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Tag: desire
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PICK OF THE WEEK: Tala Madani
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesTo experience Tala Madani’s exhibition is to be submerged in a world that rejects our dualist minds and embraces the proximity of attraction to repulsion, cleanliness to filth. Upon entering the museum, viewers are greeted by a large-scale painting depicting a pair of splayed ass cheeks resembling the rolling hills of a sublime landscape, which in turn mesmerizes a group of frumpy caricatured men who run frantically about with their arms outstretched, holding lumps of poop to offer the holy hole. Adjacent to this is a painting of a banana performing stand-up (its slimy peel limps in a gesture of vulnerability), which seems to make the disclaimer—this exhibition is a comedy, so bring a sense of humor. Madani makes drawings, paintings, and films that evoke primal-human themes such as shame, fear, and desire, depicting monstrous penises that slap and strangle their own bodies, cumming and squirming with delight and disgust—babies that feast on their mothers covered in shit, their tiny fingers playing in the curdled brown mush. In these absurd scenarios, shame hides in the shadowy spaces of a door slightly ajar or the crook of a Venetian blind. In the beams of blaring light that manage to seep into Madani’s scenes, my imagination conjures a roaring sitcom-style laugh track—a robust cackling laughter that sounds artificial because the spectator and spectacle are equally grotesque, equally covered in shit, piss, and cum—equally human. As Madani makes us viscerally aware of our own pimpled, porous, oozing bodies that are simultaneously distant and familiar, internal and external, she also points to (even if only to laugh at) the prescribed divisions and systems that order and attempt to regulate our lives. Madani’s corporeal carnival feels like a modern-day Gargantua and Pantagruel—it’s filthy but fun.
Program note: MOCA is hosting a free lecture between Tala Madani and author Ottessa Moshfegh on today (Thursday, December 8th) at 6:30 pm.
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
On view through February 19, 2023 -
PICK OF THE WEEK: Sam Anderson
Tanya LeightonHaving gone through a recent breakup, the theme of Sam Anderson’s show, “Lunch Hour,” felt all too familiar as the artist examines cyclical narratives of desire and disappointment. At first glance, the show at Tanya Leighton gallery feels like a departure for those who know Anderson’s work. But upon closer inspection, the sculpture’s strange, eerie, and DIY qualities are undeniably Anderson. This new body of work marks Anderson’s first presentation of 3D printed sculpture (which, of course, she taught herself). These creepy hybrid 3D printed assemblages represent archetypal lovers in culture, such as the cat from “Pepé Le Pew” and the Big O from Shel Silverstein’s book “The Missing Piece,” which are embedded in our psyche whether or not we consciously subscribe to them. A clunky square pedestal sits in the middle of the gallery upon which a haunt of faceless men synchronistically lurk toward us like zombies. These ghostly figures represent the ambiguously bodied men of the artist’s past. I can’t help but project my own collection of ex-lovers onto Anderson’s faceless bodies, the memories of whom are blurred but ever-present. The gallery director encouraged me to watch the 1960’s British film Lunch Hour, from which the show takes its title. The film is about the beginning of a workplace affair between a young woman and her older male supervisor—and is, unfortunately, another familiar narrative that personally haunts me. Applying a Marxist-Feminist framework to the film reveals tensions between desire and fantasy both informed by power relations and engendered by the conditions of capitalism. It feels serendipitous that I should recently decide to re-read Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism, in which she writes, “the subordinated sensorium of the worker, whose acts of rage and ruthlessness are mixed up with forms of care, is an effect of the relation between capitalism’s refusal for futurity in an overwhelmingly productive present and the normative promise of intimacy, which enables us to imagine that having a friend, or making a date, or looking longingly at someone who might, after all, show compassion for our struggles, is really where living takes place.”
Like Berlant, Anderson’s work leads me to question the narratives of desire that pull me along my journey for human connection and examine the cruel optimism embedded in my pleasure quest. I wonder what drives me to still feel excited by the prospect of new love in the wake of so much suffering, haunted by the trauma of failed relationships and sexual violence. Yet, as Anderson asserts, we persist, trapped in our prisons of pleasure and pain.
Tanya Leighton
4654 W Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
On view through August 13, 2022