All posts tagged Collier Schorr

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography @ the Barbican (2)

I went back to the Masculinities: Liberation through Photography exhibition at the Barbican for second helpings.

I spent another hour and a half going round again, but this time ignoring all the American photographers, and concentrating on everyone else from the rest of the world, the photographers I’d largely overlooked first time round, starting with the eight Brits.

First a few general points:

1. Liberation from heterosexual white men

Going round a second time, One Big Thing became much clearer: this exhibition isn’t even an attempt to represent what you could call ordinary or everyday masculinity. I hadn’t really grasped the significance of the title. When it says liberation it means gay liberation, women’s liberation and black liberation.

Liberation from whom? From heterosexual white men.

In the 1970s women, homosexuals and people of colour spontaneously generated nationwide and worldwide movements devoted to liberating themselves from what they felt was centuries of oppression, objectification and second class citizenship created and maintained by straight white men.

The fundamental impulse of this exhibition is to show how this worked through photography, through the work of gay, black and women photographers who rebelled against the straight white patriarchy.

This is an exhibition about the social and cultural liberation of these groups from heterosexual white male hegemony through photography.

This explains why Part One of the exhibition bombards us with a series of overblown, hypermasculine images – of American soldiers in Iraq (Wolfgang Tillmans), American cowboys (Isaac Julien and Collier Schorr) and American footballers (Catherine Opie). It’s a bit more mixed up than I’m implying but this first part of the exhibition establishes the images, concepts and behaviours of aggressive white masculinity which these groups are trying to flee.

So that Part Two of the exhibition shows us how these three key constituencies of progressive ideology – gay men, black men, and straight feminist women – achieved liberation from these toxic male stereotypes.

Photography is the medium, channel, gateway and door through which gay men, black men, and feminist women escaped from the grotesque, heteronormative hypermasculinity which we are bombarded with in the opening.

Huge though the exhibition is, it is not really about masculinity – it is about the escape from masculinity.

Which, for example, explains why the entire section on FATHERHOOD featured work by just four photographers (each of them good in their different ways) and this is the same number as the section devoted to FEMINIST photographers (and there are many more feminist photographers scattered round the show).

Simple maths shows you that, for the curators, feminist liberation from the patriarchy is more important, certainly more represented here, than what you or I might think of as a pretty a central element of any concept of masculinity – fatherhood.

Then again both feminists and father photos are swamped by the sheer number of gay artists and photographers.

I counted twenty gay snappers for definite, but had the impression that there were many more. Some were so popular with the curators that they featured more than once – notably gay Indian (score double) photographer Sunil Gupta, who was represented by three separate series of photographs, hung in different areas around the show:

  • Christopher Street – street photos of gay men in New York, 1976
  • Exiles – gay men in India, often forced to hide their true sexuality, 1987
  • Pretended Family relationships – a work lamenting the way gay couples had to disguise their relationships after the Section 28 legislation was passed by Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1988

The pretty obvious conclusion is that the image of masculinity the women curators, and the art world in general, is most comfortable with, is gay men. Almost all the images of heterosexual men were accompanied by labels criticising or chastising or scolding them.

2. Liberation from American masculinity

My first review ended up lamenting the way the exhibition is dominated by American photographers, American subjects, and American academic rhetoric.

But first time round I missed the significance of a big quote printed on the wall right at the start of the exhibition. It’s from the black, gay, American (score three points) writer, James Baldwin:

The American ideal, then, of sexuality, appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden – as an unpatriotic act – that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

This is the Key Quote, right at the start of the exhibition, and it clearly signals the extent to which the curators really, deeply, and profoundly see the entire condition of masculinity through American eyes.

I read that quote and simply thought, well, this ‘American ideal of masculinity’ may have been a deeply problematic issue for Baldwin, for other Afro-American men, for other American gay men, and for a large number of American women who have to put up with it… But it has absolutely nothing to do with me’.

When I was a boy I wanted to be Michael Caine in The Battle of Britain or Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare, I wanted to be John Hollins who played left half for Chelsea, and like my mates idolised Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton. I envied John Noakes off Blue Peter for all the brilliant adventures he had like climbing up Nelson’s Column. At school we all tried to do impressions of the excitable naturalist David Bellamy. On Saturday nights I watched Patrick Troughton as Dr Who, followed by Morecambe and Wise lying in bed together making jokes, or maybe Dad’s Army with its cast of hilariously ramshackle amateurs. I loved Sid James’s laugh in the old Carry On films, and a little later on I was bowled over by Monty Python, and when I was about 15 my favourite radio DJ was Kenny Everett.

My point is that the chronically hyper-masculine, ridiculously macho and extremely violent world of the American Wild West or the corrupt streets of New York depicted in Starsky and Hutch or Kojak seemed, literally, thousands of miles away. Nothing to do with me or my life or my friends or my Dad or my uncle or my teachers. Nothing.

Thus the strange sense of disconnect as I walked round this Americanised exhibition for the second time, the sense of entering a wretchedly macho culture in which more or less the only way for a decent normal civilised man to escape the hyper-competitive, hyper-macho and hyper-violent world of American maleness is to be gay.

It struck me that it was a really profound mistake, and possibly a deceit and a lie, to view the entire concept of masculinity around the world through the prism of American masculinity.

Isn’t that a form of American imperialism? Judging everything according to American standards? Defining everything according to American ideas?

I was disappointed that the Barbican curators were such willing accomplices to American cultural imperialism.

Anyway, Fuck America and its bankrupt, corrupt and negative influence.

I went back specifically to ignore the Yanks and to pay more careful attention to everyone else, to the photographers from the rest of the world, starting with the Brits.

3. The Brits (8)

John Coplans: Frieze Number 2 (1994)

This is a grid of 12 large black-and-white prints of a big, hairy, overweight, naked man. They’re just some of the many self-portraits Coplans took of himself as – born in 1920 – he entered his 60s. in the 1980s. In fact this big grid is the first thing you see as you enter the exhibition, and is one of the many ways the curators set out to puncture the exaggerated images of masculinity which they depict elsewhere.

The most obvious thing that struck me as I confronted this sizeable display is that all the photos are artfully posed so you don’t see his willy. In fact, I must say I was surprised at the relative scarcity of willies on display.

It is a… a touching image of the male body, don’t you think? A realistic depiction of the middle-aged, naked male body, a photographic parallel to all those unglamorised paintings of fat male nudes by Lucien Freud.

Jeremy Deller: So many ways to hurt you (the life and times of Adrian Street) (2010)

This is a 30-minute video showing the life and times of the wrestler, ‘Exotic’ Adrian Street who was born in 1940 into a Welsh mining village. Street is a brilliant subject because he combines hard-edged working class attitude, with a taste for dressing in wigs and make-up as part of the identity or brand which distinguishes him from the other amateur wrestlers on the circuit.

The video was playing on a fairly big monitor which was itself embedded in a huge wall-sized painting by Deller, depicting a naive, stylised portrait of Street in his cross-dressing wrestler’s outfit, set against a stylised depiction of a Welsh town and the hills beyond.

The film reflects on the performativity of gender.

Anna Fox: My mother’s cupboards and my father’s words (1999)

On my first visit I was so dazzled by the Herb Ritts and Arnold Schwarzenegger and American soldiers in Iraq and Andy Warhol and all the New York queers that I completely overlooked this small and brilliant display. In many ways it’s one of the best things in the exhibition.

My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words consists of a grid of 15 frames each containing a small, precise photo of the contents of the cupboards in the artist’s mother’s home, each one neat and tidy and filled with banal kitchen utensils and belongings.

And very neatly, in a florid calligraphy reminiscent of wedding invitations, opposite these nice neat drawers is printed the ferocious, vile, poisonous rants of Fox’s father, overflowing with bile and abuse, but laid out as elegant free verse poems. For example:

I’m going to
tear your mother
to shreds
with
an oyster knife

Or:

She wants
her bum
scraped
with
a rusty saw

He threatens to cut his wife’s bum off and feed it to her like slices of ham. He threatens to fry her in hot oil. It’s a kind of anti-poetry, or maybe the poetry of the damned.

The smallness of the images just as much as the prissy tidiness of their contents, and the satirically ornate calligraphy of her father’s drunken ranting, create an incredibly charged display, a screaming sense of claustrophobia and misery.

This, I thought, captures the true English misery, the misery of Philip Larkin, rainy afternoons in provincial towns where couples who hate each other are forced to spend long Sunday afternoons, or weeks, months and years in each other’s unbearable company.

Ten million miles away from bloody American cowboys and footballers and Mad Men jocks striding up Madison Avenue. The curators spoil the effect by translating it into their sociological jargon:

Fox invites the viewer to reflect on how notions of hegemonic masculinity are sustained within patriarchal structures.

Is that what this delicate, subtle and intensely charged work of art is doing?

Isaac Julien: After Mazatlan (1999) and Looking For Langston (1989)

Julien is black and gay and a film-maker so he presses a lot of art world buttons, so much so that he is represented by not one but two entries:

  • After Mazatlan – In 1999 Julien made a film titled Long Road to Mazatlán, which tells a cowboy story ‘brimming with frustrated homoerotic desire’ and shot in Saint Antonio, Texas. The first installation was a grid of four large stills from the film, titled After Mazatlán.
  • Looking For Langston is a 44-minute-long black and white homage to the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, set in scenes which move between a sort of 1920s speakeasy and a 1980s nightclub, with archive recordings of readings of their poems by Harlem Renaissance poets. As you might expect, the film ‘reflects on the relationship between gay culture and the gaze, with the white gaze, the racist gaze.’

Note how the ‘white gaze’ is elided with the ‘racist gaze’. This is, frankly, insulting.

Note also how both Julien’s films are in thrall to American culture and stereotypes and thus, in my formulation, a kind of cultural betrayal.

Hilary Lloyd: Colin #2 (1999)

There are two TV monitors on raised stands. Underneath them are ancient VHS tape players. On one screen a fairly buff young man takes off a red vest, very, very slowly. On the other screen he puts it back on, very, very slowly.

Lloyd’s penetrating gaze and carefully orchestrated presentation demand that the viewer move back and forth between the screens in a dance of observation and voyeurism.

Not really. The main feature of this piece for me was the ancient VHS recorder/players – I’m amazed you can find any which still work. Like a lot of other things in the exhibition, somehow this super-annuated technology made you realise how old and out-of-date a lot of the stuff here is.

(By the way Hilary Lloyd is a woman.)

Peter Marlow: Magnum photos 1980s to 1990s

Peter Marlow (1961 to 2016) helped set up the London office of the famous international photographers’ agency, Magnum. Unusually for this exhibition he doesn’t seem to have been gay, and is represented by a selection of fly-on-the-wall photos catching different types of very ordinary English men in various matey, group situations. These include:

This is something like the masculinity I experienced growing up.

At school I was forced to play rugby and then take communal showers afterwards, it was always bloody freezing. Photos like this bring back the sound of studs clattering on an unforgiving concrete floor and those shapes of mud punctuated with the round stud holes which used to get stuck to your boots and everyone banged against the doorframe or changing room benches so that the floor was covered in them with slivers of mud punctured by perfectly round holes.

Marlow’s photos of the shitty, windswept shopping centre at Runcorn perfectly convey the misery of English provincial life and the great betrayal of post-war town planning and architecture which turned so many English towns into concrete wind tunnels.

For the curator Marlow’s photos of the rugby players taking a communal bath:

highlight how sport has become synonymous with masculine hegemony and male solidarity.

Clare Strand: Men Only Tower (2017)

Strand has taken 68 copies of the softcore publication Men Only and piled them one on top of each other to create a ‘tower’. She has ‘subverted’ the sexist basis of the magazines by inserting into twenty of them twenty ‘images of resistance’ tucked into black envelopes and slipped between the pages of the lucky magazines.

The gushing feminist commentary points out that Strand choosing to ‘erect them in a vertical pile is a satirical reference to the male phallus, while also being an obvious reference to Trump Tower’. Of course.

When I was a teenager the top-shelf porn magazines at the local newsagent were Mayfair and Men Only and Penthouse. The point is that they were large, glossy, magazine-sized magazines, so I was intrigued that the objects in Strand’s art work are small, square-bound, with almost plain beige covers. They look disconcertingly like the cheap communist party editions I own of the works of Marx and Engels, or a set of obscure poetry magazine.

When I looked closely I saw that the editions Strand’s chosen of Men Only start in 1947! and the most recent is 1963. For me, then, this work was much more about a delve way back into post-war history, than anything at all to do with porn or men’s magazines or what the wall label called women’s exclusion from ‘the corridors of power’.

Richard Billingham: Ray’s A Laugh (1996)

Like the Anne Fox piece this is a deep dive into the profound misery of the really poor – the sick and alcoholic and uneducated poor whose lives are filled with drink and anger and violence.

It consists of ten very big colour prints of ragged, spontaneous, unposed documentary photos of Billingham’s alcoholic dad, Ray, and his obese mother, Liz. both caught in the seedy, shabby and poky-feeling flat in one of the crappier parts of Birmingham.

The curators blithely comment that this is a rare pictorial insight into English working class life and the visitor can’t help feeling this is partly because what gains commissions, wins prizes and gets you known is stylish films about cowboys and the Harlem Renaissance.

God, could anything be further away from the blow-dried queers of Christopher Street or Castro.

Brief summary

So that’s the work of the eight British photographers and artists and film-makers included in Masculinities: LIberation through Photography. I’m really glad I went back a second time and focused just on them, because taken together they do amount to a sort of sketch of British masculinity, a million miles away from the macho jocks or ‘faggots’ (I’m quoting James Baldwin) which dominate American culture.

The Peter Marlow photos are very good, but for me the top two were the grim and unrelenting insight into the lowest of lowlife existences in Ray’s A Laugh; but maybe the best is the hyper-charged, controlled explosion of Anne Fox’s sequence. Wow.

Europe (11)

Bas Jan Ader (Dutch)

I’m too sad to tell you is a black and white art film from 1971 in which performance artist Bas Jan Ader filmed himself crying.

Knut Åsdam (Norway)

Åsdam made a short art film titled Pissing showing a close-up of the slacks or sensible trousers of a man who proceeds to let himself go and wee himself.

While the film reflects on masculinity’s position in relation to the patriarchal order, it also highlights the significance of the phallus as a signifier of male power.

Rineke Dijkstra (Holland)

Dijkstra has a set of four fairly big colour photos of Portuguese bullfighters or forcados shown after they’ve finished the fight and exited the arena, looking elated and marked with blood

Dijkistra’s Bullfighters explores aspects of homosociality, a term coined by theorist Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick to describe ‘the structure of men’s relations with other men’.

Thomas Dworzak (Germany)

Dworzak is the guy who found a trove of photos taken by family photographic studios in Kandahar following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, improbably showing them posing hand in hand in front of painted backdrops, using guns and flowers as props with kohl carefully applied to their eyes.

Taliban portrait. Kandahar, Afghanistan by Thomas Dworzak (2002) © Collection T. Dworzak/Magnum Photos

Hans Eijkelboom (Holland)

Eijkelboom is represented by two distinct photographic projects.

In With My Family from 1973 he went knocking on doors of a middle class suburb during the day when the husbands were away working, and asked if he could pose as the father in family photos with the wives and children of the absent men.

The result is pretty creepy and you suspect he’d get arrested if he tried that today. 1973 is quite a long time ago, nearly half a century ago. The curator comments:

With my family operates as a critique of the nuclear family as well as exposing outdated gender roles that demanded that women stay in the home caring for children while the father went to work and earned a living.

In The Ideal Man from 1978 Eijkelboom asked women to describe their ideal man, and then fashioned himself in self-portraits to fit the descriptions.  Mildly amusing.

Karen Knorr (Germany)

Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen, 1981-83, comprised of 26 black and white photographs taken inside men-only private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from snatched conversations, parliamentary records and contemporary news reports, invites viewers to reflect on notions of class, race and the exclusion of women from spaces of power during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

“Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards fallen” from the series Gentlemen, by Karen Knorr (1981-83) © Karen Knorr

Annette Messager (France)

Talking of creepy, Messager is represented by a series from 1972 called The Approaches in which she took photographs of men’s crotches in the street using a concealed camera. I suppose it’s not quite upskirting, but if you tried this nowadays I wonder if you could be arrested.

In The Approaches, Messager trails men through the street and snaps photos of their crotches without permission. In this, she turns the tables on the traditional artistic norm of the male gaze, and in showing how uncomfortable and invasive this is, critique the viewing of women in a similar way, such as in gossip magazines. ‘It was a way of treating men as objects when it’s usually women who are treated as objects,’ Messager explained. ‘Men never stop checking out women’s bottoms, breasts, everything.’

Well that put paid to the male gaze, didn’t it. No longer a problem.

Richard Mosse (Ireland)

Artist Richard Mosse made a film by asking members of an American fraternity house to have a shouting competition, with the young student who could shout loudest and longest winning a keg of beer. Having contrived this artificial situation in which he films the faces of young American men shouting their heads off till they’re red in the face, Mosse then described his film as ‘a performance of masculinity and elite, white male rage’.

Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany)

The Soldiers, The Nineties (1999-2020) is an installation of newspaper front pages and photos, blown up and arranged into different size images across the wall which show NATO soldiers in a variety of conflict zones – Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the Gulf – in a number of poses – resting, smoking, reading, partying – accessed from different sources – press clippings, magazines, newspapers, TV screenshots.

Tillmans presents the viewer with images of hypermasculinity rubbing shoulders with male apprehension, camaraderie and vulnerability while also embedding the queer gaze and homoeroticism in military space.

Karlheinz Weinberger (Switzerland)

A series of black and white photos Weinberger took all the way back in the early 1960s of homosexual men dressed up in leather jackets, caps and other clichéd outfits in what was, back then, very much Zurich’s hidden, secret gay underground.

Horseshoe Buckle 1962 by Karlheinz Weinberger © Karlheinz Weinberger. Courtesy Esther Woerdehoff

Marianne Wex (Germany)

Let’s Take Back Our Space: Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures from 1976-9 is a series of large frames in which Wex arranged sets of contemporary magazine photos depicting a row of men sitting in public places, in the park etc with their legs wide open, and in a row underneath photos of women sitting with their knees primly together. Manspreading.

According to the wall label:

These differences in posture are, Wex concludes, products of a social conditioning that defines one sex as strong and the other as weak, perpetuating a hierarchical distinction between the sexes in the form of patterns of physical behaviour.

Latin America (1)

Ana Mendieta (Cuba)

A series of seven large-ish colour photos from 1972 titled Facial Hair Transplants in which Mendieta glued fragments of her fellow student, Morty Sklar’s facial hair to her own face.

Africa (4)

Liz Johnson Artur (Ghana)

Tableau vivant… if you cool the sun always shines (2002) a large embroidery with images of black people sewn or attached to it, around the central image of an embroidered version of Leonardo’s Last Supper.

Samuel Fosso (Cameroon)

70s Lifestyle, 1975-78.

By day Fosso ran a commercial studio photographing the residents of Bangui while at night he created highly performative black and white self-portraits in which he adopted a series of male personas, alluding to the idea that gender is an artificial proposition.

Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola)

Represented by one piece, an absolutely enormous wall-sized photo The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda N’zombo Before the Great Extinction (Act I), 2017.

This is ‘Act I’ of a five-part series. the flamboyant figure in the centre is modelled on Mobutu Sese Seko, the kleptocratic president of Zaire. Kia Henda’s work:

reimagines the politics and history of Africa within shrewdly conjectured fictional scenarios.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigeria)

Stunningly posed, crystal clear studio art photos of black men’s bodies arranged in intriguing shapes and wonderfully aesthetic poses.

According to the wall label:

The work of the pioneering photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode calls attention to the politics of race, representation and queer desire.

Mikhael Subotzky (South Africa)

I Was Looking Back is a large installation of 18 photos in which he revisited every photo he’d ever taken,

in an attempt to formulate a new narrative that actively exposes and deconstructs white masculine power, a defining feature of Subotzky’s experience as a white, privileged, South African male.

They include photos of blacks being beaten up and intimidated by the police, photos from inside prisons or from grim wasted slums. The photos are, apparently,

an attempt to expose and destabilise the systems of hegemonic male power that enable and normalise these acts of violence.

Middle East (2)

Fouad Elkoury (Lebanon)

Civil War 1977-86 a photo record of daily life in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath, including the series features here of militiamen posed against battle-scarred buildings.

Adi Nes (Israeli)

Soldiers a series in which Nes photographed young men posing as soldiers in the Israeli Defence Force i.e. they are not real soldiers. Nes is, naturally, gay.

Nes not only infuses his images of the military with homoeroticism but also reveals the strong homosocial bonds that exist between soldiers, as well as inscribing the queer body into the military imagination.

Untitled from the series Soldiers (1999) by Adi Nes. Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles

Akram Zaatari (Lebanon)

Zaatari found damaged negatives of bodybuilders in the archive of the Lebanese studio photographer Hashem El Madani and blew them up far beyond their original scale to emphasise the damaged, degraded effect, conveying a poignant sense of the passage of time.

According to the curator the photographs:

examine the construction of Middle Eastern masculinity and virility while also reflecting on Western, Orientalising perceptions of masculinity.

Asia (3)

Masahisa Fukase (Japan)

Two series:

Memories of my father (1971 to 1990) – photographic record of the artist’s father, Sukezo, through life and death

Family (1971 to 1990) – over two decades a series of formal posed photos of Fukase and his family but in each one of them a young woman is present, often half dressed, in stylised or parodic poses, so that they:

meditate on the ways in which women are still systematically subordinated to men.

Is that what you see in this photo?

Upper row, from left to right: A, a model; Toshiteru, Sukezo, Masahisa. Middle row, from left to right: Akiko, Mitsue, Hisashi Daikoji. Bottom row, from left to right: Gaku, Kyoko, Kanako, and a memorial portrait of Miyajo, 1985, from the series Family 1971-90 by Masahisa Fukase © Masahisa Fukase Archives

Sunil Gupta (India)

  • Christopher Street – street photos of gay men in New York, 1976
  • Exiles – gay men in India, often forced to hide their true sexuality, 1987
  • Pretended Family relationships – a work lamenting the way gay couples had to disguise their relationships after the Section 28 legislation was passed by Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1988

Untitled 22 from the series Christopher Street, 1976 by Sunil Gupta © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019

Australia

Tracey Moffatt: Heaven

This playful film from famed director and photographer Tracey Moffatt turns the tables on traditional representations of desire to examine the power of the female gaze in the objectification of men’s bodies. HEAVEN begins with surreptitiously filmed documentary footage of brawny surfers changing in and out of bathing and wet-suits. While the soundtrack switches between the ocean surf and male chanting, Moffatt moves closer to alternately flirt with and tease her subjects, who respond with a combination of preening and macho reticence. This witty piece is a potent and hilarious meditation on cinematic and everyday sex roles, voyeurism, power, and the thin line between admiration and invasiveness.

Russia (0)

China (0)

Summary

1. Lots of feminist women photographers (in the sense that all the women photographers were making points about men which were, as far as I could see, were entirely negative. None of them celebrating any aspect of maleness.)

2. At least half, if not more, of the male photographers are gay i.e. if the exhibition as a whole is about one particular type of masculinity, it is about gay masculinity.

3. No photographers and no photographs from Russia or China. Hmm. Because they don’t have men there? Or no photographers there? Or because not enough of them are gay (either the subjects or the photographers themselves)? Or because the curators don’t think Russia and China matter?

55 photographers in all, 23 from America, lots of the others covering American subjects – but none from Russia or China.

Related links

Other Barbican reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 29, 2020

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Masculinities: Liberation through Photography @ the Barbican

Barbican Art does things big – exhaustively and exhaustingly BIG. To quote the press release:

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is a major group exhibition that explores how masculinity is experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed as expressed and documented through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.

The exhibition brings together over 300 works by over 50 pioneering international artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Catherine Opie to show how photography and film have been central to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture.

300 works! I wonder if anyone’s ever done a study of the optimum number of works which should be included in an exhibition. Or the optimum number of contributors.

The Piranesi exhibition I went to last week contained 60 images and that was too many to process: I ended up studying about ten of the best. But 300 images! And over 50 contributors! Each with a long and detailed explanatory wall label explaining their career and motivation and the genesis and point of their particular exhibit.

It’s less like an exhibition than a degree course!

Untitled from the series Soldiers (1999) by Adi Nes. Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles

A degree course in Gender Studies. because Masculinities: Liberation through Photography tends to confirm my sense that, for many modern artists and for most modern art curators, gender and sexual identity are the only important subjects in the world. Thus, according to Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican:

‘In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the resurgence of feminist and men’s rights activism, traditional notions of masculinity have become the subject of fierce debate. This exhibition could not be more relevant and will certainly spark conversations surrounding our understanding of masculinity.’

In fact quoting this much makes me think it might be most effective simply to quote the entire press release, so you can see exactly where the Barbican Art curators are coming from, without any editorial comment by me. So here it is:

With ideas around masculinity undergoing a global crisis and terms such as ‘toxic’ and ‘fragile’ masculinity filling endless column inches, the exhibition surveys the representation of masculinity in all its myriad forms, rife with contradiction and complexity. Presented across six sections by over 50 international artists to explore the expansive nature of the subject, the exhibition touches on themes of queer identity, the black body, power and patriarchy, female perceptions of men, heteronormative hypermasculine stereotypes, fatherhood and family. The works in the show present masculinity as an unfixed performative identity shaped by cultural and social forces.

Seeking to disrupt and destabilise the myths surrounding modern masculinity, highlights include the work of artists who have consistently challenged stereotypical representations of hegemonic masculinity, including Collier Schorr, Adi Nes, Akram Zaatari and Sam Contis, whose series Deep Springs, 2018 draws on the mythology of the American West and the rugged cowboy. Contis spent four years immersed in an all-male liberal arts college north of Death Valley meditating on the
intimacy and violence that coexists in male-only spaces.

Untitled (Neck), 2015 by Sam Contis © Sam Contis

Complicating the conventional image of the fighter, Thomas Dworzak’s acclaimed series Taliban consists of portraits found in photographic studios in Kandahar following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, these vibrant portraits depict Taliban fighters posing hand in hand in front of painted backdrops, using guns and flowers as props with kohl carefully applied to their eyes.

Taliban portrait. Kandahar, Afghanistan by Thomas Dworzak (2002) © Collection T. Dworzak/Magnum Photos

Trans masculine artist Cassils’ series Time Lapse, 2011, documents the radical transformation of their body through the use of steroids and a rigorous training programme reflecting on ideas of masculinity without men.

Elsewhere, artists Jeremy Deller, Robert Mapplethorpe and Rineke Dijkstra dismantle preconceptions of subjects such as the wrestler, the bodybuilder and the athlete and offer an alternative view of these hyper-masculinised stereotypes.

The exhibition examines patriarchy and the unequal power relations between gender, class and race. Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen, 1981 to 1983, comprised of 26 black and white photographs taken inside men-only private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from snatched conversations, parliamentary records and contemporary news reports, invites viewers to reflect on notions of class, race and the exclusion of women from spaces of power during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

“Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards fallen” from the series Gentlemen, by Karen Knorr (1981 to 1983) © Karen Knorr

Toxic masculinity is further explored in Andrew Moisey’s 2018 photobook The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual which weaves together archival photographs of former US Presidents and Supreme Court Justices who all belonged to the fraternity system, alongside images depicting the initiation ceremonies and parties that characterise these male-only organisations.

With the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement through the 1960s followed by the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, the exhibition showcases artists such as Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowiz, who increasingly began to disrupt traditional representations of gender and sexuality.

Hal Fischer’s critical photo-text series Gay Semiotics, 1977, classified styles and types of gay men in San Francisco and Sunil Gupta’s street photographs captured the performance of gay public life as played out on New York’s Christopher Street, the site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising.

Street Fashion: Jock from the series Gay Semiotics, 1977/2016 by Hal Fischer. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant London

Other artists exploring the performative aspects of queer identity include Catherine Opie’s seminal series Being and Having, 1991, showing her close friends in the West Coast’s LGBTQ+ community sporting false moustaches, tattoos and other stereotypical masculine accessories.

Bo from Being and Having by Catherine Opie (1991) © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Elle Pérez’s luminous and tender photographs explore the representation of gender non-conformity and vulnerability, whilst Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s fragmented portraits explore the studio as a site of homoerotic desire.

During the 1970s women artists from the second wave feminist movement objectified male sexuality in a bid to subvert and expose the invasive and uncomfortable nature of the male gaze. In the exhibition, Laurie Anderson’s seminal work Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity), 1973, documents the men who cat-called her as she walked through New York’s Lower East Side, while Annette Messager’s series The Approaches (1972) covertly captures men’s trousered crotches with a long-lens camera.

German artist Marianne Wex’s encyclopaedic project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1977) presents a detailed analysis of male and female body language, and Australian indigenous artist Tracey Moffatt’s awkwardly humorous film Heaven (1997) portrays male surfers changing in and out of their wet suits…

Thus the press release for this huge exhibition. I’ve quoted it at length so you can:

  • get an overview of the exhibition’s contents
  • get a sense of the thinking behind the exhibition
  • get familiar with the dated sociological jargon which is used throughout – ‘interrogate’, ‘challenge’, ‘disrupt’, ‘heteronormative’, ‘male gaze’, ‘patriarchy’

So you can see the curators’ point of view and intentions before I start critiquing them.

The complete irrelevance of any of these ‘masculinities’ to my own life and experience

Almost none of the art or artists in this exhibition bore any relation to my experiences as a boy, teenager, young man, adult man, working man, husband, and then father of my own son. I thought it was quite an achievement to feature so much work by so many artists claiming to speak for or about ‘masculinity’ or men, but which managed to touch on so little of my own personal life experiences of ‘masculinity’.

I took photos of the wall captions as I went round the exhibition and so, as a sample, here are the subjects of the first 15 or so displays, with the exact subject matter of the sets of photographs highlighted in bold:

  1. Taliban warriors by Thomas Dworzak
  2. Beirut fighters by Fouad Elkoury
  3. Israeli soldiers by Adi Nes
  4. a video of a close-up of the trousers of a man who urinates in his pants and trousers, so you see the wet patch spreading by Knut Asadam (Pissing by Knut Asdam)
  5. American, German and British soldiers by Wolfgang Tillmans
  6. American cowboys by Collier Schorr
  7. a film by Isaac Julien about American cowboys, The Long Road to Mazatlan
  8. American photographer Sam Contis’s photos of a liberal arts college in the mid-West
  9. American photographer Catherine Opie’s photos of American footballers
  10. American artist Andy Warhol’s movies of male fashion models
  11. American photographer Herb Ritt’s photos of buff Hollywood garage attendants
  12. American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger and female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon
  13. Akram Zaatari’s photos of Middle Eastern weightlifters
  14. 100 black and white photos of himself wearing y-fronts taken from all angles by Canadian transmasculine performance artist and bodybuilder Cassils
  15. a series of photos by a British photographer of London Fire Brigade firefighters at work and in the showers

Men I know

Down the road from me lives my neighbour Nigel. He regularly goes folk dancing with his wife. At weekends they go for long cycle rides in the country. I helped him with a bit of guerrilla gardening last autumn when we planted daffodils on a patch of waste ground at the end of our road, which are now flowering. Nigel tended one of the allotments at the end of our road, and we’d have lengthy chats about the best plants I could put in my back garden to encourage more birds and butterflies.

Occasionally, we see old Richard go slouching along the road to his allotment where he tends his bee hives and chain smokes. A few years ago he was in the papers, in a photo showing him wearing full beekeeping rig and handing a letter into Number 10 asking for more government help to protect bees.

I shared a house with two friends in my last year at university who did science subjects: Nowadays Tony works for the Worldwide Fund For Nature trying to save the rainforests, and David is a microbiologist who helps develop micro-devices which can be installed within the human body to secrete medicine at regular or required intervals, for example in diabetics.

My boyhood friend Jonathan runs a puppet theatre for schools. Tom works for a seaman’s charity in the East End. Adam works for The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Scotland, monitoring bird populations, nesting habits, tagging birds to follow their migration patterns.

My son is studying biology at university. He’s considering doing a PhD into plant biology with a view to developing more sustainable crops. We play chess when he comes home at the holidays, although I’m always nagging him for frittering away so much of his time playing online video games.

These are ‘masculinities’, aren’t they? These are ways of being male? At least I think Nigel and Richard and Tom and Jonathan and Tony and David, Adam and Luke and I are men. Aren’t we?

But there was nobody like us in this exhibition, what you could call ‘normal’ people. Not a hint of men who like birdwatching, or gardening, or keeping bees, or study plant science, or like folk dancing, or are helping the environment.

Instead this exhibition’s view of masculinity is almost deliriously narrow: alternating between ridiculous American stereotypes of huge steroid-grown athletes or shouting fraternity members, and equally stereotyped images of flamboyant, make-up wearing gays working in nightclubs or part of the uber-gay communities of downtown New York or San Francisco’s Castro district. It is an exhibition of extremes and stereotypes.

Rusty, 2008 by Catherine Opie © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Paul, who I worked with for all those years in TV, wasn’t camp or flamboyant, he was just a guy who liked a beer and a laugh and happened to be gay. As was his boyfriend. As was Edwin, the Viking-looking giant with a beard who I worked with at a government agency, who also just happened to be gay, it was no big deal, and really hated the way everyone expected him to conform to ‘gay’ stereotypes.

Exactly the kind of dated gay stereotypes which exhibitions like this promote and propagate.

The British art establishment’s slavish worship of American culture

Once again I find it weirdly unself-aware that an exhibition which so smugly uses words like ‘transgressive’, ‘interrogate’, ‘disrupt’ and ‘subvert’ about its exhibits, is itself so completely and slavishly in thrall to American photographers and American subject matter and so utterly kowtows to the cultural dominance of The Greatest City in the World (if you’re an art curator) – which is, of course, New York.

The Barbican is in London. Which is in England. Not in New York or San Francisco. And yet only one of the first fifteen or so of the featured photographers was British, and I can only remember two or three other Brits among the remaining 35 or so exhibitors.

The art élite

So by about half way through the exhibition it had dawned on me that there is a very strong political element to this show, just not the one the curators intend. It is that:

Once again an exhibition about gender and race and identity proves beyond doubt the existence of a transnational art élite, made up of international-minded, jet-setting artists and photographers and film-makers, and their entourage of agents and gallery curators, who have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of the populations of their host countries.

What I mean is that the curators and critics who’ve selected the works and written the catalogue of a show like this have much more in common with their counterparts in the art worlds of New York or Berlin or Shanghai than they do with the men or women in the streets of their own cities. They speak the same art language, use the same art theory buzz words and jargon, all agree on the wonderfulness of New York, and all share the same supremely woke and politically correct attitudes to LGBT+ and transgender and BAME rights which, the exhibition strongly implies, are the most important political or social issues anywhere in the world.

They liberally throw around words like ‘elite’ and criticise pretty much all white men for their ‘privilege’. It obviously doesn’t occur to them that being part of the jetsetting, international circuit of artists and art curators is also to belong to a privileged élite.

As a small symbol of this, after having read a host of wall labels castigating élite, men-only, members-only clubs and fraternities – which had the result of hyper-sensitising me to the the wickedness of these restrictive organisations – I couldn’t help smiling when I read on the Barbican website about an ‘exclusive Members’ talk’ which is available to Barbican members only.

Preaching to the converted

And so when I watched the curator of the exhibition speaking to the assembled journalists, critics and reviewers about #MeToo and toxic masculinity, and watched the approving nods and murmurs of her audience, I realised she was praising the values and priorities of the art world and its ferociously politically correct denizens, to exactly the kinds of journalists and critics who inhabit that world and attend these kinds of launches. And it crossed my mind that I had rarely in my life seen a purer example of ‘preaching to the choir’ and reinforcing entrenched groupthink.

Horseshoe Buckle, 1962 by Karlheinz Weinberger © Karlheinz Weinberger

Initial summary

To summarise so far:

  • It felt to me that the exhibition is wildly, almost hallucinatorily partial, misleading and inaccurate about its purported subject matter – masculinity. It simply ignores and neglects almost everything I think about when I think about my own and other men’s masculinity.
  • But what it undoubtedly is, is a handy survey of the deeply entrenched anti-heterosexual, anti-male, anti-white, pro-feminist, pro-black, pro-queer attitudes which now dominate universities, colleges, the art world and art galleries. So the exhibition has this additional layer of interest which is as a fascinating sociological specimen of the current attitudes and terminology of the über-woke.

I’m not against or opposed to those positions and views, in fact I broadly support them (pro-feminism, pro-LGBT+, anti-racism etc). I’m just modestly suggesting that there’s more to the world of men than this polemical and extremely limited exhibition – either American footballers or street queens of New York – gets anywhere near suggesting. In fact there is much more to culture, and politics, and the world, than a relentless obsession with ‘gender’.

Highlights

Having got all that off my chest, you may be surprised to learn that I really enjoyed this exhibition. There’s so much stuff on show they can’t help having lots of really good and interesting art here, and – as usual with the Barbican – it is presented in a series of beautifully designed and arranged spaces. So:

I loved Herb Ritts‘ pinup-style black-and-white photos of incredibly buff and sexy (male) garage hands, stripped to the waist.

What’s not to love about Robert Mapplethorpe‘s photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lisa Lyon in their bodybuilding prime?

I really liked Akram Zaatari‘s photos of Middle Eastern weightlifters: he found a trove of badly degraded, faded, marked and damaged photos, then blew them up to wall size, warts and all. The weightlifters are dressed in loose loincloths, a world away from the slick professionalism of Schwarzenegger et al, and then further removed by the spotty blotchy finish of the damaged negatives. I like all art which shows the marks of industrial processes, decay, found objects, Arte Povera etc, art which records its own struggle to emerge from a world of chaos and war.

Bodybuilders Printed From A Damaged Negative by Akram Zaatari (2011)

I liked the work of German feminist photographer Marianne Wex. In the 1970s she made a whole set of collages where she cut out magazine images of men sitting with their legs wide apart and juxtaposed these with magazine images of women sitting primly with their legs tight together. This was funny for all sorts of reason, but also had multiple levels of nostalgia: for the black and white world of 1960s and 70s magazines (and fashions – look at the hair and the flares on the men).

There was a room on the ground floor which I nicknamed ‘The Grid Room’ which contained three massive sets of images laid out as grids, and which I liked simply because I like big grids and matrices, geometric and mathematical designs, in the same way as I like Carl Andre’s bricks. The grids are:

1. German-American photographer Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen (1981 to 1983) consists of 26 black-and-white photographs taken inside men-only, private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from conversations Knorr claims to have overheard.

a) they’re strikingly composed and arranged photos
b) the overheard conversations are amusingly arrogant and pompous, if a little too pat to be totally plausible
c) but what makes this funniest of all is that Knorr is surprised that the inhabitants of expensive, members-only private clubs will be a bit, you know, pompous

2. Back in the 1990s Polish-American photographer Piotr Uklański created a vast, super-wall-sized collage of A4-sized publicity photos of Hollywood actors dressed as Nazis from a host of movies.

It is 18 columns by 9 rows, which means it shows the images of 162 actors playing Nazi. The wall label suggested that the work is an indictment of Hollywood and its trivialisation of atrocity and, in the context of this exhibition, it is also meant to be an indictment of ‘toxic masculinity’ and the hyper-masculinity promoted by the Nazis.

But look at it. It isn’t really either of those things. What it obviously is, is an invitation to identify the actors and the movies they’re in, lots of fun in a Where’s Wally kind of way. Can you spot Clint Eastwood from Where Eagles Dare, Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen, Leonard Nimoy from the spisode of Star Trek where they beam down to some planet which is having a Nazi phase?

And then, for me, any serious intention was undermined when I noticed that two of the belong to Monty Python actors Michael Palin and Eric Idle dressed as Nazis (6 rows down, 10 and 11 across). And when I noticed the face of Norman Wisdom (from his 1959 movie, The Square Peg, where Norman is asked to impersonate a Nazi general he happens to look like), I couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

(Having googled this artwork and studied the results, I realise that Uklański changes the arrangement of the photos from site to site, with the order of the faces different in each iteration. The version below gives you an immediate impression of the work’s overall impact – imagine this spread across an entire wall, a big art gallery wall – but in this version Norman’s photo, alas, is absent.)

The Nazis by Piotr Uklanski (1998)

3. The third big grid is a set of 69 black-and-white photos taken by American photographer Richard Avedon and ironically titled The Family, each one depicting key politicians, military men, lawmakers and captains of industry who held the reins of power in America in the Bicentennial year of 1976.

The overt aim is to shock and appal the modern social justice warrior with the fact that almost all the movers and shakers are white men (though I did, in fact, count six women in the grid and two or three black people). But it just didn’t seem too much of a surprise to me that nearly fifty years ago the make-up of the ruling class was different from now or, to put it another way, over the past fifty years the representation of women and black people at the highest levels of American power have changed and improved.

Anyway, any political message was, for me, eclipsed by the hazy memories of the 1970s which these photos evoked — the era when Gerald Ford hastily replaced that excellent American president, Richard Nixon and when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize (1973). There’s a youthful Jimmy Carter (elected President in 1977), a serious-faced Ronald Reagan (another most excellent American President), and gorgeously handsome Teddy Kennedy, for so long the poster boy of liberal Democrats.

Americana

As you can see from the three works in The Grid Room, even when I was trying to overlook it, I couldn’t help noticing the American subject matter or the American provenance of most of the photographers.

The America worship continues into the next room, which is devoted to the American tradition of the college fraternity, and the secret initiation rituals they apparently hold.

Thus artist Richard Mosse made a film by asking members of an American fraternity house to have a shouting competition, with the young student who could shout loudest and longest winning a keg of beer. Having contrived this artificial situation in which he films the faces of young American men shouting their heads off till they’re red in the face, Mosse then described his film as ‘a performance of masculinity and elite, white male rage’.

Is it, though? I’d have thought it was a highly contrived set-up, Mosse bribing the men to act out a certain kind of behaviour which he then turned round and criticised using his modish sociological jargon.

Also note how the word ‘white’ in sentences like that is slowly becoming a term of abuse. Mosse is, of course, himself ‘white’, but he’s the OK sort of ‘white’. He’s artist white.

Next to it is a work by American photographer Andrew Moisey, who spent seven years studying college fraternities and putting together The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual. This, you won’t be very surprised to learn,

explores the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and the toxic culture of American fraternities.

Toxic men. Toxic masculinity. White male rage.

The gay American photographer Duane Michals is represented by a series of photos depicting a grandfather and grandson with an eerie, surrealist vibe.

There’s a sequence of photos by American-based Indian photographer Sunil Gupta, who recorded New York’s gay scene in the 1970s.

Untitled 22 from the series Christopher Street, 1976 by Sunil Gupta © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019

Reclaiming the black body

Upstairs, in the section devoted to Reclaiming the Black Body, there’s a series by American photographer Kalen Na’il Roach which are described as explorations of ‘the construction of the African-American family and the absent father’.

Nearby is a set of brilliant photos by black American photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who arranged human bodies in all manner of creative and interesting poses, all shot as clear and crisply as anything by Robert Mapplethorpe. There was a really beautiful, crystal clear and vivid and intimidating and erotic photo of a black man holding a pair of large scissors against his thigh, wow.

Untitled, 1985 by Rotimi Fani-Kayode © Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Queering masculinity

There’s an entire section of the exhibition devoted to gay masculinity titled Queering Masculinity. Among many others, this contains a set of photos by American photographer George Dureau, ‘a prominent figure in the queer and non-conformist communities in New Orleans’s French Quarter’, which included some disturbing images of a handsome young man with a hippy hairdo who had had both legs amputated right at the top of the thighs, images which didn’t make me think about masculinity at all, but about disability.

A corner is given to the technicolour experimental underground film Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) by rebel film-maker Kenneth Anger, which explores the fetishist role of hot rod cars among young American men, and whose soundtrack – Dream Lover by Bobby Darin – wafted gently through the galleries as the visitors sauntered around, looking at these collections of cool, gay and black American photography.

And also upstairs was a fabulous series of black and white shots by American photographer David Wojnarowicz, who got his friends to wear a face mask of French poet Arthur Rimbaud and pose in unlikely locations around New York.

And there’s work by Peter Hujar, ‘a leading figure in New York‘s downtown cultural scene throughout the 1970s’ who photographed its various gay subcultures.

David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (II) 1982 by Peter Hujar © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

There’s photos by Paul Mpagi Sepuya, an American photographer from who explores ‘the studio and darkroom as a site of homoerotic desire’.

And photos by Elle Pérez from America which are concerned with ‘the artist’s relationship with their own body, their queerness and how their sexual, gender and cultural identities intersect and coalesce through photography’.

While ‘in her meticulously staged photos, American artist Deanna Lawson (b.1979) explores black intimacy, family, sexuality and spirituality.’

Then there’s American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director Laurie Anderson who is represented by her 1973 work Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity) which records the men who cat-called her as she walked through New York’s Lower East Side.

One of my favourite sections was black American Hank Willis Thomas’s ironic and funny collages, Unbranded: Reflections In Black by Corporate America which cut and paste together tacky old adverts featuring black people from the 70s, 80s and 90s. As the wall label explains:

Thomas sheds light on how corporate America continues to reproduce problematic notions of race, sexuality, class and gender through the white male gaze.

(Note: ‘the white male gaze’. The male gaze is bad enough but, God, it’s twice as bad when it’s the white male gaze. Just as male rage is bad, but white male rage, my God, that’s unforgiveable. You don’t have to read many of these wall labels to realise that everything is so much worse when it’s white.)

There are photographers and artists from other countries – from the Lebanon, Cameroon, Holland, Ghana, Norway and so on. Even, mirabile dictu, some British artists. But in every room there are American artists and wherever you look there are images of New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, while an American pop song drifts over the images of American cowboys and American bodybuilders and New York gays.

It is a very America-dominated exhibition.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the woke, LGBT+-friendly, feminist, anti-patriarchal and anti-white curators are willing to disrupt, subvert, interrogate and question every received opinion, stereotype and shibboleth about the world today except for one – except for America’s stranglehold on global art and photography, except for America’s cultural imperialism, which goes unquestioned and uncommented-on.

Before this form of imperialism, British art curators bow down and worship.

Second summary

Well, if you’re a white man and you enjoy the experience of being made to feel like a privileged, white racist, elitist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist pig by lots of righteous black, gay and women photographers, this exhibition will be right up your street.

But having said all that, I did, ultimately, and despite everything, really enjoy it. In fact I might go back for seconds. There is a huge amount of visually interesting and varied work in it and, as I’ve explained – to take the whole thing on a completely different level – it is a fascinating sociological study of up-to-date, woke and politically correct attitudes and sociological terminology.

And also because the picture of Norman Wisdom dressed as a Nazi was so utterly unexpected, so surreally incongruous among the rest of the po-faced, super-serious and angry feminist rhetoric that I was still smiling broadly as I walked out the door.

Norman Wisdom as General-Major Otto Schreiber in the hit movie, The Square Peg (1959), subverting seriousness

Dated

Not only does the exhibition mostly deal in types and stereotypes, but so many of them are really dated.

The concept of ‘the male gaze’ was invented in a 1975 essay by film critic film critic Laura Mulvey. Not one but two quotes from it are printed in large letters across the walls of feminist section of the exhibition, rather like the Ten Commandments used to be put up for the whole congregation to learn in a church.

Karlheinz Weinberger’s photos of leather-clad rebels date from the early 1960s.

Kenneth Anger’s film Kustom Kar Kommandos is from 1965.

Annette Messager’s series The Approaches is from 1972.

Laurie Anderson’s piece is from 1973.

Richard Avedon’s set, The Family, was shot in 1976.

Sunil Gupta’s street photographs of gay New Yorkers are from the mid-1970s

Hal Fischer’s amusing photos of gay street fashion are from 1977.

Marianne Wex’s project ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures’ dates from 1977.

David Wojnarowicz’s briliant series ‘Rimbaud in New York’ was taken between 1977 and 1979.

Andy Warhol’s film about male models is from 1979.

Hank Willis Thomas’s funny collages use magazine photos from the 1970s and 80s

Karen Knorr’s series about knobs at posh clubs were shot from 1981 to 1983.

Herb Ritts’ photos of stunning hunky men date from 1984.

Now of course a lot of the other pieces are from more recently, from the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, and I am deliberately cherry-picking my evidence, but you get my point.

If the whole issue of gender and masculinity is as hot and urgent and topical as the curators insist, why are they going back to the 1960s and 1970s to illustrate it? My answer would be that, although many of its details have been subsequently elaborated and extended, the basis of the curators (and most of the artists’) liberate worldview date back to the late 60s and early 70s, the era which saw the real breakthroughs for modern feminism, gay rights, and a more ambitious form of black civil rights.

In other words, when you go to a contemporary exhibition of feminist art or gay art or lesbian art or politically motivated black art, you are in fact tapping into movements which have been around for about fifty years. This what gives them a curiously dated, almost nostalgic feeling. The artists and the curators may try to dress these tried-and-tested approaches up in the latest buzzwords or drum up some fake outrage by mentioning the magic words ‘Donald Trump’, but I remember going to exhibitions by gay and lesbian and feminist and black artists in the 1980s, and 1990s, and 2000s, and 2010s which all said more or less what this one does: Blacks are oppressed, women are oppressed, gays and lesbians are oppressed.

For an exhibition which is claiming to address one of the burning issues of our time it seemed curiously… dated. All these carefully printed photographs and films, how very retro, how very 1970s they seem. It’s as if the internet, digital art and social media have never happened. I described the exhibition to my daughter (18, feminist, studied sociology, Instagram and social media addict) and she said it sounded boring and preachy. Yep.

Counting the countries of origin

It’s good to count. Actually counting and analysing the data about almost any subject almost always proves your subjective impressions to be wrong, because all of our unconscious biases are so strong.

Thus when I looked up the countries of origin of all the photographers represented in this exhibition, I realised the raw facts prove me wrong in thinking that most of the exhibitors are American. Out of 54 exhibitors, some 23 were born in the States and another 3 or 4 emigrated there, so the number of ‘American’ photographers is only just about half of those included.

This exercise also highlighted the true range of other nationalities represented, which I had tended to underestimate. There are, for example, seven Brits, double the number I initially remembered.

However, these figures don’t quite tell the full story, since a number of contributors might not be from the USA, but are represented by their images of the USA. Thus Sunil Gupta is from India but is represented by a suite of photos from 1970s New York (as well as a second series of photos about gay life in India).

Isaac Julien is a British artist but is represented by two movies, one about American cowboys and one – a big one which has one of the Barbican’s entire alcoves devoted to it – a black-and-white movie set in a glamorous American cocktail bar, and set to evocative American cocktail jazz.

To really establish the facts on this one issue of American influence, I suppose you’d have to itemise every single one of the images or films on show and indicate whether they were American in origin or subject matter – which is a little beyond the scope of the present review, and possibly a little mad.

Here’s the complete list of photographers represented in this exhibition with their country of origin, which can be roughly summarised as: the exhibition includes as many American, American-based, or America-covering photographers as those from the rest of the world put together.

  1. Bas Jan Ader (Dutch)
  2. Laurie Anderson (USA)
  3. Kenneth Anger (USA)
  4. Liz Johnson Artur (Ghanaian-Russian)
  5. Knut Åsdam (Norway)
  6. Richard Avedon (USA)
  7. Aneta Bartos (Polish-American)
  8. Richard Billingham (UK)
  9. Cassils (Canada)
  10. Sam Contis (USA)
  11. John Coplans (UK emigrated to USA)
  12. Jeremy Deller (UK)
  13. Rineke Dijkstra (Holland)
  14. George Dureau (USA)
  15. Thomas Dworzak (Germany)
  16. Hans Eijkelboom (Holland)
  17. Fouad Elkoury (Lebanon)
  18. Hal Fischer (USA)
  19. Samuel Fosso (Cameroon)
  20. Anna Fox (UK)
  21. Masahisa Fukase (Japan)
  22. Sunil Gupta (India)
  23. Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola)
  24. Peter Hujar (USA)
  25. Isaac Julien (UK)
  26. Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigeria)
  27. Karen Knorr (German-American)
  28. Deana Lawson (USA)
  29. Hilary Lloyd (UK)
  30. Robert Mapplethorpe (USA)
  31. Peter Marlow (UK)
  32. Ana Mendieta (Cuba, moved to New York)
  33. Annette Messager (France)
  34. Duane Michals (USA)
  35. Tracey Moffatt (Australia)
  36. Andrew Moisey (USA)
  37. Richard Mosse (Ireland)
  38. Adi Nes (Israeli)
  39. Catherine Opie (USA)
  40. Elle Pérez (USA)
  41. Herb Ritts (USA)
  42. Kalen Na’il Roach (USA)
  43. Paul Mpagi Sepuya (USA)
  44. Collier Schorr (USA)
  45. Clare Strand (UK)
  46. Mikhael Subotzky (South Africa)
  47. Larry Sultan (USA)
  48. Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany)
  49. Hank Willis Thomas (USA)
  50. Piotr Uklański (Polish-American)
  51. Andy Warhol (USA)
  52. Karlheinz Weinberger (Switzerland)
  53. Marianne Wex (Germany)
  54. David Wojnarowicz (USA)

Third summary: why American influence is so malign

The reliance on exaggerated American stereotypes of masculinity explains why the exhibition simply omits the vast majority of male experience

American attitudes to masculinity – American images of masculinity – are grossly exaggerated, hyper-commercialised, and do not represent the experience of masculinity of men from other countries.

(Possibly they don’t even represent the experience of most men in America itself: just on the curators’ favourite subject of ethnic minorities, about 18% of Americans are Latino, compared to only 12% or so who are black. But I don’t think I saw any images of Latinos, or the names of any Latino photographers or artists anywhere in the show. To adopt the curators’ own values of diversity: Why not?)

So one way to sum up this exhibition (it’s so huge I’m aware that there are, potentially, lots of ways to do this – a feminist take, a view which focused more on the gay or black or non-western perspectives) is to posit that the Americanness of half the exhibition, photos and photographers – and the overall sense you have of the exhibition’s cultural narrowness and exaggeration – are intimately connected.

Reading my way carefully around the exhibition reminded me all over again – as hundreds of documentaries and articles and news reports have over the past few decades:

  1. just how polarised American society has become
  2. how a great deal of this polarisation is in the realm of culture
  3. and how exhibitions like this tend to emphasise, exaggerate and exacerbate that atmosphere of poisonous polarisation

The relentless criticism of toxic masculinity and the male gaze and manspreading and men-only organisations, along with the continual suggestion that being white is a crime, have their ultimate source in the turbo-charged feminism, political correctness and woke culture of American universities, art schools and liberal media.

My point is that the the poisonous cultural politics of America are deeply rooted in the extremes images of masculinity which America developed since the Second World War – and that these extremes, along with the anger and vilification they prompt on both sides of the political and cultural divide – are just not applicable outside America.

Does Norway have a massive film industry devoted to promoting impossibly buff and hunky images of super-tough men? Is French culture dominated by the ideal of the gunslinging cowboy? Is Czech sporting life dominated by huge, testosterone-charged American footballers? In 1950s did Greek husbands throw open the doors to their suburban houses and shout, ‘Hi honey, I’m home!’

No. Since the war many European countries, led by France, have vehemently resisted the bubblegum stereotypes and crass vulgarity of American culture. The American example just doesn’t apply to Swiss watchmakers and French winegrowers and Greek hotel owners and Italian waiters.

Obviously accusations of patriarchy and sexism and toxic masculinity and the male gaze and white anger can be, and routinely are, levelled at all men in any Western society, but my suggestion is that the level of anger and rancour which politically correct and woke culture have reached in America is unique.

America has morphed during my lifetime into a violently aggressive and angry society which stands apart from all other industrialised countries (look at the levels of gun crime, or the number of its citizens which America locks up, 2.2 million adults, more than all the other OECD nations put together).

The anger of American liberals against Trump has to be witnessed to be believed, but so does the anger of American conservatives and the mid-West against the tide of immigrants and liberals who they think are ruining their country. America has become a swamp of hatreds, and it is an American civil war, it is not mine.

And here’s my point – an exhibition which defines ‘masculinity’ very heavily through the lens of such an unhealthy, sick and decadent society is giving a wildly twisted, biased, partial and inaccurate impression of what the word ‘masculine’ even means because it is deriving it very heavily from a culture which is tearing itself apart. We are not all American footballers or New York gay pioneers.

So although only half the exhibition is made up of American photographers and American subjects, nonetheless the poisonous rhetoric of the American cultural civil war (‘toxic masculinity’, ‘white rage’, ‘the male gaze’) infects the conception, selection and discourse of the exhibition so thoroughly from start to finish, that it helps explain why the vast majority of much more humdrum, down-to-earth types of non-American, everyday masculinity – the kinds you or I encounter among our families and friends and at work, the kind I experience when I help Nigel plant the daffodil bulbs in the waste ground at the end of our road – are so utterly absent from this blinkered and biased exhibition.

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1 Comment
by Simon on February 23, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Feminism, Film, Photography, Politics
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Posted by Simon on February 23, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/23/masculinities-liberation-through-photography-barbican/