Mateas Pares: Could you tell me a little bit about the background of the artwork?
Johnny Olsson: The necktie has been a sort of reminder of dominant hierarchies for the last few centuries, where dress code was an important part of who was allowed access to certain rooms. But the use of suits and ties also upheld an idea of masculinity, like a social glue uniting all men. Movements in the 60s were a kind of knife-edge to these ideas and since then men’s clothing has become less uniform-like, a carefree spirit is in play. Changes to the masculine ideal have shown in a casual, self-assured attitude and a popular term for it is ”big-dick-energy”. Despite its association with cocks this attitude has little to do with men, it simply means to display decent power- and leadership qualities. And so the cock became part of the outfit, forming our personal aesthetics.
Your work consists of casual clothes and a tie. The suit, which the tie is usually connected to, is gone. And casual clothes don’t have a tie. In your work the tie seems to have lost its friend, the suit, so to speak and found a new group of friends, the casual clothes, but which don’t want anything to do with it. Is the cock totally lost in today’s society, would you say?
Remember the movie Social Network? Since people realized how to make a product of their social relations, it has become clear that anything can be put on a market. I think being aware of that has diminished our sense of belonging to one single place. Friends come and go but that doesn’t mean they just lose their importance. In the blockbuster Piranha 3D, hovering in the turquoise water, a cock detached from its owner is eaten whole by a starving piranha, then spit it out right away. I think that the cock has become seriously commodified, as an object it’s repurposed in new ways, by those who love and lust for it at the moment. As consumers, anything we can’t buy, we instead have to embody, or even distance ourselves from. A literal example of this is in Being John Malkovich, when Lotte Schwartz has to see the world though the eyes of John Malkovich to find her inner lesbian.
Proposal (Do You Dress Left Or Right?) by Johnny Olsson, 2023
In what way would you say that the cock has been commodified?
There might be other ways, but what I’m getting at has to do with self-fetishization. The value of big-dick-energy is invested into a person by others. And when people think someone has a big cock, it impacts that person’s social position, their surroundings screen their behaviour through the big-dick-filter. Since we’re dealing with mere energies, it’s a great example of how commodities are fetishized: It manifests a group of people’s belief in the unity and stability of the world because the cock has in it all the history that we keep passing on to it. And so when we project this value onto someone we embody it ourselves, by doing so we’re creating value.
Johnny Olsson
The female body has been seen, and used, as a commodity since the beginning of civilisation. For example, some say that prostitution is the oldest trade in the world; and I think we are all aware of how it has been seen and used throughout history, and the misery it has caused. Men’s bodies, on the other hand, have not been commodified. We are at the same time also comparatively disconnected to our bodies and our emotions. Do you see a correlation between those two phenomena? Could there be some sort of twisted relationship between objectification and commodification, and a positive self-awareness? And, if so, that the commodification of the cock is a good thing?
I sure think that a more visible language, that we concern ourselves with the male body from different points of view can demystify it a bit. Plainness creates this mysterious bubble, wasteful use of mystery, as if we were trying to accept that nothing is intriguing to this kind of body. It’s not hidden, history is clear on how men have used their bodies. It’s becoming more and more important to me, this intense reaction I get whenever men’s bodies are hinted at as something plain. So I lament when we fail to accentuate them or even imagine shapes to dress them with. If men tend not to contain and refine emotion but rather aim and direct it by other means, a lack of language that treasures the male body won’t help to turn that around. How many have ever imagined having a cock or two, or having it enlarged or infinitesimal? The more society takes the individual into account, I think contributes to men thinking about the place of the male body in the vast corpus of bodies. And that happens as we constantly come up with new ways to face ourselves.
Explore all artists and artworks from the exhibition COCKS!
Text and interview by Mateas Pares
