Lindsey "Lou" Howard: In Good Taste

Los Angeles, CA | albertz benda is pleased to present, In Good Taste, the first solo exhibition of New York-based artist Lindsey “Lou” Howard in Los Angeles, curated by Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s on-going “Bathroom Series” and in this presentation, Howard acknowledges the space’s conventional function as a domestic bathroom with over a dozen sculptures investigating the cultural history of the toilet and its relationship to food consumption and waste through a critical lens. The show's title plays off scatological humor’s reputation as being “in bad taste.”

Fruits and vegetables will lay scattered around the black-tiled room, half-eaten, squished, or molding, revealing ominous skulls symbolizing the metamorphosis of food. This body of work continues Howard’s exploration into food capitalism and consumerism through subversive sculptures with a punk aesthetic that are as delectable as they are stomach-churning. The bathroom is integral to the food consumption cycle and the transformation of biological material. As waste flushes away – out of sight, out of mind – it appears to mark an ending, but sewage still has the potential to affect food production. Although many take access to proper and reliable plumbing and sewage processing for granted, Howard reflects on the effects of water pollution through sculptures of poisoned food waste intermingled with litter such as cigarettes, nails, and safety pins. The concept of the flush toilet is attributed to author and poet Sir John Harrington, godson of Queen Elizabeth, who published it in A New Discourse of A Stale Subject: A Metamorphosis of Ajax in 1596. Written while on banishment from the Queen’s court for his risque stories, this text, coded as a political allegory, targets the monarchy as the “excrement” of society. Howard’s punk approach echoes the anti-establishment attitude of Harrington’s writing. However, his designs did not improve the existing unsanitary conditions, and it took over 170 more years for someone to figure out the mechanics of the modern toilet and even longer to build sewage treatment facilities.

From an art historical context, the toilet has been the subject of many a provocateur. Marcel Duchamp’s infamous readymade Fountain (1917) is an iconic example that has inspired many others, from Sherry Levine’s Fountain (Buddha) (1977), a bronze homage to the former, to Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2018), an 18k gold toilet installed at the Guggenheim, New York, as a critique of the excess in the art market and a reminder of bathroom use as a shared human experience. Often left out of this narrative is Robert Arnesons’s self-deprecating series of ceramic toilets from the 1960s, positing the commode as “the ultimate ceramic” by exploiting the scatological aesthetics of clay. Howard continues this art historical exploration of toilets and bathroom humor as a form of cultural and political protest by intervening with the toilet of albertz benda’s gallery. She cooks up a nightmare BBQ of rotten meat and double-headed fish over the sink and the toilet, heightening the absurdity of the environment. A fiery grill over the mouth of the porcelain bowl makes for a “hot seat” referencing Sir John Harrington’s penchant for getting in trouble. Although displaying food within the context of a bathroom sounds like a distasteful scene, caught within the tension of attraction and repulsion, Howard’s enigmatic sculptures make it impossible to look away.