Perhaps it's the news that Floyd Landis is in trouble for "test[ing] positive...for illegally high levels of testosterone" that has me thinking of the studio visit we paid to Jon Fortmiller in the middle of Denise's Vandeville's weekly debauch. For those who've not been there, Jon is hard at work on a troop of plaster monkeys who are occupying themselves, as monkeys do, by flinging poo, masturbating furiously, and same-sex coupling. John basked in the enthusiastic support of his classmates for this work, which he regards as critical of frat boy behavior, and got an especially warm crit from alum Romi Schroeder-Falzone for depicting maleness with such conviction in a culture and art world where the female form is so ubiquitous as to be a trite, formal device rather than a body.
The humor and wisdom of Jon's displacement of human male carnality on to other primates notwithstanding, I think it's time to complicate this critique before the discourse on Guy-Art at UArts gets over-determined. From my perch among the faculty, this seems like the most exaggeratedly raunchy year I've seen since I got here four years ago. I've been in crits framed by S&M, seen the most articulately painted breasts the school has had on view in perhaps decades (painted by both male and female painters, and generally played witness to what has been a more playful and frank atmosphere than we've had around here in a few years. Who threw open the windows?
But guy-ness appears to be everywhere all the sudden - here's what Roberta Smith observed in a piece in today's Times on summer shows in Chelsea:
Chelsea’s group-show summer fray can evoke a farmyard with a surplus of roosters. This was especially the case last summer when male artists and curators seemed to dominate, along with a plethora of Conceptually-based black-on-black appropriation art. At the time the term “boys in black” came to mind, and to a certain extent they’re back.
But it should be remembered that gender is a nuanced thing, not a start division. Lest we fall in to the mirror trap of objectification, perhaps we ought to think twice before getting serious about a formula that reads something like male=sexual=aggressive=primitive. What is lust and who gets to express it openly? What's the meeting ground between the intellectual discourse of gender and rather-more-difficult-to intellectualize arena of sex? (An amusing photo-essay on maculinity can be found at a blog by Graham Milton.) As tired as people might be of the sensitive metrosexual male, essentializing masculinity as restrictively as femininity has been circumscribed isn't necessarily the solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment