Attila Richard Lukacs paints his dreams
Repost
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