Detumescence

Resorting to the daily distribution system of mass media,' Detumescence' is a newspaper ad — a short text written in clinical language — in which Dan Graham states that he wanted to hire someone capable of describing what happens to a man’s body and psyche in the post-coital experience. This description of the emotional and physiological aspects following a man’s sexual climax evokes eroticism and sensory experience to address a subject that, according to the artist, was repressed in the specialist literature of the period. In his words, the work sought to expose this ‘suppression, this psychosexual-social conditioning of behaviour’.