Reba Maybury, Used man, 2024, Clothes (Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery, New York; Photographer: Sebastian Bach)
Take the watch. Pocket it. Nobody, not even the nit-pickiest gallery worker, will notice it’s missing. Until too late, that is. It’s barely noticeable anyway, plunked at the edge of a puddle of shucked clothes—a crumpled Van Heusen suit, a snaked tie, itty black undies tucked into dress pants, and brown leather shoes due for a replacement. Though the shoes are a bit scuffed around the edges, the watch has to be a worthy steal as these clothes were shuffled off by an unknown, unnamed submissive john who has enough financial pull to hire “political dominatrix” Mistress Rebecca, otherwise known as artist Reba Maybury. I can’t imagine those services come cheap, nor should they.
This klepto urge continued to gnaw at the back of my skull for the entirety of my visit to Company Gallery for Maybury’s current solo show, The Happy man (man being purposefully lowercase, those worms, to use a phrase from Maybury’s zine The Goddess and The Worm). This up-and-coming finance bro or lawyer’s duds are not the only man-pile stripped and abandoned in the gallery. And yes, I’m guessing this sub’s career based on wardrobe alone as the work’s title Used man offers no clues. An off-the-rack suit that can be purchased for under $400 at Macy’s? Doesn’t exactly scream executive. In an adjacent corner to the be-suited Used man sits a similar heap, except this Used man arrived in casual wear. This version consists of a Yankees sweatshirt, jeans, white undershirt, leather belt, vine-patterned cotton briefs, little balls of grey socks, and clean, white Adidas sneakers. And while we’re on the subject of diagnosing these subs’ class, I suspect this john is more well-off than the first. It’s an outfit I imagine Kendall Roy wearing during his off-time—when you’re that rich, you don’t need to impress.
This clothing class analysis is more than simply giving in to my own curiosity. The Used man sculptures encourage imagining the missing bodies of these johns, who remain both present and absent in the form of their skivvies. The structure of the clothing itself indicates that something sexual happened here—the frantic stomping on the pants, leaving two perfectly round leg holes, is the giveaway. Used man airs out dirty laundry, quite literally. I hope Maybury requested the gallery roll up their riot gate in front of the windowed door in the white-bricked backroom for the occasion for voyeurism and consenting, desired humiliation’s sake. Used man isn’t just about sex though; it’s about power (which is also about sex). The power play is between the sex worker and john, the dom and sub, the artist and muse, and the artist and willing, paying assistant.
Installation view of Reba Maybury’s “The Happy man” at Company Gallery (Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery; Photographer: Sebastian Bach)
Maybury further pushes the latter with two paintings that hang above the clothing mounds: each a unique take on the master of the golden age of Montmartre sleaze, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Sofa. Painted at the end of the 19th century, Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting portrays two sex workers, most distinguishable by their fiery orange and strawberry blonde hair, as they lounge, chatting, on a couch in Paris’ red-light district. While a painting of sex workers, they are not at work per se; this is a representation of downtime, semi-unseen with the exception of Toulouse-Lautrec’s ever-present observation. The versions at Company Gallery are a bit different than their post-impressionist original, less precise and more cartoonish. The first, Amanda, Retired British Civil Servant, 52, Blackpool, spends more care on the redhead’s face, giving her a slightly simplified sly side-eyed glance as she peers at her friend who appears to be melting into the sofa. The other, Francis Bacon, German Junior Art Advisor, Mid-20’s, London is, uh, more impressionistic, let’s say, with little piss-hole dots for eyes and a smear of red for lips.
Though neither is exactly a masterpiece, both paintings are much better than expected once their creation becomes apparent. These are paint-by-numbers done by more of Mistress Rebecca’s clients, as evidenced by their titles which provide vague tidbits of information about the men. Of course, artist assistants are nothing new but not so much those who would pay for the privilege. I mean, why not make your submissives do your artwork for you? In these paintings, Maybury takes power back for the sex workers. Rather than the women passively recorded by Toulouse-Lautrec, Maybury is the one in control, directing the men to paint. She’s the one looking, not the one who is seen. While there is nothing more tired than discussing the “gaze” and objectification in art, what is most thrilling about Maybury’s twist on the two is the clear satisfaction she receives by doing it. “There is profound pleasure in watching a submissive man tragically draw, write, move, construct or read for Me, the utter predictability and immaturity of their vision titillates Me to no end,” she writes in her book Faster than an erection. Tragic is a striking word here as there is something pathetic about grown men doing paint-by-number. Beyond the cheeky twist on authorship and labor, hanging paint-by-numbers—any paint-by-numbers—in a respectable gallery is a subversion of good taste on its own, a medium more associated with tacky museum gift shop purchases, soulless reproductions, and unimaginative art therapy sessions than anything nearing so-called “high” art unless you count Warhol’s foray into Pop paint-by-number works in the early 1960s.
Installation view of Reba Maybury’s “The Happy man” at Company Gallery (Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery; Photographer: Sebastian Bach)
The ’60s also provide a point of reference, or the most art historically respectable of the references, for the site-specific installation in the gallery’s basement. The basement is pitch-black with the exception of two long rows of UV lights, hung low like greenhouse lamps. Rather than plants, these UV lights reveal a shiny surface covered in a constellation of body markings: slapped handprints, slithery torso slides, and copious moony ass presses with a hint of balls. This installation, titled, like Maybury’s book, Faster than an erection, resembles the germophobic horror of shining a blacklight over a cum-caked hotel bedspread or the meticulous search for blood stains at a crime scene. A crime scene is not too off the mark either. Faster than an erection discloses evidence of prior acts similar to other post-performance-art remnants. Some may argue that there is a difference between ball-dragging and mid-20th-century performance art like Yves Klein dipping naked women in his International Klein Blue paint to wipe themselves all over a canvas, but I’d question exactly what those differences are. The Great White Male Artist exerted his masculine prowess over artmaking and the ladies by turning women into artistic tools. Likewise, Maybury views her submissives as, according to her book of the same title as the installation, “My medium—My tool.” More so than any other work in the show, the creation of Faster than an erection requires the transformation of the male body into a brush, slicked in UV powder and sunscreen.
The Happy man displays, not simply sellable art objects, but records of transactions, financial, sexual, and artistic. Now, Maybury is not the first artist to combine sex work and art work. The most on-the-nose that comes to mind is Andrea Fraser’s 2003 Untitled, a video in which she has sex with a collector as set up by the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. However, other than this one instance, at least to my knowledge, Fraser was not a sex worker. Untitled is more of a dabbling dalliance intended to shock, making the sometimes fraught exchange between an artist and collector visible. More than Fraser, Maybury’s art has more in common with a lineage of transgressively political sex worker artists like Annie Sprinkle and Cosey Fanni Tutti who transfer their own experiences in the sex industry into the sometimes-neuter spaces of art. It’s no mistake that Maybury previously curated both of these artists into a 2018 exhibition on sex work, Putting Out, at the now-closed Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Even so, there remains a stark difference between these two women and Maybury, namely both Fanni Tutti and Sprinkle frequently place their bodies at the center of their art.
Installation view of Reba Maybury’s “The Happy man” at Company Gallery (Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery; Photographer: Sebastian Bach)
In contrast, Maybury is conspicuously absent in The Happy man. She, instead, forces viewers to engage with the johns, the more typically ignored and less policed end of the sex worker/client relationship. The past presences of these men, responding to Mistress Rebecca’s commands, fill the space even more than their brushstrokes, disrobed outfits, and slippery slides on view. Just try not to picture eager-to-please, turned-on dudes gleefully stripping or scooting all over Company’s carpeted basement like dogs wiping their asses on the rug. Impossible. Yet, without their actual bodies as well, Maybury prevents any real titillation on the audience’s part, unless butt cheek marks and century-plus-old post-impressionist painting are your things. It’s a refusal of sorts. Mistress Rebecca is edging us too, working faster than their erections and ours. And if the title is any indication, both of us find pleasure in it.