Heath Franco, LIFE IS SEXY
The National, Carriageworks, Sydney
30 March - 25 June 2017
Influenced by pop-music videos and a trip across America, Heath Franco’s LIFE IS SEXY (2016–17) follows
many of the formal elements found throughout his oeuvre of improvisational performances and digitally
manipulated videos. It uses repetitive gestures, voices and tones looped to create frantic rhythms and
climaxes. Franco developed the work, in part, through the 2015 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging),
which allowed him to travel to the US as well as intern with music-video director Joel Kefali.
At the forefront of Franco’s works are a cast of eccentrically costumed characters, all played by the artist.
The recorded performances of these characters are like a medium, paints on a palette to be used over and
over. They appear throughout Franco’s work in various guises and forms, unnamed so that they can be used
in largely non-narrative ways, like secondary characters from a hallucinogenic children’s show you can’t
quite recall but can’t shake the feeling of either.
It could be easy to understand Franco’s videos, full of these frenzied figures fitted out in op-shop apparel, as
ironic parody or postmodern pastiche; a better term to use is ‘zany’. As Sianne Ngai describes, the zany is
an aesthetic of ‘physical bombardment’ that highlights libido and is ‘hot under the collar’.1 As Franco’s oftsweating face can attest, his characters are hot and zany and work hard to look like they’re playing. The
‘zany’ troubles the distinction between work and play and has a distinct un-fun or stressed, unrelaxed vibe to
it. For LIFE IS SEXY Franco found those vibes reflected back at him while visiting holiday spots including
Miami and Las Vegas.
As the videos Franco creates are loose worlds for his characters to exist in, specific locations are often an
inspirational beginning point. For example: FUN HOUSE (2010) was influenced, in part, by Blackpool; HOME
TOWN (2014), by his childhood home of Berridale; and parts of the US can be seen in LIFE IS SEXY.
Not unlike the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard when he travelled to America, Franco found a country of
unreality constructed from his own pop culture-fuelled expectations. This work explores those places of
neither dream nor reality but hyper-reality, where people, places and things project something real that was
never real to begin with, doesn’t even exist, never existed anyway. These include concepts of ‘fun’, ‘cool’
and, most importantly, ‘sexy’ – all aesthetic categories that become more distant the harder one tries to attain
them.
The title of LIFE IS SEXY comes from this impossibility, echoing the overuse of the term ‘sexy’ throughout
the early 2000s. But still, Franco looks, finding desire and sexiness (be it real or faux) in palm trees, sunsets,
doughnuts, neon, tanning, leisure, sparkly nail polish, bronze families, mall picnics, and the spurting water
features forged from the barren deserts of western cities – deserts that Baudrillard identified as America’s
‘primal scene’, the centre of its sexuality.2 (2) The aesthetics of this hyper-reality are hyper-realised in
Franco’s work, and thank goodness, since, as Baudrillard bemoaned, ‘Snapshots aren’t enough’.3
Katherine Guinness
1 Sianne Ngai, Our aesthetic categories: zany, cute, interesting, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2012, pp.184, 7.
2 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 1988, p.28.
3 ibid., p.1.