James Franco explores our love of him and his love of us, artists.
James Franco’s face, usually found adorning Gucci ads, movies and celebrity gossip sites, is seen everywhere in Gay Town, his second solo show with Berlin’s Peres Projects Gallery. Its features are encountered behind sunglasses, bushy beards and masks of his own face. Yet Franco’s densely packed multi-media show is a rarity – a truly non-vanity project by a genuine celebrity.
Rather than cash in on name recognition to draw crowds to DIY Cezannes (a la Bob Dylan, Anthony Hopkins and Sly Stallone), Franco responds to celebrity’s centrality in contemporary art’s discourse by using his insider position to offer a special perspective on fandom and stardom. With humble nods to Alex Bag, Cindy Sherman, Douglas Gordon, Paul McCarthy and other artists revered for critically dissecting Hollywood stereotypes, Franco creates a show about his interest in our interest in “James Franco.” As he explains, “To make a self-portrait of my public persona, instead of me in my bedroom, is to make my art about something larger.”
Huge in scope and hugely accessible for viewers and potential collectors, the exhibition consisted of 500 rugs, each one priced at $500. Many rugs present screenshots of fans’ blogs, gossip sites and Huffington Post slams of Franco’s social life, sex life and intellectual endeavors, over which Franco scrawls defensive notes. Others puckishly play with fans’ assumptions about Franco. Featuring a mysterious blond girl as his paramour, they present a straight bad-boy lover image of Franco that is counterbalanced by the show’s title and a brilliant low-fi video reenactment of one fan’s Slash Fiction fantasies of Franco having sex with Spider Man and prison inmates.
At Franco’s press conference, German and visiting journalists asked about his sexuality and drug habits, thereby proving his premise correct. We can’t separate Franco’s roles or his public persona from his true self as an actor, artist and man. And that recognition itself is fertile material for art – which only someone with Franco’s status and intelligence can properly mine. As one rug, hidden behind a plywood silhouette of a house instructs, “Cindy Sherman is not recognised at her own show.”