photographs
Don Carroll's essay
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I don’t give a shit about the masses, 2008
In I don’t give a shit about the masses, I use a durational performance to gain empathy from the viewer as I struggle to hold a headstand against a tree. For a male to attempt a headstand in the nude alone in the middle of the forest with repeated failures seems a bit eccentric. Throughout art history the female nude has been synonymous with nature, while the male nude interrupts the feminine connection to nature. Male nudes have been represented mostly as classical forms. In this performance, I display my male nude body and masculinity in Mother Nature disrupting this art historical convention. Breaking a gender specific way of seeing Mother Nature in art, I identify the art historical structure of landscape nudes that have traditionally been female. I am also interested in the notion of Thoreau’s "being lost in the wilderness", a self-exile from the public when your ideas fall out of favor. Though exile is not always negative, it allows for a reexamination of self without distraction from the masses. Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote, "insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule" is entirely relevant. The act of trying to complete the headstand alone in the nude responds to the notion of an individual trying to escape the masses to remember himself. Not only am I "in the wilderness", but also I am proverbially turning my world up side down. Gravity becomes the stricture as I struggle to maintain my inverted vertical form.
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