SHAHRYAR NASHAT

Where a boyfriend gives himself up to the other, and the lover takes him, selfishly, like a flower from a field,the hustler gives himself to himself as part of an insular economy, a useless transaction, which is, nonetheless, agift–a work.The hustler is the artist as a young man, gazing into the camera, a smug, somewhat lazy look in his eyes. He isabout to dye his hair–it won’t work.

We are witnessing a moment of transition, the blurring of a line between alife and its outcome. The hustler is his own canvas, the painter as well as his pigments. To be an artist is toturn the collateral of survival into a living. The artist is a hustler and the hustler works alone. He stains andcleans up after himself as best he can. He wears a plastic glove and he looks at us, lazily, provocatively.His picture appears several times in the exhibition. Shahryar Nashat often works with this type of repetition,as if to see what matter accumulates, whose face emerges – this time his own.

We meet him again, the hustler-artist, in a series of images of fabric stained by bodily secretions andcovered with a skin of acrylic gel. The hustler is his own canvas, but when he paints he finds his colours come outsheer: sweat, saliva, tears. Such fluids are aesthetic responses to being in the world that require some workin order to appear. This is what Nashat facilitates when he treats the picture in post-production, develops it, sothat the stain becomes distinguishable from its host, and what had regrettably seeped into the fabric ismade luminous and deliberate. You look at it quietly, that useless gift, a blurred line.

In the sculpture Deeper and Deeper, foam mattresses and glass tanks provide a set for the hustle ofbecoming. Inside them, water from the salt lakes in Camargue, France, offers a solution to the hustler’schromatic problem. Lots of things make up a hustler, all the things that make a mark: fine organic matter,living matter in its primary state, pure and simple. He lives in the water under the name dunaliella salina, amicroscopic warrior. As temperatures rise, liquid condenses, the waterline descends, and the algae-hustler’sbattle is slowly won. Life is so rarely up to the hustler, but in moments such as these, reduction comes outas production, the remnant as content, and the hustler sees his hour of stardom–the hour at which even thebasest element rises to the level of protagonist. The armour produced by the algae to protect itself from thesalt makes a pink lace-like pattern. Witness an aesthetic response to being in the world, art as the product ofsurvival, hustler art.

‘Perfection is impersonal’ wrote Simone Weil and the hustler is certainly that. For whose face do you reallysee encrusted onto the side of a glass tank, or in a bathroom mirror? The hustler is no one, but he does notfeel sorry for himself, nor for anyone else. He pays the price of salt for his luminous appearance bycleaning up after himself. He washes the carpets as best he can, scrubs grout from between amber coloured bathroom tiles, hears the dull gasp of the vacuum cleaner. When he closes the door behind him, only themost obstinate stains remain. His self-portrait.— Kristian Vistrup Madsen

Press release courtesy Gladstone. Text: Kristian Vistrup Madsen.