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The overarching title of David Cross’s recent tripartite exhibition (video, photographs, performance), invites us to come Closer in the tone of a child-abductor with a bag of sweets. Although his work typically involves an exchange with the viewer, Cross disrupts any notion of conviviality by presenting himself in a disturbing light.
The subject of Closer, and all of Cross’s work, is the artist’s eyes. Born without tear ducts or mucus membrane lining, Cross keeps his eyes moist with ointment. As medicine mimics bodily secretions, the abject and the uncanny are evoked. Cross’s work pivots on these concepts and is further informed by, and questioning of, relational aesthetics—art as a kind of convivial social exchange. He critiques conviviality through mobilising Georges Bataille’s model of social cohesion as that animated by repulsion.
Each component of Closer generates a progressively tighter centrifugal force between attraction and repulsion. Occupying the outer perimeter of the centrifuge is the video series, Figure/Ground (2004). Three video projections show headshots of the artist and a series of young men each miming a vacant-gazed fashion parade. In the brochure accompanying the show Cross says that in this piece he is using repetition to blur binary distinctions between male beauty and ‘what you might consider to be my grotesque qualities’. However the opposition is not striking enough to need blurring, Cross’s self-confident stylishness precluding a grotesque reading.
In the adjacent room the detached, personable manner gives way to raw red eyes weeping like wounds from behind plastic Halloween masks in four large-format photographs. The discordant yellow, flesh pink and mauve tones are compellingly repulsive and seductive, the slimy textures activating not so much social cohesion as a carny’s entrapment