José Villalobos

“The Measure of a Cock”

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 11, 4pm to 8pm.

September 11 – October 24, 2021

A-Side Gallery

The title of the show is inspired by Chicano scholar Jerry Garcia’s essay “The Measure of a Cock: Mexican Cockfighting, Culture, and Masculinity.” In it, Garcia examines the tender intimacy between Mexican men, and their cocks. The artist intentionally plays on the anatomical meaning of cock and the word’s relationship to the vernacular meaning in Mexican diasporic culture in the practice of cockfighting.

The literature from Ancient Rome documents the practice, and evidence of its spread across the Christian world captures its popularity despite its inherent violence. Cockfighting spread across Asia and the pre-Columbian and postcolonial Americas, taking root culturally in places like Mexico. Centuries after its introduction in Mexico, the practice of cockfighting continues as an overwhelmingly masculine and heteronormative tradition and sport.

Through sculptural installation, painting, and photography, Villalobos tackles the idea of “resistant masculinity” that cockfighting embodies. His work also reveals the queer slippages within these highly masculine charged practices. The exhibition highlights the homoerotic tendencies that quietly exist in the homosocial spaces of the pit. The artist captures a tradition that enforces toxic heteronormativity, and homophobia in Mexican diasporic culture.

About the Artist

José Villalobos protests culturally-accepted traits of toxic masculinity through his artistic repertoire: performance, installation, sculpture, drawings, and fashion. Raised in a traditional conservative Mexican family, Villalobos grew up on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, TX. His work reconciles the challenges of his gay identity caught in the conflict between traditional Mexican customs and religion and American cultural conventions.

In his work, he confronts the derogatory terms and attitudes that Villalobos continues to encounter and resist personally. The root of Villalobos’s work lies in the performativity of his identity. The accouterments used in his artwork stand as proud connections to his heritage and serve as reminders of hate and homophobia that the artist has endured. Villalobos uses objects from Mexican culture and manipulates the material, and he uses mixed media to examine and challenge gender roles within Mexican heteronormative family structures.

His artwork dismantles traditional modes of Mexican diasporic masculinity and centers interstitial spaces where the materiality of the art softens the toxcity of hetronormative virility. Through deconstruction and alteration, Villalobos protests the toxicity of machismo through the use of objects, specifically within the norteño culture, that carries its history. The new forms that the artist makes from culturally-specific iconography demonstrate the battle between the acceptance of maricón identity and assimilating to oppressive cultural expectations.

About the Artist

Villalobos received a BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2016. He was awarded the Artist Lab Fellowship Grant that same year for his work De La Misma Piel at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. Villalobos recently earned a Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptures grant and residency. He also received the Tanne Foundation Award. The nationally recognized exhibition “Trans America/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today” at the McNay Art Museum featured his artwork. Villalobos has exhibited and performed at the Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX; El Paso Museum of Art, TX; El Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; among other institutions and galleries nationwide.

Image Credit

“El Mas Macho Gana” (detail)

2021

Installation, painted plaster, cured rooster pelts, soil, knives

Approx 72 x 48 inches (completed installation)

Courtesy of the artist & FLXST Contemporary.

Official Website

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Tags: Chicago, FLXST Contemporary, José Villalobos, Near Southside, The Measure of a Cock