Robbie Handcock
All images by and courtesy the artist. All images intentionally uncaptioned.
The first time I did mushrooms was only a year or so ago. From memory, it was after a fairly civilized dinner with a friend and a flatmate at my house. As we were calling it a night, our friend left behind a few dried shrooms as a thank you that heād picked from the Botanic Gardens that season. My flatmate and I decided to eat them that night. From then, most of what I remember is just laughing. I felt like I wanted to be egged on in ways that tested the limits of my new boundaries for impulse control. For example, should I throw this cup on the ground? Yes! Should I piss in this pot plant? Absolutely! And so I dragged one of our indoor yuccas to the centre of the room to piss in it. My flatmate still has the video of it.
Previous works of mine have dealt with representations of queer sexual undergrounds, both historic and contemporary. For example, my exhibition Indecent Literature referred heavily to Bob Mizerās Phsyique Pictorialāa publication covertly about menās fitness due to the timeās censorship laws, but on reflection was obviously made for the purpose of gay men getting off on muscle dudes. Itās speculated that symbols placed next to certain models on the back pages referred to the acts and services they offered as sex workers. The title of the exhibition itself refers to charges laid against Bob Mizer for the production and distribution of said content. OnlyFans became a logical follow up to this show in 2019, but since COVID-19 lockdown the website has become less backpages and more employment opportunity as income precarity becomes increasingly ubiquitous.
However, there is a certain license required to access such undergrounds. Good faces and good bodies mean certain people achieve success on these platforms. Or in the case of cruising, both online and offline, at the very least easier to navigate. My most recent monoprints, that riff off that moment of shroom-fueled plant pissing, is a way to explore fetish and kink that decentres orgasm as the point of sexual success. In an interview published in The Advocate in 1984, Michel Foucault (an active fisting bottom in his day) speaks on the radical reimagining of pleasure, saying:
I think itās a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization [ie, the degenitalization] of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our possible pleasure ā I think thatās something quite wrong. These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situationsā¦[1]
Whatās interesting for me is that because previous works that have dealt more explicitly with gay sexual acts (fisting, barebacking etc) much of my less explicit depictions are read in the same light. Also interesting, is how both these modes of depiction are read by different audiences. In the first showing of prints that depicted both pissing and house plants, one of the first buyers proudly explained theyād hang the work in their new bathroom. For some reason that was a lightbulb moment for me. In my head, pissing as fetish doesnāt belong in the bathroom at all. In my head, it belongs in a sex club with appropriately spray-and-wipeable pleather beds or at the park, where Iāve seen it done in porn. Piss in a bathroom, though? It feels way too predictable to be considered sexy.
This series of monoprints, depicting flaccid penises pissing into on-trend house plants, operates two-fold for me. One is its inference to sexual behaviour, read because of a few external factorsāmy previous work, my queerness, and perhaps my surname. Secondly, they are about a kind of alternative sexuality. In this particular instance, a sexual-adjacent pleasure rooted in the mundanity of the domestic. What does queer sexuality look like outside of its more salacious settings? How does it operate in your lounge with your partner, or amongst friends? SWITCH, the title of the Jhana Millers Gallery show with Caitlin Devoy and myself, speaks literally to some of the wobbly, fleshy light switch sculptures of Devoy, but also to the queer code switching that occurs between public and private, sexual and non-sexual, straight and not-straight.
[1] quoted in David M. Halperin, āBecoming Homosexual: Michel Foucault on the future of Gay Writing,ā Island 63, 1995, p. 46.
Robbie Handcock was born in Olongapo, Philippines, in 1989 and currently resides in TÄmaki Makaurau. Robbie holds an MFA from Massey University and was a facilitator with artist-run gallery play_station in Te Whanganui-a-Tara from 2019 to 2020. Exhibitions include SWITCH, Jhana Millers Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara 2021; Courtship, play_station presentation at Auckland Art Fair 2019; OnlyFans, RM Gallery, TÄmaki Makaurau, 2019; Love you to the wrist and back, play_station, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2018; and Indecent Literature, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2017.