Marc Swanson is the archetypal constructivist artist for today. I can make this seemingly bizarre statement with assurance because I know it isn’t easily contradicted. The term constructivism, from the time of its introduction by Gabo and Tatlin in 1920, designated a complex of related meanings and intentions, rather than a straightforward one-dimensional style or ideology. Related terms, which all share the etymologically-loaded root “struct,” have so many applications in the present discourse of the visual arts as to be almost unbounded: structure, structuralism, construction, constructivism, constructionism, deconstruction.

The historical term, originating in the Russian avant-garde, is primarily associated with a rigorously-reduced abstract aesthetic. This led from one of its primary iterations in the nec-plus-ultra of Rodchenko’s red, yellow and blue monochromes – designated by the artist as “the end of painting” – to the larger rubric of Minimalism that still had the name Constructivism in certain times and places, the last great surge in the UK in the ’50s and ’60s. The more expansive reading of the term that I propose here, while firmly grounded in the intentions of the term’s originators, eschews the normal visual markers that casual students of art history associate with the movement. This next likely segment of Constructivism’s century-long trajectory includes works that are varied in their form and material, but in their logic approach all forms of culture as already-syncretic, as derived from multiple and diverse points of origin and as calling out to be combined anew for the creation of unforeseen possibilities.

This Constructivism for the (not-so) new millennium has found a quintessential practitioner in Swanson. His boxes with t-shirts and chains, his glittery taxidermy forms and monstrous self-portraits – all rife with freewheeling, overlaid and conjoined pop-culture associations – propose new models for building artworks and lives. In many of the primary devices used by the artist, building a new whole from parts is the crucial formal device from which the rest of his content springs.

From his earliest mature works, Swanson’s main theme has been how he has constructed himself from pieces. In a natural process of living as a curious and evolved being exposed to sensations, seductions and contradictory influences, he picks and chooses his own ways to be and behave. Through his brave self-revelations, Swanson triggers in his viewers an empathic identification. Rather than being left in the merely passive role of audience for his terminal uniqueness, spectators are invited to enjoy an opportunity to better consider their own unlikely paths of self-creation. This is just as true for those whose life-paths – unlike Swanson’s and my own – have never led to punk mosh pits, cocaine-fueled discos or leather bars. It would only be a slight exaggeration to claim that few viewers will find no basis for identification with an artist as conspicuously and frailly human, and of his times, as Swanson.

From the above description, Swanson’s work might sound exhibitionistic and egotistical. This is not the case because of two aspects of his personality that, inflecting his studio decisions, short-circuit the viewer’s natural tendency to recoil and mutter “shut-up” in response to too much information too fast. One is Swanson’s habit of making choices of imagery that require his viewers to dig and decode before they get to any biographical content. Such devices are not mere mannerist-conceptualist tropes, but function more like the truism that after you’ve gone to the trouble to pick the lock of a diary, you can’t very well be angry at what you find inside. Second is the artist’s self-criticality verging on self-deprecation. His sculptures of himself as Yeti (“Killing Moon” from 2005-2007) began as investigations into how natural history museums falsify the nature of the animals they display in ways that reveal human delusions about human nature. In an unanticipated moment of psychoanalytic discovery, the artist realized the delusion he was deconstructing was his own, resulting in sad self-portraits. Even though hunted and frail, the Yeti is capable of damaging those he tries to love but instead takes hostage. Swanson has described the Yeti’s way of being – preoccupied with the gathering and arranging of objects, but never holding on to what he wants and needs – as like his own. This aspect of the Swanson persona – strength undercut by timidity – persists into his recent works like the “Love Is All Around” video. In a quick viewing of its sexy nightclub-land, flesh-and-muscles, rock-video aesthetic, the constructed subject first comes across as lord of the backrooms of East Village gay bars, but the real protagonist is more than likely a scared voyeur who grasps the video camera as a justification and defense that allows him to be in spaces he finds terrifying.

Swanson’s object-based revelations perfectly rhyme content with form. Just as his recollections and memories refuse to form a coherent whole, his uses of materials and narratives are similarly roughly sutured. Both his physical and mental gaps are never hidden but always in plain view. Again, as in the psychotherapeutic process of excavating those past moments when we fused disparate elements into workable wholes, it’s in the gaps where we must dig. And while the objects in Swanson’s signature pieces relate directly to his biography, the larger thematic concern of his work is the constructive task itself. One of the narrative lines in his studio follows knowledge gained over time about families of origin. We overcome the tendency to misapprehend the role of our parents’ failings in our own development and, as we grow, move from judgment to identification, finding them less different from us after all.

The constructive process begins when we are children. Swanson grew up in rural New Hampshire and fancied himself the product and heir of rugged New England traditions. Yet that legacy has revealed itself to be more fiction than fact, an insupportable fantasy created by his father in some troubled relationship with his father, the artist’s paternal grandfather. The family’s circumstances were actually more suburban than deep-woods, but the artist’s father’s aspiration was to be more of the archetypal hunter that he felt grandfather Swanson hoped he would be. In reality, he was a suburban dad to a sissy son, a son so shamed by his identity that as a young artist he absorbed an impossibly romantic, rural, back-to-the-land-upbringing as his own.

This imagined background became more significant as Swanson followed his sensibility into the self-conscious, urban, decadent world of rockers, trannies and addicts. If he had not had the myths of a rural upbringing to frame and contrast with his journey into the netherworld, he would have had to invent it, just as his father invented his own mythic identity. But for different reasons. In Swanson’s urban milieu where he was nicknamed “The Puritan” by his San Francisco friends, he got to be country-boy-on-the-skids, a different sort of special than that of his more theatrical and slutty comrades.

The artist moved first to Boston, then San Francisco and Seattle before landing in New York City where he moved freely between the worlds of art, music, fashion and performance. The majority of our studio-visit discussion consisted of the two of us excitedly listing places we had been, scenes that we felt ourselves part of, records and bands we loved and our experiences of being gay men of adjacent generations who hadn’t died in the first wave of the epidemic. This fundamental bonding activity is the way culturally engaged people negotiate and learn the parameters of the unknown person before them, a thinker’s version of dogs sniffing each other’s butts. We learn how to place every utterance via these catalogs of identifications and perceived similarities, listing an itinerary of discovered samenesses, differences and histories of belonging.

Even children are highly attuned to the category distinctions of clothing, manners and speech that divide others’ ways into “same-as-me” and “different-from-me.” For those like the artist and the writer and, I suspect, many reading this essay, the youthful presumption that “others-like-me” were scarce led to desperate times and profound loneliness. When someone shared a few traits, it was cause for rejoicing. This experience never changes, and something as simple as seeing a stranger seated across from you on the subway reading the book you just finished and liked will make the world seem safer.

We can do the same type of inventory while standing before artworks (“Warhol was clearly thinking like I do when he…”). This in fact causes those of us who truly love art to feel the call from our earliest encounter with it and get ourselves back to the place where eccentrics and misfits are the norm and are, in fact, celebrated. This leads to our illusion that we commune with art’s makers even when they are far away or deceased. Swanson’s works in the here-and-now share many cultural points of reference with his audience that may be more real than illusory: if you feel him to be your brethren, he probably is. Many people of similar sensibility I sent to his last gallery exhibition felt they knew him from viewing the show.

I have to admit this is a tricky area to write about for a general audience in an exhibition catalog intended to enjoy an afterlife beyond the dismantling of the show. To say that we, as writer and artist, communed over our common histories might make readers who have never drowned in those tidal waves of glitter and testosterone think that this essay and Swanson’s art are not for them. This would be a misreading. Rather, this discussion of our discovered commonalities is meant to serve as a specific example of an activity that is fundamental to all human intercourse.

The experiences we both had, along with those we did not share, are only somewhat influenced by the hard facts of biographies, such as my being older and taller than the artist and having had an urban upbringing. The magic term “sensibility” explains more, and allows us to see that we are brethren because we were interpellated as subjects – to employ a useful if obscure term from Althusser-via-Samuel R. Delany - by the same things. Explained simply, some artwork, song or piece of clothing has literally reached out to us from the vast sea of human products and asked for our active participation. We therefore understand ourselves as subjects because we responded strongly to that stimulus, and understand ourselves as being part of an unplanned, non-family-based community because we find others who also responded to that stimulus. We dress ourselves and choose companions based on this primordial identification.

Though as two gay white guys a little less than a decade apart in age, Swanson and I will likely have no more in common than any two women, here we can recall Simone de Beauvoir’s universal dictum: “One is not born, but becomes a woman.” When I quote this to students, I tend to extemporize “is always becoming” onto what Ms. de Beauvoir actually wrote. Some of them pick up on the sloppiness of my recollection. I defend my version as a reinvention of her work for queer theory, or claim that whichever mentor first cited it to me added those words to make it a continual process. Either way, in my own mental cut-and-paste operation, it remains in that on-going form.

Some such construction is always unquestionably required for gay men. (It might be needed for everyone. I’m not sure. Those with the most power tend to reinvent themselves least, despite easier access to better resources to do so, so relevant evidence is slim to naught.) The theory from sociology is social constructionism, popularized in the ’60s and best understood as the way in which those in communities develop a collective imaginary that all can use to understand themselves and thereby function better together as a group in a sometimes hostile world. Social Constructionism has been used in queer theory as the answer to problematic essentialist assumptions that claim we are mere manifestations of some pure, preexisting, mythic being. While Constructivism and Constructionism are not as closely related as concepts as they are as words and sounds, I claim that they are in fact truly synonymous. Each signifies a building or structuring from disparate elements—the specific meaning and arguable truth of the elements is inconsequential except in their use as constructive components; that is, the constitutive elements share a real, not pseudo-linguistic, relationship.

It is with the received patrimony from his father and grandfather that Swanson’s constructs begin. Even though more invented than real, it is still the base on which all other elements in his biography and sculptures build. Each act – whether making additions to his record collection from queer metal to disco, to buying clothes – further builds these personas. Because the first construction in our teen years is the most memorable, each subsequent rebuilding adds content to that original work, so that many of Swanson’s best-known works recall his teen obsessions more than his passions of today.

I think that this act of self-building through parts is nearly universal to all types of people, whether they have ever had a self-reflective thought or not. It has an almost direct equivalent in the type of constructivist work emphasizing hand-joining and three-dimensional collage that is a long sculptural tradition, from Dada, through David Smith, Louise Nevelson and Mark di Suvero, to Haim Steinbach, Jessica Stockholder and Terence Koh. In this evolution of constructions, the mute elements of abstract metal in Smith’s sculptures morph into the loaded Lava Lamps of Steinbach. Each stage of the evolution has enlarged the amount of information that can be included in each sutured fragment, while pushing harder against the need to formally retain the fragmentary nature of the elements. Here, at the current tail-end of this constructivist continuum, one must struggle to perceive the drum kits, chandeliers and safety-orange rain parkas as shapes employed formally as well as useful things with myriad cultural associations.

One can clearly see this complex layering of elements and modes of use in the series of untitled mirrored deers’ heads. Hunting forms, being a visible manifestation of Swanson’s patrimony, are layered with queer-associated materials. (Think both glitter make-up and disco balls.) Antlers are already contradictory: failures as weapon design, located on the head more for show than practicality. They are nature’s version of fuck-me pumps that make it impossible to run despite the fact they make it more likely you will need to run. The antlers’ twisting beauty and desirability also make it more likely their host animal will end up on some hunter’s wall, a prize for the great gun-wielding predator evolution did not anticipate. When arranged as glittery, tangled floor-sculptures, displayed like trippy craft projects hung from wires or floating like archaic specimens in boxes, they are simultaneously nature and culture, both laboratory and disco.

The specimen box has a further reading. As an artist who is willing to revisit the issue of identity a decade after its heyday, being put in the box of identity politics hovers like a potential prison sentence. Avoiding being any type of poster boy for “the good queer role-model” remains a prime concern of out artists in the early decades of the 2000s. Swanson is bothered by any of his works being restricted to one uncomplicated reading. His embrace of contradiction has a long history. He is a country boy who sought out the urban demi-monde, and when he found it, was often the only gay man in the very straight, late-punk-metal scene, or alternately, the only rocker in the queer disco. Imagine if you were trying to dress for all those environs at once; the crucial job of layering and self-construction would clearly have to be constructive and deconstructive simultaneously, taking off as many personas as one adds to render as natural that which is conspicuously constructed. When Swanson traps trophies from the wild in specimen cases of his own making, he is at least somewhat celebrating his decades of escape from a similar fate. Now if only the curators will be so kind as to let him wiggle away again.

In another work, “Untitled, (Rainbow Logs)” 2003, the boy-scout version of Swanson’s New England patrimony finds its instantiation in bonfire logs remade as geometric-rainbow-flag versions of Carl Andre’s posts – over-scaled, overweight and funny as hell! Rainbow Flags as a queer symbol are horrifying when taken to extremes like being made into swimsuits or large banners. These logs remind us that well intentioned markers of community pride, from Rainbow Flags to Ebonics, often leave more self-critical members of a community experiencing their fought-for-identities, once secured, as sources of embarrassment. Swanson revealed to me in conversation that this was true for him in his coming out as a conceptually-based artist in an indie, rock-music community deeply suspicious of high-arts pretensions. He described himself as secretly pining after Ellsworth Kelly when for his friends at the time, the word “formal” was an epithet.

The only major aspect of constructivist ideology that is conspicuously missing from Swanson’s project is the social utility of the artwork. Yet even in the first generation of Constructivists, the fear was omnipresent that too many of their works failed to tangibly help society. That fear led to the introduction of the more specific term productivism, which as a movement lauding design over fine arts, quickly became an inversion of beaux-arts-era hierarchies. Swanson, whose work revels in its art-for-art’s-sake’s embrace of useless beauty, cannot follow that path.

I would still argue that Swanson’s version of Constructivism is in some sense productive. For my evidence, I cite the controversy around Swanson’s “Fits and Starts,” a glittery life-sized deer sculpture installed first without controversy at Metrotech in Brooklyn in 2004. When it was installed at the DePauw University Campus in HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greencastle,_Indiana"Greencastle, Indiana in 2005, however, students very quickly destroyed it. “Fits and Starts: A Deer Diary,” an excellent half-hour documentary of the destruction of the work available on You Tube, makes clear that some students, perhaps those with more experience of conscious self-construction than their peers, felt the attacks on the deer were attacks on them. Constructed artworks with conspicuous layers of biographical history serve to mirror the self-making processes of their viewers. Those students were right to see Swanson’s artworks as brethren, providing models for how they could go forth in life building on their family background, creating new wild beings never before seen on the planet. In fulfilling that grand role of art as a mirror of common experience, Swanson’s work is Constructivism for our times.




Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, (New York University Press, 1999), 190-191.