Dandy Day’s “Ruthless Aggression”

Sex, money, power. A suitable tricolonic for the current US administration—recent hosts of the increasingly right-wing and MAGA-friendly UFC’s “Freedom 250” cage fight on the White House lawn—and the definite motivating forces of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) corporation. Gone are the days of Roland Barthes’s “grandiloquent” Manichaean pantomimes (covered in his 1957 book Mythologies). Today, the business of professional wrestling, specifically at its fifteen-billion dollar summit in the WWE, is a toxic maelstrom of steroids, racism, alleged scopophilia, sexual abuse, drug addiction, nationalism, plastic surgery, and spandex. Smartly, in Dandy Day’s “Ruthless Aggression” the hyperreal bombast of the WWE is muted, reined into submission even, for a subtle solo presentation: sophisticated, vulnerable, and disconcerting.

In TACO!’s public area, Day has produced and positioned a series of life-size cardboard cutouts: enlarged photographs of plastic action figures of the wrestler Chris Benoit, infamous for murdering his wife and child before committing suicide in 2007. WWE was quick to disassociate itself from the crime, the consensus of its supporters being that “real violence” is a world away from the show business of its lurid simulation, but questions remain. In reality, repeated head trauma and steroid use are the professional fixtures from which rage and destructive behaviors emerge, and the consequences of their dark application outside the ring haunt Day’s project.

The centerpiece of “Ruthless Aggression” is a bedroom abstracted. A teenager’s room (the gallery handout suggests it is a boy’s), the walls painted a numbing blue, a white skirting board lining the bottom, the carpet a specific epochal timestamp of British beige (circa 1980s/’90s while still anachronistically present in the noughties), and every piece of furniture missing. In place of any characteristic fixtures, fittings, or juvenile wrestling ephemera are five large clip-framed photographs. Each is a low-resolution detail of a different element of the same scene: a room with the same wall color, a corner of a bed backboard in one image, an open door in another, a selection of stuffed toys in the rest. An uncanny atmosphere of entrapment (the room is windowless) pervades in this dematerialized zone featuring nothing but representations of itself and the objects it once possibly contained.

Here, Day is operating in similar territory to Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 work One and Three Chairs, but in a register that seeks to use tautology for affective and narratological purposes. In other words, a self-referential network is set up, but the flatly logical language games of classical conceptual art are pushed into the more dramatic arena of the autobiographical. Although details of Day’s life are at times explicitly referenced in their practice, in this instance they are opaque, used more for their generative and associative potentials. That is to say, “Ruthless Aggression” is not a self-centering confessional, but it is clear that the unsettling facts of an adolescence have been formally productive and filtered through a sharpened practical sense of exhibition making.

At work is a sensibility that recognizes something can be gained from holding back. As such, a set of rich associations are provoked by Day’s chosen present materials and their suggested absent counterparts, encouraging the viewer to fill the empty space. Whose room was or is it anyway? What took place there? Is the dynamic of present absence also used as an evocation of anxiety? It could be a legitimate way of referring to that mental process, particularly if anxiety is characterized as a state of worrying about things that have yet to appear or events that may never happen. The anticipation of a blow can sometimes be as traumatic as the blow itself, and violence too is both there and not there in the blue room’s atmosphere. The exhibition’s title ensures an undertone of it pervades the negative space, while the reference to violence is also made explicit through the community of toy Benoit cutouts, as are its developmental links to pubescence.

The phrase “Ruthless Aggression” was the WWE’s in-house title for an “era” in which a number of Byzantine storylines propelled wrestlers into set-piece confrontations fueled by paranoia, betrayal, and treachery. The question is: Does the unrealistic presentation of violence and its consequences distort, desensitize, and normalize it for audiences (a large number of whom are children)? For Day, it seems the weirdness of such images and archetypes being a fixture of their youth is troubling, despite the WWE’s alibi of spectacular entertainment. And of course, it is worth remembering that the spectacle is still used to condition audiences to both excuse and respond to the exploitative values and lax behavioral standards that capitalist modes of consumption inculcate. Nor is this a sector entirely apart from the more vapid tendencies of our own. As the CEO of TKO Group Holdings, Ari Emanuel effectively controls WWE and the UFC (see, or perhaps just avoid, bantamweight Hitler sympathizer Bryce Mitchell); he is also the owner of Frieze Art Fair and Frieze magazine.

Outside TACO!, Day’s version of homemade wrestling fan placards are placed in the window. “Did you take your shot today,” is written on one. Within the formal network of associations the exhibition sets up, it reads as a potential reference to the mental cost of aggression performed (Benoit) or Day’s early domestic situation (the ghost of a crisis?) encrypted behind the exhibitions material referents. A quote from Guy Debord comes to mind: “the world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience.”1 Day’s “Ruthless Aggression” is a clever and curious show from an artist coming into their own.

Editors' note: this text was adjusted on July 7 to clarify that Ari Emanuel is CEO of TKO Group Holdings, owner of the WWE and UFC.