On Margaux Crump
The Lure
June 16 – July 26, 2018
Women & Their Work
By Jessica Baran
September 17, 2018
Region > Austin, Texas
Margaux Crump’s work is almost irrepressibly appealing because of its appetite-inducing materials. This is work you literally want to lick, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong in doing so: it’s made of salt, or safe-sex silicone, or wax. Its forms, too, are evocative of objects you might want to put in your mouth or fondle – small phallic-like protuberances that could also be engorged clitorises or edible gourds or nipples, gelatinous stalactites that quiver when touched, crystalline mounds so ambiguously textured only your fingers could determine their kind. As the title of her exhibition confirms, these impulses are no accident. Crump wants you to want her work on an animal level, drawn in by its elemental seductions as much as its potential to harm, begging you to assess your own twin compulsions toward arousal and aggression.
And then there’s the color pink: it’s everywhere. Everywhere in our culture and in the exhibit. At the moment we know it as the color of pussy hats but also of punk. It’s the gendered hue of baby blankets for the female-born and toys marketed toward girls. As a kid, I envied my school friends who had bedrooms painted pink and wall-to-wall pink carpeting and who owned the pink-prevalent game “Girl Talk.” It’s the ribbon-pin of solidarity for breast-cancer survivors and the kind of wine apparently preferred by suburban housewives. Pink is also Pepto-Bismol and early menstrual discharge. It’s a rug burn or a rash or the interior vaginal wall. It’s a dick and a clit and, when in the shape of a triangle, the symbol of queerness. It’s not as hot as red but less innocent than orange. It’s the second color in the trans flag. It’s the word in all caps collegiate font bedazzling someone’s short-shorts-wearing ass, and the name of a whole mall boutique devoted to similar clothing. It’s cute and it’s sickly, a Renaissance Christ’s cloak and a Sex Pistols t-shirt. Pink is tender. Pink is hardcore. Pink is gay.
Margaux Crump, Rock Hard, courtesy the artist.
Pink is a one-word pun for a number of concurrent contradictions and therefore the color of in-betweenness, of discourse-in-action, of resistance to the binary. Like nature mort it’s two things at once or suggestive of a process toward either invisibility or total darkness. Puns are also an operative material in Crump’s work, as they occupy a significant role in her titles – such as “Dicklettes,” “Rock Hard” and “I Fell for You” – all of which play on active physical properties within each discrete sculpture. In fact, there’s the sense that each of these sculptures could be uttered in a way that could be their avatars – in reciting their names, constituent materials and core tensions, you’d possibly get close to holding in your mouth their verbal equivalent.
I don’t know how I feel about the color pink. While I admit to envying it as ‘80s décor when I was 12, I’ve never been a fan of wearing it. I did not don a pussy hat at the Washington D.C. Women’s March, nor is there a single article of pink clothing in my closet. Which is to say, in terms of the color’s use in commodifying gender, I don’t identify. But on any given day, I’d happily expound upon the virtues of Philip Guston’s use of pink in both his early abstract and late figurative paintings. I could also languish for days in a room of Fragonard murals and their opulent, pastoral sex allegories. Crump also sees this, given that her piece Anticipation Fantasies (The Swing) is inspired both by the famous Rococo painting and the erotic device. Pink, therefore, is a color not meant to be a fixed signifier but a kind of feint away from normative signification – and that is precisely how Crump uses it.
But while we might not get entirely pinned, we do get a lot of penetration or almost-penetrated: in Anticipation Fantasies I and II, stake-like phalluses nearly puncture fleshy nobs; in The Weight of Desire, a net of animal intestines strains to near-breaking under the heft of a deer-attractant rock; in Graft I a deer femur pushes out of a common table leg. Art historical references are also shot-through with kitsch, as Dutch still lifes have the same referential weight as a romance novel or porn film; the canon is indulged but indeed troubled. This generousness in both imaginative possibility and non-hierarchical cultural play makes Crump’s work an authentic embodiment of kink. And in the world of The Lure, kinky is high praise. Her work gives not merely permission but encouragement to mix it up and try it the other way.
Margaux Crump, Anticipation Fantasies III (The Swing), courtesy the artist.
This Fall I spent some time revisiting Kathy Acker’s work, which had, once upon a time, been introduced to me when I was a graduate student. Back in school I’d initially dismissed her books as puerile, but after reading Chris Kraus’s recent biography of the po-mo punk legend, I felt converted. Acker was, yes, a liar, a user, a bad friend, a vampirish social climber and possibly a certifiable sociopath but also I think, a genius, hero and near-martyr for a cause that wasn’t quite the one she’d spent her life feverishly trying to chase. Her self-absorption and vanity, so repugnant in life (and in many ways in retrospect) also helped positively change the optics and ethics of what a theory-literate academic woman should look and behave like. Her Burroughs-indebted cut-up novels were utterly trail-blazing in their deployment of mixed genres, from porn to fairy tales to Dickensian melodrama. And her ferocious pursuit of intimacy via sex is nearly as psychically rending to read about as watching Emma Watson in Breaking the Waves – i.e. it’s not titillating, as she herself and many of her contemporaries branded it, but rather very rawly vulnerable if not altogether the very act of tearing one’s heart out and wearing it on your sleeve.
But to read the bold-print abstract of Acker’s bewildering life-narrative is to discern a woman so singularly hell-bent on defying the norm of expected female lifestyles and feminist forms of rebellion, it give me goosebumps. I mean, when she says fuck the bourgeoisie, she really means fuck the bourgeoisie. The point being that Acker othered herself from the ways she and most women had been othered – thereby carving out new paradigms for female equity and freedom. She never wanted the tenure-track job; she just wanted to be taken seriously for precisely what she was.
Margaux Crump, The Lure, Installation image, courtesy the artist.
We live in a weird moment in terms of feminism. #MeToo is a viral hashtag-turned-movement that’s dethroned patriarchal monoliths save the U.S. president, who, despite being an accused sex offender among other criminal acts, seems immune to legal justice. This same movement aims to defend the narratives of countless women who have been violated but at the same time hews toward a traditional binary definition of femininity – ignoring the equally pressing issue of trans and genderqueer rights. Given this, and the continual urgencies of intersectional race theories and Black Lives Matter, the very term “feminism” seems primed for necessary extinction.
So what do we do with all the useful ways feminist theory has operated? Do we toss it aside entirely or find new ways of contextualizing it? These are not rhetorical questions; I’m really asking you. I’m really demanding an Acker-esque fuck-all.
Which brings us back to The Lure. The Lure is the kind of space where these questions hover but don’t calcify. It’s a space that doesn’t require a pussy hat. It’s a space that’s pink but does not ask me to wear pink. This is a place where you trust that the maker has read all the books and can make like a Medieval guildsmen but is also cool with True Blood. This is a place that’s ok with you getting a little wet in the pants and also a little teary in the eye. This is a place of cunts, dicks and all kinds of holes carefully tossed together to form an exquisitely composed bouquet that is also on the brink of dying. Because the dying is as exquisite as the living, the fucking as poetic as the shitting, the fine line between what you are and what you should be is cut and dangled as carnivorous bait, and I don’t have to wonder about where I fit because there’s an opening here for every size.
Margaux Crump is an interdisciplinary artist who is based in Houston, TX. She was born in 1989 under a dark moon. Margaux enjoys long walks, the smell of musky roses, playing with kittens, and perusing the grocery store for phallic produce.
Jessica Baran is a poet, curator, critic and Associate Director of Curatorial and Program Development at Barrett Barrera Projects and projects+gallery. The author of three poetry collections, she is the former art writer for the Riverfront Times (2008-2012), Assistant Director of White Flag Projects (2008-2011), and Director of fort gondo compound for the arts (2012-2016). She also lectures intermittently at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art and St. Louis University's Prison Arts & Education program. She holds a B.A. in visual art from Columbia University, NY and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis – where she lives with poet Nathaniel Farrell and their dog Benny.
Women & Their Work is a visual and performing arts organization located in Central Austin that serves as a catalyst for contemporary art created by women living and working in Texas and beyond. For 40 years, Women & Their Work has brought groundbreaking art to Austin, with exhibitions, performances, and educational workshops.
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RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.