A piece you could slip into your pocket if you wanted to. Yet precisely in its smallness lies all of its force. I called him “The Little Wanker”, a title meant to provoke, I suppose, hehe. And yet for me it is utterly honest.
The little Pinokel-man sits there in his awkward pose, open, fragile, almost stupidly childlike. But he is no innocent creature. He sprays his shit all over the world. But this time he has taken his own cum straight in the face.
The white material on the sculpture is not merely plain resin, it is the trace of an act that everyone knows but no one wants to see. It is the image of a self-discharge, a self-punishment. The endlessly recurring male automatism, because man cannot manage to hold himself back. It is the moment when lust collapses into shame, into fear, into self-disgust.
I meant it deliberately this way: the sculpture carries its own guilt visibly on the surface. No hiding, no covering up, no excuses. The little wanker is the little man caught in the act, choking on his own remains. Or swallowing them.
Of course, it is a commentary on masculinity. On the ridiculous pose, the grand gesture, the puffed up importance that always collapses in on itself when no one is watching.
The great patriarchy of shit.
For me this little guy is a miniature of the endlessly repeating male failure: wanting to be great, wanting to be strong, wanting to be invincible and in the end alone, preoccupied with oneself, with the result sticking to one’s face. Always someone else’s fault.
But it’s not only about “the man” in general. It’s also about me, Dominik, about my own relationship to art and to the world. I know this little wanker inside myself: the ego that can never be satisfied; the envy I feel when I see others who have more fame, more success, more shine; the self-contempt when I question my own work; the desire to create, always accompanied by the fear that it’s worthless.
A waste of time.
In the art world envy is a permanent monster. Everyone looks at everyone else, everyone wants to be seen, everyone compares, or compares their cock. The little wanker is my outlet for that. He is my open insult, my self-caricature, my mirror. He shows what I usually show no one: that sometimes you produce everything yourself and at the same time destroy yourself with it. Better to just shut the fuck up.
My small, fine figure that looks monumental and pathetic at once. A contradiction in itself, just like man himself is a contradiction.
The Little Wanker is not a sculpture that seeks admiration. It doesn’t want to be beautiful, decorative, or pleasing. It is unpleasant, drunk, obscene. It forces the viewer to bend down, to get close, almost intimate, and then to see exactly what one would rather suppress. Extreme cumshot.
For me this work is also a piece of liberation. I take the word that is usually used as an insult and turn it into an object. I transform the curse into a figure, the slur into a sculpture. I give all the Little Wankers a place, a pedestal, a visibility. And I say: yes, he exists. In me, in you, in everyone.
The wanker, my manifesto of my own vulnerability. A miniature of my ego, my envy, my shame, my lust, my failure. And perhaps that is why it is more honest than almost any other work of mine: small, pathetic, ridiculous, and yet full of truth.
Carrara 2011
