Men in nice suits do not often crawl around on their hands and knees; there’s too great a risk of their shoes getting scuffed, their knees wearing through, or, God forbid, their seams splitting right along their backside. But brave men in suits defied the norms on Friday, September 12th, when they hand-kneed it along the cold, smooth floor of NOON Projects for the opening of Yuval Pudik’s exhibition “The Hom(o)stead Act: Kaiserpanorama.” Our valiant, suited heroes were not alone; they were amongst the throngs of people (most not in suits but, nevertheless, stunning) who heard, like me, the call that something was happening at the gallery typically exclusive to the stalls of bathrooms: Glory Holes. Those out of the loop may ask, “What?” And those in the loop, “How?” My concern wasn’t whether these holes were usable, but why. Was the pull of the hole(s) simply a gimmick—yet another art show putting spicy gay culture on display for a non-insider audience—or the opening to something more profound?
Yuval Pudik, “The Hom(o)stead Act: Kaiserpanorama,” 2025. Courtesy of NOON Projects.
Pudik’s holes (twenty-two in total) punctuate the outside walls of his Kaiserpanorama—a large polygonal structure made popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ornately crafted from wood and resembling a chess rook or the crown of a king, Kaiserpanoramas were vestibules of sorts where, in a time before modern cinema, the sophisticatedly dressed could sidle to one of the structure’s many small windows to watch stereoscopic images rotate. Pudik’s reinvention, though formed from cardboard and kraft tape, retains the traditional air of regality as his capacity for craftsmanship elevates the humble materials to new heights. It reaches new heights, too. It dominates the space, towering over its audience and spreading across the gallery so you’re forced to shimmy along the wall to circle its entirety. You’d think when building with pliable material on such a scale, there would be some slip-up: A bend here, a gap there. But no, the lines are clean; the seams are sutured tight. Even the ornately styled numbers that run atop all twenty-two sides of the Kaiserpanorama are scribed perfectly. And smack dab at eye level of each of those sides are the most perfectly circular glory holes.
The rims of the holes are duct-taped (preventing the possible injury of anything penetrating one is always of utmost care); the haphazard strips crisscrossing on the outer panels of the Kaiserpanorama are in stark contrast to the otherwise pristine façade. Sitting down to peer through brings its own apprehension and excitement: What will I see? What may pop out? The mystique, exacerbated by the long line to have your turn, is tantalizing. In lieu of a stranger’s erect penis, viewers come face-to-face with a small screen displaying a steady stream of a particular kind of debauchery: Pop Culture. YouTube content, news clips, AI-generated TikToks, and scenes from film and television run across the screen in Pudik’s version of a less didactic Adam Curtis documentary, all with a queer sensibility. An interview with Barbara Streisand becomes Ronald Reagan promising to “Make America Great Again,” which becomes a clip from a documentary on David Wojnarowicz, a man in a Speedo soaped up and soaping down a car, which becomes a wet tongue, which in turn becomes the “Art Dealer” from Love is Blind season 7. To watch is to be a voyeur of the complex smut of our present condition. We’re playing another besuited man, Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas, though instead of seeing our ex through the peephole, we see George H.W. Bush. Sitting aside one another, strangers who went out for a night of art, we’re each enwrapped in our own little peephole into the world we’ve crafted for ourselves—a world that’s addictive and frightening and beautiful, which Pudik’s presented to us in a loop of 18,000 clips we can burn our eyes out on.
Yuval Pudik, “The Hom(o)stead Act: Kaiserpanorama,” 2025. Courtesy of NOON Projects.
His video is not a denouncement of our culture of brainrot; it embraces the camp of it all. There’s porn and there’s politics; there’s porn as politics and there’s politics as porn—all smashed together with art, religion, and reality TV. It’s the base of the world elevated in a way Georges Bataille couldn’t have dreamed up. The philosopher and critic advocated for razing all notions of value to equal ground, and had a not-so-discreet predilection for the excesses of the forbidden and erotic that underscored his creative work. For Bataille, the sensual and the taboo allowed for the undoing of societal norms and functioned as entry points into a raw and visceral state of cognizance of the human condition. By bringing glory to the gallery, Pudik does the same. The work may boast a flashy exterior, but a closer look and the exhibition easily bucks any gimmick allegations—there is actual depth here.
Tucked in the cavity of the Kaiserpanorama is a room of its own excessive delight: A gay speakeasy of sorts, where the walls are collaged with Leather Daddies, male models, Instagram selfies, and the entirety of gay internet culture. Entering the space brings about the same nervous excitement as leaning into the glory hole—one could argue it’s the twenty-third glory hole. Accessing it requires dropping to the floor (pant legs be damned!) and arching your back to limbo on your hands and knees under the floor-level orifice that’s been cut into the structure. (Watching the hordes of well-dressed artgoers crawl is its own undeniable kink.) Colorful net bags dangle from the ceiling, spinning as the variety of dildos held within peek their tips out between the netting. There are empty bottles of liquor and poppers, tinsel, neon signs from queer bars, full ashtrays, and loose, half-smoked cigarettes. Propped in front of a photo of a young shirtless man reclining is an empty pack of Marlboros, the logo of which is collaged over with a clipping from a cover of a collection of Bataille works—Madame Edwarda, Le Mort, and Histoire de l’oeil—a subtle nod to the king of erotic fantastical excess. Unlike the outside perimeter of the Kaiserpanorama, where you sit alone before your personal screen in zoned-out isolation, the cavity inside is intentionally intimate. You lean in to inspect a photo or tchotchke together, and your bodies rub up against one another as you make way for an incoming crawler.
Yuval Pudik, “The Hom(o)stead Act: Kaiserpanorama,” 2025. Courtesy of NOON Projects.
Despite all the innuendos and jokes that can be made from a show of glory holes (of which this review is guilty), “The Hom(o)stead Act” itself isn’t one. As shows focused on gay and queer sexuality have, thankfully, become more common, Pudik’s stands out. This isn’t a collection of Tom of Finland-esque works on a wall to stare at—though those are undeniably valuable—it’s a show that invites you to engage in the very mechanisms of queer sexuality to open us into ourselves. The stranger on the other side of the hole isn’t much of one after all, but the countless figures of the zeitgeist we encounter every day. By making us partake in the act of glory-holing, he allows us to be Peeping Toms to our desires and taboo wants, to peep the seduction of doomscrolling and the thrill of intimacy among strangers. There’s no shame here: Pudik excitedly invites us to, please, drop to our knees, and voyeur in.
