Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Gauguin, 1898
Where Do We Come From? What Are We Having For Dinner?
Behan, 2026
Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti in 1891 convinced he could recover something primal and uncorrupted — that he could arrive in another culture, look at its people, and understand them. His monumental 1898 painting arranges bodies along a long horizontal plane, figures at rest and in motion, asking the largest questions a human being can ask: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going. It is a magnificent painting and a deeply complicated one. Gauguin was the outsider looking in — the Western eye trained on an “other” culture, certain of its own capacity to comprehend what it was seeing. Gay culture has always known that position from the other side. They are the ones perpetually examined, explained, and theorized about by those who have never lived inside the life being described.
The horizontal arrangement found in Gauguin’s work is reflected in Behan’s collage — gay men spread across a sun-drenched domestic interior landscape, going about the vivid, ordinary business of living — reading, exercising, dressing, existing —bodies serving as the argument. Behan’s collage argues the working out of the everyday is the answer to the cosmic questions humans like to ask, and it turns out the answer almost always includes “what do you want for dinner?”
Humor is not a retreat from seriousness. It is one of the most serious responses available to a human being. To laugh at our own fragility — at the gap between the questions we ask and the lives we actually live — is to hold both things at once without being destroyed by either. It is, finally, a form of hope. Cindy Sherman has described seeing humor in almost everything, treating her work as a one-person mischievous show. Her clown series uses garish color and deliberate artifice to expose the fabricated nature of social roles not to mock but to liberate. When the construction is exposed, we are free to laugh at it. And when we laugh at it, we are free.
Gauguin asked where we are going. Sherman shows us the costume we are wearing while we figure it out. The Closet Series suggests we stop and have a bite first.
