Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

That Dangerous Supplement

2021; Volume: 6; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/asa.2021.0057

2381-4721

Sally Clegg,

Crafts, Textile, and Design

That Dangerous Supplement Sally Clegg (bio) When Sara Ahmed wrote "theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin" in Living a Feminist Life, she probably wasn't suggesting that we make painstakingly sculpted silicone vibrators of our favorite philosophers' heads.1 But as an artist in love with theory yet unschooled in how to theorize, I decided that perhaps I could know Derrida in the biblical sense, if not the scholarly. So I prototyped him in modeling clay, made a mold, cast him in silicone, painted him, and added a switch and a motor. Standing alone in my MFA studio, I pushed the button on the bottom of the finished piece (Fig. 1). I held his palm-sized vibrating head in my hand, locked eyes with him, and made a promise to both of us: no one will ever see this. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sally Clegg, Hold at a distance and master (2020). Cast silicone, pigment, vibrating motor, 2 × 3 × 2 in. Courtesy of the artist. Things went a different way. I began materializing theory in the realm of erotic objects. I read a little Lacan and made dozens of Möbius strip cock rings. 'Traverse the fantasy' they say in letters imprinted in the silicone, which I'm told have a pleasant texture for the wearer. In alignment with a rich history of random stuff being used for masturbation (e.g., the internet's ever-growing archive of listicles on this subject, women's magazines, and vintage sexual self-help books), I turned quotidian objects into hybrid sculptural sex toys (Fig. 2). [End Page 519] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Sally Clegg, Every thing is a vibrator (video still) (2019). Single channel video, run time 1:09. Courtesy of the artist. A set of padded coat hangers dipped in silicone became a series of functional double-dildos in a range of girths. A delicious cheeseburger from Five Guys implanted with a vibrating motor and placed on a pedestal became the piece titled Five Guys (Jacques, Jacques, Jean-Jacques, Sigmund, Michel). (I ate it before I could snap a photo). I made 121 six-inch silicone dildos of my entire body, my contribution to the art historical tradition of mise-en-abyme, an allusion completed in the realm of suggestion (Fig. 3). Each has a functional suction-cup base. I also made a series of vibrators titled Invaginations: silicone casts of existing interior spaces such as a seashell, a cabbage leaf, a lightbulb, a condom. Back in my studio, as I crushed a Florida horse conch in a table vise to retrieve my sculpture from within it, I thought about the language I would use in presenting this work. "What is your research question?" they would ask. "How could I masturbate with negative space?" I would answer. "No one wants their artwork to be masturbation," a professor said to me in earnest. I replied, "the more I research it, the more I actually think it is sort of a sweet and generous analogy." Maybe more than an analogy, I thought. In Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, Thomas Laqueur cites "imagination, excess, solitude, and privacy" as masturbation's "core elements," to which I would add a supplement: supplementarity.2 If I am honest with myself, couldn't these be keywords of my own art [End Page 520] practice? Shame and prohibition surrounding the act of masturbation have lingered well past any medical risks were debunked. What about the derogatory designation of masturbatory art? I have become suspicious of the expectation to consistently position one's artwork as outwardly productive, intelligible, and useful. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Sally Clegg, Eternal feminine (self-portrait as 121 dildos) (detail) (2020). Cast silicone, pigment, 84 × 84 × 7 in. Courtesy of the artist. Has unease about self-pleasure caused some of us to deny the complexity, silliness, self-interest, or outright filth of our art practices? In the recent past, I have made outward-facing impact claims about my work, mostly in contexts where I was asking for money. I have suggested that I was somehow...