the destroyer > art > editor's introduction
COMPASSION
A STRIP OF HIGHWAY - NIGHTTIME
– or maybe it’s a black-box studio –
a sunglasses-wearing biker happens upon a stranded motorist. The motorist is blonde, rugged with a receding hairline, and wears a grey Harvard t-shirt.
“Need some help, man?”
“Nah. It’s just overheated. I figure I can get her goin’ in about… ten minutes”
“Ok. Might as well take a piss while I’m here.”
This is the mid-point of the middle film of Joe Gage’s “Working Man Trilogy”: Kansas City TruckingCo.(1976), El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1977/8), and L.A. Tool & Die (1979). The actor wearing the Harvard t-shirt is Ken Brown, Keith Anthoni plays the motorcyclist. The dialogue they speak, what little of it there is, is chopped and repeated alongside a soundtrack that rises and falls like a siren.
All of it Anthoni’s dialogue, until the final line which is Brown’s:
“Ok.”
“Need some help, man?”
“Might as well take a piss while I’m here.”
“Need some help, man?”
“Ok.”
“Ok.”
“Might as well take a piss while I’m here.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
Anthoni’s dialogue is overlain on a montage of shots, only narrative in the loosest sense – Brown eats Anthoni’s ass, Anthoni fucks Brown’s ass in return. Soon there are more bodies (where did they come from?). Soon there are come shots. More bodies. Come shots. It conforms, barely, to the structure of gay male porn as laid out in 1985 by film theorist Richard Dyer: “a narrative sexuality, a construction of male sexuality as the desire to achieve the goal of a visual climax" [1]. Gage extends and double-backs on the traditional one-off come shot. Instead, the bodies, the language, the pacing is manifold. A siren and ejaculation, in spurty slo-mo.
“Ok. Might as well take a piss while I’m here.”
This photograph was taken on the set of El Paso Wrecking Corp. by John Preston, editor of The Advocate for a short time, and writer of landmark pornographic fiction – Mr. Benson (first serialized in Drummer magazine) and Once I Had a Master among the most well-known. Preston’s photograph, of a scene only linguistically referred to in Gage’s film but never explicitly shown, could not be more perfect. A strong light comes from the upper right and spotlights the very place where the piss douses the gray Harvard t-shirt. The stunted, squared-off arc of liquid is luminous, sparkling and suspended in midair, looking less like urine than a line of liquid diamonds. Brown looks at the stream lovingly, and opens his mouth (he loves it, he wants a drink). Anthoni grabs his stomach, perhaps compressing his bladder to force out this bit of piss.
There are two collaborations occurring – one is the fucking (I use that term expansively to include kink activities such as golden showers) happening between Anthoni and Brown. The other is the media collaboration between Gage and Preston, one working in video and the other in photography. Preston’s photograph, ideally, could be used and resold as a photo-narrative book, and this was a common practice. Importantly, though, there is a space between the film-image and the photo-image – one implies the action, the other depicts it overtly. They can never be fully brought to terms with one another – does Preston’s photograph fill in a narrative gap according to the sequencing of images, or the sequencing of sound? If the former, the action in the photograph would fit towards the beginning of the scene, if the latter, towards the end. Fucking is an atemporal labyrinthine thing. It’s akin to the way French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy defines compassion. In a problematic world for queer ways of fucking, we’d do well to take heed:
“This earth is anything but a sharing of humanity. It is a world that does not even manage to constitute a world; it is a world lacking in world, and lacking in the meaning of world […] Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violentrelatedness" [2].
“Sounds like a good idea.”
Of course, pissing is a central iconographic activity in this exhibition, an artistic collaboration between Steven Vainberg and Steven Frost. Appropriations of appropriations of Bill Watterson impish Calvin pissing are re-sized and situated from fender to the wall – the artists mirror the image in a kind of narcissistic tenderness. Or – the yellow hanky left on the ground (yellow being the color for golden showers according to almost every version of the hanky code), photographed, and printed/grommeted as an industrial bar banner might be. And – blue tarp ponchos made for embracing, open underneath for pissing. The artists switch media as readily as meaning… the kindness of pissing/the vileness of pissing. It’s a kind of “violent relatedness”, a way of opening out a true diversity of worlds. Even the shared vocabulary of pissing doesn’t always mean the same thing. Preston’s photograph made pissing the transcendent focal point, Gage’s film omitted it. Vainberg and Frost make it tender and sweet.
The show opens alongside the timed release of a collaborative Tumblr site the artists built together [http://drinkingfromthesnakesmouth.tumblr.com/]. On this Tumblr, which was meant to be a way for Vainberg and Frost to get to know each other’s aesthetics better, the artists situate their own work alongside others’ work: John Baldessari, Cady Noland, Nayland Blake, AA Bronson, Suse Weber, Nathan Prouty. Words from Jean Genet and Michel Foucault provide some of the only literary and theoretical anchors. Mike Judge’s eternal teenagers Beavis and Butthead occupy the same page as images of punk/hardcore bands homosocial teens headbang along to (Vainberg was in one such band). Calvin’s cartoony piss stream is copied, stenciled, and reframed under the tousle of the character’s iconic yellow hair. Working drawings, porn; it’s not an equivalence but an expression of difference, the kind of diversity that makes a Nancian world. The blogroll, like the exhibition itself, is a kind of affective and didactic archive that considers the radical act of love; the transition from a private act of elimination towards the public act of gift-giving, and the com-passion of mixed media.
You might as well piss while you’re here.
1. Deyer, Richard. “Male Gay Porn: Coming to Terms.” Jump Cut, no. 30 (March 1985): 27-29.
2. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), xiii.