Decay can be a queering tool that encourages appreciation, reflection, and rebirth, asking us to reorient our values away from the superficial.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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For Auch, this takes the form of still life photography\u2014\u200avanitas<\/em> compositions that mix classical and new iconography. Turgeon addresses the built environment, alienating architecture, and what happens when cities become plots of real estate investment rather than places to truly live. Decay, queer politics, and art are inextricably linked with lessons about opposing devouring greed and normativity. Our own bodies and health are in a constant state of flux, varying ability, and degradation. Thus, finding lessons in the putrid and beauty in the rotten may lead us toward humility and a sense of gratitude within the ephemerality of the material world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Neal$
Neal Auch<\/strong>
Vanitas with Big Mac, French Fries, and Sunflowers<\/em>,
from the series Food<\/em>, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Beyond sexual-identity essentialism, a queer line of speculation confronts normative values and established beliefs. Jack Halberstam theorizes queerness as a \u201cfailure\u201d that unsettles the \u201cheteronormative political imagination\u201d or \u201cheterosexual optimism\u201d propelled by pro-
creative sexual practices.^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 106.<\/span> In Queer Necropolitics<\/em>, \u201cqueer\u201d marks a rethinking of how sexual identities are \u201cresituated in the context of structural violence,\u2026 slow death and spectacular violence\u201d and emerge \u201cbeyond the logic of capital accumulation and imperial plunder.\u201d^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d in Queer Necropolitics<\/em>,eds. Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (New York: Routledge, 2014), 5.<\/span> In his 2008 essay \u201cBareback Time,\u201d Tim Dean explored the ambiguity that came with HIV\/AIDS as a newly treatable disease, delivering an uncertain future of treatment and mortality compared to previous generations\u2019 certain and rapid deterioration. In her analysis of Dean\u2019s essay, Maia Kotrosits concludes that \u201ctime is only queer against the narrative\/normative demands of history.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Maia Kotrosits, \u201cQueer Persistence: On Death, History, and Longing for Endings\u201d in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies<\/em>, eds. Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press,
2017), 139.<\/span> Here, biopolitics, health, and time can all be queered in analyzing decay and its associated political, philosophical, and artistic implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Neal$
Neal Auch<\/strong>
Vanitas with Sex Toy and Flower<\/em>, from the series
Pleasure is Fleeting<\/em>, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Whereas much art focuses on the alluring, the macabre and the putrid purposely reject standardized notions of beauty. The philosopher and feminist theorist Julia Kristeva defined the abject as not merely a defilement but a transgression. The abject is \u201cnot a lack of cleanliness or health\u2026 but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.\u201d ^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection<\/em>, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.<\/span> The abject can be demarcated by both material symbolism and linguistic semiotics such as life-death, healthy-rotten, in the usually separate terms of \u201cthe body\u201d versus \u201cthe corpse,\u201d which it distorts.^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Kristeva, Powers of Horror<\/em>, 3; Estere Kajema, \u201cThe Disgusting, The Formless and the Abject in Art,\u201d Arterritory<\/em>, January 15, 2016, accessible online.<\/span> In the canon of body art, the feminist artist Gina Pane exemplified this in her video-performance piece Action Death Control <\/em>(1975).^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - Tracey Warr, ed., The Artist\u2019s Body<\/em>, (New York: Phaidon Press, 2012), 101.<\/span> The work juxtaposed two videos: in the first, a girl blows out birthday candles and eats cake; in the second, Pane lies with live maggots, sawdust, and soil on her face to simulate decay, burial, and a different consumption. She demonstrates that the two states of being, and their contrasting rituals, take place on the same material body, despite their artificial symbolic and conceptual distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The photography artist Neal Auch revisits the Dutch still life genre with a \u201cmodern horror-inspired aesthetic.\u201d ^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - Neal Auch, artist\u2019s website.<\/span> His art practice is further informed by biblical works, Baudelaire, and Absurdist philosophy. Originally, the still life genre was laden with clear religious and philosophical meaning about the ephemeral nature of pleasure and social status through a legible iconography of skulls, books, and worldly trinkets unnaturally frozen in time. In the memento mori<\/em> sub-genre, death and the futile pursuit of riches was the central lesson. But eventually the genre warped into a showcase for wealthy patrons\u2019 conspicuous consumption, displaying books, silver tableware, imported porcelain, exotic fruits, and fresh seafood. In his artworks Auch takes a morbid turn, often featuring imagery of rotting fruit, tarnished silver, fresh and dead flowers, pig heads, teeth, bones, flies, maggots, and more, set atop dark tablecloths in front of shadowy backdrops. He revisits the memento mori<\/em> and the genre\u2019s teachings that vanity is a cardinal sin and that all earthly delights and their consumers will inevitably decompose.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Neal$
Neal Auch<\/strong>
Human Tooth<\/em>, from the series Bruxism<\/em>, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In the art world, the abject entered via Surrealist Art Informel, which dethroned high art by equating it with the lowly excrement, dirt, and filth of everyday life. In Auch\u2019s series Pleasure is Fleeting <\/em>(2021) and Food<\/em> (2021), hetakes the canon of still life iconography and adds to it fleshy sex toys and vintage homoerotic publications, among other commodities and consumables, such as putrid McDonald\u2019s burgers. The photograph Vanitas with Porn Mag and Used Condoms <\/em>juxtaposes the indulgences of corporeal sensations against inevitable death. An erect, powder-pink dildo and flaccid condoms are draped over the magazine among animal carcasses and other entrails. The phallus and pornographic pictures align vertically, with the condoms in between, flanked by rotting tripe and jaundiced offal. It\u2019s not a new theme in the still life genre, spiritually or philosophically, but it\u2019s a visual re-creation of the idea that pleasure and life are fleeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Neal$
Neal Auch<\/strong>
Vanitas with Porn Mag and Used Condoms<\/em>, from the series
Pleasure is Fleeting<\/em>, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The erotic props suggest sexual pleasure, but the porn model\u2019s bare ass and the filled condoms nod to safer sex practices and the containment of bodily fluids during anal intercourse. In a work of walking ethnography, the anthropologist Andrew Irving retraces a journey that he and a friend took to an HIV-testing clinic. Irving links the journey to Oscar Wilde and a politics of failure, elaborating that anthropologists need to access \u201cnew social worlds and [learn] about people\u2019s inner lives.\u201d^{9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 9 <\/a> - Andrew Irving, The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice<\/em> (Chicago: Hau Books, 2017), 72.<\/span> Twenty years later, walking the same route brought Irving back to thoughts of self-harm, \u201chope, fear, defiance, and empathy\u201d intermixed with shifts in time and space.^{10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 10 <\/a> - Irving, The Art of Life and Death, <\/em>93.<\/span> Irving\u2019s ethnography demonstrates a fear of failure, stigma, and mortality at a politically sensitive time for queer men\u2019s lives. Auch\u2019s still life iconography of skulls and bones symbolizes time and the circle of life, which he expands through the inclusion of semen in discarded condoms, as evidence of a hedonistic encounter, abject refuse, and a quasi-biblical seed of life. Auch\u2019s vanitas <\/em>works are memento mori<\/em> for queer life; they address death but are also ambivalent or undeterred regarding mortality or fleshy delights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In All Pleasure is Transient<\/em>, from the same series, this idea of fleeting satisfaction is reinforced through the dildo now limp among the offal and a single dead, dried flower. In another photograph, <\/em>a pink vaginal toy is posed among silver tableware, chicken feet, a cow tongue, and loose teeth. The condoms used in the series are \u201cSkyn\u201d brand, a humorous nod to the duality of simulated or implied sex and rotting viscera. The rubbery faux flesh\u200a\u2014\u200acomplete with vein details, labial folds, and testicular wrinkles\u200a\u2014\u200aare juxtaposed against the uncanny appearance of the offal. Its goosebumps and texture resemble and evoke real human skin with \u201cblemishes\u201d like wrinkles, razor burn, or ingrown hairs one might encounter in a partner\u2019s intimate areas. The rotting parts in these vanitas<\/em> still lifes evoke the human body\u2019s materialism more honestly than the idealized, stylized, and artificial genitalia of sex toys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Alex$
Alex Turgeon<\/strong>
Waste Land<\/em>, exhibition view, Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, Lethbridge, 2024.
Photo: Blaine Campbell, courtesy of the artist & Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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While Auch\u2019s use of filth updates a classical message of physical decay, materialism, and mortality, Halifax artist Alex Turgeon engages with themes of social decay and economic collapse. Halberstam argues that the queer subject \u201chas been bound epistemologically to negativity, to nonsense, to antiproduction, and to unintelligibility.\u201d ^{11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 11 <\/a> - Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure<\/em>, 106.<\/span> Queerness, then, can be encapsulated as a sense of idleness. Alex Turgeon works with the themes of gentrification, urban loss, and the \u201cbeautification\u201d of supposedly undesirable neighbourhoods. In the cityscape, reactions might be an engineered phenomenological experience rather than visceral. In her book Queer Phenomenology <\/em>(2006), the scholar Sara Ahmed writes that the physical orientations we experience are about how objects affect us and space, but also about why \u201cwe move toward and away from objects depending on how we are moved by them.\u201d^{12<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 12 <\/a> - Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 28.<\/span> The abject is a phenomenological push factor, but capitalism and housing investment have created pull factors that alter the city\u2019s fabric.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In the exhibition Waste Land <\/em>(2024), Turgeon critiques the meddling of finance in cities and the expulsion of queer spaces and cultural nuance.^{13<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 13 <\/a> - Kegan McFadden, \u201cAlex Turgeon\u2013Waste Land<\/em>: A continuation of one of the most important, and ever-pressing \u00adconversations in late capitalism,\u201d Galleries West<\/em>, September 2, 2024, accessible online.<\/span> In Privacy Screen (Lattice) <\/em>(2024), the gallery\u2019s walls are wrapped in what seems to be a chain-link fence. Upon closer inspection, it\u2019s a text work that reads \u201ca condo for ugly peeps,\u201d inspired by graffiti that Turgeon saw scribbled on construction barriers around a future Toronto high-rise. He addresses the built environment and the hostile phenomenological experience of gentrification whereby neighbourhood communities literally lose space, occupancy, presence, and character as new, sleek, boring condo towers rise. For him, neglected streets remain fruitful in their use-value, materially and culturally, whereas the financialized incentives of \u201cdevelopment\u201d sacrifice these spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Alex$
Alex Turgeon<\/strong>
Waste Land<\/em>, exhibition views, Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, Lethbridge, 2024.
Photos: Blaine Campbell, courtesy of the artist & Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Alex$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Ahmed differentiates a material\u2019s use-value in the example of a hammer being broken, too heavy, or used as a toy by a child: \u201cWhat is at stake in moments of failure is not so much access to properties but attributions of properties,\u2026 how we approach <\/em>the object.\u201d^{14<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 14 <\/a> - Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology<\/em>, (emphasis in original) 49.<\/span> Like Ahmed, Turgeon calls for a reorientation of city planning from financial value to social and use-value for the communities who live there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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A small sculpture further addresses gentrification and removal. Open-Faced Closet (Renoviction) <\/em>(2024) depicts skeletal wooden framing joints, miniature red bricks, and a collage including images of a broom, engine, flowers, skyscrapers, advertisements, and fragments of homoerotic pin-ups, such as a tanned man in a neon-yellow Speedo.^{15<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 15 <\/a> - Lissa Robinson, \u201cAlex Turgeon, Waste Land<\/em>,\u201d Preview<\/em>, September\u2013October 2024, accessible online.<\/span> Turgeon tackles the spaces where gentrification occurs as a setting for a microhistory, as if they were an artist\u2019s studio or bedroom where queer pleasure once took place. But with the pursuit of endless profit and \u201curban renewal,\u201d unique heritage and cherished environments are replaced by luxury condos or a coat of white paint and a rent hike. This supposed growth of \u201cunderdeveloped\u201d spaces comes at the expense of various communities who populate derelict corners of the city with life, culture, and pleasure. Ahmed considers different uses and perceptions of objects beyond their intended value and commonly perceived attributes. Turgeon\u2019s model of the renoviction room asks that we acknowledge layers of history, appreciate idle living, and favour an expansive value system for the built environment over the capitalist vision that dominates Canadian housing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Alex$
Alex Turgeon<\/strong>
Waste Land<\/em>, exhibition view, Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, Lethbridge, 2024.
Photo: Blaine Campbell, courtesy of the artist & Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Turgeon\u2019s critiques of capitalism demonstrate that a decay ethos is anti-growth. It\u2019s an antidote to many of the problems plaguing society. Together, Auch and Turgeon suggest that capitalist consumerism, urban \u201crenewal,\u201d and hedonistic materialism are not only impermanent but unnatural. Rather than being scared of death, Auch revels in the beauty of filth, teaching us not to dread the end but to live with the expectation that it\u2019s coming for ourselves and our possessions. Instead of fearing decay, there is power in acknowledging it and resisting fleeting greed for moral sustainability. Decay is humble and honest, advocating against materiality and individualism for an ethos of rebirth in our shared ecology. Decay returns nutrients to ecosystems and equalizes peasants and kings. In a pseudo-Buddhist sense of enlightenment, it is an admission that our material state is temporary and a small part of a holistic world of recycling and reincarnation. And with that comes an appreciation of who is around us today, what we are capable of, and an honest acknowledgment that everything in the material world will die, degrade, and change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to\u00a0the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its\u00a0beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and\u00a0make it shameful.\u201d
\u2014\u2009Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray<\/em><\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":269650,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7549],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[948],"artistes":[7635,7619,7569],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-269668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-115-decay","auteurs-chris-gismondi-en","artistes-alex-turgeon-en","artistes-gina-pane-en","artistes-neal-auch-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269668"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270284,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269668\/revisions\/270284"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=269668"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=269668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}