GAYLETTER

“With my head still under the covers, my fingers digging into my eyes, and my mind off somewhere, there remain only the lower parts of my body, detached, by my digging fingers, from my rotting head.” So proclaims Jean Genet in his opus to onanism, Our Lady of the Flowers, the principal themes of which (masturbation, loneliness, disfiguration, homosexuality) are echoed in the drawings and sculptures of Mike Goodlett, now showing at Christian Berst Art Brut in New York City. Goodlett works in relative isolation, choosing to live in semi-rural Kentucky in a house nearly invisible from the slender, overgrown road that leads to it. This kind of quasi hermetic existence leads naturally to the meditations of self and sexuality that play out in his work.

Depicted in many of the drawings are hands, with fingers transformed into veinous and throbbing phalluses, simultaneously caressing and penetrating multiple nondescript orifices. Others show abstracted faces made out of more holes and things with which to fill them. Tear shaped drops of suggestive fluid flow onto delicately rendered, raw pink surfaces. The sculptures are more subtly erotic, their undulating curves cast from stitched spandex, calling to mind garments that hug the body tight — jockstraps, leather, and latex — displaying it’s voluptuous, barely contained creases, folds, and bulges.

Like Genet, Goodlett’s work is created, at least initially, for his own benefit. Goodlett’s objects serve as the means to realize his own desires and lonesome meanderings out of graphite, paint, and hydrostone plaster. They play the role of penetrator and penetrated, submissive and dominant partner simultaneously. They are both anonymous, faceless tricks and exact mirrors of their creator’s desires. In short, they are perfect and impossible fantasies. They are his innermost desires made more tangible. The audience’s engagement with them is secondary, and the layered fetishes that inspire them are only partially, but compellingly, legible to us. The show is gorgeous, and it’s only up for a few more weeks. Go alone. Get turned on. Go back home and become ‘reacquainted’ with yourself.

FREE, September 9 – October 4, WORKSHOP at Christian Berst Art Brut, 95 Rivington St. New York, NY.