Andrew Goodman: Orgasmatron (Spaces to Make Love In)

Overview

Sex and art have a lot in common. We both want them to fulfil certain needs and impulses. They have to be fun — something we can look forward to and enter into with a sense of gleeful abandon. But there has to be an intellectual side too. What did that even mean?  Surely, there has to be more to it. How'd they learn to do that?

Andrew Goodman's new solo exhibition at Blindside looks set to take the best of both these worlds and hit all our sweet spots. The centrepiece artwork, Orgasmatron, is a sculptural re-imagining of a comical sex-substitute machine from Woody Allen's 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper. What Goodman terms a "soft sculpture", the work is an inflatable structure that houses a secret world of projection, vibration and sound — an intimate show for just one or two at a time.

The work, with all its obvious sexual undertones, is definitely fun. People crawling on their hands and knees into an amorphous vaguely sexual blob machine — it's funny. But it also satisfies our intellectual needs. The experience of being in there, all snug and confused, is sure to raise many questions about the nature of intimacy itself. With a comical edge, Goodman is interrogating the relationships we all have with our bodies, and our experiences of pleasure itself.

If you find yourself enjoying it a little too much, take solace in the eternally wise words of Woody Allen, "I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer."