Unpublished Polaroids: Hostage Redux

Last week I showed you a batch of unpublished polaroids taken over the past decade or so, several of which appear in my new book Bruce(x)ploitation. Last week’s came from a staged art happening in Los Angeles, in which 40 artists were each assigned a room in a sleazy crack hotel in Hollywood called The Coral Sands to create an installation/performance over an 18-hour period.

Enlisting an art director friend of mine, I recreated, as realistically as possible, the aftermath of a bloody murder crime scene. At that time I had been shooting models for jerk-off magazines such as Honcho and Inches for a couple of years, so I decided to shoot a porn star in the room covered in blood as a tribute to my experiences. For me it was an expression of my ambivalence toward the porn world, a hyperbolic critique of the exploitative nature of both the adult and mainstream entertainment industries, and a cathartic acting out of a lot of personal unspecified rage.

After the shoot, I invited the throngs of people who attended the event to enter the bloody room and pose on the bed for a polaroid, providing them with the choice of either a machete or a rifle as a prop. I charged them five dollars to cover the cost of the film, which is expensive, and took two polaroids of each subject, letting them have one and keeping the other for my archives. I was surprised how thoroughly people inhabited the role of victimizer or victim (with couples it was interesting to see how they negotiated who would play which role), and how gleefully and pleasurably they participated in the violent scenario.

Part of it was the fun of the carnival house of horrors, but there was something more primal at work: a deeply cathartic play-acting of the carnage that we are inundated with on a daily basis in the news, in the movies, and in real life. I found the whole exercise, which took five or six hours, extremely draining, as if I were drawing these repressed savage impulses out of people and taking them upon myself, sort of like when Father Karras in The Exorcist asks Satan to inhabit his body so that he can thwart him by jumping out the window.

Later, I presented these strange artifacts, plus those of three similar subsequent events that I participated in over the last several years. The series you see here was part of a performance at the opening of my art exhibition “Heterosexuality Is the Opiate of the Masses” at Peres Projects in Los Angeles in 2005. The idea was to recreate the hostage videos and photographs that we often see on news outlets, and in so doing to allow people to experience what it might feel like, if only for a moment, to be in that horrible position. The participants had the option of posing as they were or spattered in blood, and once again I took two polaroids, one that they could keep and one for my archives. I was trying to explore the way that the news media invariably presents such lurid artifacts as abduction videos as titillation and entertainment for the masses.

Previously - Unpublished Polaroids