#and fuck real estate in downtown sectors too

[sarasa-cat]

Can I also add this:

Fuck McKinsey

[bruceeves]

“Work # 961: Six Works Seven Anecdotes”

When accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, Harold Pinter said that “there are no real distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily true or false; it can be both true and false.” What I propose here is to engage with six works I created over the past three years, a series of works that are mash-ups of gay history, art history, and my history refracted through the mashed-up lens of image abutting image and text atop image. The resulting elements of ambiguity engage memory – not exclusively, but not insubstantially either – and neatly echo the lack of reliability between real/unreal true/false posited by Pinter. “Memory” as Mary Warnock would postulate “operates under perpetual tension: the only way to cope with life is to learn what to forget; the only way to feel one has an identity is to remember.”

  In 2007, after a months-long bout of self-doubt and self-recrimination, I decided to take a booth in the artist sector of the Folsom Fair North to decide once and for all whether or not to throw in the towel. I was interested in feedback more than anything. Aside from earning about 20 cents profit, the one thing I learned from my afternoon spent in Allan Gardens in downtown Toronto is that Leathermen, while supportive, are cheap, cheap, cheap . . .    With success and validation like that, I realized it would be stupid to give up so I resolved to stick around (much to the annoyance of some . . . they know who they are).

  Accepting “Salò: 120 Nights of Sodom” as its personal saviour, “Work # 864: The Nature of God” (2013) looked to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 enumeration of abuse of power, corruption, sadism, sexual perversity, and fascism as the first work in a series that explored the outer limits of masculine behaviour – a behaviour that is traditionally still expected of the boy before he can be considered fully a man. With titles like “Trailer Trash Terrorism”, “Behave Work Obey”, “Yes I Will Yes”, “Cell Block Bitch”, and “Shhh . . . (How to Conduct a Successful Interrogation – Lessons 1-20)” this is not a series of works intended for the faint of heart. What was done with this series was the antithesis of aestheticizing gleaming muscleboys or exploring the romanticism inherent in male bonding. “Work # 864: The Nature of God” allows that the rigour of discipline often morphs into the disciplinarian running amok. Notwithstanding the fact that this work has been described as ‘the water-boarding piece’ (which is an interpretation that I don’t dismiss), it is a multi-image cum-soaked force-feeding enacting either the predetermined choreography of some arcane sexual ritual or the resolution of cold-blooded revenge – that’s up for you to decide.  

  “Work # 900: (Endeavouring . . . )“ (2014) is masculine behaviour of a different sort – a mash-up of “Hercules Beating the Centaur Nessus” by Giambologna and a slightly abridged line lifted from “The Pickwick Papers“ by Charles Dickens. While it appears to be a meeting of an apple and an orange, the two parts making the whole have a lot in common. Giambologna (1529-1608) was a Flemish sculptor (born Jean Boulogne) based in Italy and celebrated for a Mannerist style of intellectual sophistication and conscious artificiality favouring compositional tension and instability over balance and clarity. It seemed logical to partner a Mannerist sculpture from 1599 with a comic novel from 1836. As in many other Dickens novels the main literary value is the often exaggerated personality traits of his characters. The abridged quote is from a scene when the perennial spinster Rachael Wardle is driven into a state of near-feverish excitement over her botched elopement. The two fragments – sculpture and text – taken together assume a different form of feverish instability by implying a post-modern conflicted relationship willfully engineered by Nancy-boy Nessus to force hunky he-man Herc into delivering the most satisfactorily masochistic pounding. “Work # 900: (Endeavouring . . . )“ could never be construed as a self-portrait. The only thing masochistic about me is my continual insistence on maintaining an art practice; and as far as what goes on, as they say, behind closed doors, I’m far too snotty and opinionated to be anyone’s slave.

  It was after much arguing that this work was finally exhibited as part of a self-described “queer” arts festival hosted by Artscape – a real estate monopoly that is the purveyor of postage-stamped sized “live/workspaces” and studios priced at levels geared to the 1% throughout Toronto – found this union of 16th century image with 19th century words simply beyond the pale for breached the organization’s (previously unknown) family-friendly guidelines . . .

  The fact that it even needs to be stated plainly that “according to the rules of my tribe, being 62 puts me 12 years past my best before date” strategically planted atop a photo of a hot torso in “Work # 904: Twelve Years a Ghost” (2014) should be indictment enough in exposing ageism as the last acceptable prejudice. I guess I must have touched a nerve when the piece was exhibited (by a curator old enough to known better) far enough away and high on a wall in the furthest back corner of the gallery . . . Fine, I’m a sixty-three year old, half lame, three-quarters deaf, widowed gay man with a cardiac condition, full dentures, horrible eyesight and rapidly developing cataracts; I acknowledge those facts. But that doesn’t make me, as is said in Yiddish, ein alter kocker – and old shitter!

  The scenario presented in “Work # 918: Ash [and] Tray” (2014), from the same series as “Work # 864: The Nature of God” and    

                dredged up from deep within my unconscious, was enacted several times over the course of one sultry evening at the Crash ‘n Burn in the summer of 1977. Toward the end of the line for the C’nB, the now fondly mythologized punk rock club brooding in the basement of its overlord the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), the crowd had become distressingly uptown (meaning north of Queen Street). Technically acting as the eyes and ears for the head office upstairs, the perpetrator of the heinous acts was me (drunk) and the instigator (drunker) was one Paul Bartlett (now deceased), a poor little rich boy with impossible-to-resolve daddy issues and (stupidly) the perpetrator’s soon to be boyfriend. That that sultry evening proved to be one of Mr. P.B.s more rational moments was soon to become apparent. That memory is both a weapon and a crutch led Jean Genet to claim that every man guards in himself his own particular wound. I don’t remember when the affair completely fell apart but I don’t think it lasted past that Christmas. To quote Francis Bacon, they say time heals, but I really wonder about that.”

  There’s nothing metaphorical in the least about the title of “Work # 943: Spider Web Sex Machine” (2015), it’s exactly what it says – two panels, one over the other; the top, a photograph of a spider’s web glinting in the sunlight and the bottom a no-nonsense advertising styled photograph of a sex machine. Discovering its existence of such a thing left me with the same sense of unease in not being entirely sure how this baroque contraption accommodates a human body as when I inspected close-up one of the pieces of fucking furniture custom-built for the future Edward VII. One assumes that Mr. Spider has gone out for beer and poppers because the web is as empty and inviting as the sex machine is peculiar and menacing.

  On March 28, 2016 I received the following email with the subject heading “Question about Work # 943“ from a fellow with residences in both Montreal and Berlin: “Hey There, You show a sex maschine [sic] in the Artworkt Nr 943 [sic] called Spider web sex machine' out of 2015. Do you know where to buy that machine from? [sic] maybe you can give me a website or a hint in what direction to go for more information about the machine.  Cant [sic] find any hint nowhere [sic] on the internet so far. Thanx a lot for your help. Greetz [sic] J___ B______ “. Two things came immediately to mind when I read this: 1) this is the first time I’ve ever been sent correspondence from a genuine pervert (cool!); and 2) both the deutchen grammaticus and the fractured syntax made my pants feel too tight. Of course I emailed him at once (!) with a couple of suggestions and that perhaps, if all else failed, he would be interested in purchasing the one-of-a-kind “Work # 943: Spider Web Sex Machine” (2015), which is a work of art . . .

  He never wrote back. Oh well. I tried.

  On an annual school trip to the Royal Ontario Museum before I had pubic hair, I recall lingering behind my other classmates when we got to the Greek and Roman galleries because of one sculpture in particular, a life-sized fragment of a man’s nether region with orange-sized testicles and globular glutes – feeling sweat and convinced I was the focus of knowing glances. I don’t think anyone noticed, but in my mind’s eye “Work # 956: David Was Horny” (2016) is how I imagined I looked staring up at David’s gigantic balls for the first time. It made me wonder whether or not male desire has really changed all that much from 1500 to the present, and while I have long delved into the question of the "gay sensibility", it’s never been either a trip down memory lane or a retreat into the stereotyped suck-and-fuck paradigm. I've positioned myself as an ironic spectator of this world of men ripped from the daily headlines where the 19th century notion of a romantic friendship has been kicked into the gutter. Herein lies the challenge: it is old news that the male body continues to be a provocation; but ironically, a critique of masculinity has gone largely unexplored, and embraces the proposition examined in much of my work that it should be possible to be simultaneously hot and sweaty and critical and detached. It is desirable – even exhilarating – to question the givens of our cultural baggage while at the same time allowing ourselves to be wrapped in its brawny arms.                                                                   Bruce Eves, April 2016

Bruce Eves is an artist living in Toronto. In past lives he was the assistant programming director of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), art director of the New York Native and Christopher Street magazine, and the co-founder and chief archivist of the International Gay History Archive (now part of the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library).