The Brooklyn Rail

Hugh Hayden’s exhibition Hughmans takes the form of a series of bathroom stalls ringing the three walls of Lisson gallery in Chelsea, creating a life-size advent calendar experience. Viewers move from stall to stall, excitedly unlocking the doors (all open except for one), peering inside, and finding themselves greeted in each by a singular sculpture or installation. The implication is the lurid homoerotic bathroom tryst; as phallic imagery is a defining feature of the semi-secret vignettes. Several of the stalls open to reveal male torsos, some naked, with the genitals replaced by guns, as in Elvis (2024) and another showing a cross-section of the hips of a police officer, Boogey man (2024); Cowboy (2024) presents a handgun painted with an anatomical diagram of a penis, and one stall is a tribute to Robert Gober, Sleepover (2023). Still, the neat white-walls and gallery location turns this presentation to a PG level. The network of stalls does allow Hayden to create unity and a sense of interaction, which is aligned with his earlier large-scale sculptures and installations such as Brier Patch (2022), a public project in Madison Square Park in which banks of school desks sprouted forbidding masses of thorny branches; indicating both the promise/danger of uncontrolled growth. Inside the stalls we find a panoply of objects precisely rendered in wood or metal—male torsos, a pair of Pinocchios, musical instruments-cum-cooking utensils, and many skeletons (in water closets no less). The spotless bathroom stalls and the pristine works within raise one of the primary concerns of Hayden’s practice, that of craft-versus-fabrication. Hayden uses wood frequently; often it is wood taken from a specific location, like the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, or recycled from specific uses, such as discarded Christmas trees, and rendered into neatly carpentered school desks or tables, preserving some of the original wayward branches. In creating his sculpture this way, Hayden insists that we recognize where the works originated, as well as tracing them to their final uses, generating an effective socio-environmental life cycle. In Hughmans, wood is again a primary media as well, and the artist seeks to apply the material to another set of signifiers. (There is still one skewed desk in Walden [2024], and two baskets: Brier Patch [2024] and Idol [2024].) Skeletal remains dangle from metal racks, as in Plywood (2024) in which eight rib cages, each perfectly crafted in a different type of wood, are arranged on a New York Subway handrail. The meaning is elusive: the multifarious wooden bones in an urban context can represent so many things to many viewers.

Unlike in Brier Patch, Hayden’s hand disappears quite frequently in Hughmans. He engages in the idea of producing his own readymades—similar to artists like Hirst, Koons and Gober, who all play with this idea to varying degrees. The total elimination of the hand seemingly creates an art object so pristine and perfect it seems mass-produced. Hayden then engages with the work from the position of an industrially fabricated object. In American Gothic (2024), the extremities of two headless skeletons are replaced with mops and pitchforks—not just referencing Grant Wood’s 1930 painting, but also bringing up the idea of African American unpaid or low-wage labor. African American labor is a subtext of the exhibition, where the notion of the Dream Deferred recurs as pots and pans and musical instruments hanging from subway handrails as well, as in Harlem (2024), and a single mask/skillet in Black Don’t Crack (2) (2024). As Hayden removes his own hand from the object, he increasingly makes work about labor, which is a fun contradiction. Like the skeleton in Hayden’s hands, the cookpot becomes a substrate for symbolism, either being imprinted with African masks, or contorted wonderfully into hybrid brass instruments, referencing both jazz bands and marching bands as outlets for African American culture under oppression. In one installation, Hayden has created a double urinal, Sleepover (2023), a gentle nod to Robert Gober’s sink imagery as a metaphor for gay guilt under Catholicism. But Hayden is more universal: although he uses symbolism that is specific to Black culture, in has the capacity to spill out of those bounds towards a general comment on society—the need for police reform, gun violence, the job market, the ills of inflation and the general decrease in quality of life under a capitalistic system not-so-slowly veering toward a very distressing New Feudalism.

The most evocative piece is Harlem (2024), the rack of brass pots, masks, and instruments over a dozen golden fluid forms, at one moment displaying faces drawn from, or reproducing African masks, while other pots melt into the circular tubes of trombones and tubas. A cacophony ideas are expressed—the musical genius of jazz and blues; the broken dreams of people impressed into low-paying jobs beneath their dignity , the suppressed and appropriated cultures of Africa, South America and the Caribbean, all dangling from a handrail like New York City itself in rush hour. Squirrel (2024) is made from Fire Island Pines bark and shearling. It’s a coat of wood, and specifically bark from one of the two historically gay-friendly towns on Fire Island, Long Island. “Squirrel” is slang for an individual who is perhaps shy--preferring hugs rather than sex. And so this is their armor made of magic wood—in effect this piece, like Harlem, is not a model of something else, but a literal and bizarrely useful object made for the protection of someone, not simply a placeholder for something else.