This year marks the third annual Seattle Erotic Arts Festival. I've attended for the last three years as the festival outgrew it's original home in Town Hall and subsequently filled up Consolidated Works with sexually charged art and art patrons. The festival is part art auction, part political manifesto, part carnival, and part meeting ground where the kinky and the curious can rub elbows. Being at an erotic arts festival at once grants the viewer license and makes him feel licentious. Indeed, it was a bit hard to concentrate on the art during the festival's opening with young girls wondering around in various stages of undress. At the first festival I bought a photograph of a blindfolded woman spattered with candle wax that most visitors to my home politely ignore. I often wonder whether the festival's atmosphere generated my enthusiasm for the photo, or if I actually like it.

Erotic art demands so much from the viewer. In addition to offering its technical attributes, subject matter, and mode of presentation, erotic art wants to turn you on. Erotic art also tends to resist criticism because you can always say that the critic simply doesn't swing the same way the piece does. The Seattle Erotic Arts Festival, however, displayed a full range of abilities and intelligence. Photography continued to dominate the exhibition, but this year different media and subjects broke out of the figurative idioms erotic art often finds itself trapped in. The show's most eye-popping piece was a tent-like enclosure by Jodi Rockwell that featured latex balloons filled with honey suspended from the roof. The balloons were pricked so they slowly dripped honey through a net suspended around the circumference of the tent and onto the floor that was covered with flour. Rockwell's work is erotic art at its best: voluptuous, messy, and outright hilarious.

Few of the other offerings made as much of an emotional connection as Rockwell's. One exception was a photograph by Barbara Nitke entitled "Jeff at Camp," which depicts a man floating in a swimming pool, mummified in plastic wrap, save for his erection. The image is startling not only for its content, but also for the acute feeling of loneliness Nitke evokes by making a figure so helpless and so close to danger. Wrapped in plastic, it's hard to determine whether the man's erection is a result of erotic stimulation or sheer terror at his predicament. "Jeff at Camp" successfully communicates a sense of emotional isolation that many other pieces at the festival tried to capture. Images of waifs with bridals in their mouths stared out into the gallery, but too often the images carried with them political or religious overtones that overshadowed their emotional message.

Erotic art continues to struggle to escape metaphors of religion, politics, and the culture of kink. Too many of the Festival's offerings were striving to provoke rather than seduce. Toi Sennhauser mounted a performance piece consisting of a 1950's-style kitchen with various actors in period dress eating bread purportedly made with her vaginal yeast. A sign on the table read "banned by the Seattle Department of Health." There was also a massive bondage-related triptych the middle panel of which depicted a man being lifted from a rack in the manner of Jesus being cut down from the cross. Sennhauser's piece and the triptych address the contemporary political world that seeks to stifle kink and sexual expression. Such references come off as strident in a city like Seattle which by and large welcomes sexual orientations and preferences of all flavors. One wonders if the impact of such pieces would be heightened at the South Carolina Erotic Arts Festival, if such an event can be imagined. A related problem with such politically provocative works is their social message often competes with the possibility of communicating an erotic quality. The viewer's attention is immediately pulled in two different directions: an image of a submissive being pulled from the cross immediately signifies a protest against religious intolerance of sexual choices, while the supine figure in the painting asks to arouse. In this tug of war, the political always wins.

Many of the Festival's pieces demonstrated that there is a certain classicism growing up around erotic art that many artists cannot escape. Tom of Finland exerts a stranglehold on much of gay art; very few of the works in this category deviated from the model of impossibly buff mustachioed leather daddies cavorting with each other. The festival jury embraced another familiar idiom, science fiction, with it's first prize winner: Kenji Signani's acrylic on board painting of a figure clad in black latex with a long beak or proboscis, aiming at a nearby flower. Hummingbirds hovered around the figure on the neon green background. Science fiction, fantasy, and kink are chosen frequently as subjects by erotic artists because they suggest unlimited possibilities that do not exist in our sexually constricted world. Overuse of these subjects make the unexpected expected, limiting the erotic possibilities and becoming unintentional pastiche.

Regardless of one's reaction to the art, it is impossible to deny the enthusiasm and energy the organizers of SEAF bring to their work. This year's festival contained 900 entries, only three hundred of which were chosen for the exhibition. The staff I spoke with and the Festival's website continually emphasized selectivity as a primary goal of the event. The festival drew thousands of viewers this year, a number made all the more impressive when you consider the major sponsors of the event aren't Poncho and Microsoft, but rather Utilikilts and The Stranger. The Seattle Erotic Arts Festival is an enthusiastic and successful forum that embraces both its artists and its patrons. Seattle's traditional arts community should look to SEAF's success and take note.

The opening itself was packed with elaborately costumed members of the kink community and fleece-clad hangers on alike. The festival opening was truly a carnival where the "vanilla" members of the crowd could turn their worlds upside down and appreciate erotic art free of guilt or shame. The constant string of expletives coming from some of the more conservatively dressed members of the crowd suggested they were taking on their new roles with gusto as they dissected the art in clinical detail. The atmosphere created by the festival's opening night left me considering my purchase of my photograph. It's impossible for me to deny that the piece looked sexier hanging alongside other erotic art and being viewed by patrons wearing PVC outfits than it does today, hanging above my bookshelf, where its sexiest neighbor is Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Empire. Doubtless I felt sexier when I purchased it than I do looking at it now. Still, the photo exerts a certain pull, a reminder that a different, freer life beckons, and for that the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival deserves our thanks.