2025
All Walls Fall
I was born a decade too late to meet any of my favorite artists, before they withered and died of AIDS. Now I'm stuck cruising library shelves, shutting my cock in-between pages of dusty retrospectives and intellectual posturing about "queer possibility." I resent the fact that I would look right-at-home in a Tom of Finland postcard. But I was born just in time to give Michael Fried an open-mouth kiss as he's on his way to a lecture about how "great" art used to be. With his parting breath, he leaves the words in my mouth, "par excellence faggot sensibility." I don't know what he means, but it feels foundational.
I paid rent for the past eighteen years to live inside the body of a straight man. Inflation being what it is, I couldn't afford to stay there any longer. Maybe I should be forced to go work on Wall Street or something; that's really a passive reading of what's being done to me. I'm just looking for a two-bedroom condominium: one for me, and one for me. I'll sublet the closet.
When you step into the gallery I'll already be there. I'm inside the walls groping blindly for the last traces of Who-Gives-A-Fuck. The bull market is over. We both know why you're here, and I'm just trying to hold out long enough until painting comes back into vogue. You interested? Listen, between you and me, I got this show coming up; yea, group show fucking whatever, but it's gonna be a pretty big thing. I promise you'll see a return; my market's growing. It's called investing. Look, please, I just need enough money to fund this next thing I got in the works. I shouldn't be telling you this, but I've been in talks with Jeffrey Deitch. Here watch:
"My name is Jake Quinlan. I am a sculptor and a performance artist. I pursue means of control, authority, and expectation - especially as it involves an audience placed within the gallery and my role as an artist responsible for prescribing that experience. The artist capitalizes on power and exerts it upon an audience by way of "their" collectively socialized body; twisting, subverting decorum and our ways of understanding these rigidly defined spaces. To make seeing an aggressive act. I'm simply asking, "why do people flinch when you put a hole in the gallery wall?" There's nothing good in there, anyway.