Artist Attila Richard Lukacs reveals his vivid dreams of being a serial killer,& his obsession with serial killers & other societal victims like Timothy McVeigh,& how he uses them in creating his artwork
Joe1orbit
Here's an interesting little article on a relatively obscure artist named
Attila Richard Lukacs, in which he talks about his serial killing dreams, and
reveals how his OWN personal DEMONS, shape his artistic creations. I am
POSITIVE that there are MANY enraged societal victims who use "artistic
expression" as a way to cathartically relieve and dissipate their True
Reality-based, real-life violent & homicidal urges. Just like some enraged
victims use the creations of OTHERS, such as slasher movies, violent video
games, powerful music, etc..., to try and work through their rage & hate
without having to resort to committing illegal acts, other enraged societal
victims choose to CREATE their OWN objects of cathartic release, and the actual
process of creation, can and often does, provide a release of negative emotion
that COULD be expressed via real life violence.
I certainly don't CONDEMN an artist like Attila for choosing the
"non-violent" path. But I DO recognize that he VERY likely is sublimating and
DENYING the TRUE nature, the true depth, of his personal rage and hate, from
and to himself. He is creating a BARRIER between his own True Reality, and the
most SINCERE and DIRECT expression of his True Reality, which would involve
PHYSICAL actions taken upon fellow living things, as opposed to artistic
actions taken upon non-sentient pieces of canvas.
You can view a photo of our enraged artist, with some of his work visible in
the background, over at:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0006/goldstein.shtml
It's great that Attila uses REAL LIFE crime and societal victims, such as the
Columbine massacre & Timothy McVeigh, as part of his artistic inspiration and
methodology.
Take care, JOE
The following appears courtesy of the February 9 to February 15 online
edition of the weekly newspaper The Village Voice:
Published February 9 - 15, 2000
CULTURATI
BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Attila Richard Lukacs paints his dreams
Skin Deep
"I have this recurring dream where I’m a serial killer," Attila Richard Lukacs
reveals. Once, he woke up in such a panic that he couldn't tell the reverie
from reality. He kept asking himself whether he'd ever murdered anyone. "I
didn't know. It was like, they're coming for me tomorrow, and I spent 20
minutes on the toilet trying to decide what to do with my life." He kept
repeating the same question: "Attila, what did you do with the body?"
A natural question for a painter of bodies, perhaps. But for this artist, whose
latest show opens Saturday at the Phyllis Kind Gallery, it carries a special
weight. At 37, Lukacs has made his mark by representing acts that verge on
murder—brutal beatings and ritual humiliation as well as rhapsodic sex between
tough young men. His adoring portraits of skinheads and thugs have made him the
official bad boy of his native Canada. But even in New York, where being an
evil genius is the second oldest profession, Lukacs has had quite an impact on
the Nietzsche and Nobu set.
Elton John collects him. Architects have designed rooms to accommodate his
massive canvases. One house-beautiful photo shows an elegantly minimal dining
room—complete with a view of the Pacific—dominated by the image of skins in all
their grimy splendor. The unintended comedy of brunching before such an icon
holds a clue to what makes Lukacs more than a flash in the post-Koons pan. For
in these elegiac portraits, painted in a style that mixes high realism with
Nazi kitsch, is everything about masculinity liberal society struggles to
suppress. Here is Fight Club set in an even more idyllic world, where women
don't even exist—an Eden without Eve.
It's a dream most men won't own up to, though they act on it all the time (in
sports, business, war). But for Lukacs, these images of what one critic calls
"the hysterical male" are souvenirs of an excursion to the place where jerking
off meets art meets life. "I've already gone there," he says. "So it's a matter
of, do you want to go there too?"
His studio is a farrago of found objects waiting to be "referenced" in a
painting: stroke books from the 1970s ("when porn was still dirty"), news
photos of young men in earnest poses (Timothy McVeigh under arrest, jocks at a
Columbine memorial), books of Indian and Persian miniatures, a Boy Scouts
manual, and Polaroids—hundreds of them, filling a tall cabinet and filed by
each model's name. Hustlers would be more like it, since many of these boys
pose for him and then put out—as Lukacs did back in his Canadian days, using
the money he earned from turning tricks to pay for other boys.
These photos are also a chronicle of the artist's life, taking him from a
stormy adolescence in Calgary and Vancouver to a precarious sojourn in the
squats of Berlin, to the belly of the art beast, New York. (Of course, he's
been here before: Fresh out of high school, he arrived at the legendary Mine
Shaft only to be told he couldn't enter, not because of his tender age but
because of his Ralph Lauren wardrobe—which he promptly removed.) All along
there has been a fascination with skinheads that began when he came upon them
as a teenager, sitting in his mother's sun room and thumbing through a
magazine. Doc Martens were this boy's madeleine.
"I mean, there's nothing like a 17-year-old with a shaved head and a pair of
boots," Lukacs explains. "There's a rawness that's really sincere. And they can
be very . . . romantic." As for the swastikas that adorn skin culture (and a
number of his paintings), Lukacs insists, "They've taken all meaning out of the
image and replaced it with pure aesthetic." And it's true, up to a point. In
the brave new world of Jörg Haider, fascists don't sport swastikas, freeing up
this symbol to become a fetish. But there's nothing archaic about its
connection to male power. Among other things, the swastika signifies the
suppression of femininity, which is why, to certain skinheads—some of them
gay—it's sexier than leather. "Even those gay boys in Berlin loved to pose in
front of a swastika," Lukacs recalls.
Still, there are only so many ways to hook a cross. Whether it's an astute
sense of the market or the drift of his dreams, Lukacs is painting over the
swastikas in a portrait of coupling skinheads when I arrive. "I'm subordinating
them," he explains.
Skins are not the only players in this artist's repertoire. There are also men
in uniform, a preoccupation ever since he begged his father, a Hungarian
émigré, to send him to military school. It never happened, but Lukacs kept the
catalogs as cherished jerk-off material, and in 1990 he used them to make
paintings for a show about cadets. It opened during the Gulf War, saddling the
artist with a meaning he hadn't intended—combat has less to do with these
paintings than discipline. One piece stands out as a clue to Lukacs's
sensibility. It's called The Good Son, and it shows a boy sitting bare chested,
spit-polishing a buckle, while an officer stands over him monitoring his work
with an unmistakably fatherly regard. But what are those blotches on the boy's
body—painterly technique or scabs and welts?
It doesn't take a brutal father to plant that image in your head. Just growing
up gay, even on the ample Canadian plains, will do: the brothers who played
hockey while Attila did crafts; the kids in high school who knew he was queer
way before he did; the crush on a straight boy out of Caravaggio, sealed with a
blow job that would immediately be denied. And through it all, the fantasy of
fusing with the savior, the destroyer, the Man.
This is not an unusual rite of passage for a gay boy, especially an artist
(think of David Wojnarowicz growing up close to the knives). If you're lucky
and blessed with love, you come to some sort of peace with your (self-)
destructive urges. And the stuff Lukacs is showing these days does suggest a
provisional cessation of hostilities. Now the tough guys are languishing in
their Eden while a Persian menagerie cavorts around them. And the swastikas, at
least in this painting, are a faint white shadow.
It's impossible to say what this gesture of erasure means, though Lukacs
insists, as he does whenever he's asked to explain his work: "It's not a
critique. It's coming from an eye." But the eye sees what the heart feels. So
perhaps it's fitting to mention Lukacs's boyfriend, Claus. They met in Berlin
four years ago, and they went where any young gay couple on a first date might:
to the baths. "We were sitting in this room watching the hair grow on the
walls," Lukacs recalls, "and he cried in my arms."
There's the serial killer in your dreams, and then there's the man who cries in
your arms. And that makes all the difference.
Research: Josh Lefkowitz
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