On October 14th, I clocked out of my day job and was seized by a want for sensuous experience. I needed to be gripped by art of some kind and brought back to life from the quotidian routines of the office, which left me feeling hard-boiled, bored, and cold. Listening to my gut, I travelled to Yabu Pushelberg, the creative design studio in Toronto’s East End, where I knew Toronto-based photographer Christopher Sherman’s first solo exhibition, Your Shame Bores Me had opened the week before.
In a press statement for Your Shame Bores Me, Sherman describes the nearly forty photographs that constitute this work as “what happens after shame.” Avoiding the incapacity in the misnomer of ‘shame-less-ness,’ the statement presents Sherman’s mass of intimate portraits and nudes in the realm of activity in itself, beyond the status of mere material installation. Taken as a whole, these pictures of celebrities, artists, sex workers, staged wet-dreamy scenes of homosexual desire, and partakers of Toronto’s non-heteronormative intelligentsia both figurate and attempt to perform a peeling away, thrusting off, or obliterating of shame from its most recognizable habitat; the erotic Queer body.
Upon entering the gallery space, I recognized quite a bit of what I did not know until then to be Sherman’s published editorial work. However, beyond mere proximity, Sherman’s published celebrity photographs did not initially seem to bear any composite relation to the ‘hornier’ motifs which dominated the exhibition. Consider bleach-blond Hunter Schafer wrapped in kraft paper for Purpose and Perspective Magazine (2018) next to the painter Nicko Cecchini, naked except for a blue jockstrap and a blue cap labelled “CAM.” A photo of actor KJ Apa spread-eagled in a chair for Interview Magazine, a disembodied hand holding a white lint roller like a phallus over the crotch of his very lint-less red pants (2021), displayed next to a downward-facing shot of a presumably Southeast Asian man mirroring Apa’s pose inside a bathtub, a lotus flower both covering and drawing attention to the genitals.
In an interview with Interview Magazine’s art director Jack Vhay — also featured in the exhibition — published on the magazine’s website following the exhibition’s October 9th opening, Sherman credits his visual language to a belief in magic which runs through his photographs, horny and safe for work alike. “If you do everything with an open mind and an open heart, magic will happen,” Sherman says, “But you have to create a space for people to feel safe and be open…That’s why the magic happens.” Such magic one might perceive in an outdoor portrait of the great Canadian classicist Anne Carson, clad in a layered grey suit, as much as in the image beside it — an indoor nude of writer and poet Silvio Vallati lying before a bouquet of white lilies — in the grainy, nostalgic tinge they both share.
Describing Andy Warhol in the interview as his “first conscious obsession,” Sherman also places his artistic practice within “Warholism” and the pop art-isms through which Warhol’s artistic practice became a generative universe of its own. Like Warhol, Sherman aims for a Queer star system in which everyone is a star and worthy of their own spotlight. Just as Warhol photographed everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Divine the drag queen, to unidentified strangers, Sherman too seeks to capture “the full breadth of our community.” In Sherman’s portrait of Vhay, the art director poses in blue underwear briefs, holding two dumbbells in front of a glittering blue curtain.
On that Tuesday evening, when my gut tugged me towards Yabu Pushelberg, I did not yet know that Sherman would be staging a live version of his virtual Horny Newsletter in the gallery space too. In virtue of serendipity and a genuine curiosity about what “a horny place to explore the positive and beneficial world of sex and sexuality,” — as the newsletter’s website describes it — would look like live, I decided to stay for the event. What would have been — or perhaps already were — published excerpts from the real sex lives of fifteen writers, all featured in Sherman’s exhibition, were read aloud and performed to a full house of queer folk and other supporters who sat on the floor or stood against the walls, cheering, applauding, laughing, and drinking through a cornucopia of fruity alcohol. Here, in view of Your Shame Bores Me, as it framed the social event of Horny Newsletter Live, Sherman’s opus moved beyond garish spectacle, compelling serious contemplation of what ‘the good gay life’ might mean for those wanting to live beautifully after shame.
Everything happened. We listened to poetry about sex, essays, personal sex testimonies, watched a shibari rigger bind someone up in an elaborate knot; someone chugged a standard can of beer in under 10 seconds, someone started their reading with a Michel Foucault quote about festivals (necessary “other spaces” in which to displace the order of things, etc), someone delivered a grand ode to buttocks, someone wore a puppy hood and barked and crawled on the ground. When one reader explained his relation to nudity — rather than nakedness — as the putting on of a costume in order to perform as his most authentic self, the poignancy of Sherman’s entire project became clear: “Horny Newsletter Live” was “Your Shame Bores Me” in creative practice.
By mixing social groups, personalities, and communities within his photographic representation à la Warhol, Sherman’s project laboured to efface all distinction between these categories on the level of affect. By staging the upright, natural, alert, front-facing Carson in all her understated erudite glory next to the naked Silvio — lying down, side-facing, lyrically composed, lackadaisical — Sherman raises up the difference between good and bad, worthy and unworthy, the socially pure and the socially perverse so it may be cast away in the interaction of their similar beauty.
“Once [purity and impurity] are allowed to mingle, purification is no longer possible,” French philosopher René Girard writes in his book Violence and the Sacred. In its practice, “Your Shame Bores Me” understands that this ‘purification’ of Queer people (unnecessary as it is) means homophobic and transphobic violence, a unanimous purging of percieved social sickness so that society may remain healthy. Sherman labours to confront this by bringing forth our similar want for pleasure. In an audience full of Queer people who likely arrived at the gallery after a day of working and being surveilled in the world, I observed this effacing of distinctions happen in real time. After several readers, with enough joy and alcohol flowing through the crowd, the person delivering the ode to buttocks asked those who believed they had good ones to expose them to the audience. As the reader showed his, a few people stood up, giggling, and showed theirs too. We all cheered.
And yet, as I contemplated the exhibition, I couldn’t help but fixate on the phonetic movement in the description “What happens after shame”; the facticity of its downward movement in the mouth. In keeping with the idea that one must wear a mask to encounter or perform as oneself, the darker side of not only this exhibition but of Sherman’s entire oeuvre lies in how, even as the work labours to cast off the violence of shame, it must wear shame’s very face to reveal a certain truth about being queer in the world today. Though Sherman and his subjects do not possess shame in themselves, they are nonetheless possessed by it, moreso in our digital age — figuratively, descriptively, and virtually cast through the historical relations of domination, exploitation, violence against Queer, gay, and trans people, and the (ongoing) struggle for total equality. This comes up in several portraits, where Sherman’s nude subjects hold the gaze of the camera, fully aware that they are being (and will always be perceived) adjacent to shame; creating a double bind between the shamed and the shamer in which the relations of power and desire collapse and feed into one another, creating an endless loop of looking. As one reader from Horny Newsletter Live poignantly put it: “In the surveillance state, we are all cam girls.”
Injecting a touch of surrealism into the work, one subject, a Brown man in a black thong, holds the camera’s gaze as he straddles an inflatable shark. Next to that picture are portraits of Canadian fashion icon Jeanne Beker and film director Francis Ford Coppola with actor Adam Driver, all reciprocating the gaze. In one of the larger portraits, Grapes of Wrath, a photograph of an unidentified man’s abdomen, this act of holding the gaze takes on abstraction: like an engorged, bulbous eye, a mass of scrotal flesh peeks out from beneath a mound of grapes piled over the groin, portending the innocent seduction of delicious fruit and the excessive decadence of the Dionysian motif in similar festive parlance.
With such seductive visions, Sherman’s photographs do not definitively subvert the shameful gaze so much as they transform it into a kind of dress, wear it like a second protective skin, and parade around the town in it. As a description of what comes after shame, his subjects are not so much ‘the shameless’ as they are ‘the formerly ashamed,’ possibly existing in a nebulous of shame, pride, and the pleasant dream of a good gay life despite the indeterminacy and flux of living, dying, and trying to ‘make it’ in the real world. From here, as the Cuban American academic José Esteban Muñoz describes in his book Cruising Utopia, subjects perform gestures, transmitting an “ephemeral queer knowledge of lost queer histories and possibilities within a phobic majoritarian public culture” towards a pleasurable, nostalgic queerness otherwise known as utopia.
That the post-shame future described in Sherman’s utopian imagination paradoxically articulates itself through a retrospective idealism such as Warholism reads clearly. Beyond Your Shame Bores Me, in the rawer archives of Sherman’s Horny Newsletter archives, where both subject and the gaze occasionally appear naked as themselves than nude as performance, his visual language may inspire allusions to Robert Mapplethorpe’s devotion to the male form, Derek Jarman’s passion for the colour blue, and Peter Hujar’s vicious portraiture too. Still, if, as the psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis suggests, nostalgia is an attachment to an idyllic past and future born from a present sense of groundlessness — a homesickness for an other-world — Your Shame Bores Me projects from a false past into an imagined future a queerness that finds an easy comfort within our hyper-consuming, image-saturated, brand-obsessed age.
Despite poppers being illegal under Canada’s Food and Drugs Act, a life-sized imitation of a Rush Poppers bottle stood inside the exhibition with the inscription, “Never fake it!” Debaucherous vintage-style home videos played in an old SONY television beneath the Grapes of Wrath portrait. The hot flash of light in these pictures, the occasional staged fruit offering, and the rough grain against the subjects’ soft skin and hair elevate the material texture of these fantasies to a point of deliciousness, yet we cannot actually touch or taste them. Where Pontalis’ definition of nostalgia — from his 2003 collection of psychoanalytical essays “Windows” — extends to a turning-away from “what is dying,” Sherman does so to imagine fresh beginnings and places of belonging for both subjects and spectators. However, because the queer subject as such is not explicitly promised a home in a world which was not built for them, work like Sherman’s must take on the dual tenacity and transcience of ephemera.
Such nostalgic utopia constitutes Sherman’s portrait of multidisciplinary trans artist Vivek Shraya (Vivek Shraya, Sex is Sex Series) in an open pink coat, black bra and underwear, with a hand halfway down her crotch. Similarly, this nostalgia makes up producer and director Max Mohenu’s portrait; a pink fur shawl and a white jockstrap as they pose next to a vase of red flowers.
In a photograph titled Kiss More, longing for an other-world raises to a sort of meditative contemplation. A multi-racial cast of four young men keep their eyes closed as they partake in a ritual of desire. In excessive gestures of wide-open mouths and outstretched tongues, they kiss, performing an orgiastic scene for Sherman’s lens. With eyes closed, shame subverted into a seductive, protective mask slips on. The young men appear to forget themselves; instead, they pay attention to the imagined utopia at the centre of the desire ritual. Up to its extreme, such attention the 20th-century mystic and philosopher Simone Weil, in her posthumously published Gravity and Grace, describes as a form of prayer and creative activity in itself. “But how could a four-way homosexual kiss invoke the sanctity of a prayer circle?” one might ask. Because any attention in the Weilian sense presupposes both faith and love.
Taking both Sherman’s exhibition and Horny Newsletter Live as acts of attention towards grappling with what queerness means in the world today, I left Yabu Pushelberg that Tuesday night genuinely moved by what I had seen. As a reminder that contemplation must meet practice, Your Shame Bores Me and Horny Newsletter present love and sex as gateway drugs. Where to, you ask? Simply wherever happiness happens to find us.
Jonathan Divine Angubua holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with concentrations in Political Science, History, and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He enjoys any interesting art and is always looking for great book recommendations. As a writer and lover of fashion, he is most inspired by strangeness and beauty.