Pleather, Parachutes, Photography, the Phallus, and the Body as an Object: a Conversation with Timothy Atticus

By John Norris

JOHN NORRIS: This is your second show with BENT Gallery. How did your association with them come about?

TIMOTHY ATTICUS: I met Mark Blackwell through MoMA where I work. He had just began working with Tipton Horn and became a co-owner of BENT Gallery, which it is similar to galleries like Chashama where they use vacant spaces and storefronts. It is the same concept, BENT exhibits in apartments, storefronts, and they represent new artists that are not quite yet in Art Forum but they are not out of the loop. Mark came to me and said “we should try and get something together, I think your work would be perfect for BENT.” And that was that. I was the first person to show at BENT Gallery. They are looking for people that are more on the fringe, underground yet experienced.

NORRIS: Now, Unzipped is really a compilation of things you have done over the past year?

ATTICUS: Yes, all the work was done from late 2010 to the present.

NORRIS: And how did the idea come about to bring these things together in one show?

ATTICUS: The first show with BENT, Digestive Tracts, was a turning point for me. I was exhibiting sculptures alongside paintings and photography. It was a valuable experience because while the work was varied it also had a uniting theme. After Digestive Tracts I questioned what direction I wanted to go in next.

My artistic process is extremely interdisciplinary. I have to experiment with various mediums, but that year was special for me because I knew something had to change. I decided the works that I felt were the strongest and most exciting were the pieces where I took an object and interacted with it in some way. Or it was not just a sculpture but it was an object that has an action done onto it.

NORRIS: Let’s talk about the various pieces that make up Unzipped. There is the Bound piece…

ATTICUS: Right, and that is a nine-foot pleather sculpture that I took upstate, to Poughkeepsie, and tied it to a tree. That piece has a lot of different meanings to it.

NORRIS: I feel like you cannot get away from – looking at that image with the birch trees and the rope – and not think, I mean anyone who has ever seen an episode of “Criminal Minds” or a serial killer movie.

ATTICUS: (laughs) Yes exactly. Well I decided to do a violent act to one of my objects. And that comes from having violence – homophobic acts - committed on me.

NORRIS: Verbally?

ATTICUS: Physically. I do not normally do autobiographical work but Bound is inspired by when I was living in West Virginia. I was thirteen and right outside of where I lived in Morgantown there was a black gay kid who was stomped on and in an effort to make it appear that he was hit by a car, they threw his body on a dirt road and backed over him several times with their pickup truck. I met his mother and she told me that they tried so hard to just live and that I should leave West Virginia. And that was one reason we moved.

During that time, I was having a lot of violence directed at me. People would throw rocks at me, try to light me on fire, it was very difficult. One time I went to the grocery store with my mom and this guy just spit in my face, called me a faggot. All these violent experiences, and feeling vulnerable and a target, inspired me to recreate it in a way.

NORRIS: Many years later. Was this something that stuck with you? In the intervening years were there other works that you could say were informed by those experiences?

ATTICUS: Most likely, but it is one of those things I have a hard time talking about because I really do not like playing the victim. I never want to be in that position of “woe is me”. I came out at twelve and that is when it started to get really bad because it was obvious. I was feminine, flaming, out there and the more violent people would get toward me, the more I would react and take it even further. I had to leave my school because I was being brutally harassed. I was home schooled for a while. Then we left West Virginia and moved to Seattle and it was a complete culture shock.

In West Virginia and Seattle I had art teachers. I was more focused on drawings that were a lot more emotional and “thirteen”. I never did sculpture until I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before that, in Seattle I had met Nikki Harst, who was a student at the University of Washington and she trained me formally in painting. Harst and my other teacher Yi Liang worked together with me. Yi would approach the conceptual side of art making while Harst would push the technical side of painting. At that time, I was enrolled at Seattle Academy of Fine Arts, which is another strict academic school. After that experience, I had a completely different relationship to painting. It was difficult to approach painting without it feeling restraining. Once you have been taught how to do something, once it has been drilled into you, it is hard to escape it.

NORRIS: So at this point were you looking at art as “yes I want to do this professionally” or was it “I just enjoy this and let’s see where it goes”?

ATTICUS: I have always wanted to be an artist. It is not something one chooses, I know that sounds cliché but….

NORRIS: I have heard plenty of musicians say that.

ATTICUS: Art was definitely an escape, to go into another world and forget what was around me.

NORRIS: Now, another piece in this show is Sculpture Tour.

ATTICUS: Yes, in that I took another pleather sculpture but in this case I painted the vinyl with a visceral greasy paint. This object is more an internal organ than flesh. It goes back and forth, I am interested in the internal and the external, “could this be flesh”? But it is not flesh, because it also resembles something that is inside of you. It is very meaty, but also artificial. It is about five feet tall and has one large phallus that hangs from it. Most importantly, it is abstract. And this project was a test to see how the public would respond to abstract form.

NORRIS: And their reactions?

ATTICUS: Some people responded with, “What the fuck is that?” and got surprisingly angry. One guy was really aggressive. But I just kept walking. Some people tried to stop me and asked what was going on, you know what is this? And a mother with a stroller came up to me and she covered her kid’s eyes and said, “That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen”. Another guy handed me a pamphlet on loneliness!

NORRIS: OK so moving on to the Sculpture for the Mouth. Tell me about this?

ATTICUS: This was a project where I did more of a “family photo”, similar to a school picture. I chose a floral backdrop and I had people connected by these long tubular shapes with baby bottle nipples at the end. Some of the participants were related; there were brothers, a boyfriend and girlfriend, and a friend of mine from Seattle. This project is partly about bodily contact, yet not being connected. Having to deal with looking forward, not making any eye contact though there is some sense of physical connection that is going on.

NORRIS: How many tubes?

ATTICUS: There were a total of nine tubes and eight people involved. Another important part of this project was my interest in creating something pathetic. I like to portray my phalluses in a somewhat sad and floppy manner to transgress this notion of the penis as potent and powerful.

NORRIS: Now why does that interest you? I know the term you have used before is “de-monumentalizing” the phallus. Also, some of these images are as intestinal as they are phallic.

ATTICUS: Exactly, and they do have a “tube-like” quality so you could see them as phallic. This goes back to my interest in blurring the internal and the external parts of the body. Is it a penis or is it an intestine? Most of my recent work is grounded in gender theory like Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva, and it is difficult to avoid Freud. This symbol of the phallus being this monumental thing, something you can never really attain, whereas in reality it is a flimsy part of the body. And yet it is this object that many males put so much importance on.

NORRIS: As far as having one or not having one, or the size of it if you do have one.

ATTICUS: Of course. It is very important to me that I am not being judgmental towards masculinity. Obviously, I have my opinions on it, and they come from a place of being treated poorly by aggressive men. But this project is more invested in trying to understand where this kind of masculinity comes from and this fear of being feminine. When I have been treated badly it has a lot less to do with me being gay than the fact that I embody these “feminine” – which, I hate that word – that is another problem I’ve had with this series that I am trying to reject. I have a lot of problems with the masculine-feminine binary and I do not believe that we have the right vocabulary to describe gender. I do not consider myself a feminine man. That is not the right word. I do not feel like that is the right way to describe it. Language often does not give you a lot of options, to talk about gender. I am trying in these works to challenge language.

NORRIS: And there is the Hypochondriac Body.

ATTICUS: Yes, this piece is based on a water balloon wiggle snake. That when you grab onto it, it slips out of your hand. It is made from parachute material and beanbag beans. I chose the title from Gilles Deleuze’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus. There is a quote that basically says that Miss X is rid of all of her organs, she is hollowed out, and all she has left is the skin and bones of a hollow body. I took this as a fear of ones own body. I made this object very plump and somewhat abstract, but there is an organized structure. The white dots represent the skeleton, disorganized, and the parachute material is thin and feels penetrable and looks like it could tear very easily. This object is used for action. I go in and reach and pull and pull, then I go to the other side and pull and push, and I do this until I have exhausted myself. It is like a ring in Dante’s Inferno.

NORRIS: Finally, How to Give a Manicure is a recent piece.

ATTICUS: Yes. It was recently exhibited at Culture Fix in July. With this, there are 120 fingers on three long pillars that hang from the ceiling. For this piece I give my object a home manicure. There are several tools: a bowl of water, cotton balls, Lubriderm, nail polish, nail polish remover, etc. I clean the fingers, lotion them up, and then give them a manicure that lasts for around three hours.

NORRIS: Again there is a feminizing the phallus going on here.

ATTICUS: Yes. This piece will be exhibited at Unzipped. It will not be performed, just as is, with the nail polish and everything set up.

NORRIS: And you sew all these pieces?

ATTICUS: Yes, and before I refused to use a sewing machine. I was very stubborn and I hated the idea of a machine in the way of my body. So I did everything by hand. And I also liked the surgical aspect. As a kid, I thought I wanted to be a doctor or a surgeon. That is another part of my work, this desire to know the mechanics of the body.

NORRIS: The more phallic objects, that is a fairly recent thing for you.

ATTICUS: Yes, I embraced it.

NORRIS: So to speak.

ATTICUS: (laughs) Actually one of my professors told me – this is really great – “I would love to see you not make a cock. Do me one favor and for this assignment, do not make cock.” And of course I said, “Alright”. So I went and did Bound, the nine-foot cock instead. Which is double the cock. She said, “But that is not the assignment I gave you!” And I said, “Well I can’t not do it. I have tried!” (laughs) It was really just me digging my heels in.

NORRIS: It is interesting to me that you see the sculptures themselves as somewhat temporary and that sometimes you will just get rid of them.

ATTICUS: My relationship to the work is different. One could say I am almost promiscuous with my objects because I do not necessarily see my work as precious as some people like to make it.

NORRIS: In some cases the photograph of the piece or the action is as important as the actual physical piece?

ATTICUS: Yes.

NORRIS: Do you think that is because you are working with pleather and parachute material, things that are more…

ATTICUS: More temporary? It has to do with the way that I work because I produce a lot. I make a lot of objects, all the time. So I do not get attached to materials. I trick myself by hiding my work. I will hide it in the closet. It is hard sometimes to have your work around, because then it can make you feel content.

NORRIS: You have one more semester at Cooper Union?

ATTICUS: Yes it is very exciting. It has been a great school, but I am ready.

NORRIS: Nothing scary about graduating?

ATTICUS: No, I am ready.

NORRIS: Do you see your work evolving rapidly? Next year will there likely be a little trace of phallic imagery, for instance?

ATTICUS: I am probably going to exhaust it. I am exhausted by things easily. I am a little bored already.

NORRIS: Since we have been talking? Just by this conversation?

ATTICUS: (laughs) No, I mean I am not easily satisfied. I am the most critical person about my work. So it is a good thing I keep pushing myself, I want to always try something different.