Artists Specializing in the Depiction of Naked Men
Dan
by Steven Jenkins
In the gorgeous, occasionally garish, always gratifying works of the
great American artist Paul Cadmus, sailors and sunbathers, models and
mannequins, nitwits and nudes all are suffused with a sensuality born
equally of idyllic splendor and urban squalor, natural grace and
graceful artifice. Active since the 1930s as a renderer of pretty boys
and ugly ploys, Cadmus has spent many remarkable decades honing a
singularly complex style of idealized sexuality and vivid displeasure
in justly celebrated paintings, drawings and etchings of nude figures,
fantastical scenes and supercharged allegories.
While often working quite deliberately in the genres of social satire
and community critique, Cadmus is just as compelling when exploring the
personal and political proclivities of bodies in rest and motion. Male
bodies, that is. More than most artists of his substantial stature,
Cadmus has detailed with exquisite tenderness and unblinking bluntness
the manner in which gay males--and the gay male gaze--represent the
polemics of aesthetics.
Think of it this way: Cadmus's nudes--and, to a lesser yet still
relevant extant, his studies of societal strata--offer us an
opportunity to consider that beauty, though woundingly, agonizingly,
deliciously seductive, also can be a ruthless guise, a four-letter
word, an escape from Alcatraz, and a narcissistic, velvet-lined trap.
Beauty, in fact, is everything your parents told you was bad for you as
a child. Cadmus, to our enormous benefit, understands that beauty is
bodies, brains, buttocks, bathtubs, bicycles, Bach, bravado and bad
behavior; beauty is all things B.
Born in New York City in 1904, Cadmus was encouraged by his parents
(artists both) to pursue his creative desires. After abandoning a
career in advertising, Cadmus studied fine art and traveled throughout
Europe in the early 1930s with his lover and fellow painter, Jared
French. While gallivanting about Mallorca in an expatriate fever dream,
Cadmus learned much from French, who tolerated his pal's slavish
devotion to the means and methods of the Old Masters yet also
encouraged him--quite wisely--to transcend the trappings of
art-historical tradition and hone his own unique style.
What should we call it, this strangely anachronistic blend of
neoclassical composition, Renaissance brush strokes (a la Luca
Signorelli), figurative verisimilitude and surreal displacement?
Cadmus's style is peculiar: his technique is exacting, his figures are
elongated or oddly foreshortened, he's equally adept with charcoal and
egg tempera, and his tableaux reflect realities of the wrong side of
the tracks and fantasies of the right side. He's also, I'd venture, a
leftist.
So what do we call Cadmus's style? Let's continue to ponder as we
follow him back from Europa to the U.S., where he signed on as an
employee of the federally funded Public Works of Art Project. His first
major work for the PWAP was the infamous "The Fleet's In!," which
answers the musical question: what can you do with a drunken sailor? In
this extraordinary canvas, a gaggle of randy sailors on leave strike
deals with hookers, ogle t and a, and get a little too friendly with
each other, all while wearing (or planning to strip out of) unusually
tight trousers.
When a certain uptight Admiral Hugh Rodman ordered the removal of the
painting from an exhibition of government -sponsored paintings at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art--where, fifty years later, Mr. Mapplethorpe's
pictures suffered the same indignity--on the grounds of obscenity,
Cadmus's name was splashed across newspaper headlines as savvy critics
rallied behind him. With faux-naïve self-effacement, Cadmus did his
best to appear nonplused by the brouhaha, though in retrospect it seems
that he basked in the scandal and recognized it as a kick-start to his
career as a serious artist. All this for an image of sailors who had
never heard of--and never would have heeded--the "don't ask, don't
tell" policy.
Continuing to play the role of observer rather than participant, Cadmus
gained confidence as an arbiter of moral judgment with his "Aspects of
Suburban Life" series, commissioned in 1936 by the Treasury Relief Art
Project as murals for a post office in the tony Long Island suburb of
Port Washington. Not surprisingly, given their ruthless critique of
noblesse oblige slumming and socioeconomic inequality, the murals were
deemed "unsuitable for a federal building" and Cadmus was politely
shown the door. "Hinky Dinky Parley Voo," in which the dregs of society
drink to the dregs around a bar, didn't exactly endear Cadmus to the
no-nothings, either.
But if the government wouldn't have him, friends and lovers were
plentiful and uniformly supportive. Writer Monroe Wheeler and
photographer GeorgePlatt Lynes were close associates of Cadmus's for
years, as were E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood
and George Ballanchine. Excursions to Fire Island were not uncommon.
Once there, Cadmus utilized his close-knit group as subject matter for
portraiture. Sometimes they'd pose for him in the modest glory of their
soft skin
>From the 1930s on, Cadmus steadfastly has painted the male nude within
a milieu in which, as he says, "heterosexuality has always ruled."
Given his clear-cut understanding of this identity-based power dynamic,
perhaps the queerest thing about Cadmus and his work is his (and its)
reluctance to fully acknowledge the queer content that appears so overt
to contemporary viewers who know all the insider signs. While Cadmus
always has been "out,' his reluctance to speak at length regarding the
recognizably gay aspects of his oeuvre stems, I think, both from his
reluctance to be pigeonholed and from the fact that he came of age
among a generation of gay men who typically didn't have "we're here,
we're queer, get used to it" tattooed on their foreheads.
As much as some younger artists would like to see Cadmus adopt the
persona of nonagenarian poster boy for Gay Y2K, he's generally content
to let his images speak for themselves. That's his choice to make; more
perplexing, frankly, is the majority of critical writing on Cadmus that
blatantly ignores his gay perspective and homoerotic imagery. Lincoln
Kirstein, founding director of the New York City Ballet and the
artist's self-defined bisexual brother-in-law (married to Cadmus's
sister, Fidelma), wrote the "definitive" Cadmus monograph with nary a
mention of the artist's crucial homoeroticism, preferring to tiptoe
around the truth with statements like, "As for sexual factors, he has
without ostentation or polemic long celebrated somatic health in boys
and young men for its symbolic range of human possibility. His
addiction to aspects of physical splendor has never been provocative,
sly, nor ambitious to proselytize."
I wish Kirstein had taken a more careful look at the slender lad
sporting a box kite and a noticeable bulge in "Aviator," or the
mine's-bigger-than-yours posturing and relentless cruising on display
in "Y.M.C.A. Locker Room" (not pictured). Even more telling is
"Manikins," in which two small artist's models lovingly do the nasty
atop a copy of Corydon, André Gide's plea for queer rights. Never
before or since has the body politic been represented so charmingly.
Despite what Kirstein and others have--or haven't--said, Cadmus's work
clearly has been heavily informed by his sexuality; his male nudes and
satiric swipes exude a coolly palpable sensuality. Cadmus isn't
homogenic, however. In "Sunday Sun," a hetero couple seek out precious
rays of light amid the Dickensian grime of their oppressive urban
sprawl.
In "Subway Symphony," Cadmus trains his compassionate yet keenly wicked
eye on a sideshow of grotesques, from ridiculous hippies to religious
zealots, all of whom are having a bad hair day. While some viewers
object to Cadmus's cruel reduction of the masses to broad stereotypes,
the artist insists on his secular humanitarianism: "Will it be said
that I am anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-white, anti-hard hat,
anti-ALL, anti-people? I am NOT. I am anti a society that makes people
this way, that makes humanoids of humans, an environment that causes
this...I am FOR human beings as individuals."
One human being in particular who Cadmus has been for as an individual
is Jon Andersson, a cabaret singer with whom the artist has been linked
for more than thirty years. In "The Haircut," Andersson snips his older
partner's distinguished white locks. In an ongoing series of chalk and
crayon drawings, Cadmus depicts Andersson as muse, thinker, sleeper,
lover and Beauty incarnate.
Recalling portraits by Michelangelo, Ingres and Degas, Cadmus's images
of Andersson illustrate his comment on the drawing process: "I
specialize in male nudes. I've done many more males than females. I
like to do females too, but they're sort of harder to come by in a way.
And they don't generally pose as well as men. They have a tendency to
faint. I think--and I don't know whether this is just my own idea--that
men are vainer than women in that they work harder at their posing.
Maybe women think that they're so lovely that they don't have to pose
well, I'm not sure." In any event, the subtle highlighting of genitals,
hands and feet in Cadmus's portraits of Andersson suggest that male
beauty is a mystery that the artist never truly desires to solve.
Paul Cadmus has plumbed the depths of this mystery throughout his long
and illustrious career, producing canvases slowly but steadily at a
rate of two or three per year. Now in his nineties, Cadmus shows little
sign of disrupting his annual routine or of ceasing to debate the
thrills and hazards of the body politic. In other words, the fleet is
still in
Steven Jenkins
Steven Jenkins is a San Francisco-based cultural critic whose writings
on visual arts, literature, music and film can be found in magazines in
finer hair salons and dentist-office waiting rooms throughout major
metropolitan areas nationwide. Earlier this year he curated QAR
exhibitions featuring S. Brett Kaufman and John O'Reilly. Jenkins also
moonlights as a partner in Blueprint, a book packaging and publishing
company that fosters innovative mergings of images and text.
Previously, he served as Senior Editor of see, a journal of visual
culture published by The Friends of Photography. His most recent
impossible dream is to shack up in a crumbling villa just outside
Barcelona with Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Courtney Love and the boys
from Blur. Jenkins can be reached via e-mail at sj...@earthlink.net.
Dan
MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFIA
Indian artist and writer Bhupen Khakhar's career began in the '6os, but
some of his works might seem to be from an earlier time. An oil on
canvas titled Royal Circus, 1974, looks like something Henri Rousseau,
that classic "primitivist" of Western art, could have painted nearly a
century ago. In Khakhar's painting, a man accompanied by an odd-looking
animal of enormous proportions plays a strap-on keyboard. He appears to
sing as the beast stares at us with its tongue hanging our of its
mouth. Neither funny nor sad, the two companions stand in the middle of
a round arena; no audience is seen. The painting's faux-naive and
populist quality allows Khakhar to position himself as a deliberate
outsider to modern tradition, treating it as an airy fantasy.
A turning point in Khakhar's career came in 1981, when the seemingly
unsophisticated stylization of Royal Circus was replaced by a visually
more complex syntax, referencing a gamut of visual sources from Persian
miniatures to Brueghel and modern Indian posters--while challenging
established tastes in Indian art. (Khakhar's work belongs to the
so-called Baroda School, a group of figurative painters living in
Baroda, Gujarat, whose art endows genre scenes with Pop aesthetics.)
Khakhar's paintings acquired a gentle "Eastern" flavor, applied through
color and form, but also through a specifically Indian--or so we
believe--blend of sexuality and spirituality. In You can't please all,
1981, a naked man stands on a balcony, contemplating a city vista. Life
below is busy with daily activities, from fixing a car to strolling
around the town to digging a grave for a donkey. The near-total absence
of women in the scene suggests a man's world in which men are
interested solely in other men. The underlying narrative refer s, in
fact, to a folktale about two men, a father and a son, who get swindled
while trying to sell a donkey--to which Khakhar has added an erotic
component: The animal carrying the two men (before it dies) has an
erection. As the exhibition curator Enrique Juncosa observed looking at
this painting, "It is not difficult to see in it the story of someone
who buries a burden when revealing [his] sexuality."
Starting from the early '80s, Khakhar's paintings explore gay life,
emphasizing a tendency toward sexual promiscuity while juxtaposing it
with local Indian context. They often depict a sort of ritual of
cross-dressing and an anxious search for all-male domesticity. In Seva,
1986, a pair of older men sitting on a gardenlike carpet prolong their
intimacy in the semidarkness of the foreground. In Next Morning, 1999,
two naked men seem to wonder how to move their relationship beyond
casual sex--facing the morning after. Without ceasing to be fantasies
verging on delirium, Khakhar's works are highly introspective and
seemingly autobiographical, exposing the complexities of lust, love,
and aging. But to look at these paintings and focus on their explicit
sexual content or analyze their take on gender identity and minority
discourse is to see only half the picture. What strikes one in the
works from the '80s on is that Khakhar grew as a painter only after he
had come out of the closet. The self-protective veil of fa ux naivete
was no longer necessary for him to paint freely and to enjoy the
painterly qualities of oils or the translucent delicacy of watercolors.
The influence of Francis Bacon seems to lurk behind the Indian artist's
latest portraits, in which faces ooze with blood and entrails. Made
after Khakhar was diagnosed with cancer, these works reflect on
mortality but also suggest that sexual phantasmagorias mirror the
tragic and often violent facts of life.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Dan
On at least two occasions in his work, Caravaggio offers us his head.
In a particularly lurid version of self-oblation, Caravaggio painted
his own features on the bloody head of Goliath being held by the hair
at arm's length by a victorious David and thrust toward the viewer, in
the Galleria Borghese representation of that Biblical episode. To judge
from several other paintings, Caravaggio seems to have found in
decapitation a nearly irresistible aesthetic appeal. Not only have two
other versions of David with Goliath's head been attributed to
Caravaggio; there are also Judith in the very act of cleaving through
Holofernes' head with the latter's sword; St. John's partially severed
head in the Malta Decapitation of St. John the Baptist; the same
luckless saint's head being dropped onto a platter held by Salome in
the London version of Salome Receiving the Head of St. John the Baptist
a third version of this episode, now in Madrid, has also been
attributed to Caravaggio; and, finally, the Medusa head, mouth agape
and eyes opened wide in terror, originally painted on a parade shield
held in the hand of a lifesize equestrian sculpted figure in the Medici
armory, and now itself removed from that original body and on view at
the Uffizi in Florence. But in the other self-portrait we have in mind
- the early Bacchino Malato - the painter's head rests firmly
enough on a provocatively curved shoulder, and what we are being
offered in that head, what is directed toward us, could be read as an
erotically soliciting gaze.
We want to propose a certain interpretive itinerary from this gaze of
the Bacchus self-portrait to the decapitated Goliath/Caravaggio. Let's
begin by attacking head-on, so to speak, the trap set for us by images
of decapitation. The psychoanalytic association of decapitation with
castration has become an interpretive reflex; many people are inclined
to take that connection for granted without ever having been instructed
to do so by Freud's short piece on the Medusa head. And yet, while we
will be acknowledging the irresistible nature of that interpretation
- irresistible in large part because Caravaggio himself appears to be
proposing it pictorially - we will also be arguing for the need to
interpret castration. Far from being the final term in a reading of
Caravaggio's images of decapitation, castration is illuminated by
decapitation, by a cutting off of that part of the body where
interpretation itself originates, without which we would never see
decapitation as castration. Without our heads, we would not be
speculating about what the heads in Caravaggio's paintings may mean and
one way to make us lose our heads - to ruin any confidence we might
have about knowing him, or, as we shall see, about the very possibility
of knowledge - is for Caravaggio to decapitate himself, to thrust
toward us as David thrusts Goliath's head toward the spectator a
bodyless head that can no longer say or mean anything, that can no
longer be read.
If Caravaggio finally adopts that extreme solution to what he seems to
have anticipated as centuries of interpretive promiscuity in front of
his work, he began by seductively inviting the spectator to read him.
His paintings repeatedly initiate the conditions under which a visual
field more or less urgently solicits and resists its own symbolization.
Caravaggio frequently paints the act of looking - a looking at times
directed outside the painting, toward the spectator, and at other times
situated among the figures within the represented scene. Among the
former, much attention has been given to those in which a boy appears
to be looking more or less provocatively toward the spectator. We are
thinking of the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the Bacchino Malato both
from the mid-1590s and both in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the Uffizi
Bacchus from a few years later, and the Berlin Victorious Cupid ca.
1601-02. The poses and the looks in these paintings have generally been
recognized as erotically provocative, an accurate enough description if
we mean by that a body in which we read an intention to stimulate our
desire, not only to contemplate the body but to approach it, to touch
it, to enter into or to imagine some form of intimate physical contact
with it. What has been called a perplexing, even indecorous nudity
Cupid's position, for example, exposes not only his genitals but also
the cleavage of his buttocks, bared shoulders, enticing smiles or
half-smiles, sensuous parted lips: given all this, and in spite of
important variations among the works just mentioned, it seems plausible
to say that Caravaggio has painted a series of sexual come-ons.
The come-ons are, however, somewhat ambiguous. In two of the paintings,
the Bacchino Malato and the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the erotic
invitation is qualified by a partially self-concealing movement of
retreat. The Bacchus self-portrait ca. 1593 is at once exhibitionist
and self-concealing: if the shoulder is enticingly curved, the movement
of the entire arm closes in on the body, which it could be understood
as thereby concealing or protecting from the very advances it
simultaneously invites. Also, the greenish hue of the flesh which
accounts for the designation of the bacchino as malato adds a repellent
and repelling note to the provocation. The provocation and the
withdrawal are, however, quite evidently poses, which should make us
hesitate to see either the self-exposure or the self-concealment as
natural, or as psychologically significant. The curious inclusion of a
section of the youth's spread legs invites us to reconstruct the moment
before he turned his head to the right and positioned his arm to raise
the bunch of grapes to his lips. Since this is a self-portrait, we
might imagine the painter, sitting in front of his canvas, not yet
having turned toward the mirror in which he will see himself as he will
paint himself, posing as Bacchus. There is something grossly natural
about those thematically irrelevant knees; they emphasize, by contrast,
the youth's role-playing with the rest of his body. Thus, there is
already, even in this very early painting, an ironic comment on the
double movement we will qualify as erotic: the soliciting move toward
the viewer, and the self-concealing move away from the viewer. It is,
we will argue, the movement away that fascinates, indeed that
eroticizes the body's apparent and deceptive availability. The latter
is at once put into question and sexualized by the suggestion of a
secret, although the exaggerated artfulness of the entire operation in
the Bacchino Malato makes of that very suggestion only one element in a
nonerotic process of aesthetic design. It is as if this remarkable work
included a warning about the reading it also crudely solicits and
frustrates.
Furthermore, not only may the whole thing be nothing but a pose; the
very setting that supports the pose also works against its erotically
provocative nature. What is this half-naked youth inviting us to see?
His genitals unlike those of Cupid are hidden, and yet they are also
visible. More exactly, they are repeated as something else: both as the
knotted sash, and as the two peaches alongside the extended bunch of
grapes on the table. Look at my sex, Bacchus seems to be saying, which
isn't one. It is the sensual pleasure I'm offering you, but it is
elsewhere, it can perhaps be anywhere, inaccurately replicated in forms
that substitute a visual sensuality for a concealed sexuality. The look
that would center our look is itself decentered by such displacements,
as well as by a certain incompleteness in the entire scene: both the
wreath of ivy around the youth's head and the leaves of the bunch of
grapes on the table end somewhere outside the painting. The
self-withdrawing pose we originally noted could, then, be thought of
not only as a partial concealment of the provocatively exposed body,
but also as a redirecting of the viewer's solicited look to objects of
undecidable identity the phallus-sash, phallus-fruit as well as to a
space beyond the painting's frame a visible space out of our field of
vision.
The most compelling other center of interest in the painting is,
however, the table. Formally, its horizontal position contrasts with
the verticality of the youth's upper body a contrast repeated, in
detail, in the way the two peaches are lying on the table. With its
heavy, stonelike quality, this mass of matter more closely resembles
the tombstone jutting out at us from the Entombment than it does a
table, and it brings into the work a threat to life more unsettling
than the greenish hue of Bacchus's flesh. This is the unnamable
finality of inorganic matter, unnamable because it can't be described,
as the boy's sickness or death can, as the result of a process, the end
of a history. The stony table brings into the Bacchino Malato the
impenetrable enigma of matter that does nothing but persist, for all
time, in its deadness. Nothing could be more different from the psychic
enigma perversely proposed by the boy's smile and pose, although a
certain affinity between the sickly youth and dead matter is suggested
by the repetition of the greenish gray of the youth's face in the
table's surface. By juxtaposing the self-concealment perhaps inherent
in the erotically soliciting pose with a radically other order of
being, Caravaggio posits a mode of connectedness which, as we shall
see, he richly elaborates elsewhere: the relation of the human body not
to a more or less enigmatic human intentionality, but rather to a vast
family of materiality in which community is no longer a function of
reciprocal readings of desire.
But Caravaggio's main emphasis in these early works is on the
apparently unfathomable nature of the erotic. Like the double movement
of the youth's body in the Bacchino Malato, the tensed curve of the
wrist in the Boy with a Basket of Fruit 1593-94 suggests a drawing of
the basket toward the boy and away from the prospective buyer, at the
same time that the painting fosters the illusion that we are looking at
an offering. What is the boy offering us - the basket of fruit he
seems to be claiming as his, or the highlighted right shoulder that is
in effect pushed toward us? By implication, this question makes the
open mouth undecidable: is the fruit vendor offering his merchandise,
or has the mouth been opened to make the alluringly tilted head more
enticing, thereby shifting the merchandise from the lush but partially
withdrawn basket of fruit to the vendor himself? And yet it is easier
to look at the basket of fruit as something we might possess than at
the boy who, by looking directly at the viewer, reflects and resists
the invasive gaze that would take him in. He has only to look at us to
remind us that the erotic gaze is itself invasive as well as inviting.
His looking at us protects him from our looking at him.
The invasiveness is, however, illusory on both sides. What we primarily
see in looking at the fruit vendor's eyes is an emphatic point of light
in his left eye. We are looked at by that light, and, as Lacan has said
in his seminar on The Gaze as objet petit a, what that light paints in
the depths of our eye is not an object or a constructed relation, but
rather that which is elided in the geometrical relation - the depth
of field, with all its ambiguity and variability, which is in no way
mastered by me. The eye is not a point of perspective from which we can
look out at, measure, and appropriate the world. Like the fruit
vendor's eyes, the viewer's eyes are penetrated by a luminosity that
has the ambiguous shimmering of a jewel, a luminosity that, from a
cognitive point of view, illuminates nothing. The eye is an unreadable
transparency a fact made viscerally evident by the opening shot of
Beckett's Film, in which Buster Keaton's glaucous eye, occupying the
entire screen, is at once obscenely exposed and wholly impenetrable.
The erotically provocative pose transforms the otherwise neutral
unreadability of the eye into a willful reticence, as if we were being
solicited by a desire determined to remain hidden. Let's note, finally,
that the eye's brilliant opacity in Boy with a Basket of Fruit, which
repels the look it solicits, is the principal element in a complex
system of double movements. The fruit, which would otherwise be the
passive object of an appetitive attention, is being withdrawn. What the
boy thrusts toward us is the unreadability that keeps us at a distance.
The one part of the basket's contents that has escaped the boy's
protective embrace - the leaf in the lower right section - could be
thought of as the most unambiguously available element in the painting;
but it is limp and faded, highlighting, by contrast, the inviting
ripeness of both the rest of the basket's contents and the boy himself.
In the paintings just discussed, erotic soliciting is countered by a
movement away from the solicited viewer, a holding back that
complicates the idea of erotic availability. Or rather it is perhaps
because of the movement away that we identify these looks and these
poses as erotic. Inherent in this sort of erotic invitation is a
concealment, and the concealment generates both what we recognize as
the erotic invitation and possibly our own eroticized response to it.
Sexiness advertises an availability that is somewhat opaque. The erotic
here is a function of the noninterpretable address.
We should emphasize here because the word could, of course, be used to
describe an invitation without concealment. In Georges Bataille, for
example, the erotic refers to an unqualified openness, an availability
uncomplicated by any reticence or secretiveness. Any such reticence
might be the sign of an individuality resistant to that communication
in which, for Bataille, the boundaries that define and separate
individuals no longer exist. In this state of radical indistinctness,
psychic and physical being is reduced to pure openness; being has
become a receptive hole. While Caravaggio appears to consider this type
of address, or solicitation, he seems comparatively indifferent to a
wholly nonresistant openness. Even the frequently open mouths in
Caravaggio's work think of the boy rushing away at the right of the
scene from the martyrdom of St. Matthew, as well as the boy bitten by a
lizard are more frequently figured as a defensive cry against the world
than as a readiness to be penetrated or invaded. What seems to interest
Caravaggio more is a body at once presenting and withdrawing itself -
a somewhat enigmatic body. The distinction between nonerotic and erotic
address might be, not that the latter solicits greater intimacy or
fewer barriers between persons, but rather that it solicits intimacy in
order to block it with a secret. Erotic address is a self-reflexive
move in which the subject addresses another so that it may enjoy
narcissistically a secret to which the subject itself may have no other
access. The subject performs a secret, which is not at all to say that
he or she has any knowledge of it.
Is this secret homosexuality? It has come to be taken for granted in
most Caravaggio criticism that the painter himself was homosexual or
perhaps bisexual, and that his work - especially the early portraits
of scantily clad boys - has a powerful homoerotic component. These
perceptions, or assumptions, have produced some astonishing critical
documents. The most authoritative - and tendentious - text for the
documentation of homoeroticism in Caravaggio is a 1971 essay by Donald
Posner. For Posner, Caravaggio's fleshy, full-lipped, langorous young
boys assure us of the painter's homosexual tastes. These tastes are
portrayed in an innocently spontaneous manner in such early works as
Boy with a Basket of Fruit; they receive a slyer, more sophisticated
treatment later on in the Concert, Bacchus, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, and
Lute Player. The representation of a boy being bitten by a lizard seems
to clinch the case for Posner. In this painting, homosexuality is
pointed to by the fact that the boy's hands do not tense with masculine
vigor in response to the attack; they remain limp in a languid show of
helplessness. His facial expression suggests a womanish whimper rather
than a virile shout.
Such gibberish will surely inspire a virile shout from even the most
languorous gay reader. Unfortunately, the discussion of Caravaggio's
presumed homosexuality and his work's homoeroticism has not progressed
since 1971 to more invigorating intellectual exercises. The
distinguished Caravaggio scholar Howard Hibbard remains sensibly
neutral on the subject: Whether Caravaggio was essentially or
exclusively homosexual is far from certain. It is, however, generally
agreed that when Caravaggio quotes Michelangelo in such works as
Victorious Cupid and St. John the Baptist with a Ram he seeks, as
Hibbard puts it, to tear away [Michelangelo's] idealizing mask and to
expose the true source of his devotion to male nudes. To what extent
homosexual impulses are also the true source of Caravaggio's own
devotion to partially clothed young men remains a subject of lively
debate. As recently as 1995, Creighton Gilbert tensed, as it were, with
masculine vigor in order to defend Caravaggio's heterosexuality.
Gilbert goes to great lengths to show the unreliability of the hostile
testimony given by Tommaso Salini during the 1603 judicial hearings of
a lawsuit in which the artist Giovanni Baglione was suing Caravaggio
for libel, testimony about Caravaggio's having shared with a friend a
bardassa a male who takes a female role in social and sexual behavior.
As far as the paintings are concerned, Gilbert argues that in making
Bacchus quite soft as well as fat, Caravaggio was merely following a
convention in representations of Bacchus. The hired male model is
common around 1600, and muscles were a qualification for the
representations of male nudity that were becoming more frequent.
Caravaggio's youths are boasting of [their] sexual success in naked
pleasure - Creighton invokes the heterosexually [?] heady atmosphere
of the locker room in contemporary American high schools, and
Caravaggio's Cupid is for Gilbert cheer[ing] on heterosexuality at age
twelve.
Gilbert's analogies from Caravaggio's youths to raunchy American
adolescents of the late twentieth century are not the most persuasive
argument for Caravaggio's heterosexuality. At his best, Gilbert
emphasizes the differences between contemporary and Renaissance
perspectives on male beauty and homosexuality. Furthermore, as he
writes, the idea that Caravaggio may be hinting at homosexuality in his
work is itself a modern prejudice. When same-sex love is the subject of
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting, it is generally presented in
a direct and explicit manner. On the other hand, it could be said that
while a heterosexual artist such as Annibale Caracci would have no
trouble painting a frankly homosexual scene there are, for example, two
small homosexual scenes on the Farnese ceiling, artists with
complicated feelings about their own homosexual impulses might feel
less comfortable about treating such subjects directly and might, like
Michelangelo, be able to express those impulses only through an
idealized treatment of the male body in works with nonhomosexual
subjects such as David and the Creation. Nothing forbids an indirect
presentation of the homoerotic, even in a period when direct
presentations were acceptable. Acceptability is, moreover, an
historical variable even within the sixteenth century: after the
Council of Trent [1545-63], nudity and pagan themes, many of which had
homoerotic components, were officially condemned, although they hardly
disappeared from post-Tridentine art.
Indeed, Caravaggio may be indicating his taste for homoerotic subjects
through his androgynous male figures, figures at once muscular and yet
recognizably feminine in some of their poses and expressions. Since
antiquity, the androgynous had been associated with effeminacy and
therefore bisexuality or homosexuality. This code might lead us to
reconsider a favorite contemporary dogma about the differences between
modern and premodern notions of sexuality. The identification of the
androgynous male figure with homosexuality suggests not only that the
homosexual existed long before 19th-century sexology elaborated it as
an object of medical attention and social surveillance, but also that
it already consisted in the form most familiar to modern definitions: a
woman's soul in a man's body. While a homosexual androgyne, strictly
conceived, could only mean a male-female who would desire other
male-females, the fact that androgyny operated as a code for male
homosexuality - that is, desire of a male for another male -
suggests that the androgynous subject was not seen as belonging by
nature to both sexes but rather as a kind of corruption of one sex by
the other, that is, as a feminized male. From this perspective,
androgynes are freaks: they are male bodies anomalously harboring
female desires.
Similarly, Proust evokes the myth of androgyny in the essay on
homosexuality that opens Sodome et Gomorrhe. The invert gives himself
away when his female soul - like a disembodied spirit seeking the
incarnate form it has been unjustly denied - take[s] advantage of the
narrowest apertures in her prison wall to find what was necessary to
her existence, and makes herself hideously visible in the invert's
body. The very hair on the invert's head gives him away: unbrushed,
undisciplined, as he lies in his bed in the morning, it falls so
naturally in long curls over the cheek that one marvels how the young
woman ... has contrived so ingeniously to manifest herself in its
feminine ripple. No longer on its guard, the invert's body might be
painted as an androgynous body; and having thus been feminized, it
would be recognized as belonging to a homosexual. If Proust calls this
visibility of the invert's female soul hideous, it is because his
emphasis here is on homosexuals not as desired objects but as desiring
subjects. The androgyne becomes freakish when he/she is viewed as a
male body with female desires. By the same token, however, the
androgynous youth legitimizes heterosexual male desire for boys -
legitimizes it as heterosexual. If men who desire androgynous males
really desire women, the androgynous youth can be represented as
beautiful. The question of the latter's own desires becomes not only
irrelevant but also a potentially dangerous speculation that might lead
to some troubling general conclusions about the hideousness of any
same-sex desire. If homosexual desire renders a man effeminate and
potentially androgynous, who knows when the adult male lasciviously
enjoying the male youth's feminized body might suddenly begin showing a
feminine ripple in his own hair, a visible sign of the imprisoned woman
within him struggling to be free?
While the association of effeminacy with homosexuality is hardly a
modern invention earlier periods viewed at least the passive partner
as, in essence, a woman, the characteristically modern move in Proust's
discussion is to evoke androgyny within a discussion of the psychology
of desire. Once the androgynous male's desires are centered, he risks
becoming hideous; looked at only as a feminized body, he can be admired
and even desired. Thus, it is probably anachronistic for Posner to call
Caravaggio's Bacchus depraved. Posner refers to Bacchus's proposal,
which he finds indecent thus drawing our attention to what the youth
presumably desires from us. But while this overfed, cosmeticized youth
may be less seductively appealing than the rosy-cheeked, fresh-looking
fruit vendor but less appealing to everyone?, nothing points to his
depraved intentions except an irrelevant attempt to get inside his
desiring skin.
In large part, the homoerotic elements in Caravaggio's work are
inferred from the way we think his contemporaries might have read his
work. Indeed, perhaps all we can say with any confidence is that if
viewers of Caravaggio's time found his youths androgynous, they may
have concluded that he was representing homosexual youths. And,
whatever our suspicions may be, nothing really justifies our believing
in an exact correspondence between Caravaggio's interest in such
subjects and a particular homosexual identity. Finally, even if such a
correspondence were justified, it would be unfortunate. For it would
ignore what we take to be the greatest originality of these paintings:
their intractably enigmatic quality. Caravaggio's enigmas are not meant
to be read. At least since Oedipus, the enigma in Western civilization
has been an epistemological challenge. Its unreadability has been
fantasized as provisional and, far from blocking knowledge, the enigma
holds forth the promise of new knowledge, of expanding the field of
epistemological appropriations. Caravaggio resolutely rejects
opportunities for such expansions. The distinction between heterosexual
and homosexual reduces soliciting to a sexual identity. It makes the
soliciting look transparent: homosexuality is the unveiled secret, the
truth thanks to which, as the Proustian narrator says of Charlus when
he discovers that the baron's desires are for other men, everything
that hitherto had seemed (...) incoherent became intelligible, appeared
self-evident. Now we know Charlus, just as we would presumably know
Caravaggio better if we could confidently identify his works as
homoerotic and Caravaggio himself as homosexual. The secret is an
accident - or a defense that can be broken down - on the way to
knowledge. Caravaggio's enigmatic youths propose something quite
different: the secret is inherent in their erotic appeal, although
there may be nothing to know about them. A provocative unreadability is
presented as an occasion that might lead to a sexual arousal. Sexual
identities, however probable, deprive these works of their erotic
charge. Caravaggio's enigmatic bodies have not yet been domesticated by
sexual - perhaps even gendered - identities.
nxt.htmlnxt.htmlLeo Bersani/Ulysse Dutoit
Dan
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From: HeIsNude (Original Message) Sent: 6/6/2001 11:58 AM
Before I forget, allow me to begin my mentioning that another VtNM
member has opened a lovely album dedicated to Egon Schiele in his
Briefcase. http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/star_castor
Yipes! PhotoBaroque, wherever did you get the idea Schiele killed
himself? On Oct. 31, 1918, at only 29 years of age, he was cut down by
the epidemic of Spanish influenza ravaging much of Europe at the time.
His wife, Edith, had fallen to the same plague just 3 days before
(while pregnant for the first time). Schiele was already sick from the
virus when Edith died. Her family attended to him, striving against
great odds--with the assistance of a renown physician-- to save him. In
those days following Edith's death he wrote several extant letters
which, while aching from the loss of his beloved and their child, give
not the slightest indication of self-destructiveness. In the months
prior to his death, Schiele had achieved great financial and artistic
success. He was the darling of the special show at the 49th Vienna
Secession Exhibition, ALL his paintings selling. He received numerous
new commissions. Some of the leading Viennese personalities wanted him
to paint their portraits.
An ardent Expressionist, Schiele certainly did not shrink from
portraying violence. However, it is emotional tumult, not physical
force, which he took on as a recurring theme None of Schiele's
self-portraits depict a flaying of flesh from skin. I can't think of
ANY nude images created by him to which such a metaphor might apply. To
the contrary, he "shrink-wraps" skin to flesh. The epidermis adheres to
his own lean meat and spiny bones like a protective
covering--containing the tempest within and shielding from outside
dangers. As for painting technique, fervor and daring ought not be
confused with violence.
Schiele wrestled with the social ban against men scrutinizing their own
bodies. The internal battles he underwent in transgressing this taboo
are often reflected in his artwork. But Schiele was possessed of an
unusual affection for the actual physicality of human beings--his own
included. Not only does Schiele exalt his own bodiliness in masterworks
like "Embrace (Lovers II)" and "The Family," but also in innumerable
lesser works. Foremost among these would be the self-portrait entitled
"Crouching Male Nude" of 1917 and the double self-portrait entitled
"Two Squatting Men" of 1918. The manifold series of nude self-portraits
drawn respectively in 1910 and 1912 also betoken the reverence he felt
for his own body. The self-portraits of Schiele masturbating are quite
dissimilar from each other in mood and purport. Sometimes there is an
air of dread surrounding the image, other times a solemn pensiveness,
and still others an intense anger. Therefore, it seems ill-advised to
generalize about them as a group. As a self-styled sexual anarchist and
Catholic subverter, it is unlikely Schiele would have subscribed to any
notion of self-pleasuring as self-abuse.
He did regard himself as abused by the defenders of the status quo,
especially in the earlier days of his career (during his imprisonment,
for instance). But his interpretations of the male nude are neither
sadistic nor masochistic. In his stripped and twisted bodies, Schiele
bears witness to his belief in the individual's capacity to prevail
against torturous laws and customs.
A thought... in days gone by, masturbation was often termed
'self-abuse.' And indeed, many of Schiele's images show him as a
tortured, fractured, fragmented human being. He is his own martyr,
symbolically flaying the flesh from his skin. His weapon is a
paintbrush and its violent action cuts as it slices across the canvas
again and again, laying down wounds in line and color. Since Schiele
killed himself, could showing oneself masturbating simply be a
precursor to the ultimate sacrilege of suicide?
~PhotoB.
Whether the dark smudge illustrates a tuft of anal hair or the anal
opening itself, its exact placement draws attention to Schiele's rear
rosebud. As you note, the disjointed posture of the entire lower body
accents his back door. In the West, the first rule of representing the
nude male is "Don't even suggest openings." If not absent, all orifices
of the male body must be securely latched. Have you noticed, that even
mouths are sealed? If aliens had to rely only on high/pop cultural
pictures, they might never figure out that we actually loosen our lips
to speak, sing, cheer, weep, call, munch, drink, smoke, clown around,
etc.--let alone do anything sexual. You can bet it's no coincidence
that "our" movie heroes are likely to be "tight-lipped," while film
fools can't seem to shut up. This rule of representation, of course,
corresponds to the first tenet of Machismo Dogma. The male body must
not to be entered. Nonreceptivity is the cardinal virture. Hurray for
Schiele heretical practices. "Rump Bump" serves as a inviting reminder
that impenetrability is synonymous with stupidity.
The URL I want to pass along is
>http://w1.857.telia.com/~u85702918/schiele/arkiv.htm
>If you're not already familiar with this site, I believe you'll be agreeably surprised. It holds an exceptional Schiele collection with not a few male nudes, one of which I'd never layed eyes on previously. I'm attaching it. It is astounding this rear-view interpretation of the male body should have been cooked up by a heterosexually-oriented man. All the more so since, in all probability, it is one of Schiele's mirror-dependent self-portraits. The nude's low-hanging testicles appear to serve a dual purpose. Since the frame of Schiele's figures is almost androgynous, it marks the subject as male. in no uncertain terms. Secondly, by sculpting the scrotum and buttocks so that their shapes echo each other, and coloring them similarly, he appears to be declaring ass no less than cock emblematic of manhood. Given the presence of Schiele's trademark fetishistic hand, plus that sweep of long-thick hair, along with the rump-bump into the observor, it could even be reasonably argued there is an erotic intent to the composition.
> Re: the model in The Dancer. Letters sent by Schiele to booster and subsequent biographer Arthur Roessler, as well as correspondence exchanged with fellow coffee-house denizen Ludwig Wittgenstein (himself "gay"), clearly indicate that Egon and Edith were close friends with a male couple. Both of these men danced for the Vienna Ballet. Egon executed a series of portraits of these fellows between 1911 and 1915. Nearly all the illustrations in question are, not surprisingly, in private collections. To my knowledge, they've never shown up pictorially in any study about Schiele. Much to her credit, however, Jane Kaller includes all these pieces in her catalogue raisonne for the Fisher Schiele Archive in London (published Stateside by Abrams). Although the reproductions of all items in the catalogue are all but microscopic and in B&W, I take some consolation in the fact that Kaller files them under the category "certainly authentic."
> Several aspects of these works are striking. Firstly, the compositions mimic in many ways the paintings Schiele made of himself and Edith together--the ones frequently dubbed Lovers or something likewise uncharacteristically romantic. Along with the similarities of layout, the portraits of the male couple bear titles such as "Devotion." Secondly, the couple is never presented totally nude but always in the middle of disrobing (for each other?). They are either topless or bottomless. Whichever, shoulders and limbs are bared, frequently accentuated with the drapery of clothing. One, simply called Two Men, has the couple standing in a frontal embrace--arm around waist. This one IS on permanent display at Vienna's Graphische Sammlung Albertina. Thirdly, all the portraits of these men possess a relatively calm quality unimaginable in Schiele's depictions of other peeled men. And unlike his fantastical lesbian scenes, these works suggest something biographical about the models. One might even say they hint at the domesticity Schiele so loved in his personal life but eschewed in his painting.
> What are we to make of an artist who produces portraits of himself masturbating AND, by his own account, does so while gawking at himself in a mirror in the midst of "doing the deed"? The society ladies who served as principal patrons of the arts in his time detested Schiele's dis-comforting vision. Quite self-consciously Schiele created his artwork mainly FOR certain other men--the radical intelligensia of Vienna. It would be difficult to deny that any picture of a young man stripped and handling his own hard-on is (to put it mildly) likely to convey erotic undertones. So, if the subject of a visual representation is a naked man jacking off, and the originator of the representation IS the man engaged in masturbation, and this originator is well aware his representation will be received through the gaze of other men, it what sense is the image erotic? Any claim that such an image is somehow hetero-erotic seems to stretch credulity to the breaking point. Yet most art critics are loathe to identify these images as in any sense homo-erotic.
> Having said that, I must confess to seeing his masturbating self-portraits as among the least convicingly homoerotic of his male nudes. Unlike his masturbating female nudes, Schiele seems unable to surrender his body to the pleasure of his own touch. Be that as it may, to these eyes in many of his other self-portraits in the buff, he seems to overcome this guilt/fear/disgust. You should know that part of what I'm taking for granted here is that heterosexually-oriented men have been profoundly alienated from their own bodies. It seems they cannot enduring having to look at their own nakedness. To behold another man's nakedness is to risk seeing the reflection of one's own. If such men are image-makers, they tend to project male nudity through the viewpoint of the Admiring Female. Little wonder, then, idealization becomes a requirement. Especially in the past, this displacing approached also had the effect of desexualizing the male body.
Couldn't agree with you more. In fact, not to devalue their formal
properties, I find myself mostly relishing Friederick works as highly
personalized portraits. In many instances the photo seems to be "about"
the interaction between her and the model. It's more the record of an
event, than a figure-study. Having feasted first on her photos, it came
as no surprise later when the text described her models as
non-professionals.
Dan
While browsing the net recently, I happened upon a most engaging
website. Allow me to recommend that VtNM members investigate it for
themselves. It is found at URL indicated above. At this location are
numerous nude self-portraits by a fine art photographer. Letters to him
reprinted at the site address him as "Eric," with no surname given.
Since his e-mail moniker is "Airjay"-- which readers will notice also
appears in the website's URL--he will be referred to in that manner in
the following critique. This artist was previously unknown to me. As
far as I'm aware, Airjay has not been represented in gallery exhibits
or photography periodicals/books. However, reprints of his color and
B&W photos may be ordered at the website indicated above. Airjay also
makes available from this site a video documenting his practices as a
self-portrait photographer. The photographs in question are as unusual
as they are excellent. They bring an atypical perspective to
photography of the nude. Their distinctive quality arises from a
restrained and rational composition combined with a discerning
appreciation of textural detail. Layouts lavish attention on sinuous
lines and shapes. The grainiess and smoothness of surfaces is
celebrated, and further inflected through the interplay of light and
shadow. Each picture makes for a unified image wherein the male form
and rural settings articulate a reciprocal commentary. In our era when
the fragment reigns in nude photography, Airjay usually includes his
entire body within the frame. Compositionally and atmospherically,
Airjay's works call to mind certain shots by Imogen Cunningham.
Notably, they resemble pictures taken by Cunningham during the early
part of the last century of her husband Roi on Mt. Rainer and along the
Dipsea Trail. This similarity situates Airjay in the Pastoral-Romantic
tradition of photography exemplified by Wilhelm von Gloeden and F.
Holland Day. Into this idyllic point of view, Airjay incorporates the
sharp focus and full color of commercial photography, not to mention
contemporary Realists such as Chuck Close and David Hockney. The
digital manipulation of his prints, including adjustments in color,
contrast and clarity, as well as the application of special effects
such as embossing and solarisation, may be influenced by the likes of
Man Ray, Edmund Teske, Lucas Samaras or Mark Marrisroe (the latter two
also known for their nude self-portraits). Viewed as abstractions,
there is a formalism about Airjay's photos comparable to the nudes (and
flowers) of Robert Mapplethorpe. However, these photos are utterly
devoid of Mapplethorpe's affinity for the scandalous and titillatating.
Saying this is not to deny that these self-portraits effuse a daring
eroticism. But here flesh is inseparable from spirit. Excitation of the
senses is tightly interwoven with enticement to dive deep and to
transcend. Carnality is part and parcel of Airjay's nature mysticism.
The photographer presents his naked body as a microcosm integral to the
macrocosm of the surrounding environment. This is the case not only
with those photos identified as landscapes and seascapes, but also with
those grouped under the rubic of "Ghost Towns." This grouping does not
take abandoned settlements as its subject, but rather is about the
effects of the forces of nature on dwellings left unihabitated. A
building's sun-dried, rain-warped and wind-aged wood becomes as much a
natural element as stone or foliage. As such, it provides the scene and
mood for the nude figure no less than acquatic and mountainous
habitats. Airjay's self-portraits resolutely steer clear of the
flirtatiousness common to depictions of the nude which have come under
the spell of advertising. Though a youngish man, there is a no-nonsense
maturity about his attitude and expression. Airjay's imagery is without
irony. He expects to be taken seriously. His physique does not aspire
to the standards for today's glamor model. Though physically attractive
and seemingly in sound health, his features and shape are far from
stylish. He has an average build which, when seen from certain angles,
approaches the slender. However, his is not the the boyish lankiness
made fashionable by Calvin Kline fragrance campaigns. Rather it is a
leaness rendered paradoxically voluptuous by virtue of its unity with
the outdoors. Airjay implants his body in lush vegetation. He drapes
his body around rock formations. He lounges against the weather-beaten
walls of buildings . He cavorts amidst the earth's wetness. He abandons
his body to the free-form dance of natural illumination and shade.
Since his body incarnates a Cosmic Eros--a force rendered equally
evident in sky, forest, mountain and sea--there is nothing raunchy
about the sexual explicitness of Airjay's self-portraits. The
photographer represents himself as kind of ithyphallic nature deity.
Thus, it is not surprising that body-positioning and photo construction
often zero in on backside and groin. Airjay gazes upon his erect sex
organ--and invites the viewer to do likewise--because it serves as an
icon of the generative and amorous energies pervading the whole of
creation. Glancing over his shoulder, he turns his spread buttocks to
the camera as summons and incentive. Inasmuch as such iconography is
more typical of Asian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Celtic cultures, one
can't help but wonder if their spiritualities and aesthetics have
influenced Airjay's approach. The explicitedly sexual symbolism here
may well disturb some North Americans and Europeans steeped in a
dualistic heritage which severs sacred from profane, form from matter,
mind from body, and male from female. Fortunately for us, Airjay is not
one of them.
There is an album featuring Airjay's work in the Photo section of
VtNM's World Groups headquarters.
http://WorldGroups.com/groups/SpotlightingtheMaleNude
Dan
http://www.artboomer.com/app/catalog/customer.asp?id=344&return=customers%2Easp%3Fl%3Do%26s%3D1
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2002/12/02/30534.html
http://www.imagesofeyes.com/nudes/oberholster.htm
http://www.rendiva.com/profile/artistname--966
From: donny (Original Message) Sent: 1/18/2003 10:34 AM
ARTIST FINE ART NUDES BY EVAN OBERHOLSTER Evan Oberholster was born in
1956 in South Africa. After completing a Fine Art degree at the
University of Pretoria, he moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where
he worked as an artist and illustrator. In 1994, he returned to South
Africa to live in Cape Town. Since 1997, he has devoted most of his
time to his art and in 1999, had his first large solo exhibition of
male nudes. He has subsequently held two solo exhibitions in Cape Town
and has participated in a number of group exhibitions. In May 2001 his
work formed part of 'Å 4000 - Å 8000', a group exhibition featuring
some of South Africa's most prestigious artists which was held at the
Knysna Fine Art Gallery and he was again invited to exhibit at the same
gallery in May 2002 in an exhibition titled 'The Art of Colour' which
constituted a focal point of the Knysna Pink Loerie Festival. Evan
Oberholster's work is held in private collections in South Africa, the
UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and the USA. 21ST CENTURY NUDES In his
most recent solo exhibition, 21st Century Nudes, Evan Oberholster
examined contemporary issues of gender, relationships, diversity,
status and sexuality in South African society. A selection of
paintings from the exhibition can be seen at 21st Century Nudes Evan
Oberholster can be contacted at eoberh...@iafrica.com Evan
Oberholster is represented by Sparx Media. To enquire about online
sales or to arrange a visit to his studio in Cape Town, contact:
Michael Thorne at sparx...@iafrica.com Address: 7 Morley Rd,
Observatory, Cape Town, South Africa. Tel: +27 21 4487326 Fax: +27 21
4477429 TOTAL EXPOSURE MALE NUDES "It was a case of art coming to
life at a city gallery last night as a Cape Town artist opened his
collection of male nudes by appearing naked. People who came to see
artist Evan Oberholster Total Exposure exhibition got more than just an
eyeful of nude paintings. Some of the models used in his work also shed
their clothes for the occasion..." - Review by Yunus Kemp, The Cape
Argus. The work shown here is a selection of Oberholster's male
nudes and includes work from the exhibition Total Exposure, a solo
exploration of the male form and its sensuality. Oberholster's 69 oils
of male nudes at the Le Bon Ton Gallery, was the culmination of 18
months of intense work and caused a stir when it was opened. Although
the bulk of the work was sold into South African and international
private collections during the exhibition, the display on these pages
has been updated with a selection of the artist's best male nudes
produced after the exhibition. A NAKED NATION 21ST CENTURY NUDES BY
EVAN OBERHOLSTER "The idea that clothes make the man has been around
since the beginning of time, although it was Mark Twain who first made
it a pithy saying, and went further to say that 'naked people have
little or no effect on society'. In his exhibition, 21st Century Nudes
Cape Town artist Evan Oberholster turns this concept upside down, as he
shows how society and nudity are inextricably intertwined. What
Oberholster does is to deconstruct through his nude paintings of
everyday people, the camouflage that clothing provides, to show how
culture is not just a construct of clothing, language, belief, and
behaviour. Culture exists also in nudity. Evan Oberholster, who has had
several one-man and group exhibitions since returning in the mid-1990s
to South Africa from the Netherlands, has long explored the
relationship between nudity and being. His latest showing is a first
public viewing of ordinary people in ordinary settings, all
nude.....more the Art of Colour exhibition. Male Nudes: 1999 - Total
Exposure - A solo exploration of the male form and its sensuality. In
December 1999, Oberholster exhibited 69 oil paintings of male nudes at
the Le Bon Ton Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. This large
collection was the culmination of 18 months of intense work and caused
a stir when it was opened. Although the bulk of the work was sold into
South African and international private collections during the
exhibition, the display on these pages has been updated with a
selection of the artist's best male nudes produced after the
exhibition. Female Nudes: 2001 - Naked at Fiddlewoods - A solo
exhibition of both male and female nudes. Following on the success of
Total Exposure, this exhibition was held at Fiddlewoods, Cape Town, in
April 2001. It formed part of the area's Walking The Street art
festival. In June 2002, the selection displayed here was updated with
some of the artist's recent female nudes, to replace some of the sold
material. Exhibitions: Oberholster is currently producing paintings
for a solo exhibition that is planned for the end of 2002. It develops
the theme of the nude not as romanticised perfection, but as part of
everyday life and sensuality
Dan
General : George Dureau Paints/Photographs Dignity
From: DavidM (Original Message) Sent: 2/7/2003 8:57 AM
"The photographer and his subjects have entered into a shared
enterprise, whose purpose is to record not only outward appearances,
but an inner sense of worth in the person being photographed-achieved
sometimes against overwhelming odds."
Edward Lucie-Smith on George Dureau
As a regular Drummer contributor, I had always tried to stretch
boundaries by including characters that did not fit the usual
over-endowed stud image. Entitled "Different Bodies," my article
explored the relationships between able-bodied men and men with
disabilities. Drummer built a feature, "Maimed Beauty," around the
story and then decided to add photographs by George Dureau.
The magazine received more letters about "Maimed Beauty" than any other
feature. Partly in response to those overwhelmingly positive letters, I
wrote another piece about disability, this time fiction, called
"Chester." Drummer published that, too, also with illustrations by
George Dureau.
George is a New Orleans artist who often photographs local men with
disabilities. Since I'd already decided to visit New Orleans, I thought
I'd track down George and try to arrange a meeting. True to the
tradition of Southern hospitality, I found myself invited to his home
for lunch. George lives in the lower part of the French Quarter in an
area once notorious for drug deals in the park facing his house. By the
time I got to see it, the neighborhood had reverted to its earlier,
quiet state. I even saw a few Yuppies in the park.
I had expected that I might be met by one of George's models, but the
man who ushered me inside, George's incredibly handsome assistant, had
no observable disability. As I walked upstairs I noticed some
works-in-progress on the walls, stylized portraits of dwarfs that would
later be the basis of a book of George's paintings. The rooms had an
open feel, obviously arranged to accommodate his work. When I reached
the second floor I recognized George immediately from the photo of him
and his frequent subject B.J. that had illustrated "Different Bodies."
George is African American and his tastes run towards other
African-American men, especially those with disabilities. The majority
of men he photographed for his first book are locals, many from the
poor neighborhoods circling the Crescent City. Other subjects included
a number of dwarf wrestlers and a few men from other cities. Our
conversation touched on the lives of his models, including the legless
B.J., whose arms-akimbo pose in Drummer had sparked questions about his
body. There were those who wondered if he possessed sex organs or
normal bowel functions. George showed me a photo of B.J. with an
American flag draped tightly across his loins. The photo left no
question about B.J's sex organs.
B.J., George explained, had been born with flippers emerging from
drastically shortened calves. For "aesthetic" reasons, the flippers had
been surgically removed, leaving extensive scarring. B.J. used a
skateboard for mobility. It did not seem that George and B.J. had been
involved in any way other than model-artist. It did not even seem that
B.J. was gay or bisexual.
The photographs of B.J. were representative of George's work,
ragged-edged black-and-white portraits with a lack of background detail
that forces the viewer to focus attention on the subject, often
portrayed naked. George presents disability without visual comment or
apology. Only one other time would I see such powerful depictions of
disabled men, at a Seattle exhibit that featured medical photographs of
Civil War veterans taken to document the effects of war.
George's subjects had not been in any war other than the war that rages
around poverty. Some of them had been in prison. Others would wind up
there. Some were from middle-class backgrounds, with only their
disabilities thrusting them to the fringes of society. Few of the men
that George records, even the openly gay ones, are found cruising local
bars. George himself seemed to frequent them only rarely, as if aware
that the men he finds there are rarely men that would wind up in his
photographs.
He told me of searching for models in hospital wards, on Bourbon
Street, and in parts of the city that most tourists never see. I've
seen some of those areas and I understand their sadness: They will
always yield men with disabilities by reason of the poverty and neglect
found there.
It was hard not to be impressed by the beauty of George's photos and
the desirability of his subjects. One of the amputees George
photographed had been his lover. Another man, also a former lover, was
someone I encountered years after my meeting with George. Yet another
is a famous little man who can be seen frequently at Mardi Gras time in
full leather, accompanied by his multiply pierced lover.
Beautiful as they were, the photographs only hinted at the sexual power
of the men they depicted, something I learned years later, after making
love to several of them. Unlike the photos of Diane Arbus, which
emphasize the grotesque qualities of her subjects and their uneasy
relationship to society, George Dureau's photographs suggest nobility
through the directness of the images.
In one, an African-American man uses a stick to maintain his balance
while crossing his stump over his undamaged leg. The viewer is forced
to acknowledge the discrepancy between the two limbs, but that
discrepancy is merely part of a portrait that includes a wild mane of
hair, the fineness of the torso and the impressiveness of the exposed
sex. The viewer is forced to look at the obvious plusses and what some
would call minuses and come away weighing both as reasons for either
rejecting or embracing the image.
The same holds true for George's image of Wally Sherwood. Wally is a
man with a strong, beautiful face; his arms and legs defy ordinary
proportions and thus say "dwarf." But if you equate "dwarf" with
"undesirable," that beautiful face (and a well-packed jockstrap) may
convince you to reevaluate your preconceptions. Wally is a sexual
being, one not above standing naked on a bar as one man after another
confirms just how desirable he can be.
The fact that many disabled men have exposed themselves to George's
camera may be a tribute to their courage. But the fact that George
Dureau has photographed them in a way that makes his belief in their
beauty unmistakable challenges us to think hard about the kinds of
beauty we are used to extolling.
George and I talked for hours and he showed me photographs that had not
made it into his book. There was a little man from Atlanta, a very
hot-looking lawyer, whose friends insisted he pose for George. And so
he did. I had seen him once during a visit to Atlanta and was impressed
by his handsomeness. There were photos of another little man with
patrician looks and seemingly mismatched limbs. A bare-chested man with
a prosthetic-arm hook draped across his chest was someone I had seen
coming out of a gay bar in Chicago.
But there were also photographs of men whose bodies could only be
called perfect. Those men seemed surrounded by an aura of danger, as if
George sought another kind of differentness when choosing them as
models.
Sadly, George's books are hard to come by these days.
A trip to a local gay bookstore will net dozens of albums of
well-muscled men in exotic surroundings, often engaged in equally
exotic acts. Few of those models reflect the people who buy the books
and even fewer offer bodies that challenge our perceptions about what
is perfect and what is desirable.
I don't know if George Dureau's mission to photograph those other
bodies grows out of his own sexuality or the need to shock. Most likely
his motives combine the two. Unfortunately, I met George only once.
Since our meeting I had noticed that one or two of his photos could be
found on web sites that featured pictures of disabled men.
Some people protested that such photos objectified men with
disabilities in a negative way. Most sites have stopped using them
anyway, mostly because of copyright issues. To me, it seemed incredibly
positive that for a short while pictures of disabled men were given
equal play on the Internet alongside pictures of hunks and
bodybuilders.
Perhaps if more of George's photos had made it onto web sites, disabled
men themselves would have been able to view the images in a new way, as
something that gives pause, stimulates in unexpected ways, and manages
to put men with different bodies, clothed or unclothed, on an equal
footing with the stereotypical "normals."
Is there a better justification for stripping down and exposing what
most people assume they would rather not see?
© 2000 Max Verga
.By & About GEORGE DUREAU
Fotografie Heft 34: Kultur Jetzt (Gottingen, 1984)
Includes a portfolio of photographs by George Dureau
Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, by Jack Fritscher (Hastings
House, 1994) Includes an interview with George Dureau
The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography, by Melody Davis (Temple
University Press, 1991) Includes photographs by George Dureau
New Orleans: 50 Photographs, by George Dureau with a foreword by Edward
Lucie-Smith (GMP Publishers, 1985)
MAX VERGA (Bea...@aol.com)
has been an activist ever since getting a call from a friend reporting
that he'd been in a riot at the Stonewall Bar only hours before. He
began his activism with the West Side Discussion Group, later became
involved with its offshoot theater group, and was one of the founders
of Mainstream, a gay-disabled group. For more about Max, see his longer
biography.
Dan
http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/tuk/tuk00.html
http://www.geocities.com/tuke_site/
Henry Scott Tuke (12 June 1858-13 March 1929), British painter and
photographer, is best remembered for his paintings of naked boys and
young men, which have earned him a status as a pioneer of gay male
culture.
Life and works
Tuke was born in York into a prominent family of Friends (Quakers). His
father Daniel Hack Tuke was a prominent campaigner for humane treatment
of the insane. His great-great-grandfather William Tuke had founded the
Retreat at York, one of the first modern insane asylums, in 1792. His
great-grandfather Henry Tuke, grandfather Samuel Tuke and uncle James
Hack Tuke were also well-known social activists.
In 1874 Tuke moved with his family to London, where he enrolled in the
Slade School of Art. After graduating he traveled to Italy in 1880, and
from 1881 to 1883 he lived in Paris, where he studied with the French
history painter Paul Laurens and met the American painter John Singer
Sargent (who was also a painter of male nudes, although this fact was
little known in his lifetime).
During the 1880s Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets
and writers, most of them homosexuals (then usually called Uranian) who
celebrated the adolescent male. He wrote a "sonnet to youth" which was
published anonymously in The Artist, and also contributed an essay to
The Studio.
Tuke returned to Britain and moved to Newlyn, joining a small colony of
artists. These included Walter Langley, Albert Chevallier Tayler and
Thomas Cooper Gotch a lifelong painter of the girl-child, who became a
lifelong friend. These painters and others are known to art historians
as the Newlyn School.
In 1885 Tuke settled in Falmouth, a fishing port in Cornwall, then
still a remote and romantically rustic part of the country, with a very
mild climate which is more agreeable for nude open air activities than
in most other British regions. He bought a fishing boat for 40 pounds
and converted it into a floating studio and living quarters. Here could
indulge his passion for painting boys in privacy. Most of his works
depict boys and young men who swim, dive and lounge, usually naked, on
a boat or on the beach.
Tuke also produced more saleable works on narrative or historical
themes. In these paintings Tuke placed his male nudes in safely
mythological contexts, but critics have usually found these works to be
rather formal, lifeless and flaccid.
>From the 1890s, Tuke abandoned mythological themes and began to paint
local boys fishing, sailing, swimming and diving, and also began to
paint in a more naturalistic style. His handling of paint became freer,
and he began using bold, fresh color. One of his best known paintings
from this period is August Blue (1893-1894), a study of four nude
youths bathing from a boat.
Although Tuke's paintings of nude youths undoubtedly appealed to those
gay men who found adolescents attractive, they are never explicitly
sexual. The models' genitals are almost never shown, they are almost
never in physical contact with each other, and there is never any
suggestion of overt sexuality.
Tuke formed close friendships with many of his models, but it has never
been established that he was sexually involved with any of them, on
either a romantic or commercial basis. Although it is possible that he
was sexually active with local youths, it is equally possible that,
like many gay men in this period, he sublimated his sexuality into
romantic friendships, and into his art.
Because of his subject matter, Tuke was unable to sell many of his
works, except to a select circle of homosexual art collectors. But he
was also well known as a portraitist, and maintained a London studio to
work on his commissions. Among his best known portraits is that of
soldier and writer T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia").
Technically, Tuke favored rough, visible brushstrokes, at a time when a
smooth, polished finish was favoured by fashionable painters and
critics. He had a strong sense of colour and excelled in the depiction
of natural light, particularly the soft, fragile sunlight of the
English summer. Had his choice of subject matter been more orthodox,
Tuke might have become a major name in British painting: as it was he
remained a niche painter.
Nevertheless, Tuke did enjoy a considerable reputation, and he did well
enough from his painting to be able to travel abroad, painting in
France, Italy and the West Indies. In 1900 a banquet was held in his
honour at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. In later life he was
in poor health for many years, and died in Falmouth in 1929.
After his death Tuke's reputation faded, and he was largely forgotten
until the 1970s, when he was rediscovered by the first generation of
openly gay artists and art collectors. He has since become something of
a cult figure in gay cultural circles, with lavish editions of his
paintings published and his works fetching high prices at auctions.
Reference
· Emmanuel Cooper, The Life and Work of Henry Scott Tuke (with 35
colour and 25 monochrome plates), Heretic Books, 2003
Dan
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From: roberto (Original Message) Sent: 1/2/2003 7:31 AM
Michal Macku was born on April 17, 1963 in Bruntal, Czechoslovakia. He
completed his secondary grammar school education there in 1981, and
went on to graduate from the Technological Faculty of the Polytechnic
Institute in Brno in 1985 and the Institute of Art Photography at
Prague in 1989. Until 1991, he worked at the Sigma Olomouc Research
Center. He then briefly taught part-time at the Pedagogical Faculty of
Palacky University in Olomouc. He has lived as a freelance artist since
1992. Michal has started with photography since the age of 15. He is
also interested in sculpture, drawing, and graphics. In 1989, he
created his own photographic technique which he has named "Gellage". He
continues to use and develop this technology in his still-photo art
work, and, with the cooperation of Czech Television Brno, has made an
animated Gellage film.
Michal is married and has two children. His sister Alexandra
Kolackova is an art ceramist. You can visit her website and see a lot
of her work HERE
More details about exhibitions, publications, and the Gellage
technique can be found on their respective pages.
A little notice:
He more and more recognizes that human life is so amazing and magical
that any short biography is bullshit.
Michal Macku - "GELLAGE"
About the technique
Since the end of 1989, Michal Macku has used his own creative technique
which he has named "Gellage" (the ligature of collage and gelatin).
The technique consists of layering exposed and fixed photographic
gelatin on paper. This transparent and plastic substance makes it
possible to reshape and reform the original images, changing their
relationships and endowing them with new meanings. The finished work
gives a compact image with a fine surface structure. Printed on
photographic quality paper, each Gellage is a highly durable print
eminently suited for collecting and exhibiting.
The laborious technology, which often includes the use of more than one
negative per image, makes it impossible to produce absolutely identical
prints: Each Gellage is an original work of art. The artist does make
at least 12 signed and numbered prints of each image.
Michal Macku talks about his work:
"I use the nude human body (mostly my own) in my pictures. Through the
photographic process [of Gellage], this concrete human body is
compelled to meet with abstract surroundings and distortions. This
connection is most exciting for me and helps me to find new levels of
humanness in the resulting work.
I am always seeking new means of expression and, step by step, I am
discovering almost unlimited possibilities through my work with
loosened gelatin. Photographic pictures mean specific touch with
concrete reality for me, one captured level of real time. The technique
of Gellage which I am using helps me to take one of these "time sheets"
and release a figure, a human body, from it, causing it to depend on
time again. Its charm is similar to that of cartoon animation, but it
is not a trick. It is very important for me to be aware of the history
of a picture and to have a sense of direct contact with its reality. My
work places "body pictures" in new situations, new contexts, new
realities, causing their "authentic" reality to become relative. I am
interested in questions of moral and inner freedom. I do what I feel,
and only then do I begin to meditate on what the result is. I am often
surprised by the new connections I find in it. Naturally, I start out
with a concrete intention, but the result is often very different. And
there, I believe, lies a hitch. One creates to communicate what can not
be expressed in any other way. Then comes the need to describe, to
define."
Dan
Have you ever felt you blood run cold when someone mentions that
special album that you loved and lived to your freshman year of
college? That album you played over and over till the roommates
threatened to savage your entire personal lot until you took it off?
You walked around to classes and late at night with nothing but that
album to keep you company in your naïve little freshman world. This is
the same feeling I developed about the work of French artist
duo/partners, Pierre et Gilles. These artists are sacred to me for so
many reasons, and when I found out about their first ever show in the
U.S., I felt like I should NEVER breathe a word of it to anyone. Still,
here I am reviewing the show and letting possible non-believers in on
the secret.
Pierre et Gilles' artistic vision inhabits many different parallel
universes: the sacred and profane; the dark, hidden recesses of lust
and violence; the world of the celebrity/icon; and the magical and
fantastical world with people as flowers, mannequins, and historical
figures. Most of these worlds overlap, with stars like French singing
legend Sylvie Vartan, classic actress Catherine Deneauve or New York
club diva Dianne Brill representing everything from magical inhabitants
to patron saints.
My personal fascination with Pierre et Gilles, and consequently their
connection with FRET, is the male subject matter that the artists
employ. Ranging from the crass to the sublime to the solemn, Pierre et
Gilles idolize the male form in every aspect. Although I'm no fan of
Bruce Weber's idolization of the male body in the Abercrombie and
Fitch catalogue, Pierre et Gilles are entirely different, more
innocent, or perhaps more alluring.
I can see a gang of Weber's ridiculously clueless homoerotic fratboys
any time I walk down the street, but it is highly unlikely that I will
ever encounter a beautiful, morose drowning sailor boy, pictured in
"Dans le Port du Havre." The mystery and allure that the artists'
work invokes is therefore otherworldly. All blemishes are erased, all
bodies immortal. Like James Bidgood before them, Pierre et Gilles poise
the male body in the purest form.
>From the Saints et Martyrs Series to the gorgeously rough Jolis Voyous
to the more overt Plaisirs de la foret, Pierre et Gilles keep the main
focus on the male figure. The more recent Plaisirs de la foret series,
partially included in the New Museum show, has more overt imagery,
incorporating blood, semen, chains, and cum, rather than come-hither
glances.
One reason I can stare endlessly at characters in Pierre et Gilles'
work is that the figures are there for the viewer alone. Although not
all figures confront the viewer, they all beckon for you to look at
them and their surroundings, whether for guilty pleasure or holy
vision: the artists leave that up to you.
I met Pierre et Gilles at a rushed book signing, held in conjunction
with their exhibition, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The boys
seemed as shy as I was, perhaps from lack of translators or a hectic
schedule; they simply signed every book and took the occasional photo.
What was fantastic about the book signing was the signature of the
artists- a mini-artwork in itself. When I saw my name surrounded by
fluttering banners, birds, and hearts (see pic above), I knew that
there was a chance that someday I could inhabit a Pierre et Gilles'
universe as well.
While this story may sound cheesy and sappy, it should. Pierre et
Gilles are not without their detractors, who claim that their art is
commercial, fluffy, and created only for the lovers of homoeroticism
and kitsch. Obviously Pierre et Gilles are not for everyone. Their work
is full of hokey male nudity, exemplified in the image "Le Beaute et la
Mort," with a perfectly sculpted young man surrounded by eerily
grinning skeletons and sparkles; sex: unsubtly mocked in Panne; to
gore, with the strange, suicidal "Le Garcon des Neons." Perhaps that is
how Pierre et Gilles wanted it, only to draw in people that they feel
can appropriately live in harmony in the Pierre et Gilles World.
by FT (taken from Fret's premiere issue, January 2001)
Dan
From: givehead (Original Message) Sent: 10/12/2002 9:36 AM
The Resurrection of Roy Blakey
Throughout the '70s, Roy Blakey shot one beautiful male nude after
another. It's time for a rediscovery.
"I don't know if you know the background of this miracle that has
happened for me," says 72-year-old photographer Roy Blakey. He is
talking about the newfound interest in his male nude photographs. The
product of several hundred sessions taken in the 1970s, his nearly
forgotten body of work has been resurrected in a photo exhibition in
New York and a lavishly produced coffee-table book, Roy Blakey's '70s
Male Nudes (Goliath).
In 1998, photographer and writer Reed Massengill‹who has published
image books of his own male nudes, such as Brian: A Nine-Year
Photographic Diary‹located an e-mail address for a Roy Blakey in
Minneapolis and sent a blind-shot message to it. Blakey says that
Massengill wrote, "'I'm a huge fan of yours and think your work should
be brought back for a new generation, published and exhibited.' And he
has made all that happen. I'm the luckiest guy in the world."
Roy Blakey traces his interest in photography back to his army stint in
the early '50s. "Every time I had four pennies and three days together,
I would take off and go to Spain or Italy or Paris, and I was taking
pictures all the time." Upon his discharge, he pursued another of his
interests, ice-skating, and toured for many years with Holiday on Ice,
performing in such countries as Thailand, Japan and Russia.
In 1967, his last tour dropped him off in New York City. "I told
myself, I'll visit my friends here for three days, then head out west.
But you know how those New Yorkers are. They said, 'Why in the world do
you want to go to California?' like I was a complete idiot." He looked
around and found a loft. "Three days turned into 25 years."
In his new loft, which sat above Billy's Topless Bar in the Flower
District, Blakey began working his show business connections and
shooting entertainers' head shots. Over the years he shot such
celebrities as Chita Rivera, Shirley MacLaine, Tommy Tune, Divine and
gay male porn-star pioneer Cal Culver (a.k.a. Casey Donovan), whom
Blakey shared a Fire Island Pines house with for many summers. These
celebrity images often graced the pages of magazines of the period,
including the semi-gay entertainment monthly After Dark.
Of that time, he says, "It seemed strange to me that there were not
serious photographers of the male nude. I put a little ad in The
Village Voice. The ad stated that in exchange for a nude session, the
photographer would shoot your head shots for free." A few people showed
up because of this one-time-only ad, and word of mouth kept a steady
supply of young male models pushing his buzzer from then on.
Unlike most physique photographers before him‹like Bruce of Los
Angeles or George Platt Lynes‹Blakey's images are devoid of props or
garments. "Before, it was all about photographing guys with sailor hats
and cowboy chaps, or leaning against a Greek column."
In contrast, Blakey's classically inspired black-and-white 35mm
compositions locate the completely nude figure in dramatically lit
poses against the void of plain, seamless backgrounds. "It was more
difficult because they didn't have anything to play with. Well, of
course they had something to play with, but you know what I mean. Most
of the people I worked with had not posed nude before, so that also
made it more of a challenge."
These sessions led to the 1972 publication of HE, Blakey's first book
and one of the first photography books to exclusively focus on the male
nude. Around that time, Blakey also boasted a solo show of his work
that was held at the infamous Continental Bathhouse and reviewed in The
New York Times. Though he maintains that the reviewer was just "looking
for an excuse to enter the bathhouse." Blakey moved to Minneapolis in
1993, where today he shares a photography studio with his niece Keri
Pickett, whose book Faeries documents a radical faeries community. He
continues to shoot portraits and nudes, and is responsible for the
IceStage Archive, the largest collection of theatrical ice-show
memorabilia. He hopes that his current solo photo exhibition, which
premiered at New York City's Leslie-Lohman Gallery, will travel.
Of his 30-year-old male nude work and the modern reception it's
received, Blakey says, "I get the most satisfaction from the pictures
where I think the lighting worked well. Most people, however, are
looking at the guy and thinking, Do I like this guy; is he my type?
It's shocking to me when people walk by the pictures that I think are
my great masterpieces and go stand by the ones of the guy that's cute.
But I'm learning."
Roy Blakey's '70s Male Nudes is available at Buygay.com
<http://www.buygay.com/store/affiliatewiz/affiliatewiz.asp?Type=Text&AffiliateID=143&Task=Click&url=http://www.buygay.com/store/prodinfo.asp?number=3-98076-021-9&variation=&aitem=8&mitem=15&dept=126>.
Dan
From: pieceofass Sent: 10/22/2002 7:12 AM
Hearty
by Jill Conner
Despite the inclusive nature that contemporary Third Wave feminism has
tried to foster with respect to sexual orientation and gender
differences, the debates that ignited in response to NY Arts' Spring
2002 features, "Art & Porn" (March) and "Art, Feminism and
Pornography," (May) exposed the divisions that continue to exist
between men and women. While Tina LaPorte claimed that pornographic
imagery is now in the domain of female artists, the notion of the
"masculine" or "masculinity" as it relates to the nude male body is
still taboo since it is believed that men form their masculine selves
upon the oppression of women. Contemporary artist Saul Chernick,
however, has attempted to retrieve the male nude from the banality of
pornography and popular culture through an application of the arabesque
to elaborate cut-outs and drawings. The rhythmic line that constantly
oscillates between realism and abstraction in Chernick's work
explores the male-stereotype as it has been conferred upon men as well
as the oppressive role that patriarchy exerts upon men through the
moniker of religion. Chernick's visually intimate presentation of
self-exploration returns dignity and artistic mastery back to the
notion of the human form without resorting to campy, kitsch appearances
as seen in work by Tom of Finland and Lisa Yuskavage.
As of 2002 Chernick's work began to concentrate on the cut-out human
form. Adopted from comic-book drawings, the artist's representation
of the lyrically-shaped human figure through the use of an elastic,
moving line creates a visually explosive dynamism within a fixed,
measured setting. Untitled, for example, portrays two sitting positions
within one form, making this work easily understood as an erotic moment
shared between two men. But rather, Chernick uses this piece to capture
both the sexually dominant and vulnerable aspect of man. The artist's
laborious, time-consuming representations of society's male
stereotype upon the male figure appears in two works titled, Grand
Odalisque (recto), and Grand Odalisque (verso). Whether seen from the
front or the back the form of a car hood and radiator appears within
the open space between the figure's legs, causing a visual distortion
to occur upon the body. Men, cars and sexuality were also explored by
Kenneth Anger in a short film titled Kustom Kar Kommandos, (1965) which
isolated society's agreed-upon stereotype of the masculine in order
to demonstrate its close connection to homoerotic aesthetics. Chernick,
however, sidesteps homoeroticism and instead eloquently addresses the
fact that all men are captured, trapped and confined to such broad,
linear, simplistic associations which deny the unique personalities
inherent within each individual. Since the details of these cut-outs
are not immediate and rather difficult to see, it is evident that these
works lack voyeurism.
As the line of Chernick's work puts one into a trance, demanding time
to observe and understand, the very process of following this
calligraphic lyricism gradually reveals the viewer's own complicity
in creating the male stereotype. Moreover these cut-out pieces make use
of the formal qualities of paper so as to establish the presence of
male identity within the absence of pictorial space. Due to the
presence of gender feminism which has applied its own combative notions
about men in such aggressive, univeral ways, one could also see these
cut-out pieces as a male artist's attempt to create a personal
definition of male identity within the presence of negativity. It is of
course ironic to see that desexualized space does in functions as an
oppressive barrier.
Untitled (from the Battle Royale series), reflects the legs of two
wrestling men at opposing ends of the same diagonal. As the incomplete
figures of both combine together in the center of the large sheet of
paper, the sheer force of muscular energy gives way to a visual maze
like swirl. The intensity that emerges from this dualism clearly
questions what it means to be masculine. Doug Robinson's No Less A
Man: Masculinist Art in a Feminist Age discusses some concerns that
parallel those of Chernick. Focusing on popular art, Robinson exposes
the artificially constructed male as seen in television, movies and
theater. Bruce Springsteen, also referred to as "the Boss," is for
contemporary rock music what Jackson Pollock was for Abstract
Expressionism: a charismatic male persona performing the widely
accepted stereotype of the American man.
Consequently, popular culture's embrace of this generalized idea has
created: men as generalized emblems of 'patriarchy [to] feel
dismissed, peripheralized...Some of this may be a paranoid fantasy
prompted by our socialization to gender, our training in the
patriarchal battle of the sexes, which coaches each gender to blame the
other for all (real and imagined) defeats and deprivations. 1
Thus the broadly accepted definition of masculinity is nothing more
than a general standard that is not naturally lived but rather
superficially performed. Gender feminists have also defined femininity
as a concept that can be performed by women who, in doing so, choose to
pursue a repressive form of self-surveillance that translates into
compliance to patriarchy. 2 Beauty achieved through the use of make-up,
accessories and dieting is seen as demoralizing and enjoyment is
considered to be pathological. 3
Regardless of the recent technological and scientific achievements, a
puritanical shaming of the body continues to prevail within our Western
culture as well as others. And despite its pursuit for equality,
feminism has also developed into its own fundamentalist orthodoxy.
Since the body of the individual has become the site from which
politics and religion develop rules and regulations, our "free" society
carries with it a very repressive characteristic. Lloyd DeMause's
study of restrictive religious-based cultures of the Middle East
identified a link between the act of genital mutilation and bodily
shame with the development of self hatred. Negative perceptions of the
self are then transmitted into tragic events caused by adult, youth
and/or group violence. 4
One of Chernick's untitled gouache drawings on denril revisits the
process of self-exploration through touch. Void of a particular
individuality, this body emerges from a white, opaque background and
signifies the artist's ability to traverse the barrier of shame as
established by society. Chernick's drawing suggests a way in which
individuality can be defined and pursued. Wanderer, represents a
fragment of hand and phallus, one grasping the other, within an
isolated realm. This image is quite different from Andy Warhol's
penis drawings since it neither glorifies the male gender nor
sensationalizes it as part of a sexual act. Using contour and
expressive line to embellish dimensionality onto the surface, this
piece is more than a simply-drawn line since the artist uses the
technique of realism to give the subject a tangible,
three-dimensionality in a non-aggressive way. Unlike Warhol,
Chernick's phallic representations appear in extremely small scale,
reflecting both modesty and ambiguity. By abstracting this gendered
form away from the larger picture of reality, the artist also questions
the how the link between the body and the fully-defined self is
eventually established.
The claim that negativity exists within free, open space returns in
several depictions of beards. Created as both cut-outs and drawings,
these works are not simply a fetish for facial hair. Rather each is a
response to the patriarchal pressures that religion has imbued into the
artist's life. Angel, for example, depicts a mustache floating
weightlessly in the sky whereas an untitled drawing creates an outline
that suggests the presence of an individual. While remaining true to
his Jewish heritage, Chernick does not represent literal depictions of
a particular religious persona but rather the idea of one. Beard,
however, reflects a facet of orthodoxy that functions as a site of
authority. In this work, numerous arabesques cluster together forming
wavy facial hair, affirming the presence of an other through a literal
visual absence. In 1999 Robert Therrien also pursued the beard as an
icon in both sculptural and drawn forms, but according to Lynn
Zelevansky, Therrien's No Title (fake beard), is nothing more than
the artist's own fascination with the facial appearance of sculptor
Constantin Brancusi, an artist who he strongly admires. 5
Appearing less conceptual than Therrien and not as literal as Warhol,
Chernick's consistent use of shaping space out of space with
interlacing arabesques keeps his work individually expressive and
unified under the idea of identity, process and self-definition. Up
until now, Saul Chernick has explored the fomal qualities of paper and
line. However in the past year, the artist took a step in attempting to
establish a bridge between his art and life by placing more of himself
within the artistic process. His use of realism, moreover, falls short
of exact likeness which leaves enough room for personal interpretation
and identification. It seems that Chernick is part of a humanist
revival that has emerged in the wake of the perversely-famed decadent
art made by artists such as Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy.
Notes:
1. Doug Robinson, No Less A Man: Masculinist Art in a Feminist Age
(Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1994):
22.
2. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed
Women (New York, NY: Touchstone 1994): 230-264.
3. Ibid.
4. Lloyd DeMause, "The Childhood Origins of Terrorism," The Journal of
Psychohistory, 29, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 340-348.
5. Lynn Zelevansky, "No Title: The Work of Robert Therrien," Robert
Therrien (Los Angles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1999):
59-61.