oh hey Beth Cavener! (oh hey another post I've had in my tabs for months and kept putting off reblogging). wow what great work, I've been following her off and on for years and I'm always blown away by her stuff. hope I get to see it in person someday.
Cavener is always a bit funny to me because I can't help but look at pieces like "A Rush of Blood to the Head," which is a large piece of two goats locked in an embrace and kiss with visible erections, and think about how this would be received in actual furry circles. burned furs and all that. I've noticed a general squeemishness actually in furry circles whenever things get a bit too close to the actual gallery art world and its sensibilities and established ideas. there's a willingness to put on display, in publicly accessible galleries that just ANYONE could WALK INTO, stuff that is treated as astonishingly taboo online, with an expectation of layers and layers of disclaimers and content warnings and apologies. like, Tommy Bruce has this great set of fursuit photos involving firearms and fetish and people had SUCH a "how dare you sir" reaction on social media, which if you know anything about the work of people like Marina Abramovich, Chris Burden, and Yoko Ono, is just, so fucking funny.
some of this is absolutely part of the broader weird culture clashes you get when different pretty distant parts of the field of cultural production meet, like two rivers from very different watersheds colliding. it's not dissimilar really to stuff like the low art movement in comics (though, they swing in the other direction towards deliberate vulgar grotesquerie but that's a story for another day). sometimes it feels like, ok well if we can write certain things off as just someone's kink that's one thing, but turning it into an actual artistic statement? that's sort of threatening because it demands something of the audience. and as furry increasingly becomes popularized to a huge extent and subsequently more corporatized, I think that there's probably a lot of people for whom the idea of artists taking risks, or art demanding something of the viewer, just isn't something they associate with these funny animals. maybe that, too, is why burned furs types crop up periodically: if you spend all your time consuming uncritically, you assume that must be how everyone else is engaging with their kinks or artistic tastes.
but Cavener's art demands engagement. it's so beautiful and tempting, clay surfaces worked to look like whipped icing, beautiful sensual forms. and the subject matter so often involves codependence, inescapable relations, entrapment... like Bruce she's got this amazing capacity to aestheticize and eroticize deeply uncomfortable subjects. like this piece, Trapped, is gorgeous, kind of nervously funny, and also makes me go damn you uh, you alright? lmao. I'm drawn towards furry art that is similarly challenging and complex.
ultimately there might not be so great a division between these worlds anyway. Cavener has a patreon that makes about the median expected amount per month (you know: bupkis). one of us! one of us! I wonder if she has to take people's state issued indentification papers whenever she wants to show someone her artwork. that might be the remaining difference between high and low furry: some pompous ass judge somewhere deciding that he "knows it when he sees it".
that's why it's so important to have spaces where it feels like these worlds can blend together and exchange. Like Cohost!
yep.
uh huh, like Cohost.
