i'm going bananas
In a looped performance for camera, the artist fellates a banana, turning a familiar sexual gesture into an overplayed image of desire, glamour and repetition.
CONCEPT & CONTEXT
The banana enters the work already carrying a history of images. Warhol’s banana for The Velvet Underground & Nico, the eroticised acts of eating in Natalia LL’s Consumer Art, and the endlessly reproduced image of Marilyn Monroe form a visual genealogy that I’m Going Bananas takes up and performs through the body.
A platinum wig, heavy make-up, facial expressions and rehearsed poses invoke Marilyn through a repertoire of recognisable signs rather than through impersonation. Femininity appears as something assembled, exaggerated and repeated for the camera. The banana operates in much the same way: simultaneously an everyday object, a phallic stand-in, an art-historical quotation and a comic prop.
The work borrows gestures associated with pornography, then stretches them until their seductive function begins to fail. The action becomes too repetitive, too explicit and too theatrical to settle into a stable erotic image. Camp enters through excess; humour through literalness. The banana never stops being a banana.
Looping makes repetition the work’s basic structure. There is no final release and no completed transformation of the performer into an icon. Instead, the same visual codes are continually reconstructed in front of the camera. Art history moves through the body: through mouth, posture, hand, costume and prop.