One of the Biennale’s most talked-about works, the film attracted a steady stream of visitors, myself included, who lingered in its darkened room for suspiciously long spells, captivated by its alluring combination of charm, intellectual rigor and sexual charge
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The artist Frances Stark has been known to insist that she is a writer. It’s true that she is the author of many essays, which have been anthologized twice and are -of-consciousness style full of surprising digressions, connections and confessions. It is not uncommon, for instance, for her to reveal that she has taken a pause of a few months in between sentences. But her insistence on being a writer is perhaps also related to the fact that her artwork is marked by a dense, literary quality; she tends to gravitate toward idiosyncratic, unexpected forms of self-expression, from annotations of poetry to conversations in chat rooms to rap, which she refers to as an emancipatory form of autobiography.
To art audiences, Stark is perhaps best known for the work she made for the Venice Biennale in 2011, borne of her experience in the virtual rooms of Chatroulette, an online social portal hookupdate reddit introduced to her by her students at the University of Southern California, which she used over a period of months to have conversations and virtual sex with men of diverse ages and shapes from around the world. The resulting feature-length video, “My Best Thing” (the title is a reference to one of her lovers’ pet names for his penis), turned the transcripts of Stark’s exchanges with two of the men into conversations spoken by hokey avatars resembling semi-nude Playmobil characters. The topic shifted from hammy erotica to lofty ruminations on creativity to discussions about the Arab Spring, which was unfolding at the time.
Junk mail, job concerns, a lover’s penis and a young male muse called Bobby Jesus – the artist’s material is her life
“My Best Thing” earned Stark a reputation as an artist with little regard for personal boundaries (or, as the art critic Jerry Saltz put it, as an artist who made high art from a “masturbatory tryst with a younger man”). Her popular Instagram feed (), which often feels a lot like her art, offers another window into her personal life; on an average day, it might include an image of text messages on her phone (“Everyday I’m hustling,” she writes to her son, Arlo, 12. “LOL,” he responds); a doctored image of the front cover of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” featuring the rapper Sean Paul; and a picture at an L.A. party of herself, Arlo and Bobby Jesus, a young Chicano with long dark plaits whom Stark calls her muse (“Impossible Demographic #thrasher”).
Youthful at 48, Stark hides behind long choppy bangs and has a shy, tomboyish affect only occasionally undercut by astonishing erudition. Many of her artworks rely on complicated backstories involving chance meetings that often take on mythical qualities – how, for instance, in 2010, on a flight from New York to L.A., she met Skerrit Bwoy, then a leading practitioner of “daggering,” a frenetic Jamaican dance style that incorporates wrestling and dry humping, and later staged a performance with him for Performa 11, in which he daggered her, to the shock and confusion of the assembled.
Credit. Ink, collage on paper, 14 x 11 in. (35.5. x 28 cm). Anonymous loan. Image courtesy of Galerie Buchholz Cologne & Berlin
Credit. Sumi ink on arches paper with collage, vacuum sealed on aluminum and wood, 58 x 38 in. (147.5 x 96.5 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of the artist