SEX MACHINA
- Megan O'Neil
- 11 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Writer and critic Megan O'Neil reviews American artist Rachel Youn, and discusses the erotics of machines, transgressive pleasure, and cunts with teeth.
Manipulating and disciplining the body is the central concern of the works of Rachel Youn's Unruly Vessel (on until October 2026 at Scuola Piccola Zaterre, and in Youn's practice at large, combining new and existing works. The show, a result of their research and production residency at Zaterra, expands upon their practice of transforming second-hand wellness devices like Shiatsu massagers, elliptical machines, riding simulators and electric bread slicers into kinetic sculptures. The urtext of their discarded wellness items can be traced to Duchamp's readymades, but Youn takes the ethos further. They couple their machines with synthetic plants and uses this as a grammatical system to stress-test oppositional intersections of discomfort and pleasure, the machinic and the human, intimacy and alienation.
Rachel Youn, Unruly Vessel, Scuola Piccola Zaterre, 2026. Photography courtesy of Scuola Piccola Zaterre/Riccardo Banfi.
In a world wherein attempts to shock gratuitously are vulgar at best and futile at worst, Youn does something cleverer; they arrest the viewer, hold their shredded attention, inciting them to witness a ritual, an unfurling; to experience (vanishingly rare) rapture.
Objects which once had a purpose—to relieve pain, to provide pleasure, to perform a domestic task like rocking a baby, designed to take the place of a human providing care, become automata: their movement recurs infinitely, divorced from their original purpose. Their once soft padding or casing, forming a kind of carapace to conceal their skeletal, mechanical innards, is stripped away, leaving the mechanical armatures inside cruelly exposed, their motors still powering repetitive, undulating movement.
Writhe (2026) features an artificial anthurium, an open-headed flower with a very large, protruding stamen, the end of which is pierced through with a delicate snake chain. The petals are clipped to a neck massager stripped of its outer casing so that only the whirring, silver, robotic arms remain. The petals fold and stretch in various contortions, directly referencing the title, writhing- being pulled taut, being bent. The inner pink of the anthurium resembles flesh, and its phallic quality is one of its most noticeable features. It does call to mind an erection, and therefore arousal. This anthurium-cock subtly, but suggestively, bounces as the neck massager circles, in such a way that a delicate, necklace-like silver chain hanging from its tip swings through the air. Youn is inviting the viewer to contemplate this image of arousal subjected to control and to discipline. The resonances to BDSM are there, but more broadly, so are the punitive forces which suppress the flows of the erotic, under which we are all bound.
Loves me, loves me not (2026) also leans into a sense of erotic play: the orchid head is necklaced with metal hardware, and from its centre is dangling, glamorously, a delicate silver chain which features two intricate transparent beads. Attached to a modified neck massager, the orchid head dances between two positions, the motion scintillating. The effect of this particular piece is more consoling, more beguiling, than some of Youn's other more troubling works. It is often the specific way in which Youn applies the kinetic element to their sculptures which alters their affect. The title of the piece- Loves me, loves me not- invites the viewer to consider its playfulness.
Taste (2024), which was featured in LA's Night Gallery's tide-pool themed booth at Art Basel in 2024, uses the same formula and yet is curiously romantic. Two artificial plants, this time not decapitated, but long and kelp-like, garlanded with tendrils, meet over and over again as the circulation massager they stand on brings them together as though in a kiss. Youn seems to have created an imaginary aquatic plant, an assemblage with a curvaceous, slender stalk, skirts of trailing seaweed, and a fern-like head. Though possessing independent bodies, the plants are attached via a chain of seaweed: pink, with bulbous beads, resembling a necklace. The seaweed is pulled taut as their bodies are held apart, and is then loose again when brought together. The tautness seems to signify pain and suffering at their apart-ness; their symmetry, that they belong together. It actually reminded me of Marina Abramović & Ulay's 1980 performance piece Rest Energy: the exact same sense of their bodily intimacy and balance binding them together is present in Taste.
In CLEANSE (I'll do it myself) (2024), part of Factory Doomscroll in LA's Night Gallery, four identical shower curtains depicting a paradisiacal ocean horizon and blue sky, hang from a metal frame. They are gently swayed in a circular motion, mimicking the movement of ocean waves. But this is a plastic beach: there is no trompe l'oeil illusion; its abiding visual characteristic is its artificiality. The motion is produced by old air conditioning fans. The curtains themselves are shredded into wave-like ribbons, so that they undulate in the movement, their plastic-ness explicit. The line of the horizon above the turquoise ocean undulates invitingly, but any immersive experience is denied. It creates this tragic effect of a fake window into a world which is not real. Artificiality is crucial to Youn's work: the simulacra which disorient, and encroach into reality, splintering human life, are returned to the head of the ouroboros, as Real objects. Most of Youn's work stirs this curious feeling of pathos, but a pathos married with unease. They create sympathy for these motorised contraptions. Though their status as automatons is never in question, they are nonetheless personified just enough to arouse pity.
Youn's treats the feminine body as a political site of subjugation, and religious rituals of mortification. Comments on Contemporary100's recent Instagram post of some of Youn's works reflect this uneasy marriage between liveness and artificiality, automata and (what appears to be) nature. "I viscerally don't like this and feel uncomfortable looking at it… It makes me feel cold and horrible and surgical… It brings me to a place where I myself feel like a scared little flower with autonomy taken away by the hands of something bigger, rougher, something that wants to understand but doesn't care?" writes one user.
It is useful to consider affect theory when looking at Youn's work. The body anticipates the feeling of touch even without ever touching that object. Youn's sculptures speak directly to the autonomic nervous system and accesses the viewer bodily. It is clear that many viewers have intense, gendered responses to Youn's sculptures, particularly the ones made from fake beheaded orchids: "They're doing this to me at work right now", "This hurts me", "How I feel going to the gynaecologist". There is, as mentioned above, a feeling resembling the private tragedies of the punitive nature of late-stage capitalism: beauty, life, contorted, and not free. Simone Weil writes in The Poem of Force that ‘There are other, more unfortunate creatures who have become things for the rest of their lives.’ Part of the embodied experience of being a woman is to experience becoming a Thing via objectification. I think this ultimately is what invokes these intense responses. There is, subtextually, a recognition of: That Is Me.
This brings me to the cunt. In Western culture, the cunt is the most obscene, most trance-inducing image in the repertoire. The orchid heads directly refer to and conjure up the vagina, which in this context becomes by extension a symbol of the feminine and its discontents by virtue of the robotic element which manipulates them. This produces: the gynoid. Youn has essentially created a pared-down, deconstructed, post-modern fembot, exposing its most essential ideas. There is no metal bikini with pistols for nipples, but still Youn's work continuously evokes the gynoid by getting down to the nerve-endings of the mechanised female form: the orchid heads are unambiguously yonic, instantly evoking the vagina, which becomes a gynoid by being operated by automata.
Feminised automata have existed in art since Antiquity- the ivory statue so beloved by Pygmalion he prays that she becomes a real woman, with whom he fathers a child. The Iliad features female automatons (the Kourai Khryseai) crafted by the blacksmith Hephaestus. These Golden Maidens possess artificial intelligence and serve Hephaestus as attendants in his palace. The eroticised gynoid (perhaps a tautology) is simply the patriarchal imagination's wet dream made material.
But is the cunt offensive? Youn's work is not a stony-faced critique, rather a deft and exploratory method of play. In this way, Youn provides the cunt with teeth; they produce the vagina dentata: she bites.
It is useful to consider Donna Haraway's seminal essay A Cyborg Manifesto, which in her own words ‘is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.’ Writhe is a useful piece to consider in this context: the anthurium as an image is very androgynous- its stamen is large, stiff, and phallic. The orchid heads of the other sculptures are highly feminine, yes, with the machinic arms manipulating them very masculine- but they are ultimately one object, they are joined. Though the boundaries between them are discrete, neither would be legible without the other, and they function as one unified organism. At this knotty intersection of borders between gender, between sex and control, desire and unease, a punctum can be located in Youn's work, from which the pleasure Haraway describes arises. The term punctum comes from Barthes: he used it to describe ‘That which pricks or wounds’ the viewer. Though originally written in the context of photography, it just as well applies to the exposed nerve that Youn's work touches.
Agony and intimacy as inextricable from each other is a recurring theme across Youn's oeuvre, as is perversity and purity, the organic and the machinic; and with it a certain deliciousness springs from the oppositionalities Youn deals in.
Rachel Youn, Unruly Vessel, Scuola Piccola Zaterre, 2026. Photography courtesy of Scuola Piccola Zaterre/Riccardo Banfi.
In an age of rapidly increasing artificiality, Youn's investigation into finding the latent, ghostly, human echo in a machine- how to make them perform yearning, pain, eroticism- is especially timely. But Youn's image-language is not merely a grammar of juxtaposition. The contrast alone of the soft, flesh-like flower petals and the cold, machinic armatures is immediately striking, but it is the kinetic quality which functions as the crucial joint between the two main visual features. More than being visually satisfying, it elicits something deeper, something more like jouissance. Lacan described jouissance as a kind of ‘backhanded enjoyment’. Jouissance is deeper, more transgressive than enjoyment: there is something embedded within jouissance which is shocking, and which results in a kind of negative pleasure. ‘Negative pleasure’ is perhaps a useful way to think about the effect of Youn's sculptures. The erotic is an innate part of jouissance, or perhaps we could say that jouissance is an erotic affect- we take the word from the verb jouir- French for ‘to come’ (orgasm). Jouissance is derived in response to, as Richard Howard puts it, ‘sexuality at its most abrupt and ruthless’. And there is a ruthlessness to the rendering of sexuality in Youn's sculptures, a starkness not only in the cruel materials but in how their liveness evokes a sense of something being startlingly revealed. They are not world-affirming, but oppositional. The constituent parts don't create harmony, but are discordant. They are provocative and erotic in a way which reads as potentially dangerous. They have the capacity to appear offensive without it being readily simple to explain exactly why. As Donna Haraway describes, ‘The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.’
Youn's sculptures produce what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as a bloc of sensations: a Borromean knot of the pleasing and the troubling which cannot be disentangled. In a visual culture groaning under the weight of banality, the creation of something capable of producing rapture, of digging the scalpel below malaise and apathy and into something vitally responsive, is thrilling.
Megan O'Neil is a writer based in London. You can find her on Substack at A Pearl Dissolved in Wine.
