INAPPROPRIATE
2006
video and drawing

This work was generated for a show called “Cronyism”. It’s a gentle indictment of the necessary perils of cronyism: that in order to function as a community (for better or worse), one constantly engages in practices that are sycophantic, creepy, and awkward but also tender, affectionate and genuinely intimate. We’re all complicit, much as we rail against its evils. In this spirit, I made a video and drawings of friends in the Bay Area art community touching each other “inappropriately”.

I was also thinking about politics and star-making in general, and found myself wondering about the seemingly arbitrary assignation of value, and the idea of “gloss”: who gets picked out for that extra coat of gloss, and who doesn’t. I asked friends to choose partners, and to then “gloss” them: to apply a shimmering, pearlescent theatrical makeup to one another’s faces, to make them glow. The ink drawings were done on a similarly luminescent mica paper to perpetuate the glowing effect further. The resultant work is tender, awkward, and funny: we all work in such professional and emotional proximity to one another, but we so rarely can acknowledge the intense intimacy involved in this.

In continuation of the questionable taste implicit in the show’s theme, I edited the whole video to James Taylor’s “You’ve Got A Friend,” and ran a soft-core-porn-like filter on all the footage.