When we throw craft hierarchies out the gallery door, who are contemporary artists but philosophers? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the first line of Plato’s Republic: “I went down to the Piraeus…” Socrates descends from his high and mighty dwellings to speak with the people — the working people of the Piraeus, the port of Athens. In order to really think of what the perfect city could be like Socrates cannot stay pent up in the realm of his intellectual existence. It’s simply not enough for him to jerk off his peers and write books for the peasants. He must turn to the people and do the hard work of beginning his thinking in complicated (and looooong) discourse. It’s no coincidence that Plato starts his big bad book of philosophy this way. Plato’s philosophy is about society, it is for society, and so it comes from society.
So what is art if it doesn’t come from society? Bad, probably. Who is art for if it’s not for the people of the Piraeus? Keith Haring’s first semester at the SVA was probably a lot more successful than mine here, because in his journal he wrote: “The public has a right to art/ The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists/ Art is for everybody” Prolific words that launched his successful career and stardom; I couldn’t agree more with Keith.
It seems to me the “art world” (read: rich white collectors) are primarily interested in art that is too hard to access for the people of the Piraeus. It’s a power thing. If they understand a work of art that no peasant could, it reinforces the intellectual gap between them. It justifies the exploitation of the working class that is necessary to amass huge amounts of wealth. This is not possible without the dehumanization of the worker.
Don’t get me wrong — I want to make it in the art world. I have skin in the game. But if 2020 isn’t a time for the art world to make changes, when is? I want to make art that escapes the pretension of artmaking. David Byrne’s film True Stories really changed me when I first saw it because it so delicately walked the line between celebration and satirization. I want to make work that takes after that — it’s observational, it’s intuitive, it’s quick-witted, and more than anything it’s funny. So what does artwork for the people look like? Can I sell that to the art world, or do I have to weasel my way towards an uncharted career trajectory?
Here’s a digital collage that I made this morning. It’s chicken nuggets overlaid on a page of gay Pornhub. I’m not sure what it is or what it means, but it really clicks intuitively for me. There’s comedy, there’s an investigation of bodies and food, there’s a spectacle for voyeurism, there’s queer culture, and there’s a question about the globalization of chicken nuggets as fast, available, and familiar food. I think there are a lot of elements that someone could grab onto here and feel like they “got it” while keeping the mystery of work alive. I’m thinking about blowing this image up to a large scale. It might take viewers to an Andy Warhol reference in its grid. There’s something interesting there about the fetishization of queer culture and the queer artist. I often feel like I’m overperforming my queerness to prove myself as a valid queer artist — as if sucking dick isn’t enough to get you into the elite group. I think that kind of gaying it up exists in a Byrneian state of celebration and satirization. I question if the gay porn element here is really even significant. I defaulted to gay porn because it’s what I consume. Consume. That’s a good word for it. Maybe the title of the work.