CURA.

Francis Bacon, a young German Oxbridge graduate now working in the London art market, was the first submissive to deliver one of the eight paintings requested by Mistress Rebecca—Reba Maybury’s dominatrix alter ego—, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Medical Inspection (1894), purchased and then executed from a number kit painting bought online in 2022. Francis Bacon, as it turned out, was the nickname assigned to the submissive by his mistress, who chose it after receiving, from him, a monograph of the English painter published by the Royal Academy as a gift. ‘Doggy,’ perhaps, would have been his preferred name. He is “a submissive angel, a sweet boy.”^[1] The other eight submissives—‘Minute,’ an Italian web developer in his forties living in Tuscany; ‘Wannabe Mellors,’ an Irish Builder in his forties living in London; ‘no hobbies,’ a German artist, also in his mid-forties, based in Berlin; ‘Admin,’ a 37-year-old marketing employee based in Lancashire; ‘Volunteer Music Festival Security Guard,’ a corporate account manager for an energy firm and festival security employee guard over the summer in his 20s and based in West England; ‘Annoying Emoji,’ an unidentified Southern German artist in his late 40s; and ‘Amanda,’ a cross dresser, and retired civil servant in her 60s who is based in Blackpool—more or less succeeded in fulfilling their dominatrix’s task, with the exception of one, a “young white boy who loves Dean Blunt,”^[2] by delivering all of the reproductions of the French artist’s painting in which two sex workers appear awaiting a medical inspection in a Parisian brothel. Both women have rolled up the bottoms of their dresses above their waists, in a state of semi-nudity and partial exposure of their bodies—this “interchangeable element of sex work”^[3]—anticipating the doctor’s verdict. If they show signs of venereal disease, such as syphilis (the 19th century’s destroyer of the bourgeois status quo), they will be sent to prison. A sort of banal, bureaucratic torture in humiliation—in short.

The deployment and use of the erotic in the work of Reba Maybury—whose practice is intimately linked to her persona as Mistress Rebecca, and her role as such as a dominatrix—can be traced as part of an historical reclamation of such a resource as inherently tied to individual power, deeply embedded in the unarticulated and unacknowledged realms of experience. In line with the theoretical framework articulated by Audre Lorde, particularly in The Uses of the Erotic,^[4] this dynamic is marked by the understanding of its repression when expressed through female subjects, often distorted as antithetical to the prevailing norms of social and political power. Through her engagement with these notions both within the context of her dominatrix practice and in their incorporation into analytical and conceptual domains, Reba Maybury reframes the erotic as a source of self-proclaimed and self-possessed power—an intrinsic force embedded within personal and collective women experience—thus challenging its historical vilification, marginalization, and devaluation within Western society.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, born in Albi to an aristocratic family descended from the Counts of Toulouse, stands as a post-impressionist figure whose legacy is firmly entrenched in the historical context of late 19th-century Montmartre’s subcultures; he is recognized for his sense of line, his focus on the instant, and his selective omission of background elements in favor of the depicted subjects. His work is notably characterized by an intense focus on the depiction of sex workers and dancers from this milieu, a region that remains synonymous with the decadent Parisian, pre-bohemian Moulin Rouge extravaganza. This ideological framework has, in turn, been highly commodified in his posthumous legacy, becoming a quintessential emblem of Parisian identity. Situated within the ideological trajectory of French tourism, it serves to obscure any potential connection to the historical violence and gendered oppression faced by women, as depicted within these representations themselves. Thus, Lautrec’s The Medical Inspection—and its reiteration through the conceptual position of Reba Maybury’s demand towards her submissives—situates the painting as embedded in the systematic, historical humiliation of sex workers, depicting them in a state of anticipation that transcends mere passivity, and symbolizing the inherent violence of their labor. The souvenir, through its objectification as such, becomes the consumption not of the sex workers, but of the submissive laboring for Mistress Rebecca.

In The Happy man, presented at Company Gallery in New York City, the artist repeated the presentation of reproductions of paintings by the French impressionist. The particularity of the painting—The Sofa, executed between 1894 and 1896, and depicting two sex workers engaged in a conversation on a sofa—aligns with Lautrec’s characteristic tendencies to erase the background in favor of a focusing on the potential psychological condition of the subjects; the two women are similarly positioned in a state of anticipation, boredom, and fatigue, synonymous of their condition as sex workers; the dress hiked up below the waist of the figure in the background, revealing the lower part of her naked—accessible—body. One could think, and must have thought, that these women are not at work. One could also think that they are not, at the same time, totally exposed. In fact, they entirely are.

Conceptually, and throughout the practice of Reba Maybury as an artist, the meticulous, precise, and invisible performance work synonymous with the female condition is inverted through the production and reproduction of representational symbols of that same historical condition precisely not by Reba Maybury, but by her submissives. Similarly, when writing, Reba Maybury refers to herself as Me, with a capital M, women as She or Her—and he, for men, with a lower-case h. Littering the floor of the same exhibition in New York, and accompanying the condition of semi-nudity of the sex workers in Lautrec’s painting, are piles of clothes (Used man, 2024). The implication of the condition of man as ‘used’ in this context, and directly in the title of the work itself, applies to the reversal operated within the work as for the space that occupies men, referring to the historical erection from which statues of men (and so forth, the presence of men in general) are erected. The clothes are those of the submissives, who have undressed under the command of their dominatrix, before rubbing themselves against the floor of the gallery’s basement, a floor of which is ‘dirted’ by the traces of their bodies, and revealed by black lights placed from the ceilings at the height of the average American man’s penis (Faster than an erection, 2024). This height is the one to which men assign all their importance. “Faster than an erection,” as a title and a locality, underscores the notion that a man’s sexuality is never subjected to the same societal judgments as a woman’s; whereas a woman is labeled derogatorily as a ‘slut,’ a man is never afforded such a designation. The dominatrix, here, and within the conceptual and political action of reversal in power, possesses the ability to render the man invisible, with only the remnants of the patriarchal signifiers (a Yankee sweatshirt, Stan Smith sneakers, a white t-shirt, a tie, a suit jacket, and so on) of masculinity—his discarded clothing—left in a pitiful heap on the floor. The viewer is positioned in the role of the dominatrix, witnessing the ordered action of the submissive, and looking down upon the man. For Reba Maybury, the act of having the submissive undress in front of Toulouse-Lautrec-inspired women—figures of indifference and detachment—creates a scene that is inherently humiliating for the male subject, and where (as a scene) the artist has made the man naked in the space the viewer occupies.

The ideological logic of sex work, through the lens of its historical, cultural, and political external limitations, is fundamentally understood in terms of economic value, wherein the ‘prostitute’ and her labor are institutionally commodified. The association between this state and modern capitalism, as explored in the work of Reba Maybury and her simultaneous practice as Mistress Rebecca, lies precisely in the inversion of this established system of transactional exchange; the ‘client’ assuming the position of the submissive, becoming both the commodity of production and exchange (the titles of each reproduction painting adopting the name attributed to the submissive by Mistress Rebecca), while the total absorption of their value occurs, and directing the sex worker towards a sovereign position retaining complete autonomy, both morally and in action. In Faster Than An Erection (2024), Reba Maybury writes: “Fetish is an area of the absurd because it is inherently about an infatuation with what is dead. When I am fetishized for My strength as a Woman I must not allow the attraction of these men towards Me to be an attraction to someone without a heartbeat, but rather a desire rooted in action. I am not an object, nor a play thing. My autonomy is palpable and much like an orgasm I am formlessly alive.”^[5]