It Can’t Be Helped: DW Fitzpatrick

To experience the everyday as a stream of insatiable curiosities is the sort of feeling adults are supposed to outgrow, but some of us don’t know how to do that. Or we simply refuse it, because a world governed by the imagination is preferable to exterior social systems we didn’t design, but can only counteract through acts of imagination, and willful recalibration. And so the mundane becomes a space for reorganizing impulses that refuse to be dulled. Impulses are best when sharp, big baguettes best kept standing tall.

DW Fitzpatrick’s recent installation The Baton at Art In General’s Storefront Project Space brought sculpture and photography together as an indivisible unit of thought. The Baton treats the lexicon of surrealism with an invigorated immediacy, a sense of play that could only happen now. The installation was comprised of a large freestanding pipe cut-out, a human-sized cast sculpture of a baguette leaning casually against the wall, and a video stream of photographs by Fitzpatrick’s everyday findings in urban space. Some of the photographs both overtly sexual and steeped in hilarity.

A couple of weeks ago, Fitzpatrick leaned back on the studio chair and said “…it’s how I deal with many serious issues: I use humor to own it.” And Fitzpatrick has tackled serious issues, both personal and social, by cultivating an arc of happenstances shaped by a freewheeling wit that is, in one word: inexhaustible.

“There are lots of childish phallic jokes in my pictures. Blatant perversions in the PG-13 range. Bottle necks, beads of water, flowing hoses, things like that.”
—DW Fitzpatrick

At the time of writing this, my Twitter feed is flooded with child-like drawings of sharpened pencils in solidarity with the Charlie Hebdon attack in eastern Paris yesterday. Pencils as tools, AK-47s, bullets. Scrolling through, I think about the power of humor, and the strategies of its deployment. When is humor playful, when is it bigotry? When is humor a method for breaking down an unfit social armature, when is it complicit with the unfit system?

At the time of our interview—between the Millions March NYC on December 13, and the Charlie Hebdon attack on January 7—we met at Fitzpatrick’s studio, where another brown pipe was wedged in one of the walls. We talked about the relationship between photography and sculpture, the role that photography has played in Fitzpatrick’s development as an artist, and all the ritzy wonder that surrounds a practice committed to seeing and shaping, from that point of intelligence.

The active surveyorship of the flâneur is important to Fitzpatrick. And after having marched on different dates in support of #blacklivesmatter, we could not avoid discussing the basic politics of public space, where race, gender, and class inevitably intersect: “The death of Eric Garner, was very upsetting. The broken windows thing needs to get done away with. It’s outrageous that police were harassing that guy for selling loose cigarettes. That is a market, it should be a job.”

As Fitzpatrick shared that observation, I thought of when I first saw the life-sized baguette from the street. Standing in that butch stance of leaning confidently against the wall, placed in a spot of privileged seeing—to scan as much of the room as possible. Kind of like that old-school thing where the masculine one goes on a date, and always takes the seat facing the whole restaurant, and all its ensuing activity. From Fitzpatrick’s observation on the racial tensions of public space, I found more cultural elasticity in the stance of the life-sized essential substance of bread (the body), and the pipe cut-out—in all its Freudian undertones, it continuously speaks to the power of perceptions.

The Baton can also be read as a question: who in space surveys, who is being perceived and how? When I laughed at the photo stream in the window, I didn’t feel shame or guilt—I laughed at the visual puns because they remind me of all the funny things we cannot outgrow but keep us humble. It’s the spark that “can’t be helped,” the inevitable slips of the bizarre that permeate our perceptions and bring an unexpected re-ordering of life as we thought we knew it.

At a time where humor and satire are under scrutiny, The Baton is a relevant reminder that humor can also be deployed as the richest form of commentary—Wit; and it can be given the sultriest form of pleasure—the unknowable.

What follows is an interview with DW Fitzpatrick conducted in 2014.