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FOR SALE

NEW WORK IN SCULPTURE AND DRAWING

Mark Aguhar

TC 660H Plan II Honors Program The University of Texas at Austin May 8, 2009

_________________________________ Dan Sutherland, MFA


Department of Studio Art, Assistant Chair Supervising Professor

_________________________________ John Stoney, MFA


Department of Studio Art, Assistant Professor in Sculpture Second Reader

ABSTRACT Author: Title: Mark Aguhar FOR SALE: NEW WORKS IN SCULPTURE AND DRAWING

Supervising Professor:Dan Sutherland, MFA My work examines art as a tool for communication. I examine the relationships between my peers and me as a microcosm of society in general. My work makes reference to relational aesthetics. Relational aesthetics is a conceptual art that depends on the transformation achieved at the intersection of audience, artist and artwork. My work depends on my relationship with my friends as well as involving direct interaction with the audience. I use sensuality and sexuality in my work. My sculptures play with desire through food and smell, influencing the senses that are perhaps least widely cultivated by visual artists. My work also has a performative element, whether visible or invisible. I am fostering a relationship with my viewers and manipulating it over time to perform social work.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank all my friends and family without whom I would not be able to do the work I do. Thanks to my mom and dad who have always wanted whats best for me and supported me, and Michael and Christine, my brother and sister, for being incredible big sibs and looking out for their baby brother. I also want to thank all of my professors here at UT, really. This work is the culmination of 4 years of trying to figure out what was important to me. I especially want to thank my advisors Dan and Jack for helping me and pushing me to be better for so long, and also Sarah and Margo, who have been incredibly supportive during the hardest semester of all.

CONTENTS

An introduction Sculpture Drawing Bibliography Biography

1 12 23 39 41

Fall

08

AN INTRODUCTION

I have become increasingly more self-aware in my work. My sculptures and drawings are most concerned with my identity, both in exploring it and forging one. I seek to expose the dichotomy of public and private activity by openly mixing the deeply personal with elements of fiction, confusing what is real. I believe an artists persona can have as much power as their work, and that anybodys relationship with a piece of art is couched in their own history as well as whatever they know about the circumstances of a pieces creation. I think of it in the same terms as celebrity, in that every little decision is open to evaluation and quantified within a larger framework. I care about the particular reputation that I am building among my peers, and use or pervert it as a means to further my production. My work is extremely self-referential, equalizing the meaningful content of my work and my personal story. I borrow heavily from relational aesthetics and the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija in particular. Relational art in general is a move toward interaction and the blurring of boundaries between artist and layman. The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art.1 Relational art uses cultural work as an aesthetic; we evaluate its success based on how it changes the viewer for having participated. Relational art
1

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel, 2002) p. 14.

does not value the objects it uses, but the use and function of the object. Rirkrit Tiravanija chose to give out cup noodles and boiling water in Untitled (Twelve Seventy-One) 1993 for the Venice Biennale as a way to provide a social stage. In one of his most famous pieces Untitled (Free) 1992, Tiravanija emptied the gallery and turned it into a kitchen in which he served Thai food for lunch to anyone who came in each day. Relational art is earnest in its reality: the experience of eating in the gallery is like the experience of eating at someones house, but suddenly the entire activity is open to rigorous scrutiny. The relational art of the 1990s was particularly important for its position as a meta-art; it challenged what the artist could present as legitimate or interesting. Tiravanijas works were all pretty boring everyday kinds of experiences, but because he re-contextualizes home-space into gallery-space, the experience is new and fresh. Something so simple as giving away food becomes a subversive act in denying the commodification of art, and re-ordering the hierarchy of the artist-art-viewer relationship. Tiravanija cannot really claim any ownership because he is no longer on the top tier he chooses to make his viewers as important as himself as creators and elevates the art above both of them.

SEMI-RELATIONAL SCULPTURE In sculpture, I deal most notably with food and the everyday, using fleeting performances and ephemeral sculpture whose most lasting effects are added padding around the belly and a vague sense of well-being. I want to

isolate that sense of satisfaction and manipulate its meaning. I am concerned with the transformative effect food has on the consumer and what that means for relationships among people. My sculpture is very passive aggressive; I affect my viewers very specifically and literally, altering their bodies and minds in alchemical ways, activating their senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing by seducing people into a willing relationship. The relational art I engage in is a very generous variety, much in the same vein as Rirkrit Tiravanijas work of the 90s. Food is the catalyst to social relationships and I am trying to build a cult of personality from these little invitations of friendship, passing off uncommon culinary labor as part of banal everyday activity. I try to make impressive food, responding to what I know about the eating habits of the people I will be serving, though this mental labor usually remains hidden. The food is a tool that changes according to situation, but is always designed to make people happy. Each sculpture is meant to open a reciprocal relationship between the viewer and me, engendering a sense of obligation in the viewer for having received something special for nothing. In one sculpture called All Natural, the work is about performing an unremarkable task. The main object is a small healthfoodjunkfood muffin, packaged in a box designed like an independent organic food label, existing among sacks of other healthfoodjunkfood stored in the trunk of my car. The box is labeled in block letters: WHOLE WHEAT BLUEBERRY NUT CHOCOLATE MUFFINS: All Natural with a logo of a pig and the brand name Noble Pig. I

haul the bags from my car and dump them in the corner of the room and retrieved the real sculpture from among the readymades. The activity of bringing home groceries is wholly normal, and much of the performance is given power by my personality. The specific reusable grocery bags I use affect the meaning of the activity, and it is not uncommon for me to bring goodies to class, so it is hard to distinguish when I am making art and when I am just going on with my day. The act of eating the food also transposes blame from me to my peers; everyone participates in consuming fake health food without even realizing it. They are as much to blame for perpetuating this misguided perception of food as I am for providing it. My most direct reference to relational art is a sculpture performance in collaboration with Lillian Gerson, pragmatically entitled Dinner Party/Slumber Party. We created cardboard kitchen appliances in a blanket-fort room and made it functional with hot plates and real cooking utensils. We served pork, soup, noodles, spring rolls, and a variety of pies. We cooked in front of our guests and served them dinner, constructed a full blanket fort on site and performed the usual slumber party rituals of gossiping, watching movies, and falling asleep way too late. Our sculpture relied on our close relationship with the audience in feeding them, building a blanket fort with them and acting out the slumber party: all of these actions were real, but the real actions use fiction and illusion. We made no attempt to disguise our construction techniques in building the kitchen set, leaving everything as raw cardboard and cut edges. We also performed the kitchen in a campy, exaggerated way to

emphasize its falseness even while reifying it by cooking honest food on real heating elements adjacent to the fake ones. The performance was both artifice and reality people were drawn in and excited about the cooking smell wafting through the air and having soothing broth, hearty adobo pork, fresh spring rolls, and homemade pies. But still, the whole performance had a distinct air of disbelief, because everything looked so unreal. Its greatest accomplishment was fooling people into thinking we were not cooking real food. We constructed a similar installation for the 2009 Senior Art Exhibition at the Creative Research Lab entitled this is the way we eat. We rebuilt a set of cardboard appliances, this time much more meticulous in construction we did not want to create a fantasyland like we did for our first performance. Instead, Lillian and I made a realistic rendition of an industrial kitchen out of raw cardboard, making a sink with a big industrial faucet, a six-burner stove range, and several large pots, pans, and utensils. This time, our focus was on the particular meaning of different foods instead of the creation of a general, relational piece. We dressed as food service employees in white aprons, hairnets and sanitary gloves while we cooked macaroni and cheese on hot plates and big stainless steel pots. The food came out of fake boxes and jars labeled noodles and cheese so we looked like we were just preparing simple foodstuffs even though it was actually homemade cheese sauce. Once again, people were skeptical of our actions, thinking we were not actually going to cook. We cooked for several hours during the opening of the show,

and also on Wednesday afternoons for the duration of the shows run. People who saw the installation before we entered and began cooking thought the real cooking items like the pots and chafing dishes were only there for show. In addition to this disbelief about the setting, we were also commenting on the social climate surrounding eating. We wanted to take the familiar and pervert it, so we took perfectly All-American mac-&-cheese and used the artificiality of a cardboard set as a tool to point out the entire farce of the piece. We made the best macaroni we could possibly make and disguised it as the worst. We were also playing with the tension between desire and disgust because the food was both seductive in smell and familiar and desirable in appearance, but in a grotesque form the sauce verged on neon yellow, and it was so cheesy and stringy, it was both incredibly beautiful and horrifyingly awful. It is endemic in our culture to believe that the food we get in packages is as good as the food we make ourselves, and packaged food can have as much nostalgia as your mothers best home recipe. By faking these packaged foods using the really good stuff we present people with what they want, how they want it and in an experience they can understand from their childhoods, even though the whole thing is a game. The sculpture subtly removes any culpability from Lillian and me, instead leading our audience into a very specific set of their own conclusions. Much of my newest work comes from this particular form of relational aesthetics. Instead of being generous and giving, I am interested in the manipulation of my relationship with my peers and leading them into specific

conclusions. I am being more self-referential and directly developing my own persona as a creator. I have become less interested in a purely relational goal and instead use the content of relational aesthetics to arrive at some other conclusion. It is not enough to just set a stage and let things happen, I desire more specificity and clarity than plain relational aesthetics can give me. In Dinner Party (Manpleaser), I created the circumstances surrounding a dinner party that never happened. I sent out invitations through evite.com, created some semblance of a dining room set and played ambient music, but there was never any dinner. The table was only set for one, and the food never came, but the sound of sizzling meat and the smell of freshly seared steak were incredibly present in the room. This piece stands in direct contrast to my previous work in a few ways; the food had disappeared though it was still present through smell, the set had become real instead of pointedly fake, and my relationship with the audience had completely turned from generous and open to absolutely closed-off. I am interested in the very invasive ways that I can affect people, not just through visual methods but also by attacking parts of their bodies in involuntary ways; the smell and sound of this installation are impossible to avoid assuming you are in the same room. I want to cause some sort of reaction in other people, and I choose to attack senses other than vision or touch or hearing because we are trained, particularly as artists, to be able to decode those signals better than taste and smell signals. Eating and smelling are more primal and less cultivated, they cause changes in your mind and body that feel like magic. Bodies crave for

food in ways that they do not crave most other things. I may not evoke precisely the same reaction in different people but I can probably get some reaction using food and smell pleasure, nostalgia, disgust, nausea, gratitude, or resentment. This work is much less avoidable than a painting hanging on the wall. My final installation Untitled (Balikbayan) is closely related to Dinner Party (Manpleaser). This is another piece primarily based on smell. A plaid plastic market bag sat slumped in the middle of a small room with a specifically Asian grass broom leaned in the corner and the faint smell of foreign food lingering in the air. Inside the bag was a pair of old hospital scrubs. This was a direct response to the All-American nature of most of my other food pieces in an attempt to create something more ethnically authentic. I tried to construct a human being with as few identifiers as possible, using ubiquitous symbols and stereotypes. The most prominent feature was the lingering smell of Filipino food: vinegar, coconut, soy sauce, and garlic. I am interested in the othering of foreigners in America, and the exoticizing of Asians. We can identify someones race based on very subtle cues, in this case smell. There is a history of using smell in particular to identify the other: Americanization of new immigrants speaking English; the adoption of American customs of sanitation, hygiene, and time management; cooking "nonsmelly" foods; modification of child rearing practices was seen as a prerequisite for their socioeconomic mobility in this nation. 2
2

Sharmila Rudrappa, Disciplining Desire in Making the Home: Engendering Ethnicity in Indian Immigrant Families The Second Generation: Ethnic Identity among Asian Americans Ed. Pyong Gap Min (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press,

Smell is so primal and essential to a persons public identity, you can identify a persons particular smell and it can provide many different cues about someones personality and habits what kind of food they eat, how often they shower or brush their teeth, how conscious or unconscious they are of their body odor. The other major feature was the scrubs inside the market bag, which point to the stereotype that most Filipinos in America are nurses. The bag and broom are common items found in Filipino households and the title Balikbayan refers to Filipinos abroad returning to the Philippines with money or goods. These are all empty symbols; just because I know them does not mean I feel particularly authentic or proudly Filipino. These symbols are deeply coded, and are not precisely Filipino enough to identify easily; they would be quickly recognized by a fellow Filipino but carry too many other associations to be super specific. There is something very honest in admitting how little I know about my own culture. I use a collection of superficial symbols to form something authentic about myself. This piece places me within American and Filipino-American culture; it is as legitimate to have a fully expressed ethnic identity as it is to be somewhere in the middle, with some shallow awareness of ethnicity mixed with the culture and associations of the dominant culture.

QUEER DRAWING My two-dimensional work is a mix of drawing and painting, focusing on


2002) p. 101. Emphasis mine.

line, flatness and color specificity in relation to the body. Each character is basically the same, with only minimal attention to individuality the flatness of the image relates to the temperament of its content. I am trying to emphasize my relationship to the image, rather than saying something real about the subjects. I am imposing regularity and flattening bodies into some assumption about their personality rather than trying to create an honest depiction of my friends. I make specific choices to place the gaze of the audience on myself as the artist as opposed to my subjects. The images are intimate in scale, and have recently become constricted to a standard sheet ripped from a notebook. The act of revealing something so private as a notebook page is specific and intentional, pointing toward a narrative about the artist creating these works and the violation of displaying them. This action invites the viewer to examine me rather than my accuracy in depicting real people. These images are also about my identity as a gay man. They come out of an attempt to explore something honest about myself, and to construct a personality given inadequate resources. I position myself in various ways in relation to my friends and loved ones, but only so far as they define me. My drawings are not so much portraits of my friends, but a way to define how I see other people. I use classic forms of the male gaze from art history and flip that narrative, moving the gaze from female bodies to male ones. This is perhaps a correction of historical sexism, but more likely just an addition onto that history. My work implicates me as the queer; I am imposing sexual and

often homosexual narratives on my friends rather than acting as a documentarian. The type of sexuality I depict is also very particular. I am careful to express a chaste or nave form of sex for a variety of reasons. My images are explicit, but their content is shifted by my intention of sweetness. I am taking hardcore imagery from art history, pop culture, and pornography, so I am deliberately mitigating tempering that hardness in my own work to provide an easier point of entry. I also find it much more interesting to be naughty than overly explicit. Totally hard images are too easy to dismiss as raunch and are less open to examination; naughty or wicked images can have as much sexual content wrapped into them without being so alienating. It is also important to depict sexuality as naughty and sort of sweet because I want my images to relate to discovery and a sense of awakening from a state of innocence. Lastly, making more extremely sexualized images would pervert my own relationship with my friends when really these images are supposed to be funny and cute, not excessively invasive. Because my drawings are so minimal, cropping becomes an important compositional tool that also refers to identity issues. I explore how much information is necessary to construct a complete image or narrative. My figures are extremely stripped down to only a simple outline with the symbols of hair, eyes, hands, feet, mouths, and noses. I further restrict access by erasing even these few symbols, cutting off heads and torsos, reducing the image to as little as possible while keeping a body. I am playing with censoring

in this way to jokingly address the content of my work, censoring faces but keeping erections and covering genitalia with transparent cloth patterns. I am also very interested in concepts of coding and differing levels of access to information. I use small cues in my work to hint at much larger topics. I like how a specific sort of floral textile pattern can give a sexual act both a specific location and meaning. I find the image of homosexual intercourse taking place on a very pretty floral cloth most common in elderly womens houses both funny and tender. There is something very loving in my drawing Rosebed, even though it is an image taken directly from gay porn. Other compositional elements can also point in particular directions in similar ways locating a horizon line very particularly can emphasize certain body parts and place the body in different settings. There are also very small cues in the body language of the figures; I pay attention to their gaze, the way they hold their heads and arms, and the stance of their hips to try to create a specific temperature in my work. I want very specifically to make my figures naked rather than nude, in that they are vulnerable instead of empowered, because their nakedness relates to my own nakedness in exposing this seemingly private activity. These are private portraits ripped from my personal notebook, not artistic nudes arranged in a studio. I use my work to create a specific persona, as a form of extroversion. I am using images and performance as tools to make myself more popular or more liked among my friends. My drawings and sculpture are related in their need for other people; I am using relational aesthetics to position myself

within my community. Much of my work is an invisible mental labor, trying to gather as much information about the people around me surreptitiously to use in a drawing or a food choice to show off how good a friend I am or how well I may or may not know somebody. My identity is defined by my relationships with other people. I desire the trust of my viewers, because my work relies so completely on people trusting me for my images and objects to hold any sense of power. They have to believe that I love and care about the people I depict, that I earnestly want to win their affection with food and believe that whatever the temperament that shows through my work is real.

SCULPTURE

All Natural Dinner Party/Slumber Party This is the way we eat Dinner Party (Manpleaser) Untitled (Balikbayan) Crocheting isnt manly enough

13 14 16 18 20 22

All Natural

printed cardstock, homemade muffins, performance Fall 2008

Dinner Party / Slumber Party November 2008 Cardboard, sheets, food, performance Top: installation view, Right: Lillian taking pies out of the oven, Next page: detail of the appliances

The objects in this performance were deliberately fanciful. The sink and stove were playfully sloppy, and our relationship with these objects was transparent in how we pretended to treat them as real while reaffirming how fake they were. We would mess with the knobs on the stove and pretend to check the heat in the oven or turn on the water to bring attention to that labor as well as point out how fake the set is.

This is the way we eat February 2009 Cardboard, mac-&-cheese, performance

TOP: Installation view, NEXT PAGE: performance stills

Dinner Party (Manpleaser) April 2009 Installation, steak scent

TOP: Installation view NEXT PAGE: detail of the place setting

The setting of this sculpture is intentionally generic. I was very specifically thinking about what kind of person sent out these invitations and how that person would decorate their house. Each element is particularly chosen and positioned to emphasize how pathetic the entire situation is.

Untitled (Balikbayan) April 2009 Installation, Filipino food scent

TOP: Installation view NEXT PAGE: detail of scrubs

Crocheting isnt manly enough December 2008 Oil paint on bronze dolls, cast Virgin Mary candle, bedside table, doilies, family photo

This piece is a bridge between my drawings and sculpture. The full setting is

meant to evoke the kind of headspace my drawings occupy in that there is a tension between the nature of the gay sex happening and the delicacy of the figures. The entire piece is really funny and intentionally silly, like a miniature altar that you might find in your grandmothers room but also completely wrong.

DRAWING
Ox-Bow No Homo Eric, Erik, Eric, Eric & Eric Untitled (People I dont dislike) 32 33 24 28 31

All the grads in the order I met them (sort of) Daydreamer Pattern work 34

36

Ox-Bow Drawings June-July 2008 Mixed media on sketchbook paper

These drawings were the seed for my most recent work. I was at Ox-Bow School of the Arts for a two-week workshop in the middle of nowhere in Michigan over the summer of 2008. It was like summer camp for artists from all over the country. The place was in the middle of the woods with only the small tourist town Saugatuck nearby. Without any television or Internet and all my normal responsibilities like cooking and cleaning taken care of, the days were suddenly this huge expanse of free time. There was not much else to do but draw, so I started to draw these quick portraits of all my friends at the camp. I suddenly realized there was something very vital to these rapid drawings as a catalogue of my friends. I was never much of a picture-taker, so these served as a kind of photo album for my time at Ox-Bow. I continued to develop their formal language throughout my senior year.

Left: Ladylove; Right: Beardlove (Tommy & Carlos) gouache, ink, pencil, acrylic, watercolor on paper 5 in. x 8 in. each Spring 2009

These drawings are most closely related to the Ox-Bow drawings in temperament although they came much later than some others. Part of the project of the Ox-Bow drawings was that they were kind of a joke, a funny little game I played while we all sat chatting by the fire. Once the whole project of guessing someones body type started to become more formalized and regularized, I started to play with other aspects of the drawings than just nakedness. These more recent drawings come from silly observations about my friends and classmates, pairing them up for more or less arbitrary reasons. Courtney and Megan are good friends, so I made them lesbians; Carlos and Tommy both have the most incredible beards so I made their beards kiss. On the next page, the image of Warren and the Daniels is taken from the fact that they are really tight with each other to the point that people joke about them

being lovers.

The Three Graces (Warren and the Daniels) March 2009 gouache, ink, watercolor, pencil on paper, actual size

THIS PAGE AND NEXT: No Homo (Andrew, Jim, Giulio & Travis) March 2009 gouache, pencil, ink, watercolor on paper 5 in x 8 in each

This No Homo series of drawings along with the drawing The Three Graces (Warren and the Daniels) are perfect examples of what I mean about my own voyeurism or imposition upon my friends. My depiction of Jim, Giulio, Travis and Andrew reflects a common feeling about heterosexual male

affection and cultural homophobia. It is meant to be funny and cute, but there are also moments of extreme delicacy in the images that belie the light nature of the drawings. It is a problem that men cannot be affectionate toward each other without couching their words in heteronormative posturing. These boys are physically and emotionally naked and then the whole series is totally hinged on that stupid slang phrase No Homo. Who cares if they are homo or not? Everything about the images together screams gay but then you add on that phrase and it brings the work into the realm of the ridiculous. I love participating in normal homophobic behavior like calling people queer or fag because it just drives home how inane the whole activity is. So far, this type of work has ended up as large catalogues of my relationships. In these smaller works, I was trying to create groupings that somehow made sense but were also somewhat farcical. My larger drawings were extensions of these smaller groups; I would set some rule and try to list everyone I could fit into to that category and do a drawing of that list. The categories could be more or less strong, just so long as it formed some way to organize my relationships. These pieces became the most strongly relational of my drawings as my ability to depict people was so heavily reliant on social networking sites like facebook or MySpace to use as source materials. All the grads in particular required hours upon hours of internet research to gather as much physical and personal information as I could get to make the drawing. The smallest and perhaps most silly of these drawings was one based on the name Eric. Eric, Erik, Eric, Eric & Eric is a drawing of five guys I know with the name Eric; most of them do not know each other, they are not connected except by name. The strongest common characteristic among them is that I know them in some way, whether I grew up with them, sort of met them once or twice, or am actually friends with them. The chronologically first of these catalogue pieces is (Untitled) People I dont dislike. This is a self portrait with myself drawn naked in the center of a large page, surrounded by friends or family ordered according to how much I like or care about them. They are arranged into loose categories according to family or school or social clique, but these borders are malleable and unclear they are mostly just there to define me in relief. This is a kind of list in constant revision, depicting all (or at least most) of the art school graduate students I have met in approximately the order that I met them. This drawing really reveals how weak the categories I am working with can be, because the piece is constantly changing as I remember someone I forgot or meet a new person and have to squeeze them in wherever they will fit.

Eric, Erik, Eric, Eric & Eric gouache, watercolor, pencil & ink on paper spring 2009

Untitled (People I dont dislike) watercolor & ink on paper February 2009 23 x 33

All the grads I ever met in the order I met them (sort of) ink & watercolor on paper April 2009

Along with these relational pieces, I have also been working on more

content-driven work. The first of these works was a series of 13 drawings titled Daydreamer. I play with sexuality and delicacy, with an emphasis on placing the viewer within a narrative right before any actual sex takes place.

Examples from Daydreamer

Most recently, I have become interested in textiles and pattern in relation to the flatness of my imagery. I use patterns to enhance or turn the content of my work, making them more decorative certainly but also focusing my compositions more. Some of my patterns are taken from textiles and can date the drawing according to the style of the textile, and focus the content. I am trying to bring sweetness and romance to sexually explicit imagery.

Rosebed March 2009 8 in x 5 in ink, watercolor & gouache on paper

NEXT PAGE TOP: Bitches 8 in x 5 in watercolor, gouache, pencil & ink on paper BOTTOM: Torsos 8 in x 5 in watercolor, gouache, pencil & ink on paper

TOP LEFT: Pink X 5 in x 7 in gouache, pencil, watercolor TOP RIGHT: Erik 5 in x 7 in gouache, pencil, watercolor BOTTOM: Trick 5 in x 8 in gouache, watercolor, ink

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Bailey, Colin B. The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 2. Basquiat, Jean Michel. Basquiat. Ed. Marc Mayer. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2005. 3. Bayrle, Thomas et al. Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting. New York: Phaidon, 2002. 4. Blake, Nayland. Nayland Blake: Hare Attitudes. Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1996. 5. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel, 2002. 6. Cameron, Dan. Food for Thought Frieze, (17) (1994): <http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/food_for_thought/> Accessed October 2008. 7. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999. 8. Coulter-Smith, Elizabeth and Graham Coulter-Smith. Art Games: Interactivity and the Embodied Gaze Technoetic Arts. 4(3) (2006): pp. 169-182. 9. Dexter, Emma. Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. New York: Phaidon, 2005. 10. In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice. Eds. Nayland Blake, Lawrence Rinder and Amy Scholder. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995. 11. Luckhardt, Ulrich. David Hockney: Paintings. Munich: Prestel, 1994. 12. Marshall, Richard. Robert Mapplethorpe. New York: Whitney Museum in Association with New York Graphic Society Books, 1988. 13. Platow, Raphaela. Dana Schutz: paintings, 2002-2005. Waltham, MA: The Rose Art Museum, 2006. 14. Rosenberg, Pierre. Fragonard. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988. 15. Rudrappa, Sharmila. Disciplining Desire in Making the Home:

Engendering Ethnicity in Indian Immigrant Families The Second Generation: Ethnic Identity among Asian Americans. Ed. Pyong Gap Min. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002. 16. Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Dir. Kirby Dick. DVD. Lions Gate Home Entertainment, 2003. 17. Terry Winters: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, 1994-2004. Ed. Adam D. Weinberg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 18. Watteau, Antoine. Opera Completa di Watteau. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1968.

BIOGRAPHY Mark Aguhar was born May 16, 1987 in Houston, Texas. He has wanted to be an artist since the first time he saw Bob Ross paint a happy bush on PBS. When he came to the University of Texas he dropped the Bob Ross, enrolled in Plan II, took up a Studio Art major, and never looked back. Mark will be one of the featured artists in Arthouses New American Talent 24 opening in downtown Austin in June. He will be moving back to Houston and will begin the process of applying to graduate school in the Fall.

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