Radical Body Politics

Tee'd off: Outspoken artist Albo Jeavons' T-shirts, emblazoned with his incendiary political opinions, will get you noticed in a crowd. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Offensive T-shirts, and the auto-pornographer who creates them.

by Bruce Schimmel

Brass gonads and a set of very big biceps. One or both of the above might be helpful if you are planning on wearing one of the T-shirts that political artist Albo Jeavons has created to attack consumerist culture. Here’s a sample of the hand-silk-screened images and slogans that are sure to provoke a look, if not a left hook. The shirts are recycled from thrift stores, and cost $12.

• the D&G logo -- from Dolce & Gabbana -- reads "Dumb and Greedy"

• a McDonald’s logo reads "Monoculture"

• CK (Calvin Klein) logos, rewritten as "Cocksucker" and "Conformism Kills"

• the classic antiwar T-shirt that says "War is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things" is changed to "War is Highly Profitable for Politicians and Other Parasites"

• a MasterCard logo, transformed into "Masturbate"

• an image of George Bush with bleeding fangs, with "Stop Me Before I Kill Again" scrawled in red

• a Hello Kitty image, rewritten as "Hello Pussy," complete with pink genitalia

• a tee that reads "Dare to Say NOW to Drugs"

Jeavons’ T-shirts are a part of a larger body of work that includes sculpture, illustrations and websites, which he uses to express his politics. And for a day job, Jeavons gives new meaning to the phrase "body politics" by using his own body to make pornography, whose sole subject is himself.

"Everything I do is devoted to social change on some level. I eat, sleep, live and shit politics," he says.

As a radical political artist, Jeavons garnered some notoriety in the summer of 2002, when he proposed a facetious replacement for the failed DisneyQuest development at Eighth and Market. He created and distributed plans for a new institution called the Museum of Corporate Welfare, or MOCOW (plans and illustrations are available at www.disneyhole.org).

Jeavons has also created other parody websites that mock consumerism and government/corporate cronyism, such as www.adanon.org, a site for people recovering from the advertising industry; www.pirasite.org, which parodies the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority; and www.disincorporated.org, which "lifts the rock of corporate personhood" to see what "crawls out."

Many would consider much of what Jeavons does to be obscene, but he claims he doesn’t enjoy upsetting people. "I don’t," says Jeavons, "though I am sure what I do is upsetting. I don’t like to think of [myself as] being upsetting -- just inciting.

"I’m kind of mild-mannered," he says. "I’m really very Swarthmore."

Born to what he calls "an average suburban divorced family," Alexander Jeavons is the youngest of four, the self-described "oops" baby. His father was a salesman, his mom a school librarian.

His first "conscious political act," says the 44-year-old, "was to distribute campaign election material for [the presidential campaign of] Richard Nixon."

He wasn’t particularly tormented growing up gay, as many gay children are, says Jeavons, because he came out after high school. But he adds that "growing up queer and closeted as a teenager" taught him something about people without a political voice.

After a brief stint at Philadelphia College of Art (now UArts), Jeavons enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and soon after began to question the profession of being a fine-arts artist.

"I was not interested in the allure of ambiguity," which Jeavons says is created mostly "to give art critics something to do," and whose consumers are primarily the very rich.

Turning away from art for art’s sake, Jeavon sought to make art for the sake of politics -- and ran into what he calls the typical art-world attitude that "it’s wonderful for artists to be politically concerned, but it’s basically a waste of time."

Jeavons went on to become a founding member of Philadelphia’s radical group, Act-Up. He calls himself a "granddad" of the Wooden Shoe Bookstore. Recently he was interviewed by the Austrialian Broadcast Corporation about an exhibit at Nexus Gallery on illegal art, which most notably parodied and pilloried the clothing designer Diesel.

As a political artist, Jeavon says his goal is "to figure out how art can communicate clearly," and, by that measure, his new collection of incendiary T-shirts is a stunning success.

But success as a radical political artist doesn’t put bread on the table, which is why, in part, Jeavons is a self-proclaimed pornographer. He sells auto-fellatio videos through his website, www.solosuck.com. The site also offers how-to tips for those who want to try this at home.

"I guess I’m just a lucky guy," Jeavons says of his natural gifts. He also credits his chiropractor and possibly a rare heart condition for his unusual flexibilty.

Jeavons ordinarily dresses in clothes that come from thrift stores, which he wears with the careful elegance with which Fred Astaire wore a tux. Trim, with delicate hands, he slinks around his Center City loft like a friendly cat. His thin face is offset by round glasses whose frames are made of incredibly flexible steel that bends and twists without snapping. His hair looks sandy, "but I’ve debated with a friend about the color, because I self-identify as a blond," he says with grin.

The gargantuan loft on Walnut Street is heaped literally to the ceiling with trash-pickings. We sip herb tea, sharing one of three huge couches, and are dwarfed by thousands of items. What strikes me are a couple of inverted nude male manniquins, their legs sticking out of a pile of furniture, cascades of magazines on the floor, lots of advertising art, including several wall menus from a defunct hoagie shop in South Philly, and a trapeze, which is hanging, full length, from the ceiling. "There is nothing hidden in the rooms," he says. "My style is maximalist: I like a lot of stuff, a profusion."

Trash is the basic material of Jeavons’ art: "I work with the materials of our culture, which presents itself as middle-class and consumerist." Trash is also the stuff of his life. Other than food -- he is a vegetarian -- Jeavons says almost everything he uses is trash-picked, including most of the computers he uses for his websites.

As a political artist, it is the man-made landscape of images and ideas that attracts, repels and provokes him to create art that he hopes is too offensive to be co-opted.

"One of the challenges for a radical artist is that whatever provocation we come up with, there’s always someone in the advertising industry willing to turn it around and use it to sell something."

Which is also why Jeavons is unrepentant about using his own body to make pornography.

"Part of what appeals to me about explicit sexual imagery is that it’s so much harder for the powers that be to take it and use it for their own ends."

As such, for Jeavons, his body is a living symbol of his politics. However fabulous or freaky, his body is Albo Jeavons’ best gift to transform a flawed world.

Albo Jeavons’ T-shirts are available at the Wooden Shoe Bookstore, 508 S. Fifth St., where you can meet the artist himself, working the cash register, on Tuesday afternoons.