Romeo Gómez López

Zac’s Haunted House, A Haunted House For Men 

A ghost is a disturbing presence that only some can see. Others believe from ghostly effects: a glass that falls, a rope that moves, a persistent stain. Some, even then, choose not to believe. Ghosts are power structures, discriminations, the pharmaceutical, pornographic, fashion, and soccer industries. Paul B.Preciado’s petrosexoracial capitalism and the binary categories that have organized life so far.

Zac’s Haunted House takes its title from the gif novel by Dennis Cooper (2015) and the Haunted house installation by Louise Bourgeois and Robert Gober (2015). Terrors of masculinity, capitalism and the body that repeat themselves, attacking in spiral. Sculptures that are also systems, gifs, loops, boomerangs. Cycles and pendulums to cross the threshold of our unconscious or voluntarily repressions, by being too much information, the uncomfortable conversation that we did not expect to have so early, sober and on a Tuesday.

Zac Efron is the protagonist in the exhibition, he dies in the first room. If his muscles are insufficient, his veins thin and his jawline weak, what chance do the rest of us have? 

A tour through childhood, games and toys divided by gender. References to childhood are perceived as autobiographical work, but is there any difference between the information encoded in one’s own biography and that which comes from the consumption of popular culture?

Adolescence and its primal anxiety, molding our sexuality and fetishes. The body as anagram, as a phrase that can be rewritten over and over again in body parts forever linked to behaviors and rituals. The displaced experience in the hand that falls queerly into an incorrect position. Repressions and stereotypes, hair falling.

However, the greatest fear, deep down, is time and death. We look for outlets in science fiction and art, forever doomed to the uselessness of it all, since we will always have craftsmanship repressing art, behavior repressing desire, the codes of contemporary art repressing these ideas.

Olga Rodríguez Montemayor