EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/yAJ0e.jpg)
Fuddx's seminal Fucktronic, America! Iteration 34: Granting Indulgences, one of 48 pieces on display at MoMA this summer.
Every few decades, an artist crosses our landscape whose sheer force of talent demands our attention. In their work we seek grace, we seek sublimity, but mostly we seek ourselves. The mirror Fudd would show us is not always clean, and it will not make us look pretty, but it will help us see.
In Fuddx's latest work, we really start to see all the elements of the artist emerge. He's really finding his footing and, with each stride more confident than the last, is venturing boldly into new aesthetic territory. Immediately, we're barraged with phallic imagery, a subtle reminder that, even in a world where a man is designing balloon halter tops, cock is king. By staging the framing of the picture at a dutch angle, Fudd ramps up the psychological tension of the scene, and the viewers' uneasiness is palpable. By cleverly manipulating the focus, Fudd has added a dreamy, haunting quality that floats in your mind long after the picture has left view, but it's not until we delve further into the scene's many details that we start to understand what Fudd means to tell us with this work.
The most obvious is the mannequin. Clearly meant to represent contemporary African-American culture, the doll cuts a striking figure. The arms, shorn off their shoulders, clearly symbolize the black community's struggle for power, while the lack of head and face provides perhaps the most salient commentary on the issues of self-identity since DeCesare's The Last Shadow. Around it's neck, a golden choker pays a grim nod to a history of oppression and a worrying trend of indulgent consumerism that threatens to erode decades of progress.
A lesser artist might have left the statement at that, content with tackling only a few major issues, but Fudd is a master in his prime and has gifted us with a trove of insights, not mere observations but also suggestions on how we understand ourselves both as indivuduals and as a whole.
Perhaps the most alluring part of the scene is the subject itself, the artist. Here, Fudd has juxtaposed the fashion sense of an adult caucasian male with the body language of a sassy Latino girl, as if to say, "Am I the boy next door? Am I Rosie Perez? Do you find me erotic?" Questions that will no doubt linger. The seductive pose and bubbly, revealing halter top hearken back to an Americana that's long dead, since replaced soulless greed and consumerism, clearly represented by the invisible subway sandwich in his hand. How can that which is not there nourish us? Are we perhaps all dining on an invisible sandwich, licking our chops and impressed with our luck? Have we all been hoodwinked? I don't know, but Fudd makes me need to find out.
“Fucktronic, America!” continues through Oct. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.
