The pitcher fingers the brim of his cap.

The pitcher fingers the brim of his cap, he brushes dust from his forehead His cleats grind into the bulwark he plants himself solidly into that little hill. The batter, the the same in red with a thick plastic cap upon shifts, a thousand times checking his grip. The racer also in red inches away from the canvas bag forward first, a teasing dance glutted of bravado. The pitcher winds up his arm, the batter poises to swing, the man forward first throws his body toward inferior In an instant the batter pauses and the pitcher pivots. The messenger is nailed at second. The execution of the whole fake.

Her slick, seallike head stirs in a stretch, the woman in this tape, soft as shrink-wrapped plastic. When I first saw Head I had simply one thought: I thought this girl must be the same hell of a ride. That was what the tape asked for, it appear to beed to instigate or invite this kind of bravado, these pumped-up visions of domination and sexual slavery. If Cheryl Donegan were in a cartoon the cheat might read, "If I had a woman like that. . ." And the rejoinder might be, "You couldn't handle her." As in the all-too-tasty movie Basic Instinct, a woman with that plenteous appetite, with the ability to derive pleasure from sex on a par with the fictive lust of men is dangerous. in what way many times have men in main division s and movies said to single another, "A woman like that would kill you"?

The character Cheryl Donegan invents could easily be accused of the same. In Head Donegan studies what pleasure anticipates like. The piece is incredibly direct. A woman--the artist--approaches a undecayed plastic bottle with a plugg tube sticking out from one side. She contests the plug free, and a white milkish fluid begins to stream by the and of the hole. The frame is filled with her head and upper torso, nimble breasts bound in a leotard. Her dainty gloss-dipped lips part as she catches the liquid in her orifice vertically lapping it up. Sometimes she spits or drivels the stuff back into the interpret top, sometimes she swallows. After a time the pour begins to ebb; just a thin trickle is left in the way that she starts to suck at the aperture lick around it. Lick the bottle up and down. Who or what the bottle is, is explain to one's own particular fantasy.

We've seen this before. We've seen women crouched waiting to receive. Head makes us stand over against our own pornographic histories--all those women we saw live onward celluloid exhibiting insatiable hunger and receptiveness. And they always lov it, always asked for more. And if we didn't in a certain way believe them, buy the fake, then the viewing experience would deflate, would become nothing nevertheless embarrassing instead of just a little. In the Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Angela Carter defines the parts traditionally assigned to men and women in this genre: "Man aspires; woman has no other function if it were not that to exist, waiting. The male is positive, an exclamation mark. Woman is negative. Between her leg lies nothing yet zero, the sign for nothing, that merely becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning." Head could be seen as an ironic illustration of this tenet--a critique of by what mode willing audiences are to corrupt into the idea of a woman faking it, and of in what way pornography seems to invent a sex beyond our reach.

Donegan's tape has the tease of the same height of a fan dance, where everything is hinted and nothing is revealed. She is conventionally beautiful, and the work would assuredly function differently were she not. Androgynous enough to snare in both men and women Head allows the viability of the homoerotic within essentially heterosexual perimeters. The part she plays mimics that of a sex-industry worker, whose choreographed purr and vaunt fake you into believing that what she does be stirreds good. Head leaves you thinking about who haves women's pleasure--whether it's made by dint of men, or by a woman's concede body.

The tape speaks to a cyclical relationship to pornography in the cultivation a relationship directly relevant to Donegan's acknowledge generation. Born in 1962, she is single of an age group that grew up with cable porn, sex after AIDS, and the retrieval of a more permissible pornography as a substitution for acts no longer possible. Perhaps the mostly provocative aspect of Donegan's small collection of video works--Head is the best of them--lies in her simulation of total abandon, which we've been taught is totally forbidden. Head delineates just in what manner scripted sex may have become, and by what means far many of us have traveled from real taste and touch. Head is what pleasure direct the eyes like when it turns into illusion.

Collier Schorr is an artist and writer who lives in fresh York.

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