Word to artists: For those who set up your work inside restroom stalls, as Hugh Hayden has performed at Lisson Gallery, don’t be shocked if individuals name your exhibition crappy.
A delicate nostril will immediately decide up the stench of gimmickry upon getting into the Brooklyn-based artist’s exhibition on the blue-chip Chelsea gallery, self-importantly titled Hughmans.
In every conceptual public rest room stall hides an paintings by Hayden (all however one are from 2024), with which we’re invited to privately commune: a pistol sliced in half to disclose the interior workings of male sexual anatomy; one other gun bursting out of a person’s groin rather than his penis; a pair of phallic statues within the type of New York’s Empire State Constructing, one erect and the opposite flaccid, each with pubic hair across the base. We additionally see wood Pinocchio dolls with prolonged noses, a pair of skeletons performing Grant Wooden’s 1930 portray “American Gothic,” and a few of the artist’s acquainted tree-inspired sculptures.
As you’ll be able to already inform, Hayden needs to make an announcement in regards to the pitfalls of masculinity and America’s obsession with weapons. The difficulty with this phallocentric artwork is that it resounds with the identical virulent masculinity it purports to critique.
Texas-born Hayden, who got here to artwork after a decade of practising structure, has made some attention-grabbing work with bushes and wooden prior to now, together with woven basketball hoops and thorny furnishings. By these works, he has found creative methods to strategy subject material comparable to Black American pleasure and ache, and the elusive American Dream.
So why flush all of it down the drain with this set up? If this can be a queer artist’s nod to public toilet hookup tradition, why is there no point out of this anyplace within the exhibition or press supplies? (Lisson’s Los Angeles location, the place the present was first put in final 12 months, is housed in a former queer bathhouse, the artist says in an unofficial YouTube video.) And doesn’t this setting make gentle of such life-and-death topics as racism, police brutality, and American empire?
Inside the grey stalls, I puzzled: What am I presupposed to do right here, locked in with this artwork? Make out with it? Snort a couple of traces? Change a diaper?
With work so on the nostril, I gained nothing from the intimacy the structure gives. And with no specific objective behind it, the general public toilet idea felt like a hole stunt.
The artist and his gallery name the present an “exploration of the prosthetics of energy.” I name it a claustrophobic encounter with a sophomoric prank, à la Maurizio Cattelan, Andres Serrano, and the like. As with all public restroom, the second I walked in, I couldn’t wait to get out.
Hugh Hayden: Hughmans continues at Lisson Gallery (508 West twenty fourth Road, Manhattan) by August 2. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.