A portrait of Queen Elizabeth by Christina Empedocles was stolen from its perch over a toilet just before the bar opened for the show.
By Stacy Martin
For one night only, the three bathrooms at one of San Francisco’s all-time favorite leather bars were multipurposed into mini-fine-art galleries. “Walls of Glory,” a temporary, site-specific installation at the Eagle Tavern debuted at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 12, and closed that same night at 10. Curated by California College of the Arts graduate student Luke Butler, the show included works by 18 artists.
Butler’s idea for the event came from his desire to stage an exhibition in an undesirable location, a place that’s the complete opposite of a gallery and its white, pristine walls. He also wanted to bring artworks to a place everyone eventually has to go to, and one of the great equalizers of humanity is, indeed, the toilet.
After much convincing, skeptical Eagle bartender Doug agreed to let Butler stage the event, though the show was kept to its brief viewing hours due to potential environmental hazards. But some work was designed to handle the rough environment.
Muddy waters: Danny Keith showed paintings of dudes getting down and dirty.
Take Erik Scollon’s series of tiny porcelain figurines of nude men lewdly posing in the urinals, all begging to be pissed on – and pissed on they were. Jason Kalogiros’s sneaky and rusty tin tea box sat on a shelf above another urinal, with its image of King Edward sporting a black bar of tape over the monarch’s eyes. The object is actually a pinhole camera, and removing the tape lets Edward get a peek and take an image of the visitors to the loo.
Danny Keith’s paintings of guys wrestling in the mud shared stall-wall space with Travis Meinolf’s homey embroidered motto piece, while a photograph by Larry Sultan adorned one wall across from a sink sporting Elisheva Biernoff’s specially molded hand soap in the shape of a nude male reclining on a bed.
One unfortunate consequence of this fun, but risky installation came just an hour or so before the official opening time when a painting of Queen Elizabeth hung over one of the toilets was stolen. The artist Christina Empedocles, realizing that the show must go on, quickly fashioned a response piece for the thief. She embroidered “Hello Teeny” in pink thread onto black fabric and hung it in place of the missing work. Works by Butler, James Gobel, Erin Allen, Jordan Kantor, Keith Boadewee, Jason Hanasik, John Jenkins, Brian Murphy, Jessica Rosen, Patrick Hillman, and Guardian critic Glen Helfand rounded out the show.
For his next curatorial adventure, Butler is hoping to flip the environment from the masculine to the feminine – perhaps creating a new installation in one of the city’s public women’s restrooms.
Glen Helfand introduced a book installation to the Eagle Tavern men’s room; Jason Kalogiros, a King Edward tobacco/tea can-cum-pin-hole camera. Curator Luke Butler presented collages of nude men with presidential heads – the Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon noggins were notable – lounging in natural settings.
