I love dick.
We're so back, and I've got news (with some shows you need to see in New York).
Hey there, long time no pee… I mean see—well whatever! You knew that one was coming. Just can't stop.
Now, judging from the title you might be thinking to yourself, hmm, well we already know that don’t we? I mean, I filled the pages of PISS 1 with delicious 1960s porn and sexy communist hunks. The pages were saturated with sex (literally if that’s what you used your copy of the mag for a little clean up here and there in a pinch…), but what about desire? That’s something else entirely. You’ve got to reach for it a little more.
Now we’re onto PISS 2… THE SECOND COMING which will be out on 4/20 AKA EASTER!
In the meantime, I’ll be sending you loads of stim like this! So enjoy:
TRANCE, Paul Mpagi Sepuya @ Bortolami until March 1, 2025
If you’ve been paying any attention to contemporary gay photography in the last few years you know the instagram handle @pagmi, belonging to Paul Mpagi Sepuya who presents a body of work in which the body (and bodies of others) he’s known to capture largely absent. Sepuya plays with your horny expectation of what the show should be, through a newly published Aperature book (which is a to-date catalog raisonee of the artists work), Dark Room A-Z, presents a more familiar subject matter with a double entrendre for a title. The dark room is the place where one develops their photographs and the place you have dark public sex. But TRANCE is a fantasy of this, shot on a digital camera and complete with after-the-fact negatives, where the photographed reflective surfaces invite us to make our imagination of the body as titillating as physically encountering it. When Pornhub used to have rolling sex facts at the bottom of its genre menu, I recall one reading that men grow facial hair faster when they expect sex. Sepuya’s work has always been about sex play as a subject, but this time the artist’s medium is as much expectation as anything.
In a small room, Sepuya does present the bodies of himself and a friend who were shot in the space in which the photographs are displayed. In the negative pictured above, they masturbate in front of a recurring 12in lawn orb-turned-all-seeing eye which seems to be you, me, us, them, or that desire to look.
For TRANCE, Sepuya has left behind the dark-stained wood frames he had been using up until this point. In part, this is due to the artist not appearing in the photographs as prominently, when the previous frames would echo his skin tone, as one of the gallerinas explained. Instead, solid brushed aluminum frames polished within an inch of their life surround the works which follow the show’s reflective motifs. Body parts are reflected in Sepuya’s flat mirror works shot in the gallery and that chrome orb appears throughout the works reflecting the act of gazing at them back onto the viewer themselves.
I walked out feeling like my mustache had grown a little bit and I could use a shave. So if Pornhub was right all those years ago when I was searching up “boys kissing naked,” then the feeling of expectation and anticipation engendered in these photographs calls upon a universal sensuality that defies time and age.
Misc. Pippa, Pippa Garner @ Matthew Brown until January 25, 2025.
In a back room past Garner’s pencil-drawn fake adverts for a subcutaneous airbag seen bursting from an intoxicated Lindsay Lohan and “Mega-Butt” inflatable derriere to protect you if you got hit by a car, there’s a piece that gets inflated and deflated like lungs with a light switch turning a bulb on and off that comes with a warning of what lies in front of you: “The Bowels of the Mind”. This show was never supposed to be posthumous, but Pippa lives and breaths still through it with a cheeky invitation into the bowels of a great artist’s perverse mind.
There are chairs that suck, photographs that suck and if you don’t come away from it as happy as after a great truck-stop blowjob, then know that Pippa is looking down on you thinking, “What a tight-ass!”
Dark Star/Grey Wolf, An-My Lê & Refracted Times, Boris Mikhailov @ Marian Goodman Gallery until February 22, 2025
Ok let me queen-out over some capital-P Photography for a second. An-My Lê’s Dark Star/Grey Wolf is a photo show at its best. The work presents expansive landscapes captured both through long-exposure at night in Mesa Verde (Dark Star) and in the sky via helicopter in Montana (Grey Wolf, which comprises 7 vinyl prints arranged inside a white cylinder). The work has a quality of Italian Futurism’s seeing all from above mixed with pastoral grandeur abstracted by the vastness of an untamable American landscape. The locations are specific and yet entirely nondescript as if to be a representation of a genre of place rather than the record of what is. Satellites abstract the night sky as farm equipment appears minuscule against Lê’s omniscient gaze. If you can’t get there, watch this.
Mikhailov’s Refracted Times is an orgasmic exercise in process. The Ukrainian photographer presents cyanotype and printed work from the 1980s to present at massive scale that is really a reminder that the medium of photography is not the viewing of an image, but in its physical print.
Nudes, Andy Warhol @ 56 Henry until February 23, 2025
Need a break from the ass? Cause I do. Warhol’s series of Polaroids of men’s asses in various positions and states of undress (mostly undress) from his Sex Parts series which began in 1976 are placed in grids and lines on two opposing walls of 56 Henry’s minuscule space, while two larger drawings based on the polaroids sit catty-corner as if sharing the back corner of the space like two men using the same urinal. Too bad this show doesn’t exude the raw sexual tension that experience elicits, the daring approach, mutual pleasure and the deviant satisfaction of being watched. In such large numbers, the Polaroids fall into being individually unremarkable Grindr-esque doomscroll in somewhat blah framing. Some are fun, including one in which a man’s hairy ass peeks through a pair of jorts (love), while another spreads his cheeks for a high-contrast hole moment. I’ll admit, this was amusing to look at, but I didn’t feel a rush of energy viewing them in the overly bright, teeny white box that is 56 Henry. They didn’t make me work for it and that spoiled the fun.
THINGS WE SAW THAT WERE NICER THAN THE SHIT WE WON’T MENTION, LOL!
I saw Gregg Araki’s first film with Cruising the Movies held at IFC, Three Bewildered People in the Night, which is a moody black and white, bisexually charged tale of, well, three bewildered people in the night, whose sexual tension, coffee addictions, art-anxiety and overdubbed audio makes for an unintentionally comedic and at times piercingly real tale of young love. I recommend watching it in a section full of queers, hot t-girls and old, married gays for the best effect.
This Perfume Genius album cover for their upcoming album Glory, out on Matador in March… Gag.
OH! And a friend of PISS (F.O.P.) went to the Larry Clark opening at Ruttkowski;98 and reported that “the opening smelled”.
OK BYE!