Gretchen Faust
January 1992
John LeKay continues his examination of the taboos
held by contemporary society and culture, using the functions and
conditions of the body as metaphors (Randy Alexander, October 4-26).
The works present the act of art-making as being an activity
primarily centered on a pathological ego, and which results, by its
very nature, in surrogate devices in the form of artworks.
This view is confirmed in LeKay's choice of materials, which
includes a model of a diseased scrotum, a stained orthopedic
mattress covered with large fleshy dildos, and furniture designed
around the limitations and requirements of the deformed body.
There is a quirky humor underlying the work that
reverses without warning into a strange and cutting malevolence.
Staying alive requires a certain degree of compromise, capitulation,
and death, and it is the persistent balancing of these undesirables,
as manifest in the perpetual act of decision-making, that this work
addresses in its depictions of sexual aberration, human frailty,
deformation, isolation, and illness. Three of the six works
included (all Untitled) addressed the issue of balance quite
directly, with the intended metaphorical meaning made manifest
through LeKay's choice and arrangement of found objects; LeKay
literally balances a wheelchair, in a half extended state, atop an
eight-foot-high aluminum stepladder; attaches a prosthetic leg brace
(with shoe) to a three legged chair, and suspends an invalid's
toilet seat from the ceiling with rope and C-clamps. In each,
the objects of illness or handicap are put in situations that
reflect the perilousness of that condition, which seems at first to
be a sympathetic exercise on LeKay's part. With time, however,
they elicit the feeling of being the residue of an especially mean
trick, or cruel and humiliating process. In the center of the
room LeKay suspends a simulated scrotum actually used medically to
help men determine the presence of testicular tumors. The
scrotum is at once hilarious and outrageous - its silicone skin
ripped open to reveal a tit-like nipple covered with mold.
Like some strange and rude "adults-only" version of children's
"bobbing for apples" party activity, the bubblegum-pink "castration"
dangles, evoking some sort of nightmare scene from a dream generated
by a classic paranoic psychosis. Grotesque titillation reaches
a clinically erotic climax in the placing of a human tongue, larynx,
and thyroid glands (preserved with silicone, again an actual
illustrative medical device) out of the wall at crotch height.
Dissected to expose the vocal cords, the tongue takes on an
unsettling hermaphrodite quality - its size, extension, and tip
resembling a penis, and the almond-shaped throat aperture and
surrounding flesh, a vulva. Its position on the wall confirms
a sexual reading of the work, in that it represents a taxidermic
device for a non-gender-specific autoerotic action. Even with
this piece, where the possibility for failure is so great, LeKay is
able to balance successfully between the possible pitfalls of using
such material sensationalism and disrespect bordering on the
immoral) by using the organ that generates our literal voice to get
at a profound metaphoric illustration of the manifestations of the
ego.
