Ryan Hawk
Sweet Surrender Dec 8, 2018 – Mar 3, 2019
Ryan Hawk Sweet Surrender Project Space
In Sweet Surrender, Ryan Hawk showcases a new sculpture and moving imagebased installation that scrutinizes representations of masculinity through narratives of tragedy and macabre humor. By approaching prosthesis––both literally and metaphorically––the works in Sweet Surrender explore the propensity to extend corporal experience while simultaneously exploiting the horror in penetrating social boundaries. This project expands Hawk’s ongoing artistic research into alternative demonstrations of embodiment within the dominant social and cultural imagination. Public Program Film Screening & Discussion with Ryan Hawk and Max Fields Saturday, February 2, 2019 1 PM A program of experimental film curated by Ryan Hawk and Max Fields in conjunction with Hawk’s exhibition Sweet Surrender. A discussion will directly follow the screening.
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Ryan Hawk Sweet Surrender Exhibition Checklist
Showcase (Undershirt or “Hanes Men's ComfortSoft® Tank”), 2018 Silicone rubber with tattoo, synthetic hair, custom display case 76 x 22 x 18” Showcase (Big Toe), 2017-18 20ft prosthetic silicone toe, custom display case 54 x 22 x 37” Sweet Surrender, 2018 1080p video with sound, 60” flat screen on cart, speakers, carpet, lights, theater seating, flower arrangements Dimensions variable Video duration: 06:00. Video Synopsis: Sweet Surrender centers around a male figure on a stage who suddenly, and very unexpectedly, is positioned to execute karaoke of the late iconic pop-rock song “Sweet Surrender” by Sarah Mclachlan. Despite the proverbial support of a third leg, he struggles to perform. Performed by Mark Brady. Produced, Shot, and Edited by Ryan Hawk. B-Roll by Alex Goss. Untitled (2/21/18), 2018 Silicone with custom tattoo, synthetic hair, MDF, acrylic, various lights and hardware Dimensions variable Special thanks to Alex Goss, Lily CoxRichard, Laura August, and the Core Program.
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Strap-ons and Fascism: Or to gain a limb and still feel the tingles That is to say, this is about desire and dissolution Or why we know the lyrics to that Sarah McLachlan song. An essay for Ryan Hawk. by Laura August December 2018 “Always bear in mind that primal fear of dissolution.” Barbara Ehrenreich Have you catastrophized about your extremities? Have you imagined your toe getting caught in a door or on a splinter, the nail being split or damaged, the appendage’s smallness always making it vulnerable to being cut or scraped or mangled, pierced or torn apart? Have you played that imagined moment over and over in your mind, sickened and aroused by its strangeness? And if that appendage extended impossibly out along the floor, curling around itself and reaching far in front of its body, would that make this uncomfortable pleasure greater? I.e. can vulnerability be scaled, compared, somehow measured, enjoyed? (At the gym, I find a pool of blood in the steam room. When I tell the front desk staff about it, I think maybe this is not the first pool of blood reported in the steam room. I don’t mention that I stayed there for a half hour after I saw it, wondering if the particles from the blood were being absorbed into my lungs in the damp, hot air, and what it might mean to breathe in some-body else’s bodily fluids. Our particles are, after all, always pushing up against one another, mingling, dissolving together.) The word dissolution can be a closing down—an end of something—or a decomposition of flesh. It can mean either death or “debauched living,” the line between those things ever so thin. The word seems to signal that one’s point of falling apart can be both a site for pleasure and for discomfort, and that these things sit alongside one another, overlap, and careen wildly into each other. Broadly, we assign dissolution to specific bodies and naturalize it among certain communities. That is, a community can sit (or be imagined to exist) on a tender line between pleasure and complete disintegration. And, historically, when communities in power face dissolution they lash out, fighting for a return to an imagined past, a mythic oneness that never existed: they fight the dissolve. Writing about our cultural relationship to technology, Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes that “In a condition of hyper-stimulation, the cognitive organism cannot process the emotional content of the stimuli… Stimulation frequency and diffusion, the speed of exposure of the self to the erotic stimulus have accelerated to a point that it is more and more difficult to decode consciously emotional messages or to process them with the needed tenderness.”1 I think of Gertrude Stein and her Tender Buttons and how a Twitterhungry president requires flashcards in order to mimic the gestures of empathy. “Are you an angel / Am I already that gone,” Sarah McLachlan sings. “I only hope / That 4
I won’t disappoint you / When I’m down here / On my knees.” The man with the third leg can’t find the words, and we see him hitting the moment of almost, being thwarted somehow by something we can’t see. Why can’t he sing this song of surrender? Has he never fallen to his knees? Writing about the loss of her leg and its replacement with a prosthetic, Vivian Sobchack describes the phantom feeling she experienced at a leg’s absence: “That is, I had no formal sense of a knee and only the barest sense of narrowing that might have been an ankle and, of course, did not proprioceptively, feel the weight of my thigh or sense some equivalent of my calf against the sofa cushion. The leg’s connection to my bandaged stump was also ambiguous; there seemed to be a certain auratic area around my residual limb, a sort of vaguely bounded band of ‘unfilled’ space, a no-man’s land separating two different perceptions of my body that would admit no trespass…”2 (Of course a middle-aged white man would get a prosthetic leg when he already has two functional ones. Those who already have seem to always be the ones to receive more. I want to also write that of course he still would sing Sweet Surrender badly or not at all, when he knows no surrender, has not been taught to be less-than, only more-than. And yet, that erases the tenderness here, too, as we watch him face failure and its attendant confusion: this is a new sensation for white masculinity, and I want to watch it, over and over.) German fascists, argues Klaus Theweleit in his book about the Freikorps, were disgusted by the sticky moisture they associated with the female body.3 Mud, muck, slime, blood, piss, pus, milk: excretions were an assault on the male erection/erectness/militant-straightness that signaled righteous nationalism. Dissolution was the enemy, to be assaulted with all manners of violence, especially—paradoxically—by sexual violence. Drain the swamp and lock her up. (Sometimes you don’t even know something is assault because it is so culturally accepted as a form of control. That is not hysteria, that is facts.) When someone loses a limb, they often become aware of it in a way that perhaps they weren’t before it was gone, writes Sobchack. “Indeed, the more I focused and consciously tried to ‘figure out’ the limb’s contours, the less successful I was—experiencing, instead, what felt like nothing being given a shape by the geometrically rigid and horizontal
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compression of what seemed like an externally imposed plexiglass block.”4 This sense of the limb can manifest itself in tingling sensations; our minds want to animate what is gone. To counteract this disorienting feeling and pain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran developed something called a mirror box. An amputee places her remaining, partnerless, limb to the side of the box and does a series of mirrored symmetric movements (like clapping). The mirror reflects the limb in reverse, creating the mental impression that the missing piece is still present. The tingles go away. What would it be like to be convinced that all the things that have been cut out of us could be brought back, that we could be made whole again and not tingle with their absence? Or does that tingling mean we understand something important about surrender, have a constant reminder of it? Is that tingling the physical manifestation of empathy? (In the end, that third leg is a strap-on, isn’t it, and countless popular women’s magazines caution that they may provoke male insecurities, even while giving pleasure. The dissolve can be terrifying before you relax into it.) And yet, these silicone pink fleshy tattooed and pierced sculpture skins wiggle and flop and are limp and luminous all at once. There is what Hawk describes as a “multiplicity of desire and discongruity” here. There is pleasure in these incongruous bodily things. Loose, flabby, fleshy softness can also hold a deep and knowing strength. (We might imagine empathy to be a generous meeting of bodies, in patience, with lubricant.) Bifo roots contemporary fascism in the “aggressive loneliness of the male body” and, in attempting to imagine a future in which we survive, he finds in femininity a “magmatic sphere of possibility.” Imagine magma—molten liquid rock matter—as a feminine superpower that would rain down on us, burning away this ugly place in which we’ve lost our compassion, melting us into a sticky, viscous, empathetic puddle of something impossibly new. 1 2 3 4
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Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (London: Verso, 2017): 52. Vivian Sobchack, “Living a ‘Phantom Limb’: On the Phenomenology of Bodily Integrity,” Body & Society 16, no. 3 (2010): 57. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Sobchack, 58.
Ryan Hawk Sweet Surrender Bios
Ryan Hawk is a visual artist utilizing moving image, performance, and sitespecific installation to explore alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Solo presentations of his work have been held at Art League Houston; The UMLAUF Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin, TX; and the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX. His work has been included in several group exhibitions, screenings, and performance festivals in spaces such as Jonathan Hopson Gallery in Houston, TX; The Wurks in Providence, RI; Grace Exhibition Space in NYC; dfbrl8r gallery in Chicago; Perform Chinatown 2013 in LA; Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Nagoya, Japan; as well as many others. Awards for his work include the UMLAUF Prize; the Roy Crane Award in the Visual Arts; and a Traveling Fellowship for researchbased travel to Trinidad and Tobago. He holds a MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin and a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Ryan Hawk is currently based in Houston, TX, and is a fellow of the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Laura August, PhD, is a writer who makes texts and exhibitions in dialog with artists, poets, activists, and loved ones. She is contributing editor at Arts + Culture Texas, and has written for publications including Art Lies, Art Review, Gulf Coast, Pastelegram, and a variety of international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. Laura holds a PhD in Art History, and is a recipient of The Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her writing in Central America. She completed the Core Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). In 2018, she curated James Dean Pruner: Tell it to the Horses (MFAH); Kevin Frank Pellecer: In Case of Natural Disaster (Harrisburg Studios); the XXI Paiz Biennial (with Gerardo Mosquera, Maya Juracรกn & Esperanza de Leรณn, at sites across Guatemala); and Mud & Blue (sites across Houston). She is currently at work on a book-length essay about corn and historical violence. In 2019, she will curate the first retrospective of Los Anthropolocos. She lives in Guatemala City and Houston.
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Image courtesy of the artist.
Mission Lawndale is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center that engages Houston communities with exhibitions and programs that explore the aesthetic, critical, and social issues of our time. About Lawndale believes in the role of art and artists to inspire and inform the world around us. By serving as an intimate gathering place to experience art and ideas, Lawndale seeks to foster connections between communities in Houston and beyond. Lawndale presents a diverse range of artistic practices and perspectives through exhibitions and programs, including lectures, symposia, film screenings, readings, and musical performances. Through exhibition opportunities, the Artist Studio Program, institutional collaborations, and the engagement of an advisory board comprised of artists, curators, and scholars, Lawndale seeks within its mission to support all artistic and cultural communities of Houston. Support Lawndale’s exhibitions and programs are produced with generous support from The Brown Foundation, Inc.; David R. Graham/Felvis Foundation; the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; Houston Endowment; Kathrine G. McGovern/The John P. McGovern Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; the Texas Commission on the Arts; The City of Houston; and The Wortham Foundation, Inc.
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