Slugs are really the only kind of Pacific Northwest pest that floods me with ick. Everything else is pretty cute and easygoing, as pests go. Slugs are just gross.
A slug is the subject of the greatest work of art I saw all week: a three-foot long slug painted by Dana Blume.
This slug is ickless. It has a sheen. It is, I dare say, sexy.
Do you know about slug sex? Google it. I promise you won’t be disappointed. There’s a readily available BBC clip of slugs making love, the blow-by-blow action narrated by David Attenborough’s rich and serious voice.
Slugs are hermaphrodites; they have both male and female sex organs and can use either or both at will. They can impregnate themselves. While the slug does not need to fuck, it fucks. During a state of arousal, a large translucent penis, nearly as big as the slug’s body, blossoms from the side of its neck. As the slugs cling to each other in a mucous-y lovelock, their penises grow and grow, twining around each other in continuous tight spiral. It looks like a slimy, white spiral lollipop.
When I was 14, the boy I was madly in love with in Sanger, Texas brought a salt shaker out from the kitchen into the mudroom, where a luscious slug was slicking its way across the cold concrete floor. He knelt down and sprinkled the slug with a slow shower of saline crystals. “Watch,” he said. I was disgusted and sad, but my teenage bones were aching for him so much and we were bent so close over the slug that our knees almost touched, so I watched. He asked me to marry him three times in the next three years. The last time, I said yes. We never had sex. The slug melted into a salt lick.
There’s a radiant light spilling off the back of Dana Blume’s slug. Almost as though it were speeding along a slug freeway. To feed? To fuck? Who knows the mission of this speed demon. The ground beneath the slug is seashore, a beach criss-crossed with drawings carved into sand. I do not understand this hurry to the ocean: Did the slug not learn anything about salt growing up? That to bathe in it is sure death? Maybe it's a case of mistaken identity, the creature thinking itself a nudibranch. Maybe the drawing in the sand is supposed to give us a clue? Those petals etched in earth like a kid’s crude doodle, rendered almost red in the shadows, under the bifurcated fleshy folds of the slug’s chin.
And what labial chins these are! Drenched and lubricated in a fine slime. Maybe this lubricant is the reason for the slug’s speed, as it hurtles through slug-space haloed with speedy iridescence.
Blume’s title for the painting is On Not Being A Slug, which indicates a prolonged rumination on the nature of not being the thing depicted. Is it a celebration of a human’s recognition that he is not a mollusk, but is in fact a human, or is it something more? The title of the group exhibit it is in, Now You Are Me, sets forth a loose context of addressing identity—I, me, you, them—and offering means by which to conceive the self outside the normal identity containers, whether by dissociation or hallucination or any number of artful ways. At one point in the exhibit, visitors are required to bend down and lean in close to view a detailed artwork, alongside which is situated an inconspicuous camera mounted to the wall. The camera captures an image of the viewer in real time, leaning over, and a projector projects the image in real time back onto a nearby wall. Individuals leaning in toward the camera cannot see the image of themselves projected back on the wall; their backs are turned to it. Only everyone else in the gallery sees you.
The whole show can be taken as a sort of funhouse hall of mirrors filled with beings watching beings seeing others seeing themselves, where subjectivity itself is being called into question.
So then, what is the logical (or illogical) conclusion to be squeezed from Blume’s slug, and from a title that suggests Blume is ruminating at length on the fact that he is not a slug? Or perhaps Blume is flipping the premise of non-slughood on its head, and he’s messing with us. Is it a portrait of the artist as a slug? Or is he simply pointing out that we are guilty of othering the slug the entire time?
Which unfolds another line of questions, such as: Is this slug other, or is it I? How far back the evolutionary family tree (if you believe that kind of thing) do we share a common grandmother? The slugmother. Who birthed one slug especially sluggy, who would tow the family line, and birthed another slug that was ever so slightly more human-ish, who would go on to grow arms legs and pop a head, and retain the precious luscious slug folds tucked in a special place, between the legs.
We can see ourselves in anything, if we look closely enough. If we spend a moment to let ego fall like scales from the eyes. Art allows us to do that.
Dana Blume’s slug is going somewhere nowhere everywhere fast on a slick track of perpetual glowing wetness. Everything is soft, wavering, and watery—gelatinous, as though seen through a lens smeared with petroleum jelly. Everything is non-solid, like a moment from a François Boucher painting, where the edge of a cloud melts into the ruffle of a hem melts into roseate flesh—all is atmosphere, nothing is actually solid. Subjectivity is subjective.
I am not a slug, yet maybe I am. We spend all our lives in the pursuit of othering in order to find ourselves, but maybe all I have to do to see me, is see you. ◼︎
Now You Are Me, curated by Gage Hamilton and Grayson Richter, is on view at Common Ground on Saturdays and Sundays 12:00-5:00 p.m. or by appointment.
Amanda Manitach is a visual artist and the editor of Public Display Art. The daughter of an evangelical minister, she spent her childhood in Kansas and Texas drawing on the backs of church bulletins during long Sunday sermons. She eventually dropped the faith, but not the pencil. The best thing I saw this week is an ongoing documentation of art encountered in the wild.
