The Sex Show (text accompanying The Sex Show exhibition)

(1) Scumtrap Figure #1 (2006)
wood, foam, clothing, fabric

"I can't simply say art is a process that somehow just comes out of me, like something vomited up. That's where the difficulty begins: for, when we simply allow a process to unfold and do nothing more, forces emerge like a psychograph of pathology."

Joseph Beuys 1979

"Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir."

Friedrich Nietzsche 1886

What compels a person to make an object like Scumtrap Figure #1?

'The Sex Show' attempts to answer this question, with a collection of artworks made by Matt Lippiatt between the age of 9 and 26 years old. The works have been selected in order to trace a kind of psycho-sexual portrait of the artist during this period and up to the present.

What emerges are not only artistic intentions, but also unconscious impulses that have found form through creative activities.

These impulses fall into three categories, appearing in (roughly) chronological order:

- First, an identification with femininity and a desire to be a woman;
- Second, a repulsion and fear of female sexuality and heterosexuality;
- And third, an objectification of the male body as object of desire and target of abuse, linked to an identification with sexually ambiguous male serial-killers.

Scumtrap Figure #1 manifests the third trait. 'The Sex Show' will now retrace the story leading up to this point.


(2) Self-Portrait (1997)
ink pen on card

This drawing was made in a senior school art class when Lippiatt was aged 16.

At this time the majority of Lippiatt's artwork depicted glamorous women drawn from imagination. For an assignment on the theme of 'food' he drew a series of obese women posed in fashionable clothing (see below). Self-Portrait (1997) was a response to an assignment titled 'Me'.

By representing himself as a composite of imaginary female bodies, Lippiatt graphically revealed his repressed desire to be a beautiful woman. Remarkably, this was unintentional.

Lippiatt recalls: "Once, a teacher asked if the women I drew were the type of women I'd like to be with, or the type of woman I'd like to be. The latter suggestion shook me and I was keen to dismiss it although, of course, it was precisely the case."



(3) Stick Lady 1995 - 2007 (including Stick Lady 52) (1997-2007)
pencil, acrylic, and digital print collage on paper

Involving hundreds of drawings and spanning twelve years, the fantasy world of Stick Lady is the most extensive manifestation of Lippiatt’s fascination with the female form, inspired by Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Anjelica Huston in The Witches (1990), and promotional imagery of rock singer PJ Harvey c.1995 (see below).

The Stick Lady drawings function as part of a game, originally played with Lippiatt’s younger sister, Claire. He would make sets of character drawings which Claire scored as in a beauty contest (emphasising style rather than physical perfection). All characters were named and given storylines, often satirising contemporary issues.

50 rounds were played between 1995 - 99. In 2007 Lippiatt resumed the game, making new pictures and inviting exhibition visitors to play the role of judges. ‘The Sex Show’ includes four new paintings and will play host to the 52nd round of the competition.



(4) Untitled (dress) (1990)
home-made dress

On one occasion, with the assistance of their mother, Lippiatt designed and made this dress for his sister Claire.

Throughout childhood Claire played an important role in Lippiatt’s creative activities. Sometimes she provided a female presence through which he could vicariously act out his impulses to be a woman.

Had he felt comfortable to do so, Lippiatt would more than likely have designed the dress for himself. However, aged 11, he observed the social convention that males must not wear dresses.

(below: Untitled 1992, felt-tip pen)

Untitled (The Grand High Witch head) (1991)
papier-mâché, wire, marbles

This head was intended to form part of a life-sized sculpture of The Grand High Witch as portrayed in Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 film of Roald Dahl’s 1983 book The Witches.

The Grand High Witch character was a grotesquely disfigured child-murderer who wore a prosthetic face-mask to assume the appearance of a beautiful and stylish woman when in public. Anjelica Huston’s film performance of this role exerted considerable influence on Lippiatt from the first time he saw it, at the cinema, aged 10.



(5) Untitled (Mummy/Daddy) (2001)
papier-mâché, wood, acrylic, hooks, rope

This sculpture was made by Lippiatt, aged 20, on an art foundation course.

Untitled (Mummy/Daddy) collapses phallus and orifice onto one plane, and presents the result as ridiculous and crude. Potentially, this could be interpreted as a caricature of the male anatomy, perhaps in regard to anal penetration. However, the painted words direct the meaning toward a mockery of the genital taboo common in western families.

This sculpture anticipates the crude depiction of heterosexual (parental) sex later seen in Bedroom Door (represented in ‘The Sex Show’ by a wall-mounted axe).



(6) Bedroom Door (2006)
axe, false door, cardboard, gloss paint, door-handle

This axe is all that remains of Bedroom Door. The sculpture was originally installed imbedded in a false door fixed to a wall.

Lippiatt said: “I saw the axe as phallic, the incision in the door as a vagina-symbol, and the penetration of the blade as a representation of male-on-female penetrative sex.
I was surprised when people didn’t recognise these symbols. I regarded them as obvious. I was thinking of slang terms like ‘gash’ and ‘axe-wound’ for vagina, and ‘chopper’ for penis.”

Bedroom Door makes a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, in which a father attempts to murder his wife and child with an axe. This
reference emphasises Lippiatt’s heterophobic attitude to parental coitus, also evident in his earlier sculpture Untitled (Mummy/Daddy).



(7) Scumtrap Board (2006)
plywood, prints, paper, felt-tip pen

Paddle (Sigma Lambda Upsilon) (2006)
Paddle (Zeta Psi) (2006)
Paddle (Phi Beta Kappa) (2006)
wood, acrylic, rope, fabric, nails, screws,

The Scumtrap Board and Paddles were part of an installation which also included the Scumtrap Figures.

Scumtrap explored ritualised abuse as a convergence point between social horror (torture) and pleasure (initiation, sexual play). It reiterated the slur made between sexuality and violence in an earlier sculpture, Bedroom Door. Here, Lippiatt extends his fearful view of parental coitus to include sado-masochistic sex and group sex, both heterosexual and homosexual, linking them all to hysteria, social trauma and murder.



(8) Scumtrap Figure #3 (2006)
polystyrene, wood, wire, rope, bucket, stool, plastic bag

 

Scumtrap Figure #3 originally appeared in the Scumtrap installation, installed in a toilet bowl.

This is one of the few depictions of violence against women found in Lippiatt’s work. However, comments made during the preparation for Scumtrap reveal strategic intentions:

“The woman in the toilet is about hating the power of desire, and transferring that hatred onto the object of desire, leading to an impulse to destroy it. Personally, I feel this toward men who I find very attractive, so this sculpture would only be effective for me if it was a man’s body stuck down the toilet, with good-looking legs and butt. The only reason I’ve used a female figure is because I’ve already made a few male ones and I don’t want to limit the effectiveness of the installation to people who are attracted to men. I want to open it up to straight men and lesbians, by also using a girl’s body as the object of desire.”



(9) Cute Guys (2005)
prints, veneer pins

In this work, Lippiatt copied images of young men from amateur porn and profile websites, cropped the faces from the bodies and placed them into bogus missing persons posters.

Lippiatt treats the images as “cute” sexual objects, but plays this off against a fantasy that the men themselves are now missing, possibly deceased.

The posters inform us that there is no more than a month or so between each disappearance, and all the last sightings were within one area. This implies that there is a serial killer (or abductor) targeting good-looking young men.

Cute Guys was made at the same time as the Gein and Psycho model houses. These works introduced the sexual serial killer as an important figure in Lippiatt’s work, marking a shift from his identification with female glamour to an identification with male psychosexual dysfunction.



(10) Is There a Pattern to the Disappearances? (2006)
map, prints, tape, red wool, veneer pins

This work was made a few months after Cute Guys, and essentially reuses the same device.

The difference is that Is There a Pattern?... formed part of a larger installation involving an implied storyline about a spate of abductions of young boys.

Lippiatt assumed that people would understand that he identifies with the killer in the narrative, and that he is inviting the viewer to do likewise.

The inclusion of male children as victims is therefore a deliberate provocation: a self-conscious and cynical attempt on Lippiatt’s part to suggest to his audience that he genuinely has sexual and violent feelings toward children. This is not a trait that appears in any previous or subsequent works by Lippiatt.



(11) Untitled (selected drawings from The Second of the Second of the Second Best Ever) (2002)
ink on paper, gaffer tape

These drawings are selected from over 600 made by Lippiatt for an exhibition titled Second of the Second of the Second Best Ever. All interior walls and surfaces of the venue were covered with the drawings.

This was one of the more transparently derivative and cynical works produced by Lippiatt following his enrollment into higher art education. Here he took formal cues from Ray Pettibon’s drawing installations and combined them with an aping of Tracey Emin’s provocative confessional approach.

The point of interest in these drawings is that the production of such a large number led Lippiatt to write and illustrate seemingly every thought in his mind at the time. In the spirit of confession, he deliberately concentrated on taboo and degrading revelations.

The drawings selected here explicitly present certain traits that appear in less obvious forms in previous and subsequent works: Lippiatt’s fear of the vagina and heterosexuality; his sexual objectification of the male body, and resentment towards men who he finds desirable; and his interest in mutilation of sexualised male bodies.

(12) Psycho (2005)
cardboard, tape, cocktail sticks, acrylic

In 2005, Lippiatt became obsessed with Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho.

This led to a new-found interest in serial killers and outsiders, including Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho.

The model house shown here is based on the one that appeared in the movie which in turn was based on Edward Hopper’s 1925 painting House by the Railroad - one of Lippiatt’s favourite paintings.

Like Lippiatt, Bates was a slim white adult male (apparently) living with his mother in the paternal home. Also like Lippiatt, Bates experienced his sexuality as conflicting impulses of desire, jealousy and violence. Finally, Bates’ cross-dressing at the climax of the film chimed with Lippiatt’s frustrated childhood desires to take on the appearance of a woman.

Lippiatt identified strongly with males for the first time in the shape of sexual serial killers such as Norman Bates.



(13) Gein (2005)
cardboard, tape, acrylic

Lippiatt used photographs found on the internet to make this scale model of the farmhouse of real-life serial killer Ed Gein.

Lippiatt identified with Gein as an adult male who had lived in his deceased family’s home (by this time Lippiatt was 24 years old and living at home with his mother. His father and sister had both left). Lippiatt was fascinated by stories of Gein
at home alone, using human skin to upholster furniture, create ornaments, and make clothing.

Gein attempted to create a female skin-suit that he could wear over his own body in order to become female. It did not occur to Lippiatt that this closely recalled a previous figure that he had identified with: the monstrous Grand High Witch with her female prosthetic disguise.

By identifying with serial killers like Gein and Bates, Lippiatt consciously developed a self-image as ‘loser’ and ‘outsider’. His earlier identification with glamorous females, which he now recognised consciously, could easily be integrated into this new persona.

By 2007, aged 26, Lippiatt began to collect together and analyse his own childhood artworks, using them as evidence to construct a developmental story that would authenticate his new conception of himself as an outsider artist and a life-time case of mild psychosexual pathology.