CURA.

At first, the demons come from within. Chelsea Hotel No. 2, from 2010, is sometimes cited as Alex Da Corte’s breakthrough work. He made the video with a cartful of supermarket items, sliced bread, cherries, flour, cheap meat, a smiley-face plastic bag. The pathos runs high, not just because the mournful strains of Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2 is the soundtrack, but for the sheer palpable desire to transcend the dumbness of what’s available in this dollar store of an existence, by jabbing cherries onto his fingertips or (with a friend’s hand’s help) applying cherry nail polish to cherries. But there’s revelry here, too—love for plastic pop and neon. The Cohen dirge arcs back to Warhol days and the suffering starlets in the business artist’s orbit, embracing camp, retrieving joy, a queer exuberance marbled with deep sadness, like lonely Andy in his fright wig.

Da Corte regularly dresses up as monsters, witches and devils, for press photos as well as artworks. But to grasp his relationship to monstrosity, you need to go back to his earliest videos, before the literal masks, and see the way Da Corte’s work has always tugged at the taut heartstrings of the outcast. The candy coating, so to speak, of bold colors and wacky characters that he’s now known for, the whole machine of Pop, conceals his cast of outsiders pulled into the mainstream, where they are both famous and misunderstood, sometimes violently.

This tension appears in a lush, lesser-known trio of videos, from 2012, A Season in He’ll, Bad Blood, and The Impossible. A homage to Arthur Rimbaud, the trilogy wears the aura of queer alienation, coupled with a positivist view of substance abuse; each depicts the same gaunt, buzzcut man engaging in druggy rituals, shot in extreme slow motion—smoking, drinking, injecting—except he seems to be imbibing watermelon, snorting egg yolk, and shooting up Coca-Cola. At 11 minutes, The Impossible is longer than the other two videos combined and draws out the actor’s self-destructive gesture to excruciating, nigh transcendent length—like a slow decline, the video leaves plenty of time to wish he would stop or to hope he won’t really press the plunger, but then he does, and his gaze meets the lens with defiance, with the confidence of someone who has found their place on society’s margins. The scene is cartoonishly occult, as when, needle still lodged in the vein, he snuffs out a black candle with his fingers.

The actor in the Rimbaud trilogy bears a superficial resemblance to Da Corte—you can infer a sort of surrogacy, as if this rough lookalike is the artist’s avatar in the world of white male angst and bohemian excess. The monster is inside, like an addiction, dancing with depression, trying to reach an unsanctioned refuge. Da Corte’s THE SUPERMAN videos, completed in 2018, are similar: deadpan, shot straight on, a lone figure performing wacky but dire tasks with plastic toys and bottles, like struggling to untangle a Gordian knot of Nintendo 64 controllers. This time, though, the figure is the artist, edging into costume by dressing as the rapper Eminem (who, a friend suggested, he resembles) in bleached hair and white t-shirt. Da Corte and Marshall Mathers appear here as parallel products of the same moment, roughly middle America in the 1980s and ’90s. Da Corte, almost a decade younger, came of age around the same time as the Eminem persona of Mathers, a violent homophobe and misogynist. When Eminem puts on his own lightly fictionalized avatar, Slim Shady, he becomes the monster he’s already taken for, in the way that “society” externalizes its fears in the form of “misunderstood” people.

Being on the wrong side of this cultural, cathartic misunderstanding gives Da Corte’s work much of its deep sadness. It’s the burden of Frankenstein’s hunted Monster more than sociopathic Dracula or psychotic Wolfman. Charlie Fox^[1] suggests that Frankenstein’s misbegotten son is just trying to survive, to have a kind of life in the wilderness (of art?), yet the philistine townspeople pursue with pitchforks and torches. In the 2017 video Slow Graffiti, Da Corte in a green mask and neck bolts lopes through absurd rituals, at one point, as Fox writes, collapsing “skewered by a heap of brooms like Saint Sebastian on Halloween.” For Da Corte, the monstrous thread isn’t gore or murder, but silliness. Instead of jump scares or biting off the heads of bats, Da Corte plunges us into alienation through bright colors and slapstick situations, like his Frankenstein’s Monster making a meal of a shredded hero sandwich dressed with chips and cheap beer.

You play with what you’re given. Invited to make a work for the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Da Corte hit on the fact that the Heinz condiment brand is headquartered in that same city, and set to making a 57-part costume epic titled Rubber Pencil Devil (2019). Installed on a TV-like monitor wall inside a custom cabinet, the segments clatter out like Saturday morning TV’s life flashing before its eyes. There’s Da Corte as Mister Rogers, beloved children’s star, taking off and putting on his shoes in a purgatorial loop; four elven workmen in blue jumpsuits hoisting up a suggestively cropped portion of a billboard; Da Corte as the titular red devil lewdly waggling the titular giant rubber pencil. One of Da Corte’s first films, Carry That Weight, from 2003, shows the artist in resplendent magic-hour light lugging what could be a twin mattress but is actually a large plush ketchup bottle through the streets. This is all the wholesomeness of American mass culture, its grotesque avatars of belonging, as a monstrous weight.

Art history has its night terrors, too—in Da Corte’s world, mostly fathers—and like many artists, he has found that the only way to evict them from his closet, so to speak, is to face them in the light of day—that is, to embody them, under floodlights and cameras. Da Corte takes on a passionate litany of roles in ROY G BIV, first shown in 2022, in what might be his most studied treatise on art and influence yet, as well as his most poignant performance as an actor. In the first of the video’s Shakespearian five acts, Da Corte as Marcel Duchamp arranges the furniture and sculpture in a modernist gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The scene is grisaille, Duchamp’s rubbery features deeply lined; he plays both sides of a chess match with a weary hand. Then the scene bursts into pink, or rose, and cartoon birds deck out Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, the conceptual grandee’s queer avatar. Da Corte as Duchamp as Sélavy prances around in a wizened fantasia: a young artist playing an older one in drag, in drag himself, but in this exact way he’s able to freely inhabit the constrained play of contemporary art.

This is art history as drag—the kind conservative politicians dream into a monster who is out to get their children. Adult cartoons are more acid than other “adult” genres, because (like mango-flavored vape pens) they’ll seduce the youth. Da Corte’s work seems milder than his comparable forebears, like Paul McCarthy; more fun than Terry Fox; more serious than William Wegman—like a carefully metered hedonism is the most subversive kind.

In his latest show, World Leader Pretend, at Gió Marconi Gallery in Milan, Da Corte presents new paintings and sculptures in an installation resembling a kunsthal with a dose of funhouse. Here, the monster is the pursuit of power. In a text he wrote for the exhibition, Da Corte imagines a conversation between an aging Napoleon Bonaparte and his trusted valet that takes the form of a pop-psychology game: Imagine a desert, a cube, a ladder, a horse, a flower, a storm. Da Corte’s Napoleon imagines a war-torn wasteland, the death of his beloved horse, a ladder he can’t find, and ah—his estranged lover, with a bouquet of peonies. The emperor in this text is a version of Da Corte’s Gumbyish red devil, a damning portrait of absolute corruption that can’t help but seem hollow, since it gives us everything we want. The world is never so tidy as the monster, remorseful, on his deathbed.

Some of the work in the exhibition is based loosely on the objects in the personality game. A statue of an upturned horse, for example, is a scaled-up standee of a sketch by the cartoonist Gary Panter. The horse lies in the final room of the show, surrounded by reverse-glass paintings that Da Corte has fashioned like the arc of a person’s life. On one side is a diptych of an egg wedged into a hen’s feathers (The Mother of the World), on the other another diptych of hellfire, and in between mortal events like friendship—a goofy portrait of the Muppet-like sports mascots Gritty and the Phillie Phanatic hugging—and love, represented by a dewy red heart from a Breeders album cover. The room’s walls are patterned with the girders of a bridge, which might as well be a rainbow.

During the show’s opening, Da Corte himself embodied another tragic figure, a tweedy foley artist, in a wool suit and scraggly beard, dashing between two steel sculptures on either end of the show. One, a metal sheet, made the sound of thunder; the other, a ring and ribbon dangling near the horse’s body, made the sound of wind. As Da Corte galloped between the two sculptures, making the sound of the storm, a wooden block strapped to his shoes clopped like a horse’s hooves. Here is the artist as the fallen beast, abject and alive.