Griffith Park, Los Angeles, last night.
Category: {photography}
Photography
The Male Gaze
Trunk (Jay Garvin) by James Bidgood (early 1960s).
The Male Gaze is an exhibition at the powerHouse Arena,
Brooklyn, NYC, from April 20th–May 27th, 2007.
Untitled by Raymond Carrance (aka Czanara) (1960–70).
Sullen burger boys meet the effete cognoscenti in The Male Gaze: a group show including over 20 artists whose cultural explosions have rocked foundations across the world. With work spanning over 100 years of bloodless revolution, The Male Gaze features contemporary artists and their classic antecedents reinventing themselves, their world, and their media in savvy, bawdy, dreamy, and terrifyingly new ways. Artists include Stephen Andrews, Gio Black Peter, James Bidgood, AA Bronson, Raymond Carrance, Robert Filippini, Andrew Harwood, Christian Holstad, Scott Hug and Michael Magnan, Brian Kenny, Bruce LaBruce, Qing Liu, Ryan McGinley, Futoshi Miyagi, Slava Mogutin, J. Morrison, Will Munro, Joe Ovelman, Paul P., Jack Pierson, Ezra Rubin, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Lionel Smartly, and Wilhelm Von Gloeden.
Two revisited portraits of John by Paul Mpagi Sepuya (2004).
• The NYT interviews some of the artists
powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street
Brooklyn
NY 11201
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
The recurrent pose 3
It’s that man again… Another instance of the perennial Flandrin pose, this time from photographer MJ Cardozo. The earlier examples are linked below.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive
The art of ejaculation
left: Sperman (2007) by Cary Kwok; right: Here Cums the Spider (2007) by Cary Kwok.
NSFW, as if you need to be told. It’s almost a commonplace of contemporary art that there are so many artists around today, producing such a volume of work, that any newcomer (as it were) has to find a niche and stay there if they want their efforts to stand out from the crowd. Cary Kwok’s niche seems to be the seminal emission which he depicts in a variety of ways, including showing various well-known comic-book characters shooting their respective loads. Kwok’s work has been shown recently at the Herald Street gallery, London, and Hard Hat, Geneva.
I like Kwok’s drawings, they’re carefully-done and funny, and serve to remind one that the cum shot is under-represented in art. Despite various Biblical prohibitions, women have been subject to no end of sexual display throughout art history, from copulations with gods in the form of animals to Danaë’s impregnation by Zeus as a literal golden shower. But male sexuality, especially at its most essential moment, has rarely been depicted outside the pages of pornography. The irony of this, as with arguments against erections in art, is that if it wasn’t for ejaculations we wouldn’t be here to discuss their pros and cons. Gay artists have been in the vanguard of addressing the sperm-drought, possibly because they have more than a passing interest in these matters; Michael Petry’s work earlier this year took a lateral view. There’s another sample (as it were) of Cary Kwok’s work below the fold plus some other seminal (as it were) artworks through the ages.
Locomotives
40th Street Shop by Jack Delano (1942).
Locomotive Dreams by Jack Delano (1942).
Just two of many marvellous antique photographs available from the Juniper Gallery that can be viewed in high-res versions. A variety of prints are available from each picture.