(Link)
Like the oral tradition whose stories allowed modification to fit the moment’s ethos, PP’s unconsensual public domaining of intellectual property proposes the Chiquita banana as open material. Beyond the usual mash-up/mix-up of post-warholian popists, PP’s appropriation remains intact, using brand as pre-established content for its storytelling, inhabiting the corporate/commercial sign systems that have come to determine our world. Harry Potter is the new Iliad for better or worse. And rather than collage systems of most contemporary post-Kelley-Walker appropriationist whose vita-mixing of signs stand in for the dismantling of Empire’s own, PP takes the post-cybernetic appropriations at their word, using the contemporary no-copyright anarchism along the lines of much more politically activated and transgressive forms of appropriation of, say, slash fiction. But so this public-domaining of the private one could posit as having to do with, not only, drag (drag as corporeal parasitization) but too the dirty and cruel world of bodies forced to adopt the identity and means of the larger cultural empire that oversees it, i.e. Adorno’s conform or perish: and that there is a sadness at the base of PP’s comedy that involves the body adopting not its own subjectivity but the the larger culture's as its means of representation with the implicit and ostensible threat to not be seen at all. Making the work super gay, even without the title’s innuendo or PR’s suggesting. Like same-sex marriage, acceptance for a subaltern group within a larger dominant culture comes with the implicit warning necessitating conforming for its acceptance. Of course PP’s marriage proposal as part of its exhibitionary history. PP obviously positing the tertiary: replace conform with thieve, steal the banana.
Which then, 2.): Like Gober’s drains and sinks conflating cleanliness and washing with sickness and waste (drain - and all its attendant synonyms: bleed, deplete, exhaust, consume, empty, reduce) draining away in the wash, PPs hand sanitizer updating Goberian themes to its hypochondrial present, the drain of wash is replaced with the sterilization and preservation of self. Like fruit gone overripe, the body, the vanitas of PP’s early interest, and all its attendant themes of transience, under overarching theme of homosexuality of this exhibition (for whom viral conditions have dark history) and Puppies own experience with a body that betrayed him, and the fruits of the title and the fruits on the table whose bodies and the metaphorical ones too all too early compromised themselves and rotted away on tables, and the desire to be clean, to preserve bodies, the new chemical cleanliness, antibacterial science replacing good-ole-soap, a sterilization that, as we know of those who adolesce under such conditions are prone to new problems, eating boogers reduces asthma in children, the need to be cleanly to conform your body to dominant standards erupts new problems. Dirtiness a real drag, drag as dirty; do you see where this goes?
See too: Puppies Puppies at Vilma Gold, Puppies Puppies at Queer Thoughts, “Friday, July 24, 2015″ at Essex Street