Notes on Sex & Violence

It's weird. The other day - and if we're talking about the pairing of sex and violence, the other day I'm remembering could very well be Marquis De Sade's 1810 as it was Lindsay Lohen's lesbo-smootch May of 2008 - I was thinking about how Tim Bowen's pairings have the ring of undeniable, unbearable in your face truth to them. His month-by-month guide to the yearly savagery that was PeopleTIME 2005 and its juxtapositions of shiny happy people and the dastardly pinpricked rhetoric surrounding their moments was arguably the best guidepost to the what-was witnessed by this author.

So to see him take on the harsh appropriations of this year's model - a photographic one - just places me atop an electric water slide and kicks me down into the rushing waters.

Bowen - an old school pestle, mortar, easel, brush guy - is simply and elegantly at ease with all new media. His Light Boxes have the neon movement of a Pollock twilight's last gleaming to say nothing of the frenetic futurism of a Daft Punk video. He's as comfortable as any urinal-licking Dada-ist when it comes to the art of appropriation since PeopleTIME was literally ripped from the headlines as Walter Winchell might say. All of these elements combined is a lethal swig of pop cultural Red Bull; nothing new but still fizzy.

Yet leave it up to Bowen to find the most formidable images in which to pair - the balls-sack-sucking bears vs. the pulpy flesh of an explosion's blast; the frustration from trying to free Tibet versus the frustration of a woman trying to masturbate herself to fruition; a war's fiery finale or a fire crotch. He's daring to question which of these elements is more harshly obscene. And at a time where we still can witness rivers of our boys' blood flowing nightly on the news but are afraid of seeing Miley Cyrus' bare back, the asking process never gets old.

Neither does the eternally young Tim Bowen.

• A.D. Amorosi