LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE BOYS
New Jersey, November 6, 2009
BOYS
Alex asks boys if he can take their picture. He has been doing this for a few years now, in Philadelphia first, where we met and lived for a long time until we couldn’t any more, now in New Haven, where he will be going to graduate school for a little while longer. After the briefest of preambles, at the bar, or the coffee shop, or on the street, he asks these boys, strangers, if he can photograph them, not then and there, but at a near date in his studio, and they ask why, and he tells them because he thinks it would be good. They always say “yes,” Alex says. I’ve asked him how he does it, and he’s never given a proper answer, but he’s never seemed anything less than certain, and I’ve never felt the need to press him. It must be this authority, the sort that needs no justification, which sways his subjects. It’s quietly persuasive, powerfully so, sweetly flattering, pure and direct, and neither crassly flirtatious nor threaded with the promise of a fantastical reward. It’s soft, but very strong, like expensive toilet tissue.
The average age of these boys looks to be about 21. There’s fresher-faced lads among them, for sure, but none of them are pubescent. And they can’t be much older than 27, because their appearance speaks still of the time during which the male body blesses its owner even if he’s not looking after himself. Alex has found these subjects in the grace period of maturity, the stretch of about six years when not sleeping and not drinking water and eating garbage and taking drugs makes no difference. They metabolize; they recover. They’re in that pocket of effortless health.
They are often very handsome, in some combo of bone structure, grooming and an enthusiastic friendship with mirrors. Some have muscles that you thought only existed on television, edible ones, delicious-looking, like pans of freshly baked bread. Their hair and skin often gleams lustrous and shiny, like a horse’s coat. Their bodies offer small details that one absolutely must acknowledge as flawless—platonic ideals of a fluffy row of eyelashes, a nipple, a sternum, some stubble, or a brow. They’re pin-ups, and they’re worthy of the handle, because they make sense on a wall, on view: there’s just so much to look at, so much which impresses, over and over. You could stare at them; they’re visually compelling.
ACTIVITIES
The first thing I discovered about Alex when we sat down face to face was that he was a scary workaholic. He had no television and (more astonishingly) no internet in his old studio, which was also his apartment, at 24th and Christian Street, a neighborhood of Philly which didn’t have a real-estate sobriquet to reflect its bourgeois potential. Have you ever lived in a neighborhood without a name? There was gunplay there, mostly at night but occasionally in the middle of the morning, and broken glass, and a Chinese takeaway that sold crack pipes. There are plenty of residential zones in Philadelphia like this. There was no community of likeminded bohemian cuties in the immediate neighborhood, no reason to go hang out. Alex stayed in his home studio and went between his bed and his shower and his kitchen and his living room that had no furniture in it, which was where he worked on his sculptures. He listened to music for all his waking hours and as long as there was music playing he was working. He didn’t stop, because there was nothing stopping him. And he made these uncanny things, these things that a man alone seemingly couldn’t make. He made a snake whose scales were thousands of hand-attached and individually painted acrylic fingernails. He made a life-size fiberglass deer adorned with thousands of rhinestones and spangles which he than smashed up, as a piñata, with a baseball bat, after six months of seven-days-and-nights-a-week work, in a grand party at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the west side of town. I was there, but we didn’t know each other then. Red foil-covered chocolate guts spilled out of the creature when it split in half I thought there were too many people there.
The first thought for these photographs of the boys, which have grown to be called the Activities, arrived on the back porch of Alex’s small cement garden, or at the kitchen table, or propped up with pillows on his bed, the places he worked in his sketchbooks. He detailed things to do, ways to keep busy and mark time during the inevitable moments when he was forced to do something apart from work, like eat (pumpkin soup, mashed potatoes) or drink (coffee, beer). He wrote these proposals down endlessly, and still does. Blowing up a balloon. Blowing up a whole mess of balloons. Drinking an entire bottle of pop in one go. Jumping up and down on a bed. Stuffing as many strawberries in the mouth as can fit. Throwing something up in the air. Tying a ribbon around the neck in a bow. There’s a robust art history of notating and enacting this sort of methodical everyday choreography, and it comes from the 1960s, when performance art, process art and conceptual art mushed and grew together concurrently, and contemporary art began to treasure the idea of art being available around every corner, this great fertility. Fluxus for sure, Yoko, you know, but Dick Higgins too, or Ben Vautier’s Fifty Eight Propositions for One Page. On Kawara painting a plain tribute to a single rotation of the earth. Sol Lewitt making drawings that were also instructions about how to make a drawing, connecting point A to point B until there was a composition. Yvonne Rainer’s winningly goofy Trio Film, where a couple in the buff bounce a ball around a supermodern apartment with admirable dispassion. Billy Apple sweeping the floor of his gallery on 23rd Street, or taking out the trash. Doing stuff. Doing stuff because it’s healthy to do stuff. Doing stuff because you’d rather not consider the alternatives to doing stuff. Doing stuff because it satisfies, it tranquilizes, it quiets the brain’s longer and more complicated questions. Doing stuff because it feels like an engagement with the world and the people in it. Doing stuff because activity is a very basic form of fuel. This lineage is where Alex’s Activities came from.
And he didn’t think, too much, about the Activities at first. They started organically, and started to accumulate. They were most of all another way of working and completing ideas. For all his solitude he is a garrulous and effervescent fellow in social settings, and when he went out for a drink or a dance, perhaps once or twice a week, he enjoyed meeting new people, not just nice-looking lads but other artists and adults and girls too. Connecting strangers to the Activities in the notebook made sense, for he could photograph them; it was easier than photographing himself, it invented a new activity for him. It wasn’t important that he did stuff, just that someone did. He came to this idea very quickly, and the sessions followed soon after. He doesn’t often talk about them, but he is always keen to share images, and he’s always got new ones to share.
COMPLICITY
Complicity is the act of moving through life by being passive, willingly waiting for someone else’s suggestion and pretty much doing whatever they think is best. It’s not lethargy or nihilism—the complicit person does want to do participate in the world—they’re just happy to let someone else direct. Consider Joe Dallesandro, 19 years old, in the first ten minutes of Andy Warhol’s unforgettable 1968 movie Flesh. Little Joe lies around. He waits, and sleeps, and gets berated by his girlfriend/pimp. He gets an erection. He smokes cigarettes. The patient and adoring camera quietly urges him to find things to do, and he is complicit. He does. And he doesn’t really think about what he does or why he does it. The clock turns, and his life slouches forward.
It’s easy to be young and not be too bothered about the way your hours are passing. If someone’s happy about the way your life is going, you’re happy. Usually, that happy person will make your life easier, too, and help you be even more complicit. In the absence of long-term thinking, the bland sense that your life meets some gelatinous form of approval is all that’s needed. You have no future, no sense of the future, just a mellow eternal present. It’s awesome.
So what forces you from this life of complicity? Well, you’re rudely rattled, perhaps, someone takes advantage of you, and it might be really horrible, and after that happens you can’t make your brain snooze in bliss no more. There’s no turning back once you’ve seen all the awful risks you were taking without your wits about you. You become a crusader for consciousness and care, and start to develop a moral palette. You are fully responsible for your actions. And it’s a pain in the ass, but this is what most people consider adult life to be about.
There is another option, and it’s dicey, but it continues to work for a touched minority—to stay complicit. If you believe that it’s safe to stay beautiful, and you’ve got the luxury of indulging the increasing hours required to keep yourself desired and thereby worthy of the eyes and hungry guidance of others, you can keep taking direction, indefinitely. You’ll never grow up and never grow old, which is a problem, because everyone grows old, but by the time this dawns on you you’ll probably be ready to die because, as it was in the beginning, you’re not really thinking too hard about what happens next. This way of life is as stupendously simple as the other way is agonizingly difficult. One encounters the eternally complicit from time to time, and they are powerful, desperate creatures.
The complicity question is one of the bigger junctures in the young person’s life, and Alex’s Activities are portraits of young men caught in the moment of their lives when they are wrestling with it. At the moment Alex approaches these young men they are living through the meat of this suspended phase of adulthood, on the brink of personal responsibility. Each Activity shows its subject speaking very clearly about himself, and the choices he’s facing. They are deciding about narcissism, vanity, submissiveness, deception, guilt—the new variables in their emotional life. How carefully will they define their future, how consciously? These photographs are archetypes of the relationship between the boy and humanity, an essential reduction of everything he’s dealing with. They are basic artistic exercises, this is how they were conceived and how they are executed.
BIG BROTHER
So what’s up with these boys? What are they collectively revealing about themselves through these activities, through these feats of endurance (guzzling large bottles of soda or chewing on raw onions), feats of agility (flexing and twisting, through a plastic coathanger, say), and prolonged interactions with absurd props? Well, these boys are living in a moment where a relationship with a lens can be just as real as a relationship with a person, and the forum presented by the Activites is totally comfortable, totally natural. The Activities are a naked, unfiltered record of the complicity question, more essential and more raw than ever before, gritty, and almost frightening, when compared to, say, Warhol’s photographic/cinematogaphic portraiture of the 1960s and ’70s.
Here’s a good way of explaining why: often, in the earlier Activities, the models are wearing American Apparel underwear. This is 100 percent incidental stuff—in the first few years of making the Activities, an astonishingly high percentage of young men who went out to parties that Alex went to wore this style of underwear in Philadelphia. It’s not styling, not “can you put these on” that has these guys in similar drawers. It’s simply that, at that time, these young men favored elasticky, tight Y-fronts, often in lurid colors. This is a tribe of men, you might think. You know what, they were; they are.
In the past five years American Apparel has become an invincible behemoth American corporation, growing in global influence at a rate that doesn’t seem real, by selling clothes through selling sex with young people. You know this, anyone who’s taken a bus ride used to know this. Their signature advertising was on the back of the weekly free newspaper being read by the man opposite you, and on the billboard outside the window too, and on your computer screen when you got to work. It may have reached its plateau, this advertising, but it abides in its original form, it’s still very much here. You know that an American Apparel ad consists of a very young person teasing out the limits of how provocative they can be for a camera, how much they can give the lens without giving it all away, and how much they can get in return by giving the lens more and more of what it’s asking for. They are distillations, and demonstrations, of the complicity question: how far, as a beautiful young person, can you take passivity.
The ascent of the American Apparel ads took me back to an ad campaign that, at the time, as a teenager, I found to be most erotic: Steven Meisel’s 1995 Calvin Klein Jeans print campaign, seemingly known, at this point, as the “kiddie porn” campaign. For this portfolio Meisel shot a bunch of young models, up close, hot-lit, and invasively. The camera unapologetically found its way where it wanted to go, up the cut-off jean shorts to a sliver of white underwear. The models looked unsure, even, at times, scared. The claim was made, and not just by conservative folk, that these photos promoted explotiation, and that the photographer and, by extension, the viewer, were about to take advantage of the model; that what was presented as a screen test was about to take a terrible turn. And there was real menace to these pictures, this eroticized vulnerability—they were the clarion call of the abrupt, sad, end to a young person’s experient in complicity.
A decade’s worth of evolution in modern sexuality brought us to American Apparel’s visual identity. Young people in total control, manipulating the camera and owning their shit, unapologetically showing what they had, what they could do. They performed. Some performed vulnerability, some performed nymphomania, but all of them looked like they were in control. In the ten years since Meisel’s campaign the young person on film has transformed into an enhanced, invincible, all-powerful animal, this tight ball of hormones.
And here’s what’s evolved: They all genuinely believe that the lens has power, that the lens can tell them what to do, that they can all enter into a passive relationship with this lens, can become a complicit partner to it. Such is the profundity of our relationship with technology and the amount of decisions we make through it; this is modern life. And the camera catches every moment of this temporary relationship, this particular dalliance in Alex’s studio, its start to finish. In an hourlong shoot Alex will constantly be taking photographs, popping in more memory, shooting more, holding down his index finger, trtrtrtrtrtrtrtrtrtrtr the whole time. It’s cinema, a lot of the time, and the contact sheets read like animation. And in the course of a session, these boys show all of themselves to the camera. Eventually, they tell their story. Some really know what they’re doing as they negotiate with the camera, decide their stance; some only have a hunch, and are awkward with it, and some are clueless, but they’re all game. All these young men are on the make. They want to get the best out of this relationship with a mechanical eye, they want to find out how little effort it takes to make it easy. They are thinking about that American Apparel billboard, and the life of youthful ease and effortless strength that it promises to them. Alex lets them at it.
The lens will see these boys changing from weak to strong and back again. They are chameleonic, these boys, shifting as if violently possessed by an alien entity, by another version of themselves. They are pupating before the camera’s eye. And Alex picks out a single image to show it all. And it always shows the boy in a light that is pure and singular, that speaks both of a timeless struggle, the journey through maturity, and a brand new struggle, our growing, dehumanizing love affair with technological machines. Alex waits for the epitome of that transitional state to reveal itself, then records it, and shares it.
They’re benevolent, these Activities, they are kind to their subjects. Alex has pulled out hard drives for me, flipped through session after session, and found grisly, unflattering or even nasty images from the session—these are not to be shared with the world. As Alex pointed out by way of explanation, very simply, as he showed me a separate portfolio of snapshot photographs of young teens in the 1990s that he discovered by chance in the wilds of New Jersey a few months ago, every young person has the potential to be both very ugly and very beautiful. And that was how he explained the way he edits the Activities. The Activities find beauty, that’s what they do, that’s what they’ve chosen to do. It’s always there to find.
They find beauty in order to push the young generation forward, to encourage them and buoy them on their way, to tell them that they are beautiful. Sounds ridiculous, but this slight, hobby-like practice of shooting the Activities has a remarkably positive effect on both sides. The boys receive help and validation from their Activity. The word’s underused these days, but Alex gives support to the boys. He’s supportive of them while they work through the process of getting over youth and becoming adults who can handle adulthood. He offers them a safe place. And Alex, for his part, sees everything. He shares their world; he keeps in touch with a younger generation whose transitional problems are the same as his were, but whose playing field could not be more different. He learns from them, and shares them with the viewer, without their progress. Big brother is watching you, they know it, but what if big brother is an OK guy? They just keep on honing their relationship with the future, and Alex keeps watching them. I hope they do well with their lives, and so does Alex. Why feel any different when you’re making your work or interacting with the world?
This story was printed in a zine for Alex Da Corte's exhibition "Activities" at Golden Age, Chicago.