by Alex Wells
Multimedia artist Matthew Lax has a show at Human Resources, about pup play kink. And by “about” I mean capital-A “About”. As in: the show revolves around its theme like carousel horses around the unseen mechanism within. There are videos of kinky french pups in masks as well as humans dealing in a variety of ways with real dogs, video of the artist’s attempt to act like and get along with a dog, an animation of a dog, bad dog drawings (the kind that feel like the artist knew they were inadequate outside of the larger context), and doggish flashing pictures. There is a giant dog crate as well.
This is a now-familiar strategy: a basically conceptual artist chooses a subject—not, one is certain, at random from their own point of view, but certainly at random from the viewer’s—and bombards it from every direction in a variety of media. In most cases this strategy feels like an attempt to substitute breadth for depth, as if a plethora of approaches could yield an insight unavailable to the artist who identified one specific approach with genuine aesthetic possibilities and doggedly (sorry) pursued it, and—sad to say—Lax’s show is no different. The press release for the show points to a variety of nominal themes—love, bonding, pack-dynamics—but the overall effect feels more like a steroidally-expanded Pinterest wall than anything else.
Signally lacking from this kind of art is a clear sense of what anyone is supposed to enjoy about the show. Nothing here is quite through enough to provide anthropological insight, it is all too distanced and ambiguous to be a celebration, any attempt at post-Lynchian weirdness is killed by the sterile high-end-gym atmosphere and nothing here is beautiful enough to be sublime or even sexy—unless you share the kink. That last observation begs the only interesting question here, and even that is only “interesting” in the tabloid sense. Is the artist anatomizing their own desire? If so—why not indulge it more? If not, why this obsession, among all others? Kink feels, here, not so much satirized as nullified—human (and animal) sexuality are dissected as if in an attempt to abstract them into meaning some other, less exciting, thing. Rather than the specific being made to speak to the general, the specific has been drowned in a bath of generalizing acid. This approach to the subject is the closest thing I have seen to the opposite of art.
Image: Courtesy of Artist and Human Resources