When looking at Los Angeles artist Richard Hawkins’s two collages, I couldn’t decide whether the young man in the middle of one of the works, haloed by streams of fake blood and cut-outs of young male heartthrobs, was Richard Ramirez the Night Stalker, or simply a Ramirez look-alike. As I was looking, curator Ryan M. Pfeiffer shared that Hawkins considers himself an “unarchiver.” The term, as I understand it, references the archive’s ability to capture potential, to fix the subject in place. However, when those unyielding contours are met by desire’s unruly lines—the type of longing that scrambles whether I want to be you, kill you, or fuck you—like the blood and guts of Hawkins’s maybe-killers, something escapes, something of ourselves cannot be contained.
This idea of rupture, spiritual penetration, the third eye opening to heaven and hell, functions as an apt descriptor of “Organgrinder,” Pfeiffer’s show now up at M. LeBlanc. For “Organgrinder” is an exhibition of transgressive art built upon the truth that the shared vocabulary of ecstasy, the furthest distance the self can tread, is articulated within the body and its expenditures: the grammar of blood, piss, vomit, shit, and cum.
Featuring work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Fakir Musafar, Breyer P-Orridge, Richard Hawkins, Hermann Nitsch, Pierre Molinier, Paul McCarthy, and Ron Athey, the show contains a mix of prints, collages (including the two Hawkins works mentioned above), moving image pieces, and sculpture. Much of the Mapplethorpe work (several silver gelatin prints of couples engaging in sadomasochistic sex)—alongside prints of McCarthy’s performance of Death Ship (1981), in which the artist played a fascistic sea captain—is being shown to audiences for the first time thanks to a combined effort on the part of Pfeiffer, M. LeBlanc, Mapplethorpe’s foundation, and the Kinsey Institute.
I was particularly taken by P-Orridge’s sculptural fetish object-cum-totem The Poisonous Trap of Biology, Frozen Replication (2005), which resembles a gumball machine filled with tampons crowned by a coyote’s taxidermied head. Though the piece is meant to indict society’s limiting notions of biology and gender roles (a worthy endeavor), my eye was specifically drawn to a smudge of dried blood on one of the tampons. I asked Pfeiffer if he knew whose blood it was, and he told me it was his own contribution. It is an elegant gesture, for not only is blood listed as one of the piece’s materials, seemingly missing before Pfeiffer added his, but the offering also shares something of Genesis P-Orridge’s own desire to merge completely into one being—Breyer— with their long-time spouse Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, before the artists’ deaths in 2020 and 2007, respectively.
Courtesy M. LeBlanc
In the exhibition’s text, Pfeiffer called his coterie of artists a “sperm-cult.” Though the moniker is a reference to a Los Angeles show he was involved in almost a decade prior, also involving Hawkins, I wondered aloud to him if “Organgrinder” wasn’t such a cult’s mirror image: a journey into the abyss, a womb that brings life and death, a chrysalis that shatters when your own edges are pierced by another, a mythical hole to the center of the world. While the image of the phallus appears throughout “Organgrinder,” it is a subject that requires a partner, phallic power being dependent upon penetration, an orifice open and willing.
We came to the agreement that within this artistic coterie of Pfeiffer’s “sacred monsters,” both the hole and the phallus are present, mingling together like the scent of church incense. The idea of a church, and its interior, are ultimately what Pfeiffer aimed to evoke through the show’s installation—you approach the work like an altar or a cross: you kneel, you raise your eyes, you remain silent, you feel your breath catch, you let a door open inside you, and something unspeakable enters.
This notion of the sacred, the screaming stuff that reveals language’s impotence, is why I thought of Britney Spears’s 1999 debut single “ . . . Baby One More Time” for the title of this review. When the singer croons “When I’m not with you, I lose my mind, Give me a sign, Hit me, baby, one more time,” I think of God and violence, the limits and needs of the flesh, the annihilation of the self, the precariousness of faith, and the necessity of longing.
In other words, I think of the stuff of “Organgrinder.”
“Organgrinder”
Through 8/29: Wed–Sat 11 AM–5 PM, M. LeBlanc, 3514 W. Fullerton
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