This post contains images that are NSFW.
Chivas Clem is a queer artist from Paris, Texas whose new collection, Shirttail Kin, is a study of the masculinity he sees around him. Texas is a state that often makes the news for its Death Row executions, abortion laws, and border control controversies, and last year outlawed drag performances, before the legislation was overturned for being unconstitutional.
Clem found his hometown hostile when he was growing up, moving away to New York where he lived for years making art. Following recovery from addiction and a nervous breakdown, he returned to Paris years later and began to photograph the local men he hired to work in his studio. The men are all transient in some way—drifters, addicts, felons. A subculture living in the shadow of the American Dream.
Today’s discourse on masculinity usually revolves around its perceived toxicity—patriarchy, sexual violence, privilege, and poor mental health. Clem’s delicate photos portray vulnerability, poignancy, and an outsider sense of fraternity as the men wield guns, shoot up, lie naked, piss, hunt, and smoke.
Shirttail Kin is exhibiting at Dallas Contemporary gallery from October 17, and is Clem’s first solo museum show. I caught up with him for a chat.
VICE: Hi Chivas. How did the project begin?
Chivas Clem: I hired them all to help me in the studio. They were terrible workers [laughs]. They’d just take a nap, or take a bath, or sit and eat a banana. I started taking these short videos and photos of them. You know the famous term “deplorables” that Hillary Clinton used [to describe Donald Trump’s voter base]? I think that was terrible and alienated so many people. I was thinking about what it meant. What is a deplorable? What do they look like?
I was also thinking about this kind of masculinity that seems outdated, but it’s not outdated in Texas, where I grew up. I thought it would be interesting to document this subculture, which is peculiar to America. A huge swath of the American South is like this.
What can you tell me about the men in the photos?
A lot of them just come from poor, rural communities in the South. Not just North Texas, but Southeast Oklahoma and Northwest Arkansas. Not all of them, but lots of them have been affected by addiction, by poverty, by systemic generational abuse. Things that reflect the landscape around them. But that’s not to say they’re just ‘That One Thing.’ I think there’s more to them than that. Nobody is just one thing. One guy that has sat for me for many years is a brilliant, brilliant poet, and a country and western singer who plays like, eight instruments. If he’d been born into different circumstances he would have gone to NYU music school and he’d probably have five albums by now.
Did you set out to offer a different perspective of masculinity?
No, I didn’t. I didn’t have any set criteria. Of course I know about toxic masculinity, and feminism, and the patriarchy, but I had to put all that to the side, really. I just wanted to photograph what was in front of me. I found there was a huge discrepancy between their exterior and interior. They look like these very menacing, dangerous, hyper-masculine men, right? One of them has a swastika tattoo, which of course, people immediately think of white supremacy when they see it. He got this tattoo when he was in prison. Do I think he’s actually committed to white supremacy? No, not really. It’s just a sign of this hard exterior.
Then, inside, all of these men were very vulnerable, tender, fragile. We can talk about mental health and toxic masculinity and all those things, but I think my work isn’t just about that. It’s about the human condition. An exterior and an interior that just don’t match.
I’m interested in what brings all of these people and yourself together at this point in American history…
Modern America and, even more generally, middle-class America does this. Right now in America there’s a real crisis of masculinity. That’s because of the rise of fascism in America, and the weird backlash against LGBT people—against drag, against anything that breaks down those traditional things. Those have really been under fire the past five or six years. The crisis of masculinity is people coming to terms with that, you know?
When you live out in the country, you’re not exposed to things. They all went to church—that still has a real stranglehold on young people—and they all watch Fox News too, which is its own kind of hyper-dangerous propaganda. That’s all about nostalgia for an old America. Where Black people knew their place, where white men controlled things, women didn’t have control of their bodies […] There’s this incredible wave of nostalgia for a time that never really was.
There’s a lot of repression, too. I had this model who was very, very, very transphobic. I mean, it really upset him; the idea of trans people. And then it turned out he was really trans amorous—so he’s actually attracted to trans people. He just didn’t know how to have a voice for that. It’s the return of the repressed. I think the crisis of masculinity fits into that, too. America is definitely at a crossroads and at a dangerous point.
Drug addiction can be disempowering and humiliating for anyone who’s in the throes of it. Are drugs something you consciously wanted to tackle in this project?
It’s just part of how they live. I didn’t want to edit the work to overly romanticize drugs, but I also wanted to cover their entire journey. I photographed them doing everything: shooting up, smoking crystal meth. I didn’t want to sanitize it at all.
Tell me about the process of taking the photos.
I feel like a lot of my models are like actors without movies. There’s no script, there’s no screenplay, there’s no movie, but a lot of them really took to being on camera. They rose to the occasion. They liked being looked at. There’s also something about being seen like no one had seen them before. There’s something very poignant about having somebody see you.
I chose them because they’re wildly charismatic or wildly magnetic. Not just beautiful, but there’s something inside of them. I think there’s something about an imaginary narrative or an imaginary cinema that they can see. That’s part of the work as well.
So in the US you’ve got an election in a few weeks. When it comes to the exhibition, is that on your mind?
The curator really liked the idea of the show being up during the election cycle. Someone asked me if these guys are all Trump supporters. I said they probably would be, because they might want a pathological daddy figure. But almost all of the men in my pictures either cannot vote or wouldn’t vote. They cannot vote because they’re felons, or they would not vote just because they don’t participate in the world like that. They don’t pay taxes. They don’t participate in the political system.
People often get reduced to their political beliefs, but I feel your work offers something different. It shows humanity in three-dimensions. Do you feel there’s joy in this work?
One of the reasons I liked all of these guys is because they’re free. They don’t follow the rules of society. They don’t feel like they have to go to college. They don’t feel like they have to get married. They don’t feel like they have to have children, although some of them do have children. They’re thrill seekers. Whether that ultimately ends tragically is another issue. There is a certain freedom in their criminality, and a romance in that. They get high and fuck all the time. There’s a beauty, romance, and joy in that. Their lives are just different to mine. I feel that their individual spirits come through in the photos, and it’s not all coded at tragedy.
‘Shirttail Kin’ is exhibiting at Dallas Contemporary gallery from October 17
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The post The Drifters, Addicts, and Felons of America Derobe for Chivas Clem appeared first on VICE.
The post The Drifters, Addicts, and Felons of America Derobe for Chivas Clem appeared first on VICE.
