Heat Transfer May 3-May 31, 2024

MAY 3rd, 6-9 PM

PRACTICE Gallery is excited to announce Peter Cage’s (aka Peter Clough) new work Heat Transfer for the month of May opening on May 3rd for First Friday’s Opening Reception, 6-9 PM.

For their new project Heat Transfer, Peter Cage (aka Peter Clough) deploys thermal cameras at FAUCET, a queer sex party focusing on piss play, capturing heat rather than light to document a space where traditional photography would be impossible. The resulting images, capturing the real and unrehearsed encounters between bodies in video and still photographs, foreground both degradation and care, two threads that form the backbone of queer BDSM. More information about FAUCET can be found at nycinferno.substack.com.

Peter Cage (aka Peter Clough) was born in Boston in 1984 and received a BA from Grinnell College in 2006 and an MFA from NYU Steinhardt in 2009. Cage has presented work in New York at MoMA PS1, The Invisible Dog Art Center, Printed Matter, haul gallery, Fresh Window Gallery, Microscope Gallery, Southfirst Gallery, Wayfarers Gallery, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, the Center for Performance Research, The Eagle, Rockbar, and Dixon Place Theater, in Pittsburg at the Andy Warhol Museum, in L.A. at Human Resources, in Nashville at Open Lot, in Berlin at Peres Projects and Space/Time at FLUTGRABEN e.V., in Seoul at Konkuk University and The House of Collections, in Antwerp at the Monty, in Ghent at O]/o] Cinema and in Oslo at Kunstnernes Hus, Fotogalleriet, and SOPPEN Performance Festival at Ekebergparken. Clough’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and Time Out magazine. Cage lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Notes on Heat Transfer

by Peter Cage

Arriving at the sex party, I’m painfully aware of the boundaries of my own body. Squatting in the shower an hour earlier, I finger myself to make sure I’m clean; I hope to take as many cocks as I can. I worked hard in the gym today, as though one workout could make a di]erence. My hairs are all trimmed. The barber did my head; I did my mustache; I had Brandon do my back. For my nerves, a bong rip, and a stiff drink.

I duck my head as I slink down the creaky steps. At six foot six, I duck my head on most any staircase anyway. The neon sign is a nice touch. “Hi,” I say as flirtatiously as I can. “Thirty dollars,” is the response. 

I can feel myself sucking in my gut, even though I love a guy with a belly. I know I’m thinking too much about how I might look to other people, and not enough about how they might look to me. I’m trying to slip into my desiring brain, but this early in the night I feel aloof. I make my way over to the beer fridge. It’s empty. “Do a lap,” I tell myself in my head. 

The wooden maze I’m moving through now was built to facilitate the sort of encounters I’m seeking. I might wonder about the history of architecture like this if I were thinking more abstractly, but I’m still focused on my own edges, on the limit of where my body ends and the bodies of others begin. The narrow passages are designed to keep our bodies close as we circulate. Corners and eddies form a choreography of apparitions.  The light is dim, and pools on the rough cement floor from intermittent bulbs overhead. Bodies pass through the beams, bright red, then into shadow. It feels out of time, maybe because we imagine a gay past that never existed, or maybe just because they took our phones away at the door. 

The air is warm. I’m naked except for my chastity cage, my collar, and my piss sneakers—I’ve learned to have a special pair, because of the smell. Once I got mixed up and wore them to work, which I thought was funny, because it didn’t really matter.

I move around a corner and come up against a body that stops me. I stand still and look; he does the same. He’s thick, and hairy, and sweaty. He’s wearing a soiled jock that I bet he keeps in a special plastic bag, so it stays as disgusting as possible. It’s wet, and the outline of his thick cock protrudes. We lock eyes, in a stare that’s both well-rehearsed and genuinely curious. We are standing about 12 inches apart; then we move closer. He reaches out his hand and cups my junk, tightly locked in its chastity cage and just starting to swell. His fingers are large; I wish they were rough, like a construction worker’s, but they aren’t. He squeezes my balls, and I hold his gaze resolutely, my signal that I’ll accept any pain he cares to offer. He hardens, and clamps down. I whimper, and after a moment, he smiles. “Thirsty?” he says. I kneel and pull his half-erect cock from the soaked jockstrap. The rough cement presses into my knees as I press my face into his balls and inhale; this is one of my favorite parts. Then I take his cock into my mouth. 

As a kid, I was terribly pee-shy. I remember standing at the urinal, desperate, but unable to let go. I’d steal a glance at the men next to me. Their cocks are big, and heavy, and their piss flows casually, and powerfully. I don’t yet realize I like to look at them. Mostly, when I look at them, I feel ashamed. I close my eyes and count, but nothing works. One, two, three... I imagine that everyone knows my problem... seventeen, eightteen, nineteen... I imagine that they’re laughing at me. In kindergarten, I used to wet my pants at school. I was afraid to go to the bathroom but couldn’t make it all day before I took the bus home. I knew that other boys didn’t have my problem, and it was one of the ways that I knew I wasn’t like other boys.

Waiting for a guy to unload his piss in my throat, I’ve learned to be patient. Some piss-tops get pee-shy too. I grip him with a light touch, resting my lips gently around his shaft, and avoid touching his head with my tongue. I stay as still as I can. If it starts to take a while, I close my eyes, to take the pressure o], but this time, I don’t have to wait. I feel him release the molten liquid, acrid and pungent. It fills my mouth quickly, and I gulp it down, breathing through my nose and concentrating on keeping up with him. He’s not going slow. 

There’s a video of me chugging piss on Twitter that has over eight hundred thousand views. It’s my most lauded achievement to date. People ask me sometimes if I like the taste; of course I don’t. But I like the opportunity to debase myself for the people I play with. I like the chance to prove what a good slut I am, to prove that I’m up to the challenge. I like it when I can take more than they think I can, when they’re impressed by my skills. I like to show off. I like to make them proud of me.

He finishes and pulls out. The last few squirts go on my face. He ru]les my wet hair with his hand affectionately, the way maybe my dad did when I was a kid. I grin. “Thank you, Sir!” I say, looking up at him. “Good boy,” he says, as he spits on my face. 

A few hours later, the edges of my body have vanished. I’m soaking wet, with piss, and sweat, and saliva, and cum. There’s a film of piss-mud all over my skin. My throat feels hollowed out; it’ll be sore tomorrow. My lip is swollen from that one guy’s cockring. My belly is full, and if I take much more, I’ll be genuinely sick. I didn’t actually get fucked as much as I had wanted, but there’s at least one load in there, maybe two.

The fridge is full of beer again, and I help myself. I find my friend Phil and sprawl on the bench next to him. Our legs are touching. We chat, and joke, and cackle. He’s naked too. People who need a break are gathering here, and we smile at each other. The party is winding down soon. I see a few guys that I played with earlier and say hi. Some of us trade info; we find a pen and some scrap paper on a table nearby, since our phones are checked, and we have no pockets anyway. I’m terrible at following up, but I stuff the scraps into my wet socks optimistically. I’m no longer sucking in my gut.

Phil and I agree to grab some food, but first I head to the bathroom, thinking I might shower. It’s occupied. The guys in there look at me, and I look back at them. They’re hot, but by now, everyone’s hot. I reach back and push the load from my hole into my hand. It’s thick, and warm, and gooey. “Big load,” I think to myself. They watch as I scoop it into my mouth and lick my fingers clean. I grin. They keep fucking. I find Phil and we head out; there’s a cute Italian spot down the block. I want pasta.

Later, I’m chatting with my friend Adam who throws the party. It’s a monthly event. “You should do something at my party sometime,” he says, meaning something artistic. I like to make out with Adam, and to drink his piss. I think about what I can do at the party, as an artist. It goes almost without saying that these spaces are illegal. As central as they are to the formation of queer identity and queer culture, they are forced to remain underground, precarious, cryptic. I had an art show in a DIY basement gallery a few years ago. It was shut down after less than a week by the fire department. Sometimes people think that sounds cool, but really it was just discouraging. I wish we had better spaces. I wish we had better institutions, better money, better people. I wish we had a fire code that would keep us safe instead of keeping us in line. Still, I like this dingy basement. I hope it lasts.

Heat Transfer was shot at a subsequent edition of the piss party FAUCET using thermal cameras, which capture heat rather than light and map it into colorful images, not quite photography, but not quite anything else. Thermal cameras are made for industrial purposes. Architects and construction crews use them to identify leaks within walls. The park service uses them to track animals in the woods, just like their most famous cinematic appearance, to track the Predator. Creating a record of what happens in spaces like this is complicated, but I want a record because what happens here is important. I want a record because I want to know for sure that we exist, as Wojnarowicz did, that the bodies in my memory are in some way corporeal. I want a record because it’s fucking hot.

We talk a lot about the politics of being out. “Live your truth,” we say, “be out and proud.” There’s political power in visibility, and sharing our stories is how we heal. But we all have our limits. These aren’t porn stars, or artists, these are regular people, and there’s also power in the dirty little secret. I wear my chastity cage and butt plug around in public all the time, under my clothes. They anchor me to my perverted self, to my own personal truth, even as I hide them from those around me. A secret can be different from a lie.

I was worried people would be shy, so I asked a few pups I know to come show o] with me. I hired someone else to hold the camera, so I could camp out in the piss pool. Everyone was really kind and enthusiastic.

In the images we captured, our bodies are luminescent. We glow from within. The frame of the camera shifts rapidly. Our senses are on overload. Phantasmagoric, we move in and out of view. We suck; we gulp; we fuck. We slap and spit. We smile. Cold beers appear as black rectangles in our hands, bobbing in the background as we watch. We care for each other in ways my mother would not understand. A man chokes me as he fingers my throat, and I feel honored to have been chosen. In one image, the white-hot stream of piss floods the back of my throat. In another, the red line of a tear streaks down my cheek. The puppies fuck in the inflatable piss pool.

My friend Vincent made a project a few years ago about piss play, and he told me that at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s, some guys turned to piss play as a way to exchange bodily fluids more safely than exchanging cum. I like that something most people see as degrading could be used as a form of mutual care. I don’t really know how true that is, but it doesn’t really matter. Probably nothing I think I know about the AIDS crisis is true, except for the fear, and the missing people. History, memory, and imagination are hard to disentangle, and the records we make are about our desires as much as they are about our experiences. Heat Transfer is this sort of record, dreamlike, but true. Funny that the inflatable piss pool looks kind of like a life raft.

Huge thanks go to my collaborators: to Adam Baran of NYC INFERNO and FAUCET for your generosity, support, and trust, as well as your piss; to the puppies, Pup Desik and Pup James, for being very good pups indeed; to Odin the Red for both videography and cage checks; to Pickles’ Playground for hosting the shoot; to Chipper and Dylan for keeping things organized; to Dana Buhl for your sharp eye and careful attention as we printed the photographs; to Dave Hannon from Practice Gallery and Brian Whitely from Satellite Art Show for giving the project space to be seen; to Phil Miner for the Italian food; to all the hot sluts who do terrible, wonderful things to my body; and to my love Brandon, for basically everything else.

—Peter Cage, Brooklyn, 2024