Public Pool

Public Pool, Image credit: D.K. Sole

Cj Hendry, Public Pool

By D.K. Sole

It was a merch opportunity that hadn’t even been disguised very well and everybody there was having a nice time. The only people who seemed to be suffering were the ones who were stepping into the chilly water in front of their friends and families, and they were being theatrical. In the middle of the general mellow mood, they singled themselves out with a performance. It’s freeeeezing! It’s freezing, mom, don’t come in, it’s so cooold, ah ah ah! – etc etc. Friend or parent would look over the ladder that led into the inflatable white pool and urge them to be brave or sigh or wave at them, or something like that. Then the thrill wore off and they let the performance go, moving on to the next job of wading about after one of the daisy-shaped floaties. Influencer-looking people here and there were doing a similar thing—I mean finding a dramatic moment—but they were having it filmed or photographed, and it would go on social media: the recognition they wanted came from strangers who were not present. They smiled into a lacuna. Their dramatic moment was typically happy or static: they weren’t hamming up the chill, they were pretending it didn’t exist, or they were standing in the warmth of the sunshine, outside the water, holding out their arms in front of the dazzling snowy plastic wall of the store. If you went inside you could see rows of Cj Hendry’s photorealistic drawings hanging on the backdrop of a cage half-filled with the inflatable daisies in a shade of brown-red. 

I stood out of their way, as you do when people are at work. What an annoying gig, I thought: buying the right bikini or shorts, driving out to Sandy Valley, grinning, and then you have to do it all again in a new setting to keep your audience up. Being stared at. Cowboys rode around in the desert beyond the plastic verge and chatted with the attendees. I think I overheard one of them saying that his dad had been a catcher for the Baltimore Orioles in the ‘60s. One of the horses sneezed. “Oo,” said the woman who had been stroking its nose, “was that wet. Was that wet.” She might have been the same person who, earlier, I’d heard discussing the colours of the floating daisies with her friend. “It looks like the green has purple,” she’d said. “I’ll decide if I’m going to get anything else by the time I get over there.”

When the Baltimore Orioles cowboy told someone that his dog was a Queensland blue heeler I took note of the word “Queensland” because Cj Hendry is also a Queenslander. Those two thoughts attached themselves idly to one another. There wasn’t much traction between them, to be honest. Well, anyway, her work relies more on lack of traction, letting go, and enjoying things. In her social media videos she’s sunny and forthright. Her origin story, as told by CNN, revolves around money. She was spending so much on luxury brands that one day her card was declined when she was out with friends, a moment so penetrating that she put everything else in her life to one side, quit her degrees in architecture and finance, left her job at a Chanel store, sponsored her new life by selling her collection of designer goods online, and dedicated herself purely to art. 

Stated like that, the idea is so counterintuitive that I can’t stop thinking about it. You want to get somewhere in life, so you abandon your finance degree to make painstaking glamour portraits of products that have already been photographed to within an inch of their well-advertised lives? What kind of instinctive madness is this? The fact that the origin story worked and now she lives in New York with a beautiful well-lit studio and oceans of Danish pencils seems outrageous, but there it is. CNN attributes it to Instagram—she got on when it was still new—but it’s not as if every artist who got on Instagram at that time is equally successful. I’m delighted every time I think about it. Ha ha ha, she won. 

Her surfaces—going by the artworks in the inflatable store at Public Pool—are scrupulous. Smooth. She places each object at the centre of a white field, citing Robert Longo as an inspiration and showing her social media audience a picture from his Body Hammer series—a perfect black and white drawing of a gun, executed in charcoal and graphite, pointed at the viewer. The white border isolates Longo’s gun, making it naked and dangerous, but in Hendry’s case the stark moat operates like a fluorescent light in a store, highlighting a consumer good and showing you that the surroundings are open and uncomplicated. In a conversation with artnet.com, she says she finds large white areas calming. I imagine them representing a salesperson’s version of honesty, like a magician holding out their open hands to show you there’s nothing up their sleeve. Hendry’s directness is not, as in Longo, a form of threat. This is an arena of exchange, not domination. Or if there’s a dominant (active) party then the artwork wants you to think it’s you. The object is just waiting for you. Like Hendry in her videos, it seems guileless. The animating concealment that another artist might put into the execution of the work (Frank Auerbach’s brushstrokes building a face and destroying it at the same time, for example) is displaced into real-world games–fun mystery boxes that her fans can buy, or a hidden treat that they’re invited to hunt down. With Public Pool, she promises that if you can make it out to this far-away desert location (the advertising makes it look like the middle of nowhere though it’s really Sandy Valley Ranch) then you can buy her work at an affordable price in the form of limited-edition caps and sunscreen branded with the Pool’s signature daisy.

She seems to know who she is as an artist, which is not a bad achievement. Her Instagram timing was a piece of good luck, but she figured out how to capitalise on that luck, which, again, not everybody can do. I couldn’t. Witness the fact that I decided to write this, when I don’t seem to be able to say very much except that she seems happy and her work sells. A cannier person would have chosen a different topic. Jeannie Hua just had a show at Core Contemporary—there she was, making art about Chinese American history, much meatier stuff. Why not write about that? I was restlessly aware that other people had already found more things to say—when I looked at the comments on the main Pool Party post on Instagram I saw them complaining about the volumes of plastic that were used to fabricate her inflatable objects as well as the amount of water that had to be trucked out to Sandy Valley. But no, after scrolling through too many of these drive-by one-liners I felt repelled and tired. I wanted to let it go and classify Public Pool as another wrinkle in Lyotard’s libidinous capitalist skin. Her method of turning long or complicated processes into simple, pretty presentations seems to make her appealing but also an easy target for irritation. Oh you want to complain! Her world is too easy to see! You want to prove that you’re smarter than this, you’re not inveigled, you’ve thought about her project more than she has. (Excess water in the desert is wrong. These words seem so comfortable, so correct, so familiar, that it feels like a mistake not to say them. They are so thoroughly expected.)* 

You need to do…something. How do you get past that calm moat? Looking at the comments was like watching people work out that itch. The fact that Sandy Valley Ranch has also been used for film shoots and weddings and it has an Airbnb tiny house and coverage on Outdoor Nevada and Big 7 Travel and Channel 8 News and blah blah blah—in short it is a well-trafficked working property—didn’t stop the commenters telling her she was destroying the (quote, unquote) “pristine desert.” Santa Claus hacks out a massive hole in that same piece of desert to bury Brandon Flowers in Don’t Shoot Me Santa and when I checked the video’s comments sections for similar responses I couldn’t find any. But the hole-digging is surrounded by distractions: a murder story, rousing music, ugly Christmas sweaters and the Pool is not. I thought, “She manufactures visibility.” The moat of clarity makes targets. The child makes itself a target of affection, the influencer is a target for eyes, the pool-store unit gleams out of the sand and tumbleweeds like one of her objects at the centre of the white paper sheet; the centres of the daisy floaties are circles of contrast. The landscape was relegated to a backdrop--the part of the target you don’t hit. I admired the mountains of Sandy Valley like a person who was in no danger of being asked to climb them. 

So we hung out in this egg-space. The condition that Perry Anderson described as the crux of the various modernist art movements, “none at peace with the market as the organizing principle of a modern culture,” was nowhere in sight. “From a young age, I’ve just been obsessed with luxury and spending all my money on things I couldn’t afford,” Hendry told CNN. (I picture her looking happy as she said it.) With the Pool, she provided us with the glamour she always wanted by mixing our enjoyment into the “organizing principle” of a promotion. No longer were we watching attractive actors drinking Coke at the beach with their friends on TV. We were being merged with them. We were on a set. No wonder the experience felt so weirdly familiar. No wonder we somehow knew how to get along.  

It was not actually luxurious—there was the cold water, the gooey horse, the wind that blew dust across us and turned the blue pool floor brown. Yet people were making something out of it. I’ve only mentioned the influencers and kids but there were others while we were there: a multitude of body types, different ages, friend groups, artists from Las Vegas checking things out (I had a couple of oh-hey-it’s-you moments), and people who looked like Sandy Valley locals who had come over to see what was going on at the centre of things. Men with a truck were selling tamales. From a distance, her career sounds like a fairytale image of work. You labour hard at your chosen skill and in return society agrees to recognise your labour, treat it like a treasure, and reward you. At four o’clock, Sunday afternoon, shortly before Public Pool closed for good, she released a series of limited-edition resin daisies on her website at seven hundred and something dollars each. By the time I checked the site that evening they were all sold out. The caps sold. The sunscreen sold. Every commonsense law in the universe dictates that she should still be back in Queensland, catching public transport to the office every day and hating her mediocre job in finance. And she isn’t. Ha ha ha.

*it was reported afterward that she was working to recycle the water and re-use the plastic, which suggests that a) when she wrote "I fucked up” and promised to do better in the future after complaints were made about her Straya piece in 2021 then she was indeed speaking the truth and b) maybe she actually read those comments. (Artnet article link)

Cj Hendry, Public Pool
1411 Kingston Road, Sandy Valley, Nevada
April 5-7, 2024

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, D.K. Sole has degrees in Literature and Film from Deakin University and the Victorian College of the Arts. She joined the Barrick Museum after moving to Las Vegas in 2012. Sole works in education and research, managing tours and writing many of the museum’s text materials. She curated the Barrick’s 2017 group exhibition, Play On, Gary, Play On. An artist who works with found objects, she has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, CO.

See more of D.K.’s work on her Instagram.

Images courtesy of D.K. Sole

Posted and published by Lyssa Park on May 12, 2024.