of pornography on the internet, this may seem like an absurd question.

Posed to many, the answer would be that it means exploitation and objectification — of those watching as well as those involved.

Gasson obviously isn’t in that mindset. There is talk in her deleted pages of “sex-positive approaches”. Rein’s call-out for performers makes a specification for those with “experience in sex work, particularly in porn contexts”.

Yet the intent is also, clearly, a kind of utopia of sexual performance. All shapes, sizes, conditions are welcomed, with cast members negotiating “sexual intimacy riders” between themselves, under the care of what looks like a sex bureaucracy.

Let's take a time out, on a number of fronts. Is simulated fucking in a flashy Hollywood movie to be given the pass, while non-simulated fucking, under what seem to me elaborately supportive circumstances, is to be condemned?

One of the aftermaths of the debate about Poor Things, the film adaptation of the Alasdair Gray novel, is a dim recognition of how deeply misogynistic the core story is.

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A mother’s suicided body is replaced by a male surgeon with the brain of her own unborn child, who quickly develops a massive libido and couples incessantly, eventually turning to prostitution as a career path. What?! Who let that through the gates? We preeningly promote this freaky story of bio-medical weirdness, while some muddy and consensual writhings get both barrels?

Secondly, we should by now be more aware of how sexuality is its own form of distracting spectacle. I’m an old-school devotee of the works of Michel Foucault, the French historian and philosopher. Foucault asked whether our constant public chatter about sexuality wasn’t a liberation, but a subtle form of control.

Who really benefits from an ever-proliferating list of labels and identities, other than the authorities who eventually legitimate them?

Of course, there should be publicly subsidised artworks about the many varieties of “dyke” sexuality. I’m just asking whether there’s as much administration of difference here, as there is celebration and promotion of it.

It’s not as if Scottish public life hasn’t been gripped by questions of the “administration” of sexual difference in recent years. I know, and respect, the agonising about whether humans can self-identify in their sex, regardless of their chromosomal and physiological birth condition.

But what Sophie Rae Gasson’s work — and acutely so with Rein — asks us to remember is how much creativity and plasticity there is in the human condition.

We sapient creatures constantly calibrate between security and risk. That is, between the safe conditions that ensure our survival, and the explorations we then make to explore our “thrival”, answering our curiosity and desires.

We have the anthropocene (meaning the fate of the planet) in our hands because our restless inventiveness frames and reframes our world, in ways other animals are incapable of. As the old hippies once said: we are as gods, and we should get good at it.

But human play often escapes its grounds. I’ve literally never heard of most of Gasson’s typology of “dykeness” that the installation might have included. Stone-butch dykes, switchy princesses, bunnies and riggers, enbies and soft bois…

My response (and I accept it’s not everyone’s) is this: what are these humans up to? What part of the future is their inventiveness with themselves opening up, and preparing us for?

And isn’t that what we partly expect from the arts in our lives – to be a space and zone where possible or parallel futures are tested and prototyped?

We’re in a world of increasing collective violence, brutal extraction and mental exploitation, skating on the precipice of self-termination.

Faced with all that, should we really be breaking butterflies like this on the wheel? Or should we be thankful that artists stay committed to the practice of keeping the human condition open, intimate and playful, rather than closed, steely and dysphoric?

A re-consideration, please, from Creative Scotland. Particularly given that the classic Arts Council “arms-length principle” — where the state funds, but must not direct, the decisions of a public arts institution — seems compromised here.

And let’s not have Joe Orton cackling from his grave at Scottish censoriousness.