Put A Bag On It
I put a bag on my head and shot a self-portrait.
Last night, while I was tossing and turning in bed, I had a very important thought: No one wants to buy a photograph of twenty-three clones of me, let alone just one of me. I’m not a celebrity nor am I a hot sexy model, so unless our notion of hot-or-not changes in the near future, I’m outta luck trying to sell an image of myself. I jumped up and exclaimed, “Fuck it, I’ll just put a bag on my head”.
I’m totally enjoying the process and the outcome!
I’ve been thinking a lot about humiliation lately. A bag-on-my-head is definitely one solution to that problem. I like to think about a great joke Chris Rock once said. He said that when ladies look at him, they don’t see a hot sexy man and just get that urge to kick off their shoes and jump on him. They don’t look at him like they look at an icon like Denzel Washington. They look at him and weigh out the pros and cons: “Well…he is kinda funny.” I love that idea and I feel the same way. I mean, the jig is up, I get it, I’m not a sexy kinda guy: there’s no five-foot-four, one-hundred-twenty pound Asian dude gracing the covers of GQ or Men’s Health in America. Sex sells, and when I’m taking self-portraits and I don’t look like Matthew Barney or Anthony Goicolea, then I should stop with the self-portraiture or simply change up my overall appearance.
I’m excited to incorporate the bag-on-my-head concept into the Society of 23 as well. In terms of humiliation, I’m excited to create a series of Hazing artwork. Secret societies have a stigma associated with hazing newly recruited members. Having the brothers with bags on their heads would be a nice, humiliating element to add.
I also changed up my artist’s statement last night to a very short idea, and here it is:
I have an inability to negotiate between objective and subjective reality. My artwork is born from my personal space between these two worlds. By using recognizable signs and symbols from our objective reality, I can begin to describe my own experiences. Through my extremely personal self-portraiture, I question my own identity and existence, while trying to have a laugh or two along the way.
This bag-on-my-head idea is one of the rare moments in my practice where I feel like I’m actually throwing in the towel and thinking, “alright objective world, you win, I’ll play by your rules”. We shall just have to see how this develops.
