THE Institute of Contemporary Arts, known for years for its challenging avant-garde work, has been seduced by pornography. This week it will stage two days of events about sex under the title ErotICA.

It is likely to raise questions about whether the London-based ICA, which receives more than £1.1m a year from the Arts Council, has lost its way.

The events will include striptease artists from a burlesque ensemble called the Whoopee Club and a performer called Mr Teds, a half-pig/half-woman character who dances on ice skates wearing only tassels. There will also be a session on how to start a sex magazine and another on why the British are so bad at pornography.

“The idea is to give a voice to an underground experience which is creeping through London and burgeoning,” said an ICA spokesman. “This goes for burlesque in particular. It’s time it was brought into the public consciousness and given a proper space in terms of the theory and the practice.” Eschewing the usual artistic intellectualisation, he added: “It’s smutty, not sexy.”

Last week the Arts Council, the ICA’s main funder, expressed worries about the direction of the organisation, though it did not overtly condemn the two-day sex extravaganza.

“The challenge now is for the ICA to be more than the sum of its parts,” said a spokesman. “It needs a clear vision for the future.”

The council, while praising the ICA’s film programme and visual art, is critical of its performance programming. Others in the arts world are blunter and feel the ICA has lost its relevance. “It was a place we all used to go to once, but it’s not essential any more,” said Joan Bakewell, chairman of the National Campaign for the Arts.

This disillusion is not hard to fathom, judging by the promotional material for ErotICA, which states: “We at the ICA take sex seriously. In a unique contribution to British industry, ErotICA brings some of the finest pornographic minds together with artists and writers to put some spice into British erotica.”

The programme adds: “While the French indulge themselves in a literary-erotic renaissance and the Americans use hand-held cameras to democratise the business of pornography, the British, in thrall to lame innuendo and shivering readers’ wives, remain enthusiastic amateurs.”

Among those involved is Lara Clifton, a former stripper, who is creative co-director of the Whoopee Club. “The club’s repertoire turns old ideas of striptease into performance art,” she said. “We explore ideas of voyeurism and gender.” Five performances from the 10 dancers will include stripping to underwear but not full-frontal nudity.

In another event the launch team behind Slit, a new sex magazine, will tell people how to find porn writers and saucy photos. Included in this session is Stephanie Theobald, whose latest book Trix is about an American dominatrix and a waitress from Scarborough who drive across America.

Another session will be devoted to the future of sex in the high-tech age. “As digitally simulated sex comes of age,” the programme asks, “are we on the brink of a brave new world of erotic fantasy porn? Or is the future of digital sex peer-to-peer communications through mobile phones and webcams enabling people to swap erotic images between themselves?” The ICA has for long had a reputation for cutting-edge arts, but has recently struggled to maintain its leadership. Its former chairman, Ivan Massow, was ousted two years ago after a scrap with its director, Philip Dodd, over conceptual art; Massow described the ICA’s work as more like “bleeding edge” arts because of the many conflicts at the organisation.

While Massow was chairman, he and other council members, such as the art gallery owner Sadie Coles and film distributor Hamish McAlpine, tried to bring in an artistic director to work alongside Dodd. But Dodd never wanted that to happen. All three council members have since left.

In August Dodd surprised his colleagues by announcing his resignation and a move in the new year to work in China.

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