The Devil in the Zeitgeist: Clovice Holt’s ‘out of your arms, I gotta go daddy’

Arts

Mar 31

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Darkness needs a face. Humans need myths to make sense of the unknown world around us. All myths are man-made. Thought by thought, pixel by pixel, one idea after the other, one figment of imagination at a time, a monster is born, real and sobbing in front of us. Who, then, created the devil? Who first spoke his name, owns his story?

Clovice Holt’s out of your arms, I gotta go daddy gives Satan a new body. Holt challenges religious doctrine, and creates an alternative narrative for the fallen angel to exist. The devil’s appearance, history, and purpose is subverted into the image of a sad, soft victim of a cruel joke.

Holt gives him cartoony dimension, like a clumsy villain from a Saturday morning kid’s show. His Satan has plastered strawberry-candy skin, bulbous insect eyes, baby-blue tears, swelling and deflating like old balloons. He also has a penis like an elephant trunk and a massive booty to match. The sight of it is at once hysterical, shameful and chilling. Our emotions towards Satan get confused. Our feelings trip on top of one another, as the bedtime tales we were told try to make sense with the angel dangling in ropes from the ceiling in front of us.

Satan is unique in the way he seeps into the human experience, an inner voice digging its way inside. He is a beast, feeding off the pain of others. He is inherent shame. When we are taught to deny our own earthly pleasure, the devil steps in. He is the voice of suppression, a symbol of temptation, the fear or celestial punishment. This fear devours the soul, it shadows our willingness to understand each other, or ourselves in ways outside of what we’ve been conditioned to believe.

“Satan cried the day he left heaven,” Holt declares in his statement. “Positioning God, not Lucifer, as the onus of failure, I relate to an allegory of a son deciding to venture off into the world, leaving his home to journey on his own adventures.” In both digital space and sculpture, Holt takes control of the narrative, the most vilified figure of the bible is now in colorful queer hands.

Was Lucifer’s plight inevitable or did God expect his faltering? Like original sin, was it meant to go wrong? God sets the world in motion and hell awaits its master, anticipating the one fateful act that will send Lucifer, beaten, to his kingdom. Lucifer’s narrative from scripture echoes the queer narrative. He is a man cast out, deemed unworthy of heaven. He has forfeited his chance at redemption. In the eyes of some faiths, queer people, too, are rejected from eternal paradise because of who and how they love.

This idea of queer people as hell-bound souls, like Clovice’ image of Satan, is a silly one. How silly it is to believe that we are inherently what’s wrong with this world. We are brave souls, not tragic, as we reach for what we believe makes us happy in spite of the consequence. After all, queer love has existed long before the devil was ever conceived.

Less than a week ago, Lil Nas X gave Lucifer a lap dance, fell from the sky on a pole. As queer people, mentioning the devil, particularly in a religious audience, is a radical act. Because of work from artists like Holt and Lil Nas X, an old conversation is happening again. Now’s the time to reevaluate our ideas of good and evil.

What if the devil could be reimagined as a gift, divine power in man’s hands? What if there was a space where we as queer people, sinners, condemned, can be our own source of power wisdom and cunning, existing outside of judgment, where we can find sanctuary in our own perverted treasures and twisted endowments. Artwork that pokes fun and exaggerates the absurd nature and solemnity of a figure like Satan gives us room to think about what informs our faith. We can decide what moves us more, fear or pride.

‘out of your arms, I gotta go daddy’ was up at Haul Gallery in Brooklyn, NY from Feb, 20th - March 21, 2021. Check out the exhibition artist talk here. For more of Clovice Holt’s work visit cloviceholt.com

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Nicholas Goodly is an Atlanta-based poet and the writing editor of Wussy Magazine.

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