Whitney Hubbs “Animal, Hole, Selfie”

SITUATIONS

[Image: Whitney Hubbs "Selfie" (2020)]

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Whitney Hubbs gives us four positions to work from here. The first three are categories in black and white – pictures that bring language into the room (“animal”, “hole”, “selfie”), jumping off points, obsessive returns, ideas that won’t leave the artist or that the artist can’t leave. Each is symbol, metaphor, talisman, category, and provocation. And they are, together, the armature of an amateur psychoanalysis conceived ad hoc. The fourth position (the subject / patient in my psychoanalytic metaphor) is the mirror covered in contact prints of Hubbs’ 4x5 negatives. The images are of the artist herself in a detournement of low, rough pornographic pinups. These pictures are steps into the abyss doubling as chances played for connection. They are degradation staged as eroticism (and vice versa), and they open into a wealth of both/and binaries in the attraction / repulsion or sex / violence mode — not least of which is a surfeit of animal feeling drawn tight against conceptual thinking.

The usual place for this kind of complexity when approaching the body is in theories of sexuality, and for the content here - specifically in considerations of fetish or BDSM, which do indeed offer a compelling point of entry. But, as shorthand, sex makes for an overly narrow accounting; as also at work in Hubbs photographic performances are a teaching life upstate, online dating, decent therapy, winter, aging, humiliation, family, illness, death, loneliness, resistance, joy, humor, friendship, and formalism. Hubbs is enacting a set of psycho-physical potentials based on a skeleton of facts and evoking strategies from her own punk rock past. But at the crux, is an artist bravely searching for an alternative to the burdensome weight of American optimism, somewhere down in Acker or Beckett’s register, and is generous enough to share it with us.

-Lucas Blalock