Happening, Not Yet: Justin Beachler’s Vibratory post/prePerformance Objects

Justin Beachler has maintained an internet persona that, through an endless visual and

hashtag time suck, evokes an addict-like deadhead figure that oozes pitiful, basement

masculinity. Over time, Beachler has formed physical manifestations of this persona through

immersive installation practices. However, the exhibition Old and in the Way, at Haw

Contemporary, is the first time I have witnessed the conversation between screen/object

occur under such “normal” conditions as the commercial gallery space.

Image Courtesy of Justin Beachler, documentation by Timothy Amundson

This collision, between internet-persona, artifact and white-cube gallery, is not an uncommon

one; plenty of galleries are scouring Instagram art in order to produce new art show content.

However, it is rare to come across such work at local commercially motivated spaces.

Beachler’s show was in a small gallery at Haw Contemporary, and in the corner of the space

was Scum Rigs: a tree of colorful bottles and La Croix cans, pieced together with tape, rings,

and small totems. The sculpture sits below eye-level, it does not overwhelm you, and looks

like garbage; the viewer literally looks down on it, and in doing so, one begins to find patterns

at work. The flecks of trash are pipes: Their color and rigorous carelessness implore the

viewer to touch them. These objects are slap-happy yet quietly depressing: Where’s the

party? Did it already happen? Is it going to happen? Like a college dorm filled with pasty bros

and their empty liquor bottles, Scum Rigs is both a commemoration of consumption and a

poignant showcase of the sad male. While both bottles and pipes get passed around, the

construction of Beachler’s pipes in Old and in the Way suggest attentiveness to the antisocial

aspects of consumption, and perhaps addiction, that is both humorous and vulnerable.

In this way, Scum Rigs simultaneously showcases the residue of Beachler’s persona,

use/performance with the object, invitation for others to perform, and our own consumptive

tendencies as viewers.

Beachler’s Instagram account is a constant and consistent report of “shit posts” that begin to

speak back and with one another. The colors, objects, and forms begin to weave in and out

of each screen, developing compulsive compositions. These generate visual traces that work

at altering loaded consumer content by way of repetition and erasure, yet produce a figure

(persona) behind the work/posts that may well be a cis-het white divorced dad that believes

The Dead never broke up, and is always trending “one step behind the kids” but ready for the

apocalypse. Beachler imagines and paints a depressing, flattened, but constantly reworked

picture of an internet breakdown as understood by someone who still believes Microsoft

Paint is the best creative tool at hand. This figure, arguably, displays a kind of vulnerability

that only the internet can produce: one that is unabashed about guilty/not guilty pleasures

and uncomfortable personal opinions, all the while safely tucked away behind LEDs. And,

this is where Beachler’s persona is complex: while he may be ironically gesturing toward 20-

something art bros who create internet-style Arte Povera, he still makes the work. Again, if

the visual “fuck you” were a one- off, we may comfortably “locate” the process; however,

Beachler’s repetition asks us to question sincerity, even in jest.

Screenshot of Justin Beachler’s Instagram

To see one Instagram post, on its own terms, may not mean much: one has to follow the

work, see timecodes on posting, the rants on the art world mixed in with ironic cultural

critiques. Yet in this visual/textual collision, Beachler understands the medium of Instagram

acutely: Knowing that these images will always display in a series of nine, as one scrolls

infinitely on his feed, there is an aesthetic flow. In this way, Justin’s work requires timebetween

us- in order to understand the totality of his visual world. For me, interest in the

Instagram/Facebook performance lies not within the seemingly shitty posts, but the

performative logic behind the images; it is in this logic, that content and visual coherence

emerges.

Similarly, Scum Rigs requires all of the objects/bongs to be present in order to develop visual

and conceptual content between them. It is in these interconnected relationships that the

performative aspects of the work engender discomfort, as we begin to imagine the figure

behind the work, the pathetic male who cannot quite securely understand his own

stoner-meandering and making.

Image Courtesy of Justin Beachler, documentation by Timothy Amundson

[Viewers] Engaging in the digital and/or physical “present” may not be the best word to locate

the work, nor is presence: as both are used to describe a performative moment; rather, his is

a troubled, certainly not stagnant, art whose affect may more aptly be described as objects

“at rest.” They are in between: relics of performance practice, yet invite the viewer to pick up

and hold, smoke, and throw away; creating a unique condition of physical intimacy with the

work.

The relics that make up Scum Rigs are shrine-like, not quite tongue-in-cheek nor one-liner,

as an overall attentiveness to the objects breaks away notions of imbued irony. Maybe Justin

wishes the work to present as careless, but, like his Instagram posts, it doesn’t, and can’t;

the commitment toward making is too neurotic. We can see decision making in how color is

applied, tape is wrapped, how the objects are balanced within the sculpture. In these

moments, the relationship between performative hand and visual mark become clear, the

divisively pathetic yet aesthetically acute fuse. So, with sticky vibrations, the work sadly

rests. However, the presumed “pathetic- aesthetics” is not inherently a problem. Plenty of cishet

white male artists have worked with tensions of failed masculinity: Acconci, McCarthy,

and Kelley (to name a few) have all performed “pathetic male.”

Image Courtesy of Justin Beachler, documentation by Timothy Amundson

Scum Rigs’ corporate bottles-cum-pipes directly attends to the line(s) between the online

persona and object materialization. Specifically, the use of La Croix cans makes mention to

the company’s resurgence among both Millennials and those who are looking to “cut back”

on drinking (Mary Choi writes an op-ed piece on her hilariously serious La Croix addiction

here). Within the context of a for-profit gallery, Beachler’s dirty physical repository for an

ephemeral practice dramatically calls attention to how “feel-good” and comfortable art culture

can become gutted, gnawed at, and perverse. The physical object by way of durational

online work, Beachler’s Scum Rigs pushes us to consider complacency within our aesthetic

consumption practices: ways in which we perpetuate awful aesthetic styles through

comfortable Kansas City buying power.

The white-walled, track-lit rectangular space at Haw Contemporary may actually provide an

uncomfortable impact and humorous reflection on Kansas City’s aesthetic tendencies toward

provinciality and normalcy. These performative “in between objects”—used up yet

simultaneously imparting our attention by way of repetition and physical care—are the

result/invitation of a persona that dives deep into a tie-dye highlighter palette of irreverence,

fading, falling out, addiction, obsession, and regret; reminding viewers that we are not only

complacent, but encouraging. Proposing a consideration of a kind of shared solipsism often

only reserved for solemnly fingering through shit-post internet/Instagram archives while

getting fucked up with “friends.”