Hugh Hayden at Lisson Gallery

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Hugh Hayden, Hughman (installation view) (2023–24). Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023–24. © Hugh Hayden. Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

Lisson Gallery’s Los Angeles building was previously home to a gay sex club called The Zone, a history Hugh Hayden employed in both the form and content of his exhibition Hughman. Hayden, a trained architect who primarily works in sculpture, often constructs strange, somewhat menacing environments that prompt interrogation of the perils of American life. For Hughman, his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, the artist transformed the gallery into a public bathroom, a gesture that reinvigorated the space with the spirit of its former life and turned the gallery into something of a cruising ground, complete with custom urinals. (According to Hayden, he revived the old plumbing of The Zone to install them.) By signaling the building’s recent past, the exhibition made it difficult to ignore the ongoing development of the surrounding neighborhood, which unavoidably wraps Lisson into the larger history of gentrification in L.A. By deploying symbols of masculinity, sexuality, and violence, Hayden also emphasized that even our most ostensibly intimate moments are subject to surveillance and exist under the influence of the political and state powers that shape our urban life and public spaces.

The first thing you saw when entering Hughman was a bathroom sink and mirror, your reflection implicating you in this body of work. Each wall of the gallery was occupied by uniform rows of metal bathroom stalls. Only by opening their doors were you able to view the artworks, mainly sculptures that incorporated both natural and synthetic materials like tree branches and nylon brush bristles. The gallery worker, assuming the role of a restroom attendant, told you the urinals behind some doors were fully functional. Whether or not you used them, as some visitors allegedly did, you had to take an active role to navigate the exhibition. The stalls meant that each work could only be encountered in isolation, and stepping inside brought on feelings of claustrophobia and self-consciousness. Peeking into and entering each stall, you felt both like you were intruding and as if someone might intrude on you. This mix of uncertainty and intimate discovery approached a sanitized version of the cruising experience you might have experienced at The Zone.

The Zone was a clothing-optional two-story maze of stalls and private booths that welcomed men on Sycamore Avenue for almost 30 years before closing in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like other queer spaces in L.A. and elsewhere, it was targeted by local police from day one. “I opened The Zone on July 19, 1991,” wrote Peter Deep, the club’s original owner. “LAPD came to the opening and threw me in jail overnight. No charges filed, it’s just I had the audacity to open a gay club in LA.”¹ In Hughman, this history of police surveillance and entrapment felt palpable. First Date (all works 2023), a sculpture with uneven, handmade-looking dual urinals that faced one another, seemed to encourage an erotic encounter, even if at risk of being caught. In another stall, Freedom, a framed collage of an American flag made of red, white, and blue Propecia, Zyrtec, and Descovy pills hung above Brainwash, a school desk blanketed in toilet brush bristles. While First Date suggested that potential risk is all part of the fun, the next installation—conjuring the American school environment, the focus of recent debates around “bathroom bills” targeting trans and gender-nonconforming students—spoke to how the state’s administrative control of bodies can make even a trip to the restroom uncomfortable, if not downright dangerous, for queer people. Meanwhile, the flag in Freedom invited two competing reads, indicating the new liberties afforded to gay hookup culture with the inclusion of HIV-fighting Descovy while simultaneously reducing an entire national mythos to a handful of branded pills developed by profit-driven conglomerates.

A number of Hayden’s other sculptures more blatantly grappled with power in relation to masculinity and sexuality. Attached to a wall of one stall, Stick ’Em Up comprised a white silicone cast of a male torso covered in human hair with a cast pistol emerging from its crotch. Peacemaker, a nude midsection painted white, sported a strap-on revolver. Pathology, meanwhile, was a cutaway anatomical model of the male human reproductive system, the kind you might find in a classroom, except this one had blue police trousers covering the leg, with handcuffs and a gun dangling from the waist. It demonstrated both dominance and fragility, exposing a representative of state power and masculine bravado to the scrutiny he might typically inflict on others. Conflating firearms and phalluses with an almost cartoonish vulgarity, these looming specters of law enforcement combined humor and erotic charge in a way that complicated but did not diminish the aura of menace. Rather, Hughman seemed to suggest that danger is an unavoidable part of American codes of masculinity, wrapped up as they are in both homoerotic intimacy and violence.

According to Hayden, the starting point for Hughman was The Audition, a director’s chair with a tangle of threatening wooden phalluses protruding from it.² The work gestures toward the uneven power dynamics embedded within a dominant L.A. industry, which reflect inequity in the city at large, including in the rapidly developing Hollywood neighborhood where Lisson is located. Here, as sites like The Zone continue to disappear from an area recently dubbed “L.A.’s coolest new hangout³” for its luxury shops and galleries, developers have eagerly rebranded it the “Sycamore District,” as if to sever it from its identity as part of a dense, diverse urban ecosystem. Hayden resists this rebranding by reviving the obscured eroticism and anxiety of the site, tapping into a history shared by countless other queer spaces at risk of being wiped out. In Hughman, the story of The Zone played out as a reminder that our most private moments may never actually be fully ours—that even stepping into a bathroom stall isn’t enough to shield us from the gentrifying, policing, and bio-politicking forces that infringe on our spaces and bodies.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 36.

Alexander Schneider is a writer and editor currently based in Los Angeles. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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