By REX MURPHY - Saturday, June 28, 2003 - Page A17

Now, here's a mouthful: Public Sex, Art, and Democracy.

It's the title of a play that opened in a Vancouver art gallery Thursday night. The climax of the play -- in the classical, theatrical understanding of the word as well as in its more mundane sexual connotation -- is a "Lewinsky." Prior to the play's performance, one of its organizers alerted the world that it would feature live oral sex -- a first in Canada, so it is claimed.

On stage, I mean. Or so I surely hope.

It was also claimed that the performance -- the play itself, and the performance within the performance -- would be art. I presume that's why it was getting its first run in an art gallery: to give the right signal. For example, if one stumbled across two oral sex actors in, say, Stanley Park, you might think they were engaged in landscape architecture. Conversely, if the orally incontinent were caught bobbing for apples in the back seat of a car, the mind would not float automatically to Rembrandt and his peers in the great artistic tradition of the West. You'd probably mutter, unappreciative boor that you are, something like "Couldn't you wait till you got home?"

But if two sufficiently randyfied actors, artists, performers -- it's difficult to settle on the right word here -- go to it in an art gallery (to the left of the soapstone carving there, and just before you get to our exhibition of Peruvian shawls) I think the cue is being given that the viewer hasn't been transported to some wet T-shirt festival, but is actually watching something artistic.

Now I'm all with King Lear on this: "Let copulation thrive." But I don't know -- two people naked, busy about each other; throw in a hammock, a monkey with a bullwhip, and a crate of 10W30 crank oil, and it might even be called a party. But in this case, it's Vancouver, and furthermore it's an art gallery in Vancouver, and with that combination all definitions are up for grabs.

Art appreciation, like sex, can be ticklish. Of course, the high question is: is copulation, or any of its delightful approximations, variants, and surrogates "art," because the "artists" charge admission to watch?

We had that kind of "art" for years in New York's Times Square and every low-rent entertainment district in North America for years: 25 cents a peep.

And what of the patrons? Are they "connoisseurs?" As in, "I like the way he's fondling her back, it's a 'quotation' from Tommy Lee's early work in the famous home video with Pamela, and I think I recognize some of the foreplay from the Debbie Does oeuvre." Or are they just your garden-variety skanky voyeurs, albeit sipping Chablis?

Is it art just because it's not in the bedroom or at the local motel? Is sex art when by the ancient laws of real estate it exploits "location, location, location?" If one were to smoke in an art gallery, would you be having a cigarette or making a statement?

Subtle stuff, I know. But remember the full title of this exhibition: Public Sex, Art, and Democracy. The art bit I can kind of understand. But Democracy ? How did the voters get hauled into this grope? Is there a stage backdrop of Tiananmen Square on which the hungry amorists cast their eager silhouettes?

On television, I caught the spokesman I referred to earlier, obviously dazed by the stress of rehearsals, saying the performance was "about" expression, and going on to make the truly lunatic observation that our society was "erotophobic."

Erotophobic? Western society of the last 50 years -- erotophobic! There are not enough exclamation marks in this universe to convey the extremity of my recoil from a statement so reality-impaired.

Erotomania is the condition of our times; not erotophobia. Every pulse of pop culture is sexual. Every square inch of public space breathes sex. Television, movies, music, advertisements, lifestyle -- sex drives every atom of western culture in the modern world. From Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle back to Oh, Calcutta! and the Sixties. This generation discovered sex. Philip Larkin wrote a poem about it.

So: If one of the reasons piously offered up for Vancouver's latest "artwork" is to free the Western polity from the chains of its own prudery -- I say, look about you. If you think this is a society starved of sex, and afraid of it, you have been living on a desert island. Swim ashore, lad. Have a gin and tonic, and catch the latest Viagra pitch from Bob Dole.

I have the low suspicion, actually, that the "play" in question is just sex in a public place, and all this chatter about "art and democracy" is the latest tacky styling of the emperor's new clothes.

Erotophobic! Look out the window, man. Caligula would blush.

Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.