But the dominant species in this show, if you’re counting appearances, is the cephalopod. ‘A glutinous mass, endowed with a malignant will, what can be more horrible?’ is how Victor Hugo characterised this aquatic villain of countless sci-fi novels and horror films. But in the works in this exhibition, the cephalopod comes across more as a sexy beast than as a kraken. Its eroticisation dates back to Hokusai and his 1814 woodblock illustration ‘Pearl Diver and Two Octopi’, a three-on-the-sea-bed romp leaving little to the visual imagination — and spelling that little out in the accompanying text, which has been helpfully translated into English: ‘Inside, squiggle, squiggle, ooh, good… There, there! Theeeeere! … Whew! Aah! Good, good, aaaaaaaaah! Not yet…’ Meg Ryan’s performance in When Harry Met Sallyseems tame by comparison.
Hokusai spawned a genre of tentacle porn to which ‘Sex is Good’ (1999), a knitted octopus by Vidya Gastaldon & Jean-Michel Wicker, and ‘Hokusai’s Octopai’ (2004), a stuffed latex version by Spartacus Chetwynd, belong. Chetwynd’s octopus also dances to a heavy-metal soundtrack in an accompanying video, ‘Erotics and Beastiality’. Video soundtracks are the bane of exhibitions, but all the videos here come equipped with headphones apart from the Otolith Group’s ‘Hydra Decapitata’, which is overloud and, at 31 minutes, overlong. The best artists’ videos, in my experience, are short and funny. Two good examples in this show are Shimabuku’s ‘Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokyo to the octopus from Akashi’ (2000) — an amusing experiment in tentacle tourism — and Alex Bag and Ethan Kramer’s ‘Le Cruel et Curieux Vie du la Salmonellapod’ [sic] (2000), a spoof nature film about a ‘sadistic, masochistic, sexually enthusiastic’ amphibious mammal performed by puppets: The Magic Roundabout meets Jacques
Cousteau.