Aaron Sheppard: Be Fnord. Be Very Fnord.
Aaron Sheppard, West Water World Sushi Bar (detail), 2022, Acrylic, charcoal, screws, plywood.
Aaron Sheppard, Be Fnord. Be Very Fnord. at Available Space Art Projects
by D.K. Sole
The two chopped-off white plastic spouts attached to the groin of the ejaculating wooden mugwamp* might have been the high point or pinpoint or epicenter or summary of Aaron Sheppard’s exhibition for me. This was where he cemented the notion that eros was everywhere, potentially in everything, that it was not only pansexual but also pan-material; it was in your paint tube or your (because the white splot suggested toothpaste) toothpaste tube; it was in the holder where the tubes stand, and, by extension, in everything else too.
The trick was to bring it into this room, cramming it into giant wooden figures or paintings that pressed their tops against the ceiling and blocked out the windows. It pushed its way outside, manifesting as a big pink spraddled figure on the walkway by the door. The ramshackle look of the figures let me imagine the artist’s gaze falling on those tubes innocently – maybe he was about to throw them out? – until, all of a sudden, the parallel occurred to him. It might have been a moment of instant witty inspiration, a decisiveness in the same spirit as the apparently passionate and inspired quickness of a brushstroke in a painting by an abstract expressionist, a brushstroke that the painter might in fact have been planning and calculating for a while. Sheppard’s aesthetic was potentially all-embracing. It was camp, overt; it went beyond what was required. Two per crotch?
He left Las Vegas after graduating from UNLV in 2009, but his work has been circling back here periodically over the past decade. In 2017 he covered The 705 building near the Neon Museum with a wrap-around mural, "The 705 Erogenous Zone” – now painted over and torn down. In the same year, he exhibited fabric and wood figurations in Sin City Gallery at Arts Square. Local artists drive to Joshua Tree to dress in wild, handmade sea creature costumes for his Bearded And Shucked parades. The lace and plastic flippers on the mugwamp are an echo of those costumes.
He's a performer who created parties and events in New York before moving to Nevada for his MFA, and his hyperactive visual-art aesthetic has roots in bodies moving, posing, dressing up; roots in drag, in cabaret, in the performances of art collectives like My Barbarian, whose twenty-year retrospective exhibition I saw at ICA LA the day after I’d visited ASAP. Like him, they gave themselves permission to pull references from any period of time. They picked mainly Ancient Greece and Mystery Plays, while Sheppard more often suggests the comparative refinement of vintage porn etchings; the etiolated Decadents – Franz Von Beyros (1866 – 1924) is a specific muse; and Vienna-expressionist Egon Schiele hysterics in the thinness of his figures, the arched tension of the legs and hands, or the flattening of details in the silver face of the giant figure in West Water World Sushi Bar.
The enveloping layout of Be Fnord suggested a set, a stage filled with beings, actors aware of their audience. The “West Water” face turned to look back at me, the eyes of the cumming and shitting or farting fin de siecle fae in Expellations de Loki knew he was being watched, all the fleshy holes in the paintings were opening for the viewer, the adorable shade of blue in Swets: Mishima’s Head; My Own Embarrassment asked us to celebrate its prettiness.
Movies came into it too – is this a recent development? He had taken the date of the exhibition, its closeness to Halloween, a time for binging on scary movies, and fed it into his ongoing themes. His figures have previously been monsters and gods (Loki’s expellations created magical thunderstorms; the women in the 705 mural blew kisses to phallic dragons) but here they are also the facehugger from Alien. The cephalopod clinging to the buttocks of West Water World Sushi Bar has a counterpart in a framed screenshot of H.R. Giger’s creature leaping at the camera. This is what confronted me when I walked into the gallery, or at least it is what would have confronted me if I didn’t have the mugwamp to navigate. The green-grey and slightly motion-blurry screenshot was in a different appearance-world from the gestural paintings of coloured cocks and the pencil drawing of Loki, but my mind wanted to connect them; the sudden appearance of the movie was on the same plane as the inspiration of the spouts; likewise rough and unbeautiful, as if he’d looked at his octobuttock creation and thought, “Facehugger! Like face, like arse! As above, so below! Quick, get it in there” – and in it went. Or the other way around.
Signs of welcome coexisted with signs of fear, but fun fear. This abundance was also comedy. The spouts didn’t work, there was obviously nothing in them, no ‘body’ of the tube to hold the sploot, and the facehugger was so obviously not real, a jump-scare. There was a skull on the wall, but it was cartoonishly hand-drawn and spun around on a screen to the ee-oo of a horror movie soundtrack collage. I don’t remember the sound collage reaching a climax, only rotating through familiar thriller chords. It let me anticipate annihilation only to pull the rug away by rolling on. Boo. Ha ha ha.
I could have been reading the word “fnord” in the show’s title as a sign of either conspiracy theories (if I were thinking of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy) or chaos (Greg Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley’s Principia Discordia) but, either way, it was fun too. I understood it as a reference to the hectic shapechanging openness of the Principia (“If you want in on the Discordian Society then declare yourself what you wish do what you like and tell us about it or if you prefer don't”), but a conspiracy theorist could have pointed to the web of objects drawn on the back of the mugwamp’s body, all numbered, with arrows connecting them. Were the arrows directing us to some conclusion, this and this leads to this, or were they indicating directions in the way that spurts of liquid do? If it was Discordian chaos then the message was not “suffer chaos” but “enjoy chaos, promulgate chaos.”
If we were enjoying it then there had to be a bedrock of safety somewhere. Not wartime chaos. Not monsters that genuinely threatened us. Extreme pauses, eternal death and momentary orgasm, coexisted with the flowing life of the brain that forms fnording linkages, reads authors like William S. Burroughs, notes the mugwump costume in David Cronenberg’s film version of Burroughs’ paranoid Naked Lunch, recalls the music in Creepshow and signals camp humour. Jokes summon up a social context, a community of comprehension, underscoring Be Fnord’s ethos of the orgy. Jokes have an audience too. Performances have an audience. The show’s points of reference have been around long enough to become familiar monuments of pop counterculture. The Principia Discordia was published in 1963 or ’65, Naked Lunch in 1959. Everything was, on some level, already known and embraced. Our host the mugwamp offered us an armchair. The seat was splashed with fake cum but you had to admit it was a friendly gesture.
*”That’s a mugwump,” you say, but the title is “Plush Mugwamp-O-Lounger.”
Aaron Sheppard, Be Fnord. Be Very Fnord.
Available Space Art Projects, 900 Karen Ave C-214, Las Vegas, NV 89109
October 24th – 28th, 2022
Posted by D.K. Sole and published by Wendy Kveck on November 21, 2022.