Keith Boadwee, Head to Toe: Works from 1990-2024

For a long time, for most of human understanding of pre-history, we’ve believed that Neanderthal were an earlier and less developed people, a precursor to us. Recent DNA studies show this isn’t true. Neanderthals made complex tools, fashioned clothing, painted abstract symbols and markings and most likely had a spoken language. Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals lived at the same time and, not infrequently, they slept together. 

I can’t stop imaging what it would be like to have sex with a Neanderthal. Maybe it’d be beautiful. Maybe violent. Neanderthals had small mouth cavities and recessed tongues which meant their voices were always high-pitched and nasally. It’s fun to imagine how it might feel to be come onto by a human other, how you might remember that you too are a human other.

The theory of “the away” imagines that when something is discarded it simply ceases to exist. 

But, what’s thrown out doesn’t really go away. And here it doesn’t at all. The away in Keith Boadwee’s work gets attenuated with color, gets framed, gets put up on the walls, gets canonized, gets contemplated and described. It’s made physical, whether you like it or not.  

His work seems ever intrigued by the space it takes up. And by the space a body can make. “It would have been so luxurious,” wrote the poet Joyce Mansour, “To have the power to piss in the street.” (Beneath the Central Tower, for Matta. 1965)

I’m shy, but Keith’s an exhibitionist. He’s got a flasher’s mentality: the kid in preschool constantly reaching down his pants. There is a devious innocence to knowing how to marvel at your own pleasure. It’s also a little disgusting.

The sweeter works, paintings of cartoonish frogs and poodles lighting cigarettes with dumb-happy expressions, bely a nonchalance to the hardcore residue of Boadwee’s well known enema works, the photographs of his naked body. The work isn’t provocative, it isn’t the grotesque as political statement — it’s a crude, unmannered style born from a disinterest in conventions. It’s about indulgence over strategy, sex over tools, mark making for its own sake. 

The theory of away demands that such imagined pleasures be under-examined. It demands that we assign the Neanderthal’s eradication to a primitive nature. We’ve thrown away their complexity. Many biologists believe their populations declined due to indulgence: they loved sex, abstract art, and decoration, favoring gratification over the prodigious tool-making habits of homo sapiens. Their brains were much, much bigger, with cortexes related to memory and abstract thought particularly developed.

As I write this, fires are still raging in Los Angeles. We’ve still got the same bodies as those occasionally fucked by Neanderthals. And we’re still making painting.

- Theadora Walsh