Art World Self-Suck
A LOVE LETTER TO CRITICISM, AUTO-FELLATIO AND SUSAN SONTAG
Funding institutions are mandating self-interpretation with force! With cuts to public funding for arts, artworks must speak, competitively, of their value prior to their inception. To receive funding, an artist must know what they wish to achieve, what it all means when they do and where it all sits in their ‘oeuvre’. Interpreting their own work, as it happens, and beforehand. Folding themselves over. Sucking dry.
Self-suck or auto-fellatio is a means for solo sexual release with oneself standing in for a partner, as both penetrator and penetrated. Difficult to perform, the sex act requires a great deal of flexibility, usually holding one’s legs flat, gripping each calf on either side of the head and curling the torso like a cooked shrimp. That or collapsing over oneself, head to crotch—as artist-critics and artist-curators are well used to.
Self-suck is a more labour-intensive masturbation, one that puts manual stimulation with the hand to shame for plain laziness. Though for all the intended effort, the receptive/generative relationship inside the act, one is still (merely) masturbating. Susan Sontag (lol, sorry, RIP), in her 1964 essay, Against Interpretation, first published in the Evergreen Review, writes:
‘In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.’
Reduced to its content, the work of art held up before the eyes of a jury has all the erotic impact of masturbation, manual or otherwise. Self-conscious and understood; the artwork may be easily assessed. In her essay, Sontag alludes to the artist or writer performing the interpretation themselves, permitting the critic to flatten out their work with an easy iron, stimulating their own erogenous zones.
‘Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself—albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony—the clear and explicit interpretation of it.’
Stuart Sandford’s Ouroboros (2018-2022) is a collection of sculptures all cast or CNC-carved in the same configuration. A young man holds one leg by the foot at the base of his skull, the other lingers in front of his face and his tongue extends to the tip of his cock, all from the burrow of his body. Sandford produced the multiple in marble, bronze, stainless steel, and epoxy; one was glided in gold and another stored digitally.
The artist states, in a 2019 interview with Dano Santana for Guest Magazine, that the work isn’t erotic at all and that he hadn’t intended to turn anyone on. The work is solely about the ouroboros, renewal and tradition. Sanford’s other works include a sculpture of porn star Sean Ford holding up a phone over his naked body snapping a pic (Adlocutio (Sean Ford), 2022), and a series of portraits, acquired from an open call, all of men on the precipice of climax (Cumfaces, 2007). I’m here to believe all artists and their supposed intentions, but we truly are saying whatever we like now.
INTENTION≠MEANING≠REALITY
Flattening the role of the artist and critic into an awful behemoth, a byproduct of arts education, allows for easy self-readings of art, self-suckings. The ironing permits the artist to install first, inside of the art, a definition. There’s no space to breathe; everyone’s confined to a space locked in by the artist, jury, gallery, critic and audience.
For the sake of ease, to allow funders (both private and public) to divert cash to the appropriate recipients aligned to their strategies and outcomes, the artist is asked to perform these roles. Sandford made the work because a Swiss collector asked him to, some man pining for a self-sucking sculpture. Not wanting to make boner art, the artist titles the work Ouroboros and sidesteps an erotic reading—according to the PR.
What, in all of the artwork’s operations, does it do? Physically? What’s happening? Who cares what it means? I haven’t any money for the artist to acquire, I frankly don’t need to understand it in those terms. I can’t commission a sculpture. I’m not A.C.E.
Should documents of cash-acquiring chain-rattling be withheld? Is it important to know how the artist frames their work in the zeitgeist of scant funding opportunities? When the strategies and outcomes are largely the same, isn't too the write-up? Sontag writes:
‘The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.’
Reiteration, recitals of meaning in the scout hall of the art world, does little to keep the eye present on what is there. Too busied reading of merits written on pieces of paper.
It’s all a little prescriptive, honey.
—Andy x