Christopher Sciuto

Even as I enter my mid twenties- a stage characterised by a scramble towards ‘adulthood,’ my ever-receding angst-filled adolescence still holds an appeal. There is a freedom in these years to rebel, to say ‘fuck you, Mum and Dad;’ diss your elders, thumb your nose, sneer, cast scorn, and bite the hand that feeds, all at once. You act on all these immature impulses without caring so much about the consequences. I didn’t appreciate it enough, mostly due to the aforementioned angst. I think it’s part of why I still enjoy keeping track of teenage fads, watching the music videos and movies of current idols, and speculating over the public personas and private lives of these transitional beings. Of course, it’s mostly mindless entertainment. But I think it’s also a temporary remedy to the sobering reality of growing up.
The process of becoming an adult and finding yourself, and its depiction in pop culture has been the focus of much of Melbourne artist Christopher Sciuto’s work. Despite his intimidating appearance- his monumental frame, shaved head, and penchant for dressing in a combination of camouflage and tracksuits- when Chris speaks the conspiratorial tone of his inner teenage girl takes hold. His use of abbreviations is incessant (or abbrev’s as he calls them) as are his references to pop culture and teen idols. All are delivered with his biting sense of humour. “I feel that I was a teenage girl, that that’s how I developed,” he says. He’s a bit like Juno from the eponymous film- if Juno was brave enough to admit that she once worshipped Britney Spears.
Chris’s studio shares this feeling. It has the emotionally charged decorating scheme of a teenage girl’s bedroom. Walls are replete with magazine pages torn out for a perceived personal significance, hung alongside several naively painted canvases of unicorns (the images appropriated from the film, Spring Breakers). A paint flecked t-shirt is draped over a wooden poster-board of Brad Pitt. A crudely drawn image of Eminem hangs on the opposite wall. Plastic drawers are crammed with cheap costume jewellery and leopard print fabric scraps. The desk is cluttered with magazines, cups, and bowls, crumpled tubes of paint, and a vase of flowers. Alongside these is one of Chris’s most recent works, a collage on wooden board glued with images, of a sculpture from a tantric sex book, an ambiguous cross-section of a penis tattooed with a smiley-face and love-hearts, and Channing Tatum as an eighteen year old stripper, all framed by a border of asphalt grey, shiny tiles. A mug decorated with motifs of Monster energy drink cans sits next to an open vessel of petroleum jelly. Above his desk a heart shaped frame covered with rocks, contains an image of the Gilmore Girls emblazoned with the red word “Fucked.” Taped up behind it is a page of scrawled lyrics, that reads: “I can imagine how hard it is to be you, adopting all of your history, it’s hard to be me to (sic).”
This is the title of Chris’s upcoming show at TCB, an artist run space in Melbourne’s CBD, opening on the 17th of July. “It’s a Gwen Stefani lyric,” he says, raising his full brows. “Very Harajuku. I’m all about K-Pop at the moment.”
Chris’s work often comes to him through listening to music- usually; he says “pure trash.” His current show came to him mostly through listening to Miley Cyrus and Skrillex, he says. “All of my titles are weird snippets and bytes of lyrics,” he says. “Which I like because I think they’re well-written but also because they sum up a particular moment in pop culture.”

His obsession with pop culture is evident in his selection of imagery in his collage pieces. He has a very clear idea of what he likes and what he doesn’t, and chooses niche images based on this. Despite the chaotic nature of many of his compositions he says he has a “very high cull to non-cull ratio”.
“It’s mainly found work, found imagery. It’s a very mixed style,” he says. “The way I pick my imagery is based on surface value.”
He tries not to choose imagery that is too literal. While his works generally have a dirty, sexual undertone he rarely shows anything overtly explicit. “I feel like I try to reference it rather than show it and that’s what I think I try to do with all my work.”
“I have very strong images that I love, but I wouldn’t put them into a work,” he says. “The challenge I think is referencing things rather than showing them.”
The tantric sex sculpture that appears in one of his recent collages, he says, references a scene in the film Spring Breakers, where the protagonists are snorting cocaine off the bodies of another.
One of the recurring symbols in his work is the Monster energy drink can. “It’s a shape of a quite large shaft, so it’s very phallic, and it’s got this acid green M on it,” he says. “It’s a pseudo-masculine kind of image, and they promote it through having Monster Girls. It’s also representative of a very derro culture, derros love a bit of Monster clothing, and so do I.”
The image of the Monster can, its mass media ubiquity, its disposability, and its subcultural embracement appeals to Chris. In his collages it encompasses a layered, constantly evolving trajectory of meaning. The process of cultural evolution, as represented through throwaway symbols, is also of great concern to Chris.
“I’m very into pop culture time pieces, things that capture or recount the time in which they were done and that’s it.”
His works generally revolve around topics he becomes interested in and his process of investigating those topics.
“To put a group statement over all of it, I guess I look into subcultures and subversive subcultures and see how they came to be,” he says. “I like movements that are fleeting moments of our time, that last for a year. Sea Punk, I feel was a word something shallow someone just said, and then it became a movement.”
One of Chris’s main influences is Bruce La Bruce. La Bruce is a writer, gay pornography director and photographer from Canada and was most notorious throughout the 1980s. He is known for appropriating independent art film techniques for capturing gay pornography and his films generally deal with themes of social and interpersonal contravention of cultural orthodoxies. Chris completed his Bachelor Degree at the Victorian College of the Arts. In his fourth year Honours thesis, he wrote a lot about queer theory, and Bruce La Bruce was a figure of central importance to his thesis. He is also, Chris says, someone who attempts to make a movement every ten minutes. “So every time he does something he tries to make this epic movement with it, but not through putting anything into it, but just by saying it.”
Many of his pieces are infused with these images, which function as contemporary relics of a bygone fad. “I like that idea that it’s this thing that everyone cared about for this year and now they’ve just forgotten.”
This disposability is magnified by the magnitude of images available through the Internet, and how quickly the cultural value of these is lost, and replaced by that of newer, fresher images. He’s interested in the way in which subcultures “penetrate” the mainstream, and how this infiltration occurs partially through this medium.
“Now mainstream culture is the internet,” he says. “People were always saying that porn isn’t the mainstream but it is now, because the Internet is our mainstream avenue for popular culture, and the most accessible thing on the Internet is porn.”
Chris is particularly interested in the gay pornography industry as an articulation of subcultures’ ability to infiltrate the mainstream. This industry, he says, now runs off the old Hollywood system, with competing studios and star systems. What happened for heterosexual porn stars in the 1990s, where they created “empires onto themselves,” is starting to happen “in the gay world, in the high-budget sense, with millions and millions of dollars coming into play.”
“These porn stars have become a new breed of celebrities in the gay world, he says. “They’re hired for club appearances, they’re all over Instagram and Twitter and there are a few gay underwear labels. Everything is done with porn stars now and they’re starting to cross into more mainstream movies, like soft core stuff with no intercourse.”
“The gay porn industry is very reliant on its dirty side, on its currency of sexual exchange and I think that’s really shown through how popular these porn stars become,” he says. “That celebrity-worship and idolisation of these stars is quite an important strain in what I do.”
This culture is referenced frequently in his work, either directly, or more indirectly, through referential imagery.
“This year I was very highly interested in a new Adidas fetish that was quite big in Germany.” This was explored in his most recent solo show, in February, at Rear View, an artist run space in Melbourne’s North. Tabloid images of celebrities containing Adidas items were hung in frames decorated with rocks, a sculpture was painted with raver-coloured camouflage and a large-scale lamp was installed, constructed with Adidas printed into the leather.

His use of materials is decidedly mixed. These are employed in a extremely chaotic collage technique, through both two-dimensional collages and large-scale sculptural installations. “I’ll try to mix a lot of craft and different techniques in making.” He uses a mix of industrial materials, throwaway materials, traditional mediums and found imagery.
His non-hierarchical juxtaposition of materials results in the cluttered energy of his works. He collects materials and objects, but he downplays the importance of this to his work. “I do collect things, but a lot of it I never will use.”
“A lot of things I’m currently using for this show I’ve had stored away for quite a long time now and they’re finally starting to come out.”
His aesthetic is largely influenced by a Chicano outsider art movement known as La Rasquachismo. The term is a reversal of the classist Spanish term ‘rasquache,’ which is a derogatory term for lower class attitudes. The movement was based around an ethos of exploiting the simplest, the cheapest and hence the most accessible materials and techniques to create the best work possible. It was based around the idea that, “any lady with a glue gun can be an artist.”
The movement was not contained by a rigid disciplinary framework, or defined under any particular aesthetic umbrella, “like sculptural collage or craft.” The movement started with “people making concrete freezers on the floor, so they’d draw into wet concrete and pour powder pigment over it and then stick rocks and things into it.” The style was, Chris says, purely ugly, without any mosaic or design elements. It was a crude, and gritty form of expression.
One of the recurring materials he uses is rocks, which often have the look of being wet, or dirty. He often uses them as decorations on his frames of magazine clippings. These frames are constructed out of iron, some of which are bent into love-heart shapes. Chris is interested in the way in which shells, and rocks are used to make things sacred, or to protect them. “Like where people cover the tombstones, and grottoes and Jesus figures in rocks, but it ends up looking like faeces, or something dirty.”
“I’m interested in that juxtaposition, that the reasoning for covering things in that faecal matter is to make it sacred and to protect it.”
Unless he is making a larger piece, he generally doesn’t draw or plan. His work, he says, is not fully realised until it’s made and presented all together.
“I’m not the most meticulous person in my making,” he says. “So things often don’t work out.”
“But they take quite a few twists and turns, and my making process is influenced by that,” he says. “I’m not concerned with the pristine, I like that they’re a bit messed up.”
“ I like doing casting and things like that but I’m not very careful.” Several of his works have featured casts of Chris’s body parts, including his feet. These are not often perfectly formed, and sometimes feature marks, and chips from the construction process. Chris says this becomes an important element of his aesthetic.
“I think if things are perfectly done then it means you could have outsourced them to get done like that, but I like the human touch to it,” he says.
“ I do like that it’s me,” he says. “I think that art is one of the most indulgent things we can do as humans, we make work about ourselves or things that we are interested in and I like that I use myself because I think that it shows a bit of an awareness of that.”
His work has a general aura of dirt. The cement and rocks and other elements he uses, such as smudge sticks, often have a strong odour.
He tries to create “environments,” rather than individual pieces, and his work works “together, rather than separately.”
The spaces he creates have the sweaty, lurid feel of a teenage lair. However, he says “if you really look closely at it, and pick the things apart, the elements themselves are quite clean. A lot of my work ends up being a lot cleaner than I initially intend it to be.”
His most recent show, at Rear View, was much more pared back than previous efforts. At his group graduation show for his Bachelor degree at the VCA, he made an installation of a teenage room, with a computer, posters, and a general smell and feel of teenage den, which was much more overpowering to experience. The aesthetic he used at Rearview came about, Chris says, mostly because of the space he was allocated. The works were hung “quite classically,” and had much more “breathing room,” than he is used to.
His work usually only comes together when he goes into a space to put it up, and the hanging and arranging of it is part of his artistic process.

His next show at TCB deals with themes of teen angst, and how today’s youth process this angst, predominantly from a feminine perspective.
“It’s about this release of tension and an energy that we all have and how we deal with growing up,” he says. “We all have this anxious energy and everyone deals with it completely differently.”
“There’s always a leading way that cultural commentators portray it and now it’s through this party girl scene.”
The recently released Harmony Korine film, Spring Breakers, and its themes “of changing one’s image to party with,” have heavily inspired him. The imagery he chooses to appropriate depicts, “sex and drugs and partying,” and references elements of this film.
He is interested in these later adolescent years between teenage angst and before ‘real’ adulthood, where we’re “old enough to know better, but too young to care.” Coming of age, as it is represented through teen pop culture, and through iconography, now has a necessary element of de-purification, he says, “It’s about de-virginising your image.”
This is why he was so drawn to Korine’s film. Chris suggests the film is allegorically about deflowering the girls, not only as characters, but also as actors.
“Harmony Korine referenced the outside lives within these new characters. Selena Gomez was originally the Barnie girl, and Ashley Benson originally was on Days of our Lives, and Vanessa Hudgens was in High School Musical obviously, and then Rachel Korine, who is Harmony Korine’s wife was this very innocent southern belle, and it was about pushing these girls to the edge,” he says. “I feel like it was about taking their image in popular culture and in movies and de-virginising that.”
“And I reference Spring Breakers because I have an affinity with this heroine, this strong female figure that is quite distraught, but very unstable also- but also has a certain power, is in control of herself.” Coming of age, he says, he has always had an affinity with a kind of anti-heroine- one that society suggests you shouldn’t idolise.
Some of the work he is producing for the show also examines the transfer from the model of feminine angst of the 1990s to its current incarnation. The 1990s, he says, were “all about showing true emotion and being dirty, with greasy hair: I can’t even be bothered washing my hair because I’m too emotional right now.” This angst was typified through icons such as Alanis Morisette and Sinead O’Connor, who Chris argues embodied this archetype of ‘sincere’ emotional expression. These role models didn’t have to de-virginise themselves in order to enter adulthood, but were accepted straight off as mature, sincere and emotionally complex.
The contrast between these two diverging expressions of angst means that the current way of dealing with “being eighteen,” as illustrated through current teen icons is unfamiliar, and jarring to even those a few years older, like himself.
He is also concerned with the way in which teen pop icons maintain a following, through managing their image and their transfer from teen idol to adult.
“I think it’s about trying to teeter on the edge and not actually fall off.”
“We look at Lindsay (Lohan) and her company who just failed at doing it, they went to the extreme.” Chris is on a first name basis with most of the celebrities he mentions.
He says it’s all about finding balance. “I think that Miley (Cyrus) has not yet hit an extreme, but I don’t think she was an extreme innocent either.”
“She’s having her slip ups here and there, but I think she’s performing her ascension out of the Disney machine very well, she’s not losing people through the process,” he says. In order to become a normal, mainstream celebrity, these teen idols need to be able to lose their young crowd. This is something that Justin Bieber is currently struggling to do, as younger and younger fans become interested in him. “And he can’t completely sign off on them because that’s where his main market is.”
“And if we go back, all the way back to Britney (Spears), when she wanted to lose her innocence she would wear a top that would say Fuck on it and that was her big statement,” he says. “But then she just fell off the edge.”
Chris observes a symbolic friction between these figures and the way in which they are represented. They are simultaneously being used as symbols for the growing up process that they are personally going through. There is also an immense societal pressure, both rhetorically and in terms of time.
“There’s a short window where you can do it before we all have to grow up,” he says.
His work, at its heart, is very personal, he says. It is, and always has been fundamentally about this process of growing up.
“I’m trying to work out what I’m interested in and discovering new things to be interested in and excited about, and then make work about. I go through these things because I try to find different movements and different points in time when things I am interested in were happening and the recount of that, and that’s how I discover them. And that’s what I use my work for.”
“I guess there’s this identity finding process embedded within it. This process of trying to find your place.”
Exactly where his place is, and where he’s headed is something he is still unsure about. When I ask Chris about the future, he seems reluctant to answer. “I think we better strike this one from the record,” he says. He is, like Britney, in her film debut “at a bit of a crossroads,” at the moment, someone who needs, as the idol herself said “some time, a moment that is mine, while I’m in between.”