Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Bortolami

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You would think a harem would be sexier. Be fun. But the bodies look refrigerated. This isn't service to sex, to flesh, or fun, but to the camera to be bent around. That screaming art marker, composition. This is fallout of Picasso. Of art turned to manners. Turned to need for looking like art. A man waving his arms spinning a sign saying "COMPOSITION." To mark it as art. Market it as art. The camera is the merely the node for conceptual static. A photography exchanging the desires of people for demands of art. For color and composition as a bad ruler. "The studio" is a machine akin the office paper shredder, a function for limitless abstraction.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Modern Art hosting Team Gallery

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We call this "his exploration of the dynamics of intimacy." But here's the deal, this nudity rarely feels intimate; it is awkward, stiff, bodies look uncomfortable trying to bend a composition. The bodies work for the camera who is the master to be satiated. Which explains their machine-like affection. It's a more Hans-Breder-like photographic attitude, any sympathetic Tillmans-esque is fractured, the body formalized, turned to abstraction, which is a gore, a machine of equivocation, skin becomes fingerprinted glass becomes magazine flesh cut and pasted.  This is ostensibly fun but play and its dalliance gets close to frivolousness, becomes dangerous when you are machine shredding bodies.


See too: “Automatic Door” (Mark McKnight) at Park View / Paul Soto

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Document

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Perhaps the difference from Tillmans is proven then by its flaunting the camera as possessor, the machine which embeds the photographic capture as loss, everything moving away from the machine indexing time we see now but was. These people, these bodies, moved away from this moment and its crux the camera, projecting the point. It's horribly romantic but it's true, time intransigently on, surely stupid to point out, but painful to see every-time we see it, this, our, present meeting some past and knowing now us too then. It's why so many photographers are want to document the youth, embodiment of the photograph's eternal nubility as we all die, see you then.