HATER'S DIGEST #1: Homotragedy, the tyranny of gesture, Jelly Roll, Maya Deren
'Hater's Digest' is a regular gathering of interesting people writing about whatever they're hating on most.
Ash Nerve (musician, Angel Electronics/Watchusdie.com, host, Boys’ Bible Study): We Gay Guys are the target of much scorn in the LGBT community due to our sexual availability, love of body aesthetics (fascism), and talent at social climbing. To this I say: sorry for party rocking!
Despite my sincere Gay Pride, I believe we have to stop gay men from making conceptual art until we figure out what’s going on.
A viral post from X user @alexjb24 contains a photo of a video installation by Melbourne-based artist Drew Pettifer titled “Untitled (Bram) Untitled (Ruel)” (2020). The installation features two video screens each displaying a portrait of a beautiful, muscular, shirtless man staring seriously at the viewer.
The tasteful erotic photography appeals to the gay male gaze, but the artist’s statement somberly breaks the fantasy: the work is meant to represent the true story of two sailors who were convicted of sodomy in 1727 and each marooned on separate islands to die alone.
Now, I’m just a simple country millennial artfag with no formal training in the medium. I am willing to accept basically anything as art. I clapped and cheered when Natacha Stolz’s infamous performance piece “Interior Semiotics” went viral on Youtube in 2010. I’ve been in the trenches.
Pettifer’s “Untitled (Bram) Untitled (Ruel)” is barely art. It is the worst art installation I’ve ever seen. It is pure emotional manipulation. Its visual language is shallow and pornographic. The piece is the conceptual equivalent of a gallery displaying a Sean Cody video of two twinks sucking and fucking with the caption, “By the way, these guys died 🙁”
Pettifer’s installation follows in the tradition of other Tragic Gay Guy Conceptual Art, the most notable being Félix González-Torres’s famous “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) and Keith Haring’s “Unfinished Painting” (1989) which was recently “finished” by AI in an intentionally disrespectful post by X user @DonnelVillager which I’m not proud to admit I thought was hilarious.
A key difference between Pettifer’s piece and these two inspirations is that González-Torres’s and Haring’s works derive their tragic aura from their association with the AIDS epidemic. In fact, both González-Torres and Haring died due to complications from AIDS. This unbelievably dark time in gay history robbed so many people of their loved ones and the world of so many talented cultural voices. I hope it goes without saying that I believe the gay men who lived and died during the AIDS epidemic more than earned their right to mourn through art.
It’s a miracle that a new generation of gay artists will not have to experience the same scale of loss. I get the feeling that Drew Pettifer wishes his piece had the same gravitas as the AIDS-era gay art he clearly thinks is powerful, however he has no connection to the era, so he picked a story about two random other gay guys who died in order to make us sad. Why?
Honestly, I even find “‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” and “Unfinished Painting” to be boring pieces that do no more than remind me of gay death. Due to their link to tragedy, they are sacred cows that are beyond any criticism, and their obvious symbolism offers no alternative interpretation. Both of these qualities make for uninteresting conceptual art. I respect them immensely as memorials to a lost generation, but they are conceptually basic and do not move me.
Drew Pettifer’s uninspired “Untitled (Bram) Untitled (Ruel)” cannot be excused by a connection to gay history’s darkest hour. This is a good thing. The lifesaving medications that prevent AIDS from being a death sentence mean we can make art about other stuff. Let’s go back in the studio and make some fascist Greek statues, or something.
Dan Brooks (essayist, fiction writer): In sixth grade I read a book about a boy who hosts a family of refugees from Cambodia, and the first thing he learns is that they consider it disrespectful to do the “come over here” motion with the hand. “That’s how you call a dog,” the age-comparable Cambodian son explains. This moment is supposed to convey the importance of Cultural Differences, but I experienced in it the revelation of a universal truth. We all hate being directed with the hands.
I do, anyway, and so should you. I recognize that this peeve constitutes a potentially arrogant assertion of my own importance, like the rule that one should not sit down in the presence of the English queen. Who am I to usurp such dignity? Perhaps it would be egalitarian if we all ordered each other around by gesturing, in the kind of democracy that reduces everyone to the same level. But I submit that anyone who presumes to command me must at least form words, and if he cannot manage that effort then he is not fit to rule. I am looking at you, TSA man. But I will not step forward until you open your glum little mouth.
Eli Schoop (music writer, purveyor of Constantly Hating): The country music-industrial complex is more powerful than it’s ever been. While executives bemoan the lack of new popular acts and rap endlessly debates its own “death”, country music keeps rolling on with new stars aplenty, industry woes seemingly not affecting the genre in the slightest. Tyler Childers, Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs – all box office draws. The most unique and polarizing of this new crop is Jelly Roll, a one-time Nashville rapper turned country darling with face tats and a goof name.
While I’ve never really been a fan of country, Jelly Roll inspires unique ire for how astoundingly annoying his success has become. The trap-country hybrid is nothing new, but couching it in a man who comes across as wannabe white Gucci Mane feels like Nashville’s most insidious trick yet. Jelly Roll himself is presented as this “aw shucks” type, lauded as oh-so-earnest, with a life like a Make-A-Wish kid – pitiable. It’s so bad that he testified in front of Congress in support of anti-fentanyl legislation – a drug dealer gone good, you see. Action Bronson is probably punching himself for not pivoting earlier.
David C. Porter (writer, Garden Scenery): When I was an annoying 20-year-old in college I used to get a certain juvenile thrill out of telling people I didn’t like Meshes of the Afternoon. Now that I’m older and more broken by life, I don’t think this opinion makes me special anymore, but that doesn’t mean my feelings have changed. The film (across fourteen minutes that feel like forty) manages one interesting image: the figure in black with a mirror for a face. Otherwise, it is a menagerie of warmed-over Surrealist and/or Symbolist cliches, a tedious parade of knives and roses and doubles, “dream-like” images which, by 1943, could only seem new or striking to a viewer clueless about developments in the last, say, thirty years of painting, literature, any of the fine arts, really – given that Deren’s audience was primarily American (and, let’s be clear, she would likely be as minor a footnote in film history as, say, Fernando de Szyszlo otherwise), no doubt she often benefited from exactly this level of cluelessness.
Really, that American-ness is the core of the issue with Meshes, I think. The thing about American “avant-garde” cinema prior to Warhol (who dragged its art scene, kicking and screaming, into conceptual maturity) is that, with rare exceptions, it’s very, very conservative. Its sense of abstraction is Theosophistic, not Constructivist. Its narrative sensibilities are “poetic” in the most unreconstructed sense. Even as émigrés like Lang and Tourneur were making some of the most radical work of their careers within the studio system, it remained conceptually stuck in the ‘20s, unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that there is no longer any novelty the observation that the nature of the Unconscious is mysterious. If it seems like I’m being harsh – of course I am. But unlike most people, I’ve actually watched more than the tentpole names of this cinema, and thus know that, generally speaking, they’ve been forgotten for good reason. A film like Meshes is of a kind with much of that consigned to terminal obscurity. Deren grinded harder than most, and was sometimes in the right place at the right time – and thus her work is remembered. But this is a matter of luck and persistence, not quality.