Labia-esque

Keith Harring

It's Super Bowl Sunday. For as far back as I can remember I've never been into sports. Most of the time they do nothing for me. Q once said something like: "sports; never have so many people cared so much about something that meant so little." I'd have to agree. Imagine if instead of playing American football on Super Bowl Sunday, stoners competitively smoked enormous "super" bowls of weed in a nationally televised event? I'm imagining it to be somewhat like American Idol in the way it's shot and narrated, maybe even hosted by Ryan Seacrest, where contestants would have to smoke maddening amounts of marijuana and then participate in an absurd version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire hosted by a geriatric Regis Philbin. Have you ever noticed how much Richard Simmons and Regis Philbman look alike? Richard just has more hair, and pizzaz. Looks like pizzas.

Drew invited me over to view the game, but I'm not sure I'll make it. We all went to the De Young yesterday and checked out the Keith Harring exhibit. As we walked in I joked about a piece which depicted a spaceship sporting a labia-esque aperture on the bottom from which a tractor beam had targeted the skull of a male earthling. I said, "this piece explores the relationship between masculinity and femininity; specifically the godlike, almost supernatural power of the labia to consume and enslave the male psyche." At first my compatriots laughed at my observation, even openly scoffed, but that was before we entered the next room. The next room was dedicated almost exclusively to sex, dicks, teats, tits, beastiality, birthings and vaginas. Suddenly I was validated, vindicated. I enjoyed the exhibit, mostly because of the proliferation of penises, but personally I found Harring's work a bit too repetitive. He uses the same labyrinthine motifs over, and over, and over, and over again. Perhaps this is part of his message, an indictment on the artistic and moral uninventiveness of our times, of the wasteful, iterative and overly consumptive nature of capitalism. When viewing his work one gets the feeling of being lost, overstimulated and alone, cast out into a sea of ravaged and discarded bodies all bent and punched full of holes, unified through exploitation, held at knifepoint by the immutable and voracious power structures hungry for our spiritual, moral and financial ruin.

So at the end of the exhibit, as we exited through the gift shop, we typified these artistic themes and ideas the best way we knew how: we bought little Keith Harring refrigerator magnets.

It's what he would have wanted.