Patrick Staff, on Venus(Installation View) (2019–2020)

16 Patrick Staf, On Venus (installation view) (2019–2020). Image courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries © 2019. Photo: Hugo Glenndinning. last summer it was embroiled in controversy after it was revealed by To Crush The Guardian that its CEO, Yana Peel, was, along with her husband, a major stakeholder in an Israeli cyberweapons Fe frm. Within a week, Peel had resigned. Absolute a (Soon after On Venus opened to the ture On Patrick Staf and public, Los Angeles art maven Bettina Korek was announced as Peel’s succes- Destroying the Institution sor.) Furthermore, in April of last year, exhibiting artist Hito Steyerl spoke out against the institution’s acceptance of (and prominent acknowledgment of) support from the Sackler family, who’ve What is commonly known as Hyde been called to account due to their Park—central London’s largest public ownership of the OxyContin-producing park—is actually two parks conjoined. Purdue Pharma. Though the institution To the west, Kensington Gardens is no longer accepting funding from contains Kensington Palace, currently the family, the Sackler name remains home to Britain’s future king and his on the building. family, while Hyde Park, to the east, “The show is a very direct response was once Henry VIII’s hunting estate. to being asked to make an exhibition Both—as with Regent’s Park, Green for the Serpentine, which in my mind Park, Richmond Park, and several other occupies such a large position in of the city’s major green spaces—are the London—and British, and even ofcially Royal Parks, which means European—art consciousness,” Staf that the public’s longstanding access told me recently. Given the newly to them is courtesy of the monarchy, perceived toxicity of the institution, 17 which nowadays does most of its however, the ofer was not the straight- animal-rearing and animal-killing on forward accolade it might once have more expansive estates further afeld. been. Staf, whose training at London’s Kensington Gardens also contains Goldsmiths College embedded them the Serpentine Gallery, where Los in the Marxist, leftist, European intellec- Angeles-based, British-born artist tual tradition, had previously made work Patrick Staf recently presented On that was critical of both the medical Venus. This exhibition was specially industrial complex and orthodox commissioned for the Serpentine systems of military, class-based, or peni- Sackler Gallery, an extension of the tentiary control. “I needed to accept original gallery that opened in 2013 in and acknowledge the complicity of an 1805 gunpowder store and was making a show there, but then also fnd renovated and expanded by architect a way to act within that.” Zaha Hadid. It was the young artist’s On Venus was comprised, most signifcant exhibition to date essentially, of three distinct though following their exhibition Prince of interrelated installations. With Acid Homburg, at Dundee Contemporary Rain for Serpentine Sackler Gallery (all Arts, Scotland, and the Irish Museum works 2019), Staf transformed the of Modern Art, Dublin, earlier in 2019. building—and by implication the institu- The Serpentine is a non-collecting, tion it houses—into an ecosystem and kunsthalle-style space which has been a body, with veins in the form of steel free to the public since it opened in 1970; pipes fxed to its walls and ceilings it is a popular destination for weekend that dripped a mysterious acidic liquid park strollers and for the denizens of the into steel barrels, from whence it afuent neighborhoods that surround it. evaporated back into the atmosphere. Despite being considered one of the Mirrored laminate covered the gallery U.K.’s most progressive art institutions, foors and colored gels rendered the Jonathan Grifn 18 Patrick Staf, Public Drunk (2018). Oasis water fountain, water, pump, vinyl tubing, aluminum bucket, PVC pipe, chain, plastic sheet, sock, snail shells, temporary tattoos, tape, 44.5 × 17 × 18 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Ruben Diaz. space a sickly yellow, leaving the viewer The Daily Star (and recycled by other with the—not unpleasant—sensation newspapers) which alleged that the of foating in piss. notorious child murderer Ian Huntley A photograph of an eroded church was seeking to transition from male to gargoyle welcomes visitors to On female while in prison. “Soham beast Venus, recalling the damage that acid Huntley,” shrieked the paper, “seeks rain does to limestone and marble— sex swap on tax payer.” The virulently materials often used in the construction transphobic—and baldly fabricated— of civic buildings. Staf explains: “You story was later quietly retracted. Staf realize that what was really coming etched both the original articles and under threat (in the U.K. at least) were their retractions (using another, much churches, banks, museums, prisons. stronger kind of acid) into steel plates On the one hand, I’m trying to grapple that were mounted on large grey boxes with the erosion of public institutions, in the darkened space. but maybe also reveling in the ecstasy of In the second Powder Room, these melting walls, ceilings leaking Staf projected the title video On Venus, acid, maybe destroying the Serpentine a collage of abstracted footage showing altogether.” various forms of industrial farming, If Acid Rain for Serpentine Sackler from the milking of cows to the collec- Gallery transformed the building into tion of urine from pregnant female a poisoned (or maybe medicated) body horses—the latter of which is used in sustained by jerry-rigged pipework the manufacture of the estrogen- and pumps, what was the nature of its replacement drug Premarin. The flm malady? The notion that the institution crescendos through increasingly depended on the recycling of a toxic unwatchable forms of animal cruelty, substance was deliciously appealing, progressing from slaughterhouses given that its major funder’s fortune to the skinning of live raccoons and was partly made from an addictive snakes. Mercifully, it eventually segues 19 opioid. But for Staf, who identifes as into a poem by the artist describing non-binary, the body supported by the condition of living on Venus where a pharmaceutical regime also suggests “there is pressure / enough pressure afnities with the trans body. In past to crush absolute.” works, the artist has regularly described Another metaphor in the exhibi- states in which the dichotomy of health tion for what Staf describes as “a kind versus debility is impossible to parse. of ambient pressure, ambient violence” In the video Weed Killer (2017), for is acid rain, which hasn’t been high on example, the protagonist describes our growing list of environmental crises the life-saving but devastating efects for over a quarter of a century. Staf of chemotherapy; in Staf’s 16mm flm explains, “I remember as a kid thinking depollute (2018), the gruesome surgical if I went out in the rain it would burn technique of removing one’s own testi- my skin, that I’d melt like in a horror cles is reframed by its title as a cleansing, movie. But then learning that it wasn’t restorative, and even emancipatory as direct as that, that it was more action. Staf says that gender dysmor- complicated, more structural.” Staf has phia is “the main way I interface with created enveloping systems that imply the world.” In On Venus, the dysmorphic the threat of physical harm in past body was evoked by a space that felt installations too. The presence of acid discombobulating and unnatural. in the pipes around the gallery is akin Encased within the Serpentine to the vicious security spikes installed Sackler Gallery are two brick-walled around the walls of Staf’s recent exhibi- spaces, relics of the armory’s original tion Prince of Homburg, where it was architecture known institutionally not clear whether viewers were being as the Powder Rooms. In the frst, Staf’s kept in or out (out of what?), and installation On Living drew on a story whether they were being protected or published in April 2018 by British tabloid controlled. Staf’s assignation of meaning to symbols is always multi- beyond compassion,” or “asking when layered, inconstant, and subject to we’re okay with violence and when we’re reversal. In hatefull to the stomach, not okay with violence. Whether certain harmefull to the braine, a 2018 exhibition images, certain models, for killing are at Commonwealth and Council, Staf tolerable while others are not.” presented several sculptures incorporat- The questions that challenge us, ing public drinking fountains that the viewers, also challenge Staf; the recycled water in self- evidently closed artist scorns what they describe as “most systems, undoing the fountains’ artists’ obsessive relationship to their typical association with good health own individualism—myself included!” by introducing the possibility of pollu- As a trans person, Staf is expected (by tion, toxicity, or, in the case of one the public, by the host institution) to work, Public Drunk (2018), messy deliver some kind of message derived inebriation—a state that Staf associ- from—or likely about—their exceptional ates with a queer mode of being. experience of the world. “That is about Throughout the Serpentine show, how museums and institutions package Staf challenges viewers to wrestle the lives of trans people,” they say. It with ideas that are contradictory, might be tempting to assume that trans confusing, and uncomfortable. Taken issues fgure as the connective tissue together, the three parts of the exhibi- of the exhibition. But in equal measure tion seem to dangle some simplifying the show engages with incarceration, analogies (the institution as a body; animal rights, biopolitics, environmen- the animal body as an incarcerated talism, austerity politics, social and body; the trans body as an incarcerated structural violence—all wrapped up in body; the trans body as an animal body).

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