Al Freeman

The sculptor Al Freeman likes to make hard things soft. In the last several years, she has made, using vinyl and Polyfill, big, squishy versions of small-scale everyday objects: a pencil, a neon-pink highlighter, a banker’s lamp, a Manila envelope, a Little Tree air freshener. If we think about this practice in the context of sex—and Freeman’s work is always about sex, or, at least, also about sex—it would seem to speak to a particular variety of male tragedy. The kind of shame that arises when a man’s softness persists over and against his need for hardness—when the performance of virility is set to commence and then fails to—is one that has been amply represented in popular culture. In Arthur Penn’s 1967 crime classic Bonnie and Clyde for instance, mega-stud Warren Beatty (of all people!) plays Clyde as impotent. “I told you I ain’t a loverboy,” he says to a confused, disappointed Bonnie (Faye Dunaway), turning away from the bed and her attempted caresses. Bonnie shoots Clyde a quick reassuring smile, but in her haunted eyes, we can see that his flaccidness has bewildered her: he can kill, but he can’t fuck. What kind of man is he?

In 1966, a year before Penn’s film came out, the art historian Lucy Lippard wrote about a group of sculptors—Eva Hesse, Gary Kuehn, and Claes Oldenburg among them—who practice, in her term, “eccentric abstraction.” These artists’ soft and lumpy objects are sensuous but not necessarily sensual, often made of synthetic, unexpected, even slightly gross materials, and, in their apparent pliability, evoked deflation and impermanence. These are sculptures, in Lippard’s words, that are “anticlimactic, with no crescendo or buildup of forms”: they are reduced Pop, last night’s vivid and shiny party costume that is now draped, crumpled, on the back of a chair. Freeman’s work follows this collapsed sensibility, and her decision to make her pieces largely wall-hung intensifies their droopiness: a forest-green extension cord, its prongs pointed downward, its wire heavy and slack; a hammer, its head folded lethargically over its handle. The objects she chooses to make, too, almost uniformly belong to the category we might call garbagio, with much of them remnants of bad behavior. In her sculptures, Freeman performs the role of eccentric abstraction’s dirtbag daughter: she has made a cracked, wobbly iPhone with chubby lines of cocaine (or, perhaps, that droopy drug, Ketamine), laid out on its screen; a cigarette butt, lopsided and smooshed; a crumpled beer can; a soft soft-pack of Camel cigs.

But back to sex. If these sculptures are anti-climactic in both content and form, so they are in sexual terms. The climax—at least the male kind—is deferred, likely forever, by hammering limpness to the wall, holding it up for all to see. And if this theme has been implicitly present in much of Freeman’s sculpture to date, her new body of work brings it to the forefront. In Tops, the artist has turned to the actual male form, fabricating lightly abstracted, oversized vinyl versions of ten of her ex-boyfriends. These man-muppets, their forms hung on the wall like so many large, saggy markers or cigarette packs, are only partly dressed. While their torsos are clad in wool outfits that Freeman has hand-made—button-downs, T-shirts, jackets, with accents such as glasses, scarves, and hairdos thrown in for good measure—their bottom halves are unsheathed, their wool dicks and balls peeking out shyly beneath their tops, from within a thicket of faux- or real-fur pubic hair.

There is a hint of revenge porn in these works, or perhaps of voodoo, with Freeman enacting a ritual by which these male subjects are turned into vulnerable objects, and the term “tops” is, of course, resonant here. It refers, literally, to the fairly elaborate outfits Freeman has fabricated for her man-dolls, but it also has S&M associations. Sex and power are inextricable, and in a misogynist culture, men are, conceivably, tops and women bottoms. Now that Freeman’s hand has rendered these tops bottomless, or, perhaps, bare-bottomed, can they still hold on to their longstanding dominant position?

The first soft sculpture Freeman ever made started with a black vinyl couch that she bought off Craigslist and then took apart, reconstituted, and hung up, its cushioned elements spread out on the wall. The couch was a bad-taste, starter-bachelor-pad couch, both repulsive and a little sexy. In splitting it up and splaying it out, Freeman showed the couch who was boss—she topped it. But there was also something in the act of putting the couch on the wall to be admired that paid it respect, even it was the sort of respect given to an old, broken-down soldier. (An aside: in the auction of the Philp Roth estate, held a couple of years ago, Freeman bought the novelist’s old sofa and installed it in her Bushwick studio. Now anyone who came over could sit on a relic that once supported the bottom of that ur-horny-daddy-genius.)

Respect the cock, as Tom Cruise’s men’s rights activist famously cried in P.T. Anderson’s “Magnolia”—even if that cock is no longer hard, or, perhaps, even more so then. (It might allow for less pleasure but is also likely to do less harm.) Looking at the men of Freeman’s Tops, I thought back on a line of Kim Gordon’s, from an essay she wrote about Mike Kelley on the occasion of that artist’s 1993 Whitney retrospective. Speaking of Kelley’s 1991 photographic series “Ah… Youth!,” which ended up being used on the cover of Sonic Youth’s “Dirty” album, Gordon noted that the dingy thrift-store stuffed animals whose portraits the work features seemed to gain a different aspect within their new context. “Up close, in person, they were dirty, missing parts,” she wrote. “But on a glossy CD booklet, they were suddenly stars.” There is something similarly multivalent about Freeman’s men. Their genitals are exposed, and they are helpless and sagging; but they are also larger than life, embodied, lovingly tended to, there to be beheld. They are, like Kelley’s bruised dolls, both weaklings and luminaries.

In an entry on the website bigdickguide.com, which I was perusing recently, a contributor weighed in on the penis size of Michelangelo’s “David”: “[David’s] penis is 2.81% of [his] body height, which works out to a raw measurement of 5.43 inches,” he wrote. “If we scale that down to a 50th percentile 5-foot 9.25-inch adult male, [it] means David’s scaled flaccid penis is 1.95 inches long—which puts him in the bottom 0.3% of penises measured.” That is one tiny penis, and, perhaps concerned about the effect of his calculations on the reader, the contributor goes on: “Before you feel bad for David, it's worth noting that he’s 1) facing down Goliath, so there’s definitely some fear shrinkage going on. And he’s also standing butt naked in the middle of a stone room while everybody looks at him. Shrinkage city, population him.” A sculptural representation of a male, in other words, can contain multitudes: it can confront Goliath, and it can shrink; it can top, and it can also bottom. This is true of David, and it is true, too, of Freeman’s men.

—Naomi Fry, 'Anticlimax Superstars: Al Freeman's Tops'