This is a stunning exhibition bringing together over 40 paintings by one of the most famous names from the classic period of western art, Peter Paul Rubens (1577 to 1640). It brings together masterpieces from international and private collections, many of which are appearing in the UK for the first time i.e. it represents a unique opportunity for lovers of classic Old Master art. There are some really stunning paintings and a suite of exquisitely crafted chalk drawings on display. It is a feast for the eyes and mind and imagination.
Questioning the Rubenesque
However, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that it is very much a themed exhibition. It really is about Rubens and women.
The stereotypical view of Rubens is as a painter of ample, fleshly, nude women, hence the adjective ‘Rubenesque’, which the Collins dictionary defines as:
‘of, characteristic of, or like the art of Rubens; colourful, sensual, opulent, etc. 2. full and shapely; voluptuous; said of a woman’s figure.’
This exhibition very much sets out to question that stereotype and to show that Rubens painted a much broader range of female characters, in a far greater range of postures, poses and compositions, than the stereotype suggests. Which explains why the poster for the show is very much not of a plump scantily clad woman but of the impeccably buttoned-up Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino (see below).
Strong independent women
Not only that but, in line with contemporary feminist ideology, the exhibition is keen to emphasise that many of these women were far from being passive victims of the male gaze, but in all kinds of ways were, in real life, and in the iconography of the paintings, strong independent women possessed of that key quality of feminist theory, agency.
Portrait of a Lady (about 1625) by Peter Paul Rubens. Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery
Thus almost all the 40 or so pictures here are of women, with men playing only peripheral or negligible roles, if they appear at all.
There are paintings of women members of his family, rich influential female patrons, lovely chalk sketches of naked women, key women figures from Christian iconography, and the show builds to a tremendous climax with a final room showing four enormous oil paintings of women figures from classical mythology.
There are some men in some of the paintings, but they are always playing a secondary or negligible role. In the words of the press release:
‘The exhibition will be the first to challenge the popular assumption that Rubens painted only one type of woman, providing instead a more nuanced view of the artist who painted more portraits of his wives and children than almost any other, even Rembrandt. The exhibition reveals the varied and important place occupied by women, both real and imagined, in his world.’
Rubens’ changing style
In a more specialist, art history kind of way:
‘A further theme follows the evolution of the female nude in Rubens’s art. It demonstrates how Rubens’s early nudes were quite different in style from those he became famous for, tracing how he arrived at his preferred form through an engagement with sculpture, careful study of antique models and observation from life.’
Room 1. Introduction
Room one contains eight wonderful oil paintings. One is an early self portrait to introduce the man himself, and then, in line with the exhibition theme, seven portraits of women. First, some historical background:
‘Early in his career Rubens realised that his extraordinary ability to paint portraits could open doors. In May 1600, aged 22, he left Antwerp for Italy, where he stayed until 1608, employed by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. This position afforded him opportunities to travel to Spain, Venice, Florence, Rome and to Genoa, where his qualities as a portraitist became fully apparent. Rubens’s dazzling and innovative portraits of noblewomen revolutionised the genre and cemented his relationships with wealthy and powerful patrons.’
The first room is dominated by an enormous, sumptuous and commanding full-length portrait of the Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino. No reproduction can convey the scintillating, dazzling richness of the oil paint which makes up this awesome, luxury portrait. It is deliberately placed to dominate the first room and announce Rubens’s supreme skill as a painter of power, money and women.
Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino by Peter Paul Rubens (1606) National Trust Collections, Kingston Lacy (The Bankes Collection)
Once you’ve gotten over the visual shock of this huge masterpiece, you can move on to process the six other paintings of women. There’s a further portrait of a powerful woman, Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, though depicted in the outfit of a nun, a member of the Order of Poor Clares, reminding us that this was the period of heightened Catholic religiosity referred to as the Counter Reformation.
There’s a series of portraits of ‘unknown women’, resplendent in 17th century dresses, whose luxury fabrics are depicted with loving precision, obviously well-off though not aristocrats.
But maybe the most affecting paintings is the set of ‘intimate’ portraits depicting Rubens’ family, namely his first wife Isabella Brant (1591 to 1626) and eldest daughter, Clara Serena (1611 to 1623), both of whom died relatively young, his daughter at just 12.
Clara Serena Rubens, the Artist’s Daughter by (1620 to 1623) Private Collection
Room 2. Figuring Faith
The second room is a long corridor shape and contains paintings and drawings of a religious nature. Working for the Catholic rulers of Antwerp, Rubens was commissioned to create works designed to promote the Counter-Reformation, the Europe-wide movement to revive and reinvigorate Catholic faith, theology, institutions, and project the power of the Catholic monarchs who defended it.
However, in line with the exhibition’s theme of women, the 20 or so works on display here are for the most part not huge, grand, overpowering and religiose images; most of them are relatively modest in scale but what they do have in common is the curators’ wish to foreground Rubens’s treatment of women in the Christian stories.
The Virgin in Adoration before the Christ Child by Peter Paul Rubens (1616 to 1619) KBC Bank, Antwerp, Museum Snyders & Rockox House
It is quite drily funny how, no matter what the subject depicted, the curators insist that the female figures in them are the real stars, the real centres of attention, exercising agency and power in the way every 21st century feminist would approve of.
There’s a wall-sized digital print of an adoration of the Virgin, printed out and plastered on the wall, in which the Virgin is quite obviously receiving her dues from an array of grovelling men.
In a depiction of the Flight into Egypt, it is Mary who taking the ‘heroic’ role of protecting the baby Jesus.
‘Despite the sense of foreboding, and the shadowy rider visible on the horizon, Mary radiates calm.’
There’s an Ascension of Mary which features lots of men in 17th century clerical dress (actually the apostles) but all they can do is stare upwards in amazement at the Virgin taking off into the sky.
There’s two long narrow portrayals of women accompanied by skinny clerics and these turn out to be portraits of two women saints, Walburga and Catherine of Alexandria, strong independent saints.
There’s a study of Saint Barbara fleeing from her father, who has his sword drawn ready to kill her. Typical toxic patriarchy.
By now seeing everything through the eyes of the curators what we notice in a depiction of the ‘The Lamentation’ is that:
‘it is the women who model how we are to respond to this heart-breaking sight. Gazing at Christ, Mary Magdalen pulls at her hair in distress. The Virgin cradles Christ’s body and tenderly closes his eyes. At his feet are The Three Maries (Holy Women from the Bible).’
And at the centre of all this fuss, a dead white man, the best kind.
The Lamentation by Peter Paul Rubens (1614) Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Gemäldegalerie
Denying the Rubenesque
The curators are at pains to emphasise that Rubens’ women are no more voluptuous than those of his predecessors. They are simply more life-like, their skin more convincingly elastic and believably warm. Rubens’ nudes aren’t plumper or more fleshly, they insist, just better painted.
It’s an interesting claim, and I suppose you couldn’t assess it for yourself without reviewing hundreds more works by Rubens and as many by his contemporaries. But the evidence of your eyes tends to suggest that the most striking of Rubens’ women, the climax of his development as displayed in the stunning final room, are chubby, well covered, however you want to express it. See room 4, below.
Room 3. Stone Made Flesh
‘The female nude was a subject of fascination and constant evolution within Rubens’s art. In Italy, Rubens intensively studied ancient sculptures, memorising their forms and postures. He also drew on the Renaissance artist Michelangelo who was similarly informed by ancient art. Recording observations in his notebook, Rubens devised a new type of vigorous, monumental, female nude.’
This room is the most scholarly of the three, an exploration of how Rubens’ modelling of the female figure evolved, especially after a visit to Rome early in his career. This includes a series of studies, finished paintings, a classical marble sculpture, a silverware design, sketches of classical statues, and one large finished oil painting, of Adam and Eve, to demonstrate his early handling of the female nude – all demonstrating his changing approach.
‘Rubens’s nudes became increasingly dynamic and lifelike throughout the 1620s and 1630s.’
All of these works are relatively small and require quite a bit more study and historical knowledge than the bigger, more attractive, finished oil paintings, certainly for an amateur like me.
Alongside these scholarly specimens are eight or so lovely chalk studies of female nudes. I love chalk or charcoal sketches of nudes, male or female. After all these years I still find something magical in the way the human form and shape, the lifeliness of a human body, its warmth and shape, the beauty and pathos of the bare forked animal, can be conveyed by lines of chalk on flat paper when crafted by a master.
All of them were, obviously, really good, but one in particular stood out for me and, despite the blare of the bigger, finished paintings, might have been my favourite thing in the show. After I’ve finished walking slowly through an exhibition, weighed down by the duty of reading the wall captions, I always turn around and walk back, liberated from facts and figures and free to like whatever takes my fancy.
I often play a game where I ask myself, if I can choose just one work from each room, which would it be? This is the one work I’d want to own from the whole exhibition. Scholars think it might be a study for Mary Magdelene, maybe leaning down to wash the feet of Jesus.
What grabbed me is the immense skill of the shading and cross-hatching, the use of black and white chalk, leaving most of the surface untouched and so parchment colour standing in for fleshtone, and how this technique, this skill, can make a person of flesh and blood appear in front of you. The depiction of her lower back, the curve of her bottom, the shading of the thighs and the shadow where her calves are tucking up under her thighs, the creases in the sole of her foot, the five little pinkies. The delicacy, the skill and the exactitude never cease to pluck my heart, make me gasp.
Study for Mary Magdalen by Peter Paul Rubens (1610s) British Museum, London
Room 4. Goddesses of Peace and Plenty
In line with their feminist slant the curators emphasise that:
‘The women Rubens depicts are not simply passive figures to be observed but active agentsof their own destiny. Nowhere is this clearer than in the dramatic mythological narratives that he loved to paint. Inspired by the Renaissance paintings of Titian and the ancient stories of Ovid and Virgil, in these scenes the goddesses Venus, Juno and Diana are presented as strong and intelligent. It is no coincidence that Rubens’s depictions of powerful, peace-making women were created at a time when his homeland was ravaged by the Eighty Years’ War (1568 to 1648).’
Hence it is that the fourth and final room contains four huge and awe-inspiring paintings with mythological themes and reputedly depicting these active agentsof their own destiny, namely:
Venus, Mars and Cupid (c. 1614) from Dulwich Picture Gallery’s own collection
Diana Returning from the Hunt (1615) from Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
The Birth of the Milky Way (1636 to 1638) from the Museo del Prado, Madrid, on display in the UK for the first time
Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia (1625 to 1628) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
The thing is that, although the curators try their best to claim that these women are not subject to the male gaze, but are strong independent women overflowing with agency, that’s not really how they actually look.
In my opinion this one, ‘Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia’ can be taken as a test case. It depicts the horn of plenty overflowing with the good things of life, namely a grocer’s shop full of ripe plump juicy fruit, so ripe and juicy that it has attracted the attention of scavenging parrots and a cheeky monkey, to add drama and narrative to a classical allegorical scene.
Is it just me or are the two naked women depicted as extensions of this vision of youthful fertile juicy fruitfulness?
I think they are. Far from asserting anyone’s agency, I’d have thought this picture epitomises the reverse: surely these women are totally objectified, depicted in all their youthful sexiness as direct extensions of the world of fruit and fecundity.
This is one of eight paintings Rubens took to Spain as a gift from his patron, the Archduchess Isabel Clara Eugenia, to King Philip IV, to butter him up. Made by a man to flatter a king, far from being a rebuttal it strikes me as being a kind of triumph of the male gaze – sexy topless fruitful babes designed to decorate on the walls of the most powerful man in Europe.
Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia by Peter Paul Rubens (1625 to 1628) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
More interesting to me, more persuasive and touching, is the information that Juno, in this huge representation of ‘The Birth of the Milky Way’ resembles Helena Fourment, Rubens’s second wife.
According to the curators, it is thought that his happy second marriage to Helene inspired his increasingly sensuous presentation of women during the 1630s. That seems to me a plausible and happy explanation of the plump sensuality of the nudes he painted in his final decade, just as Rembrandt’s love for his wife shine through his later paintings. I’m not sure anybody portrayed in a painting, male or female, has any ‘agency’. In my opinion they’re all trapped by composition, design, treatment, by the artist’s aims and whims, and all subject to the human gaze of us, centuries later, completely cut off from the value systems in which these works were created.
But paintings very much can convey tenderness and love. And that’s what I found in this small room full of magnificent works of art. The milk of human kindness. Motherly love. The pure, naked, redemptive love we all wish, deep down, we could recapture.
In fact this final wall caption made me realise that mention of Rubens’ second wife had been seeded throughout the show, starting with early mention of how, after the early death of his first wife, in 1630 Rubens married his second and much younger wife, Helena Fourment (1614 to 1673).
‘Their blissful marital state in the final decade of his life, during which time they had five children, provided a wellspring of love and an increased interest in sensual mythological themes.’
In a world afflicted with terrible pain and suffering it cheered me up to learn that this great artist was blessed with a long, happy, rewarding marriage. Good for him! And these images, painted late in his life, at the peak of his experience of art and life, however others may wish to interpret them, struck me as wonderfully accepting celebrations of beauty, humanity and love.
Rubens among his peers
I was struck by a quote from co-curator Dr Ben van Beneden which gives a pithy summary of three of Western Art’s Golden Greats:
‘If Raphael endowed his female figures with grace, and Titian with beauty, Rubens gave them veracity, energy and soul.’
Strong independent parrots
I noticed that one of the most powerful paintings in the final room, the Cornucopia, featured some beautifully vivid parrots pecking away at the fruit flowing from the horn, and this reminded me that the awesome painting of the Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino in the first room also features a parrot perched on her grand chair and bending down, twisting its neck in that inquisitive parrot way.
It occurred to me that maybe Dulwich’s next exhibition should be about ‘Parrots in Painting’. It could bring together depictions of a variety of strong, independent parrots who resist the human gaze to insist on their psittacine agency.
The video
Related links
Rubens and Women continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 28 January 2024
OK, so what is the Solander Collection? In its own words:
Dedicated to the enjoyment and understanding of photographic art in all its forms, the Solander Collection has a special emphasis on international traditions, under-represented and forgotten artists, ethnic diversity, and women. The aim of the collection is to broaden the understanding of photography as inclusive and democratic.
Nearly all works are vintage (made within a few years of the negative) and include many rarities and ‘firsts’. It is a working collection, intended to be shared through exhibitions and publications. The collection is based in Oregon and California and is available to view by appointment, when it is not on public view. (About the Solander Collection)
It’s named after the Solander Box, the cloth-covered black box that museums use to store flat works in.
This exhibition
This exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery displays over 130 works from the Solander Collection. They’ve been selected to make visitors “look again at well-known works by major artists, alongside forgotten greats, regional champions and unknown artists”. Here are curators Graham Howe and Phillip Prodger explaining.
Keywords are:
“feminist photography…connections between things that don’t always get connected…more inclusive, more welcoming…never meant to be a chronology…pockets of thought, ways of seeing, ways of thinking of photography…you’re meant to feel how organic everything is and the connections that exist between different time periods…a wider view, a more diverse pluralistic approach to looking at photography…as rich and diverse and interesting as the people of the world…”
Does it match up?
Does this exhibition match up to these brave words about diversity and inclusiveness? Well, yes and no. On the No side:
Still chronological
Although the curators claim to be eschewing chronology, the exhibition is still very chronological in feel. It starts with works from the very dawn of photography in the 1840s, when people used photos as the basis for fine art and painted over prints, or used the camera lucida as an aid to drawing, or when subjects were chosen to match the subjects of fine art and sculpture, for example the striking male nude included here by Charles Nègre.
It starts with the usual early pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and Eadweard Muybridge. And then moves slowly forward through the decades of the nineteenth century before arriving at the explosion of Modernism around the time of the Great War.
So this is all reassuringly chronological and follows the same timeline as umpteen other history of photography exhibitions I’ve been to. The very fact that the curators feel compelled to call the exhibition ‘An alternative history‘ indicates how far they are from throwing off the shackles of chronology and arranging works by some other method. Why not call it ‘Selection from the Solander Collection’ and arrange the pieces in a genuinely non-linear, themed, or free associative manner?
Still very American-centric
Of the 130 or so pieces I counted 24 by American photographers, or about a fifth. There are also a lot from Europe, obvz, and then only a handful each from China, Japan, a few each from some south American countries, and about a dozen in total from Africa. So it may be more geographically diverse than your standard history of photography, but not as diverse as the actual world, the real world out there beyond Galleryland. In the real world the top half dozen nations are currently ordered by population thus:
China 1.5 billion
India 1.4 billion
Africa 1.3 billion
America 335 million
Indonesia 280 million
Pakistan 240 million
So, to be strictly ‘representative’, there ought to be four times as many photos by Chinese, Indian or African photographers as Americans. Another statistic is that America makes up 4.25% of the total world population so to be utterly ‘representative’ exhibitions of global art like this ought to have that amount of representation – whereas, of course, it’s nothing like that. America, with the imperial reach of its technological and commercial supremacy, is still the single most represented country.
The fact that Americans think it is an impressive achievement to feature handfuls of photographers from other countries tells you just how deep-grained American parochialism and chauvinism is, and how slavish the obeisance of British art and culture gatekeepers to American culture is that they unquestioningly, enthusiastically go along with America’s ongoing dominance.
Obscure photographers?
Well, yes, up to a point but maybe a third of the 100 exhibits were by famous photographers – the Victorians ones I’ve mentioned above, plus ‘legends’ like Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Rodchenko, and the fairly well known African studio photographer, Malick Sidibé.
On the Yes side:
More nationalities
Yes, there are works from Poland, Uzbekistan, Mali, Cameroon, as well as East Germany, Australian, Chile, Jamaica, Mexico, Singapore, Ukraine – nations you rarely see represented in any Anglo art exhibition. It does feel as if more nationalities are represented, albeit in nothing like the proportions they ought to be.
More obscure works
There are a number of anonymous works (particularly from the early period), odd or unexpected works like the studies using native peoples of John William Lindt; and, in the later part of the show, quite a few photos from what feel like obscure and overlooked photographers, from the under-represented countries mentioned above, Poland, Mali and so on.
The Western Gaze
More important/significant/telling is the curators’ inability to escape Anglocentric or Western notions of beauty or quality or the notion of ‘interest’ which they mention in the video. On my trips to Muslim countries, in my engagement with Chinese or Indian or Japanese art, I’ve realised that many other regions of the world have traditions and definitions and canons of ‘art’ utterly different, alien from, the Christian, white western ones I was brought up in.
Feminist curators and critics go on rather a lot about ‘the male gaze’. The phrase often appears on wall labels of numerous exhibitions. But I’m not sure I’ve read so much about ‘the Western gaze’, the way all western people bring very Western values and aesthetics and judgements to bear on all the art forms – music, sculpture, photography – we encounter outside our culture. Often it’s not even clear whether it is art, as we understand it; or some part of what we’d categorise as religious artifacts or cultural traditions or traditional practices.
The mindset whereby we want to take objects from their original location and categorise and label them and put them behind glass cases in antiseptic museums and galleries, that’s quite a Western way of thinking, specific to certain locations and times in Europe then America, and not necessarily fund in other cultures. (Rooms 1 to 5 at the British Museum, the long wood-panneled room on the right of the big central atrium, are devoted to describing the invention of the Western tradition of collecting, categorising and displaying precious artefacts. Visually, it’s the least sexy part of the British Museum but conceptually, maybe the most important: it’s an exploration of the origins of the entire concept of The Museum and The Collection.
In my opinion the curators of this exhibition have obviously made an effort, and have included works from a few more countries than you might expect; but they have come nowhere near throwing off the shackles of the Western Gaze and Western aesthetics, and so barely engaged with other ways of seeing.
The narrowing effect of photography
Then again, when it comes to photography, this may be because the technology and the form themselves such Western creations. Cameras, film and all the rest of the paraphernalia were invented, developed and improved in the advanced industrial nations of Europe and America (and Japan), and exported to other countries.
Maybe photography itself is an imperialist form, colonising the minds of everyone who uses it, co-opting them into modes of observation, alienation, categorisation and detached gazing, which are intrinsically Western.
Maybe to pick up a camera (or a phone with a camera in it i.e. pretty much every smartphone in the world) is to adopt an entirely Western technology and take on Western blinkers. Maybe, on this reading, it’s impossible for photography to be truly ‘diverse’ because, even though the person taking the photograph may be from Jakarta or Kinshasa or Shanghai, or an aborigine or native American, as soon as they pick up a camera they are infected, taken over, co-opted, colonised by the Western controlling, objective, alienating way of seeing. Just a thought…
Commentaries
Arguably, the single most important thing about this exhibition is the commentaries. The Solander Collection maintains a network of contributors in countries around the world, photographers but also critics and writers, and well over half (not all) of the photos in the exhibition are accompanied by fairly long wall labels, four or five thick paragraphs long, short essays –giving detailed information about how each photo was made, the photographer, the subject matter and so on.
if you read all of these commentaries it makes progressing around the two rooms which host the exhibition quite a slow business.
Selected works
So what did I like or what stood out for me? I’ll make a personal selection i.e. create my own networks of connections through the very varied corpus or body of work they’ve selected. To give it some structure I’ll base it on topic or subject matter.
African studio photography
Several African studio photographers are represented including the famous Malick Sidibé from Mali. Apparently the golden age of studio photography in West Africa was during the 1960s and early 70s i.e. the decade following independence from colonial rule.
Studio photographers used the conventions inherited from the West (the very idea of a studio; deeper than that, the very idea of a photograph) but gave it a style and swing, matching the newfound confidence of young urban types dressing according to new Africanised forms of fashion.
I’ve selected a pic by the less well-known Michel Kameni (1935 to 2020) from Cameroon. Apparently his photos are that bit less flamboyant than Sidibé’s, which you can see in the exhibition where examples of each guy’s work are place side by side. This example uses technical tricks to create a mirror image of the same woman, momentarily appearing as her own twin. Thus it is more mysterious and strange than Sidibé’s generally cool and confident but straightforward portraiture. What is the woman looking at us thinking? She’s a kind of African Mona Lisa.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813 to 1875) spent much of his own life in poverty and set out to document the lives of the poorest in society. But that’s not the most interesting thing here. The interesting thing is that this photo was constructed. Not just staged – as the girl in the foreground standing on a suspiciously clean street sweeping broom is – no, the entire backdrop, a waybill publicising an 1871 rally in Trafalgar Square against the match industry – was added to the photo of the girl. Or the photo of the girl was superimposed onto the background. Fascinating that right from the start photographs were subject to artificial intervention.
Match Girl, 1871 by Oscar Gustave Rejlander
Documentary photography
Meaning recording the lives and practices of ordinary people. Or as the Tate website puts it:
a style of photography that provides a straightforward and accurate representation of people, places, objects and events, and is often used in reportage.
This is an apparently simple documentary photograph taken by Emilio Amero (1901 to 1976) recording a moment in a wedding celebration in Mexico. But this is a carefully curated photograph so it has depths which become clearer the longer you look.
Obviously, the woman is beautiful with a beguiling spiritual beauty which becomes more entrancing the more you look. But her dress is wonderful too, particularly the concatenation of metal necklace, pendant and ear-rings. And the bracelets on her right wrist. How beautiful she looks! And then – this is all happening in the street, far different from an English wedding in a crabbed and constricted English church. This is happening outside and, you realise, there seem to be loads of people in the background, some milling about but a row of figures on the left sitting down. Are all of these people here just for her wedding? How wonderful and sociable! How communal and shared and happy it looks. Which makes the look of concentration and seriousness on the young bride’s face all the more sweet, touching, foreboding, intense and magical.
John William Lindt (1845 to 1926) was an interesting character (Wikipedia article). Born in Germany he travelled to Australia where he built a reputation as ‘a landscape and ethnographic photographer, early photojournalist, and portraitist’. This is one of 31 photos Lindt took of Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people in a book titled ‘Australian Aboriginals’ in 1874. There are all kinds of things going on in this charged image. Most obvious is the clash or tension between the staged background and props and the vivid presence of the woman and child. And cross-threading against that, the similarity to the great Christian image of the madonna and child which he’s posed them in.
The early photographers saw the technology as a way to copy, re-enact, reproduce the poses and subject matter of the fine arts, of the Old Masters of the European visual tradition. One of the most interesting things about photography is how long it took for its practitioners to realise it could represent the world in ways not limited to fine art precedents, it could depict the world as it is, and then the development by Modernist practitioners of realising photography was susceptible to techniques which broke with reality altogether to create forms unique to the technology, such as photomontage, solarisation and so on.
Young Woman with Sleeping Child, Clarence Valley (1870 to 1873) by John William Lindt
Feminist photography
The whole point of ‘feminist photography’ is it has many strands and many meanings. Here are two quotes which indicate what they have in common, namely the quest to overthrow gendered stereotypes and expectations.
Feminist photographers turned a medium used traditionally to reinforce gender norms into a powerful tool of transformation and emancipation, reimagining not only the possibilities of photographic self-expression, but also the kinds of subjects and environments thought to be deserving of aesthetic representation.
(Beyond the Male Gaze: Photography and Feminist Theory)
Photography became an important tool of second-wave feminism to critique the established visual conventions through which gender, sexual, racial, and class identities have been constructed.
(Women and photography)
This pair of photos by German photographer Annegret Soltau (b.1946) were made in 1975 and have no written commentary, leaving us free to interpret or make up our own meanings. I’d have thought the place to start is the way the myriad fine threads covering her face in the left-hand picture have been snapped in the one on the right. But it’s not as if this has been caused by her, for example, opening her eyes to symbolise awakening from her heteronormative slumber or opening her mouth to break the silence and express her truth etc. It’s less predictable than that. Something has snapped, but what has caused it, and what it means remain suggestive but mysterious.
Not exactly a happy couple, but the main thing about this photograph is that it was hand coloured, which explains the bright but somehow aged and faded tone of the pink shawl and yellow blouse. In one way this image links to the studio photos of the Africans, Malick Sidibé and Michel Kameni, displayed on the wall opposite – but it also links to the painted photo of the maharajah with tiger (see below) raising interesting questions about tradition and continuity.
‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you.’ Hard not to find these girls’ innocent mirth infectious. People from sometime in the 1970s and yet you feel an immediate deep contact with them, they could be a couple of girls giggling in gallery right next to me. Photography can do that, make unnerving links with people you know are long dead in places and cultures which have long ago vanished. If you’re feeling robust this can be wonderfully life-enhancing, expanding your sense of humanity. If you’re feeling tragic, it can give you a bad case of Weltshchmerz and loss. Où sont the giggling girls of yesteryear?
Two girls in Kingston, Jamaica by Unknown, possibly Ernesto Bavastro (1870s to 1880s)
Historic photography
This is the first known photograph of a Chinese police unit, which began serving in Hong Kong shortly after its establishment as a British colony in 1841. The tut-tutting wall label reminds us that colonial police forces like this were strictly hierarchical, with British officers in charge, then Indians who could serve as sergeants or inspectors, then local, in this case Chinese people who could serve as constables or sergeants but weren’t allowed to rise higher.
This wasn’t a one-off by the photographer, Lai Fong (1839 to 1890). Lai “created a body of work that laid the foundation for the art of photography in China”. The wall label optimistically declares the Lai “offered a window into the pictorial traditions, history and social structures of the late Qing dynasty” but it’s not obvious that there’s anything particularly Chinese about this photo: the staging of the men and the draped curtains to either side strongly suggest the European, semi-classical visual conventions. This is what I meant, above, when I said that, possibly, photography is an intrinsically imperialist form. If Lai indeed did lay the foundations for photography in China he appeared to do so by importing entirely Western visual conventions.
A Group of Hong Kong Native Police, 1870s, by Lai Fong
Humorous photography
This piece by Austrian artist Valie Export (b.1940) is the biggest thing in the show and more or less the only one which made me laugh. I suppose it’s straight satire, 1970s satire on the identification of women with housework, using the cut-up collage techniques which people like George Grosz pioneered in the 1920s. Obviously it’s taking the mickey out of a thousand renaissance paintings which show a Madonna holding the Christ child, satirically replacing the baby with a hoover, symbol of 1970s women’s greatest care/oppression.
It is an example of photomontage which wasn’t that represented in the show. I can imagine a section of it could have been devoted to this technique, alongside works by Grosz or John Heartfield or other photomontageurs from other traditions making political/satirical points.
Or, at the same time or alternatively, it’s also possibly an example of ‘sculptural photography’ because the silhouetted 70s woman and hoover aren’t laid flat on the surface of the painting but are attached so as to be raised and physically distinct from the backdrop. Which is why the thing requires not a flat frame but more like a glass case to cater for the depth of the effect created.
Anyway, the classical painting in the background is Botticelli’s ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate’ (1487).
Modernist photography
Double exposure became a standard Modernist device. Mark Neven DuMont (1892 to 1959) was born in Germany but emigrated to England. His friend, the avant-garde painter and provocateur George Grosz, was a leading exponent of photomontage so the curators reckon that’s where DuMont got the idea to experiment with it himself. The wall label tells us that photomontage – using two or more camera negatives to create a composite image – is as old as photography; but the striking make-up of the female model and the geometric shape of the palm tree give it a very modernist, Art Deco feel.
Patricia by Mark Neven DuMont (1930s)
If modernist visual forms (sculpture, painting, drawing as well as photography) have one thing in common it’s a love of sharp lines and geometric shapes. In contrast with gauzy impressionism, gloomy symbolism or scratchy expressionism, modernism loves slick lines and sharp angles. Almost everything in this photograph by the Brazilian photographer German Lorca (1922 to 2021) is precise and geometric: from the tiny regular squares of the paving to the straight seams of the concrete wall behind the two figures; the neatly pressed seams of the two men’s suits to the super-precise outline of the shadows behind them thrown by the hot tropical sun. It’s part of the hyper-modern effect that we don’t see the men’s face, which are turned away or hidden behind a newspaper, thus increasing the sense that this sidewalk drama is not about people but about the lines and energies of the modern city.
Looking for a job by German Lorca (1948)
Motion photography
Eadweard Muybridge (1830 to 1904) is the famous pioneer of ‘motion photography’ which caught the imagination of artists and scientists around the (developed) world. In his studio he set up series of cameras in the same position or staggered along the course of the action he wanted to record, and then fired them off at intervals, experimenting with doing it closer or further apart.
The result was his famous sets of photos showing successive stages in dramatic actions. Once he’d nailed the technique he went mad and, between 1884 and 1886, produced 781 new sequences! The art of fencing is peculiarly suited to this process because it involves dramatic gestures and physical postures while the body itself doesn’t actually change position very much.
Fencing by Eadweard Muybridge (1887) collotype
Naked photography
Lots of women artists and photographers in the 1970s and 80s thought it was a radical and subversive act to take their clothes off and stage happenings or interventions or performances featuring themselves naked, and record themselves for posterity. No doubt this was a radical, subversive and so on gesture in Russian-controlled communist Poland back in 1980. Forty-three years later it looks like a naked young woman in heels confronting a woman cop. What’s not to love?
It is a little disappointing, then, to learn that this scene never took place, but that the piece is in fact a photomontage, combining a shot Ewa Partum (b.1945) took of herself nude in the studio, superimposed on a straightforward snap of a cop in the street.
Döppelgängers always fascinate us and so we are taken by the dualistic oppositions suggested here, between the naked and the clothed, between authority and submission, between the ‘authenticity’ of the artistic naked woman with nothing to hide and the overdress authority figure encumbered with all the rigmarole of legal and physical repression (radio, handcuffs, baton, gun?)
(I appreciate this photo could also come under ‘feminist photography’ or ‘political photography’. But I’m enjoying making up frivolous headings and my own connections.)
Self and policewoman by Ewa Partum (1980)
Nature photography
Possibly my favourite photo of the 130 on display. I myself have taken lots of photos of trees, flowers, plants, lichen on stones and so on, but trees are special. I think trees are talking to us but so slowly, so very slowly, that we can’t slow down enough to hear what they’re saying. And so we chop them down and burn them, over vast areas, and will end up burning the entire planet in the process. Tant pis.
Meanwhile, this is just one of many studies the American photographer Paul Strand (1890 to 1976) took of driftwood, showing a profound feel for the shapes and twists and knots and gnarls which are created by this most beautiful of life forms. Although hyper-naturalistic in feel, capturing every fibre of the gnarled old wood, Strand’s studies like this at the same time suggest flowing zoomorphic forms and, if you’ve smoked a little dope, are gateways almost into another world, enabling the viewer to immerse themselves in the non-human world around us. Entirely naturalistic they are also like meditative states of mind.
Believe it or not this is a photo, taken about 1890 by an unknown photographer. It looks like a painting because the entire surface has been covered with a thick layer of pigment, so it is a painting: a photo-painting. Apparently this kind of embellishment or overwriting of a factual photographic base with an extravagantly idealised and Romantic backdrop and details was very common. It has a floridness we don’t associate with the European tradition and feels genuinely ‘other’.
This image links to the portrait of a couple from the 1970s shown above. Was this a distinctively Indian approach to photography? Did other cultures do the same kind of thing? Does it persist to this day? Be interesting to know more.
Maharaja with Tiger, possibly Duleep Singh, after a hunt (about 1890) vintage gelatin silver print with hand painting. Maker unknown (India)
Soviet photography
In the heyday of the 1920s and early 1930s Soviet artists made some of the boldest, most radical art of the century in the name of the new society they were building. Alexander Rodchenko (1891 to 1956) specialised in taking photos from experimental and unconventional angles. This was called rakurs in Russian. The most powerful, impactful of these is looking up at the subject from below. This conveys a string sense of dynamism and energy which, when combined or attached to an image of a youth, conveyed just the sense of forward-looking, visionary, striding-into-the-future energy which Stalin and his commissars wanted. As the commentator points out, it also makes the figure look monumental, a photographic equivalent of all those huge statues of working men and women striding boldly into the brave Soviet future which used to litter communist cityscapes.
Pioneer girl (1930) by Alexander Rodchenko
Street photography
Harold Cazneaux (1878 to 1953) became known for naturalistic studies of children, often taken outdoors. During and after the war there was an explosion of technical experimentation associated with modernism, plus a great surge in popular magazines which relied on evermore photos. Thus this photo was taken for a spread in The Home magazine. It’s what you could call soft modernism or popular modernism, in the sense that a) the focus is on the children’s faces, not the ostensible subject (the Punch and Judy show); b) it’s taken from a relatively low angle, a characteristic modernist trait, but not actually down on the ground. So it’s assimilated enough modernist tricks to be considered ‘modern’ and not rattle any cages.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Polemic – a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something
WHY are progressive publications like the Guardian and Independent and New Statesman, all the BBC TV and radio channels, and most other radio and TV stations, and so many British-based culture websites, so in thrall to, so subservient to, so obsessed by the culture and politics of the United States of America – this shameful, ailing, failing, racist, global capitalist, violent, imperialist monster nation?
WHY are we subjected every year to the obsessive coverage of American movies and movie stars and the Golden Globes and the Oscars? WHY are so many progressive liberals slaves to American films and TV? American movies are consumer capitalism in its purest, most exploitative form.
WHY does British TV create endless programmes which send chefs, comedians and pop stars off on road trips to the same old destinations across America, or yet another tired documentary about the art scene or music or street life of New York or California?
WHY the endless American voices on radio and TV, on the news and in the papers?
WHY is it impossible to have any programmes or discussions about the internet or social media or artificial intelligence or the economy or globalisation which are not dominated by American experts and American gurus? Are there no experts on these subjects in Britain?
SURELY the efforts of the progressive Left should be on REJECTING American influence – rejecting its violence and gun culture and political extremism and military imperialism and drug wars and grotesque prison population – rejecting American influence at every level and trying to sustain and extend traditional European values of social democracy?
Fuck America (a poem to be shouted through a megaphone on the model of Howl by Allen Ginsberg)
Fuck America with its screwed-up race relations, its black men shot on a weekly basis by its racist police.
Fuck America, proud possessor of the largest prison population in the world (2.2 million), disproportionately blacks and Hispanics.
Fuck America with its ridiculous war on drugs. President Nixon declared that war in 1971, has it succeeded in wiping out cocaine and heroin use?
Fuck America, world leader in opioid addiction.
Fuck America and its urban decay, entire cities like Detroit, Birmingham and Flint abandoned in smouldering ruins, urban wastelands, blighted generations.
Fuck America with its out-of-control gun culture, its high school massacres and the daily death toll among its feral street gangs.
Fuck America with its shameful healthcare system which condemns tens of millions of citizens to misery, unnecessary pain and early death.
Fuck America with its endless imperialist wars. The war in Afghanistan began in 2003 and is still ongoing. It is estimated to have cost $2 trillion and failed in all its objectives. Kabul welcomes back its Taliban rulers!
Fuck America with its hypertrophic consumer capitalism, its creation of entirely false needs and wants, its marketing of junk food, junk music and junk movies to screw money out of a glamour-dazzled population of moronic drones.
Fuck America and the ever-deeper penetration of our private lives and identities and activities by its creepy social media, phone and internet giants. Fuck Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google and their grotesque evasion of tax in their host countries.
Fuck American universities with their promotion of woke culture, their extreme and angry versions of feminism, black and gay rights, which originate in the uniquely exaggerated hypermasculinity of their absurd Hollywood macho stereotypes and the horrors of American slavery – an extreme and polarising culture war which has generated a litany of abusive terms – ‘pale, male and stale’, ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘white male rage’, ‘the male gaze’, ‘mansplaining’, ‘whitesplaining’ – which have not brought about a peaceful happy society but serve solely to fuel the toxic animosities between the embittered minorities of an increasingly fragmented society.
Fuck America with its rotten political culture, the paralysing political polarisation which regularly brings the entire government to the brink of collapse, with its Tea Party and its Moral Majority and its President Trump. Nations get the leaders they deserve and so America has awarded itself a bullshit artist, a dumb-ass, know-nothing, braggart, pussy-grabbing bully-boy. Well, they deserve him but he’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t vote for him. He doesn’t rule me. Like all other Americans, he can fuck off.
Donald Trump is a fitting leader, emblem and symbols of a bloated, decadent, failing state.
So WHY ON EARTH are so many ‘progressive’ media outlets, artists, writers and gallery curators so in thrall to this monstrous, corrupt, violent and immoral rotting empire?
References
The American War on Terror
Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, have stated the total costs of the Iraq War on the US economy will be three trillion dollars and possibly more, in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War published in March 2008. This estimate does not include the cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq. (Financial cost of the Iraq War)
Between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. (Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars)
The cost of nearly 18 years of war in Afghanistan will amount to more than $2 trillion. Was the money well spent? There is little to show for it. The Taliban control much of the country. Afghanistan remains one of the world’s largest sources of refugees and migrants. More than 2,400 American soldiers and more than 38,000 Afghan civilians have died. (What Did the U.S. Get for $2 trillion in Afghanistan?)
American Torture
‘After the U.S. dismissed United Nations concerns about torture in 2006, one UK judge observed, “America’s idea of what is torture … does not appear to coincide with that of most civilized nations.”‘ (Torture and the United States)
American Drone Attacks
The Intercept magazine reported, ‘Between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes [in northeastern Afghanistan] killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.’
During President Obama’s presidency, the use of drone strikes dramatically increased compared to their use under the Bush administration. This was the unforeseen result of Obama’s election pledges not to risk US servicemen’s lives, to reduce the costs of America’s terror wars, and to be more effective.
The United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population but houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners, some 2.2 million prisoners, 60% of them black or Hispanic, giving it the highest incarceration rate, per head, of any country in the world. The Land of the Free is more accurately described as the Land of the Locked-Up. (Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries)
‘The gun culture of the United States can be considered unique among developed countries in terms of the large number of firearms owned by civilians, generally permissive regulations, and high levels of gun violence.’ (Gun culture in the United States)
Comparing deaths from terrorist attack with deaths from Americans shooting each other (and themselves)
‘For every one American killed by an act of terror in the United States or abroad in 2014, more than 1,049 died because of guns. Using numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that from 2001 to 2014, 440,095 people died by firearms on US soil… This data covered all manners of death, including homicide, accident and suicide. According to the US State Department, the number of US citizens killed overseas as a result of incidents of terrorism from 2001 to 2014 was 369. In addition, we compiled all terrorism incidents inside the United States and found that between 2001 and 2014, there were 3,043 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism. This brings the total to 3,412.’
‘About 44 million people in this country have no health insurance, and another 38 million have inadequate health insurance. This means that nearly one-third of Americans face each day without the security of knowing that, if and when they need it, medical care is available to them and their families.’ (Healthcare crisis)
‘Americans spend twice per capita what France spends on health care, but their life expectancy is four years shorter, their rates of maternal and infant death are almost twice as high, and, unlike the French, Americans leave 30 million people uninsured. The amount Americans spend unnecessarily on health care weighs more heavily on their economy, Case and Deaton write, than the Versailles Treaty reparations did on Germany’s in the 1920s.’ (Left Behind by Helen Epstein)
So WHY are British curators so slavishly in thrall to American painters, sculptures, artists, photographers, novelists, playwrights and – above all – film-makers?
Because they’re so much richer, more glamorous, more fun and more successful than the handful of British artists depicting the gloomy, shabby British scene?
In my experience, British film and documentary makers, writers and commentators, artists and curators, are all far more familiar with the geography, look and feel and issues and restaurants of New York and Los Angeles than they are with Nottingham or Luton.
Here’s an anecdote:
In the week commencing Monday 20 February 2017 I was listening to radio 4’s World At One News which was doing yet another item about Brexit. The presenter, Martha Kearney, introduced a piece from Middlesbrough, where a reporter had gone to interview people because it had one of the highest Leave voters in the country. Anyway, Kearney introduced Middlesbrough as being in the North-West of England. Then we listened to the piece. But when we came back to Kearney 3 minutes later, she made a hurried apology. She explained that she should, of course, have said that Middlesbrough is in the North-East of England
Think about it for a moment. The researcher who researched the piece and wrote the link to it must have thought Middlesbrough is in the North-West of England. Any sub-editor who reviewed and checked the piece must have thought Middlesbrough is in the North-West. The editor of the whole programme presumably had sight of the piece and its link before approving it and so also thought that Middlesbrough is in the North-West of England. And then Kearney read the link out live on air and didn’t notice anything wrong, until – during the broadcast of the actual item – someone somewhere finally realised they’d made a mistake. Martha Kearney also thought Middlesbrough is in the North-West of England.
So nobody working on one of Radio 4’s flagship news programmes knows where in England Middlesbrough is.
How do people in Middlesbrough feel about this? Do you think it confirms everything they already believe about Londoners and the people in charge of everything?
But there’s a sweet coda to this story. The following week, on 26 February 2017 the 89th Academy Awards ceremony was held in Los Angeles. There was an embarrassing cock-up over the announcement of the Best Picture Award, with host Warren Beatty initially reading out the wrong result (saying La La Land had won, when it was in fact Moonlight).
The point is that the following Monday, 27 February, Radio 4’s World At One had an item on the story and who did they get to talk about it? Martha Kearney! And why? Because Martha just happened to have been attending the Oscars ceremony and was sitting in the audience when the cock-up happened. Why? Because Martha’s husband works in films (inevitably) and was an executive producer of the Academy Awards nominated short documentary Watani: My Homeland (about Syrian refugees, naturally).
And Martha’s background?
Martha Kearney was brought up in an academic environment; her father, the historian Hugh Kearney, taught first at Sussex and later at Edinburgh universities. She was educated at St Joseph’s Catholic School, Burgess Hill, before attending the independent Brighton and Hove High School and completing her secondary education at George Watson’s Ladies College in Edinburgh (a private school with annual fees of £13,170.) From 1976 to 1980 she read classics at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
So: private school-educated BBC presenter Martha Kearney knows more about the Oscars and Los Angeles and the plight of Syrian refugees than she does about the geography of her own country.
For me this little nexus of events neatly crystalises the idea of a metropolitan, cultural and media élite. It combines an upper-middle-class, university-and-private school milieu – exactly the milieu John Gray and other analysts highlight as providing the core vote for the modern urban bourgeois Labour Party – with an everso earnest concern for fashionable ‘issues’ (Syrian refugees), a slavish adulation of American culture and awards and glamour and dazzle, and a chronic ignorance about the lives and experiences of people in the poorer provincial parts of her own country.
To summarise: in my opinion the British cultural élite’s slavish adulation of American life and values is intimately entwined with its ignorance of, and contempt for, the lives and opinions of the mass of their own countrymen and woman, and is a form of political and cultural betrayal.
Importing woke culture which is not appropriate to Britain
Obviously Britain has its own racism and sexism and homophobia which need to be addressed, but I want to make three points:
1. Britain is not America The two countries have very, very different histories. The history of American slavery, intrinsic to the development of the whole country and not abolished until 1865 and at the cost of one of the bloodiest wars of all time, is not the same as the history of black people in this country, who only began to arrive in significant numbers after the Second World War. The histories of masculinity and femininity in America were influenced after the war by the gross stereotypes promoted by Hollywood and American advertising and TV (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe). These are not the same as the images of masculinity and femininity you find in British movies or popular of the same period (Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Sylvia Sim).
These are just a handful of ways in which eliding the histories of these two very different countries leads to completely misleading results.
I’m not saying sexism, racism and homophobia don’t exist in Britain, Good God no. I’m trying to emphasise that addressing issues like sexism and racism and homophobia in Britain requires a detailed and accurate study of the specifically British circumstances under which they developed.
Trying to solve British problems with American solutions won’t work. Describing the British situation with American terminology won’t work. Which brings me to my second point:
2. American rhetoric inflames The wholesale importing of the extreme, angry and divisive woke rhetoric which has been invented and perfected on American university campuses inflames the situation in Britain without addressing the specifically British nature and the specifically British history of the problems.
3. Eliding American problems with British problems, and using American terminology and American political tropes to describe British history, British situations and British social problems leads inevitably to simplifying and stereotypingthese problems.
For British feminists to say all British men in positions of power are like Harvey Weinstein is like me saying all women drivers are rubbish. It’s just a stupid stereotype. It doesn’t name names, or gather evidence, or begin court proceedings, or gain convictions, or lobby politicians, or draft legislation, or pass Acts of Parliament to address the issue. It’s just generalised abuse, and one more contribution to the sewer of toxic abuse which all public and political discourse is turning into, thanks to American social media.
Importing American social problems and American political rhetoric and American toxic abuse into the specifically British arena is not helping – it is only exacerbating the fragmentation of British society into an ever-growing number of permanently angry and aggrieved constituencies, a situation which is already at a toxic level in America, and getting steadily worse here.
What have all the efforts of a million woke American academics and writers and actors and film-makers and artists and photographers and feminists and black activists and LGBT+ campaigners led up to? A peaceful, liberated and enlightened land? No. To President Donald Trump.
WHY on earth would anyone think this is a culture to be touched with a long barge pole while wearing a hazchem suit, let alone imported wholesale and gleefully celebrated?
In my opinion it’s like importing the plague and saying, ‘Well they have it in America: we ought to have it here.’
Advertising posters on the tube today 27/2/2020
TINA: The Tina Turner musical
THE LION KING musical
9 TO 5 the musical
THE BOOK OF MORMON musical
THRILLER the musical
WICKED the musical
PRETTY WOMAN the musical
TATE membership, promoted by an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn
Which is why, in this context and amid this company, when the curators of the Masculinities exhibition at the Barbican choose to promote it with a photo of a black man they may think they’re being radical and diverse: but all I notice is that their poster is featuring one more American man photographed by an American photographer to promote an exhibition stuffed with American cultural products, which takes its place alongside all the other American cultural imports which saturate our culture.
Think I’m exaggerating?
Recent British exhibitions celebrating American artists and photographers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Taliban warriors by Thomas Dworzak
Beirut fighters by Fouad Elkoury
Israeli soldiers by Adi Nes
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)
American, German and British soldiers by Wolfgang Tillmans
American cowboys by Collier Schorr
a film by Isaac Julien about American cowboys, The Long Road to Mazatlan
American photographer Sam Contis’s photos of a liberal arts college in the mid-West
American photographer Catherine Opie’s photos of American footballers
American artist Andy Warhol’s movies of male fashion models
American photographer Herb Ritt’s photos of buff Hollywood garage attendants
American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger and female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon
Akram Zaatari’s photos of Middle Eastern weightlifters
100 black and white photos of himself wearing y-fronts taken from all angles by Canadian transmasculine performance artist and bodybuilder Cassils
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bas Jan Ader (Dutch)
Laurie Anderson (USA)
Kenneth Anger (USA)
Liz Johnson Artur (Ghanaian-Russian)
Knut Åsdam (Norway)
Richard Avedon (USA)
Aneta Bartos (Polish-American)
Richard Billingham (UK)
Cassils (Canada)
Sam Contis (USA)
John Coplans (UK emigrated to USA)
Jeremy Deller (UK)
Rineke Dijkstra (Holland)
George Dureau (USA)
Thomas Dworzak (Germany)
Hans Eijkelboom (Holland)
Fouad Elkoury (Lebanon)
Hal Fischer (USA)
Samuel Fosso (Cameroon)
Anna Fox (UK)
Masahisa Fukase (Japan)
Sunil Gupta (India)
Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola)
Peter Hujar (USA)
Isaac Julien (UK)
Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigeria)
Karen Knorr (German-American)
Deana Lawson (USA)
Hilary Lloyd (UK)
Robert Mapplethorpe (USA)
Peter Marlow (UK)
Ana Mendieta (Cuba, moved to New York)
Annette Messager (France)
Duane Michals (USA)
Tracey Moffatt (Australia)
Andrew Moisey (USA)
Richard Mosse (Ireland)
Adi Nes (Israeli)
Catherine Opie (USA)
Elle Pérez (USA)
Herb Ritts (USA)
Kalen Na’il Roach (USA)
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (USA)
Collier Schorr (USA)
Clare Strand (UK)
Mikhael Subotzky (South Africa)
Larry Sultan (USA)
Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany)
Hank Willis Thomas (USA)
Piotr Uklański (Polish-American)
Andy Warhol (USA)
Karlheinz Weinberger (Switzerland)
Marianne Wex (Germany)
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:
just how polarised American society has become
how a great deal of this polarisation is in the realm of culture
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.
According to the press release, Cindy Sherman is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. This is a massive retrospective of Sherman’s entire career, from the mid-1970s to the present day. It includes over 190 works from international public and private collections, some of them never seen in public before, some of them reunited after decades apart.
What is Sherman famous for? For dressing up as fictional characters and types, and taking photos of herself.
She stumbled across the idea as an art student in the mid-1970s and – in an impressive example of an artist hitting a style, establishing a brand, and then sticking to it through thick and thin – she has followed the same practice for the past 45 years.
Untitled Film Still #21 by Cindy Sherman (1978) Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Chronological order
The exhibition is arranged in a straightforward chronological order allowing you to see how Sherman’s art has evolved and developed from the mid-1970s to today. It opens with rarely exhibited photographs and films created while she was still an art student at the State University College at Buffalo from 1972 to 1976.
One early set, from 1976, is titled Unhappy Hooker where Sherman depicts herself as a prostitute waiting for a client.
In Murder Mystery (also 1976) she made a series of black-and-white photos of herself, in each one dressed up in the outfit of a character from a fictional murder mystery play (which she herself wrote) – the butler, the waitress, the rich old lady, the detective etc. Note the stereotyping of the characters.
In November 1976, shortly after she graduated from art school, Sherman created a series titled Cover Girl, in which she takes the covers of five fashion or ‘women’s’ magazines (Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Family Circle, Redbook and Mademoiselle), and transposes her own face (generally pulling a yucky, silly expression) onto the face of the glamour model on the cover. Each work accomplishes the transformation from sensible to satirical in three images, and the five sets of three images are displayed here together for the first time since that heady summer of 76!
In Line-Up (1977) made just after she graduated and just before she moved to New York City, there are thirty-five black and white photos, in each of which Sherman appears, on her own, dressed in costume with make-up, playing thirty-five different characters.
So right from the beginning we can see the patterns emerging in Sherman’s work which will hold true for the rest of her career:
She works in projects or series, all addressing a particular theme or taking a similar approach
All the photos are of herself. There is never anyone else in the photos. But she is always ‘in character’, playing a role.
None of her photos has ever had a title. They are all called Untitled and then given a number. Thus the final photo in the exhibition is named Untitled #549. (They may have brackets added after the number indicating the particular series the image belongs to.) One of the intentions of this is to ‘universalize the particular’, and leave the images open to the widest possible range of interpretations by the viewer.
Untitled Film Stills
Her breakthrough piece was Untitled Film Stills. Building on the previous series but going one big aesthetic step further, Untitled Film Stills is a series of 70 black-and-white photos which Sherman started creating soon after she arrived in New York City in 1977, and which, when they were exhibited, made her reputation. They are also – to give away the plot – in my opinion, by far and away the best thing in the exhibition.
They’re fairly small, portrait-shaped prints, about 18 inches high by a foot wide. In each of them Sherman dresses and poses as a completely different character. So that’s 70 female characters going about their business in the big bad city. Each of the figures is caught in different setting, in apartments, out on the street, in a suburban garden, several appear to be set in a swimming pool.
If there’s a consistent ‘look’ to the photos it derives from 1950s and 60s Hollywood – from film noir, B-movies and, maybe, from European art-house films. Some could be papparazzi shots of unknown celebs. The most obvious vibe they emit is a sense of suppressed anxiety or, in some of the long lens photos of blurred figures, a sense of mystery. Though all that makes them sounds too dark and indoors-y. Many of the best ones are outdoors or in full sunlight.
Untitled Film Still #7 by Cindy Sherman (1978) Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
A number of things make them great. As compositions, they are all top quality, imaginatively posed, full of detail and interest.
But the really obvious thing is how dramatic they are. They are like stills from a wider drama. You feel the presence of other people just out of the shot, who are about to walk in and say or do something, or else have just left the frame after saying something explosive. They suggest all kinds of possible backstories – who where what why how? – and prompt an incredibly rich response in the viewer, making you imagine all kinds of films and stories and plots of which these are decisive moments and fragments. Each one is like a short story in itself.
The Untitled Film Stills are given a room to themselves early on in the show and – in my humble opinion – it is by far the best room, the one I came back to at the end, once I’d reviewed the entire exhibition, and sat on the bench conveniently provided for visitors, and let my eye wander over the images and my mind – not exactly work out a complete story for each image – but respond to the mood and vibe and possibilities contained in each one.
This idea, of a kind of photo pregnant with meaning, struck me as a wonderful achievement. And doing them as a set hugely contributes to the cumulative effect, creating the sense of an entire world set in this one but, because of the demonstrably false and made-up actor Cindy Sherman featuring centre stage in each photo, both this world and vividly artificial, fake and created.
Bigger
From this point onwards, the remaining eight or so rooms show three things happening to Sherman’s work over the succeeding decades:
the photos go from black and white to colour
they get bigger and bigger until, soon they are four or five foor tall, in the work from the 1990s they are horribly, oppressively huge and, in the final room, have become photo-murals covering entire walls
and, as a result, I felt that – as the photos became more technically adroit in colour and saturation, and evermore grandiose in size – the viewer, and the viewer’s imagination, gets progressively more and more squeezed out of the photos and, eventually, instead of leaning forward and entering her imaginative world, I felt I was cowering backwards and being harangued
Later series
Each of the remaining rooms hangs samples from Sherman’s major series, namely:
Rear Screen Projections (1980 to 1981)
The first series she made in colour, the Rear Screen Projections are also noticeably larger than the Film Stills, about five times bigger. The camera is closer up to her face, which is more subtly made-up to create different characters. The commentary says this greater close-up creates more psychological depth, but I felt there was more imaginative depth in the Untitled Film Stills.
Centrefolds (1981)
In the new larger size, and in the new full colour, Centrefolds are cast in a wide, landscape format which is deliberately reminiscent of the centrefolds of men’s magazines i.e. soft porn. But instead of scantily-clad women arranged to titillate ‘the male gaze’, Sherman’s personas look ill at ease and troubled, women in trouble or some kind of extreme situation. Though referencing magazine culture, some of the images very clearly derive from the aesthetic of film posters or the kind of dramatic stills used to promote movies.
Untitled #92 by Cindy Sherman (1981) Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Pink Robes (1982)
A series of big colour photos in which Sherman dresses as an artist’s or photographer’s model, who wraps herself in a pink robe between shots. So the idea is these are off-the-cuff casual moments in a photographer’s studio, with Sherman posing as the bored model.
For the first time in these photos Sherman stares directly at the camera, which led some critics to get over-excited about how we were ‘seeing the real Cindy Sherman for the first time’! This strikes me as taking a strikingly naive view of what constitutes ‘reality’.
Fashion (1983)
In 1983 Sherman was commissioned by New York boutique owner Dianne Benson to produce advertising images to promote clothes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. Sherman responded with photos of herself – in different personas – wearing the clothes alright, but in characters which are obviously abject and neurotic. This was intended as a satirical critique of the shallow superficiality of the fashion world.
The trouble is you cannot satirise fashion. There’s nothing you can say about the frivolity and shallowness of the fashion world which the inhabitants of the fashion world are not completely aware of, but still love. Thus the client loved the photos, so new, so original daaahling.
Vogue Paris (1984)
Sherman received another fashion commission from a French fashion house to provide photos for a shoot for Vogue Paris. She created images of herself made-up to be the models, again wearing the designer clothes alright, but again shooting them in a subversive style, making her look deliberately gawky, clumsy and unhappy. The client loved them. And a glance at her Wikipedia article shows that she has had a long and extensive engagement with the world of fashion, receiving numerous further commissions, designing jewellery and other accessories etc. ‘There’s nothing you can say about the frivolity and shallowness of the fashion world which…’
Fairy Tales (1985)
In this series Sherman dresses up as ‘types’ from fairy tales, in enormous colour photos, heavily made-up to create some really aggressive, scary images. The lighting is (inevitably) more dark and in most of these shots, the settings looking like the forests and gravelly soil of the Germanic Grimm stories – a visual departure for Sherman most of whose photos – you realise – have been set in city streets or urban interiors. In some of them the Sherman personas looking like they’re undergoing real physical ordeals.
Untitled #153 by Cindy Sherman (1985) Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
History Portraits (1988 to 1990)
the fairy tale series represents a conscious departure from the urban setting of most of her photos hitherto,
At the end of the 1980s Sherman took a conscious break from dissecting / analysing / subverting contemporary culture and immersed herself in the world of Old Master paintings, including a trip to Rome to see the real thing.
The result was a series of thirty elaborately staged, huge, richly coloured photos in which Sherman appears in a range of costumes and uses prosthetic noses, breasts and other accessories to drastically change her appearance and parody the appearance of male and female royalty and aristocrats, even a madonna and child.
Untitled Film Still #216 by Cindy Sherman, 1989. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
I didn’t like these at all. I thought they were a bad joke in poor taste. I thought they showed a complete lack of empathy with the Middle Ages, Renaissance or Old Master painting. You can’t really dress them up as a feminist ‘reclamation’ of the images as – unusually – half the images are of Sherman dressing up as late medieval men.
Sex Pictures (1992)
In a room by themselves – with a warning that it contains ‘adult content’ – is a set of huge, garishly coloured and disturbing photos of what look like plastic mannequins, cut up and reassembled to emphasise their (generally female) genitals, which – presumably – were specially created for these photos. The general aim is to produce disturbingly transgressive rewrites of porn tropes, and the handful of massive images here certainly are disgusting, showing cobbled-together bits and pieces of fake plastic human bodies, featuring not only vulvas but anuses, penises made of plastic, in one image a string of sausage-like turds proceeding from what looks like a vulva.
As far as I can see, these are the only series in which she does not appear. A very great deal has been written about these pictures, by critics who, apparently, do not understand what pornography is or who it is for. By which I mean they imagine that disassembling the human body into surreal conglomerates of chopped up pieces will act as a once and for all, decisive ‘subversion’ and undermining of the male gaze and pornographic imagery.
How pitifully, it seems to me, they underestimate the baseness of human nature, and woefully underestimate the ubiquitous power of pornography. A few repellent art photos change nothing, nothing at all.
Office Killer (1997)
In the later 1990s Sherman got involved in making films, directing an art movie titled Office Killer released in 1997. One critic called it ‘sadly inept’, others ‘crude’ and ‘laugh-free’. Having produced and directed TV myself, I know there is a world of difference between taking one inspired photo and creating a plausible and effective series of moving shots.
Clowns (2003 to 2004)
Sherman dresses up as a variety of clown types. Obviously all looking miserable and forlorn. The sad reality behind the clown strikes me as being one of the more exhausted, clichéd tropes of all time.
Society Portraits (2008)
A series satirising rich women in high society. The ageing female characters created in these huge colour photos are all using make-up and cosmetics to try and mask the ageing process and, failing in that, emphasise their wealth via fashionable dresses, expensive accessories and to-die-for houses.
Untitled #466 by Cindy Sherman (2008) Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Presumably these are meaningful if you in any way read about, or are aware of, rich American society ladies – from magazines and high society and gossip columns in newspapers, or from the publicity surrounding fashion houses, or at the openings of new operas or plays or art exhibitions at the Met or New York’s fashionable art galleries. Not engaging with any of this content or people, I saw them less as satire than fictionalised portraits of a social type I’ve been aware of for decades – the swank American millionaire wife – who has been lampooned and satirised for ages, going back to the so-called Gilded Age (1870s to 1900) and before.
Balenciaga (2008)
Balenciaga is a luxury fashion house, originally from Spain. Echoing her repeated engagement with the world of fashion, and mixing it with the ageing heroines of Society Portraits, Sherman created a series of six enormous, colour digital photos of herself playing the character of an ageing fashion doyenne, a bit like Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. Like I say, this is maybe hilarious or relevant if you give a damn about the world of high fashion or rich-bitch society women – but I don’t.
Untitled #462 by Cindy Sherman (2008) Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Chanel (2012)
Sherman was then commissioned by the perfumier Chanel to record some of their dresses and outfits. Sherman chose to create her biggest works to date, a set of absolutely enormous, wall-sized photos depicting more-than-life-sized women standing alone in enormous landscapes. On closer inspection these landscapes appear to have been either painted in, or digitally altered to have a painterly feel. The landscapes were from both Iceland and the isle of Capri, and I found them, artistically, the most interesting part of the compositions.
Flappers (2016 to 2018)
Sherman dresses up as flappers from the 1920s.
Untitled #574 by Cindy Sherman (2016) Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
For completists
If you are a Sherman completist then I can imagine you will be thrilled by the digital version on display here of A Cindy Book, a private album of family photographs that Sherman began compiling when she was eight or nine-years-old, which has never been seen before, and which reveals an early fascination with her own changing appearance.
Similarly, one whole room (in fact it’s the ‘transition’ space between the galleries at the front and the galleries at the back of the building) has been given over to a recreation of Sherman’s studio in New York, with wall-sized photos of her bookshelves, posters and collections of photos torn from glamour magazines and pinned to the wall, and shelves and cupboards full of masks and make-up and prosthetic attachments – all designed to provide ‘an unprecedented insight into the artist’s working processes.’
During the recent big exhibition at the NPG of photos by Martin Parr (which I found much more interesting and fun than Sherman) this space was converted into a working model of a transport caff which actually sold hot tea and cake. It would be funny if, for every exhibition they hold in these galleries, the National Portrait Gallery created a themed eaterie. A Giacometti pizzeria would have been good – imagine how thin the crusts would have been! Or a Cézanne café, with French peasants smoking pipes and playing cards, and a view of Mont Saint Victoire in the distance…
Thoughts
First of all, it is a striking achievement to have made a career out of what is basically one idea.
This is because Sherman has been able to come up with a succession of subjects and topics to each of which she can apply her distinctive, dressing-up approach and each of which are susceptible to rich and stimulating critical interpretation.
Then there’s the quality of the photographs themselves. The wall labels don’t go into as much detail about this as I’d like, but you get the impression that, as digital photography has evolved over the past forty years, Sherman has kept well abreast of all the developments and been able to incorporate each new wave of technology into her trademark concept. The sheer size of prints which modern digital photography enables, with pinpoint focus at every part of the image, becoming the most obvious one, as the exhibition progresses.
To keep mining the same vein and consistently coming up with apparently new and innovative variations on more or less the same theme deserves respect, especially in the shark pool which is the New York art scene.
However, at about this point questions of personal taste begin to intrude. All of the series certainly contained at least several highly impactful and striking photographs. And, unlike me, readers of this post may well like the fairy tale or Old Master or Flapper photos more than the earlier ones. Different people will have different responses.
All I can say is that, as the exhibition advanced through the decades and series, I was less and less engaged and attracted, and slowly became repelled by the sheer size and garish colouring of some of the photos. Way before the porn room I was actively shrinking from these big, shouty images, and I had certainly had enough by the end, and was relieved when I got to the final room with its overpowering wall-sized murals of vague landscapes with a modern woman plonked in front of them. Phew. Duty done, I could stroll back to the early room and enjoy again the marvelous Untitled Film Stills.
As well as feeling more and more repelled by the images, I also quickly disliked the ideas and subjects. Satirising the world of New York fashion, while making a lot of money from working within the world of New York fashion, just struck me as hypocritical and typically… American. If you are American, an American artist or photographer or film-maker, it appears to be very difficult to escape from the vast money-making machine which is American culture.
When it came to the society photos, taking the mickey out of vain, rich, wrinkly old American millionairesses is something I grew up watching the great Alan Whicker do on his TV documentaries back in the 1970s. It just seemed such a very…. old idea.
And lampooning Old Master paintings seemed to me a rather pointless thing to do, particularly when it’s done in such a grim and humourless way. Strapping on a fake plastic boob and spending hours dressing up to look like a madonna and child seemed a peculiarly futile exercise. If you’re going to mock them at least be funny, in the manner of Monty Python or the Horrible Histories. Just pointing out that the real-life kings and queens of that time were probably not as smooth-skinned and luminously handsome as their portraitists depicted them strikes me as being, well, not the most original or interesting idea.
The notes to the porn room made the point for me that her photos heavily referenced the disturbing sexualised mannequins the Surrealist sculptor Hans Bellmer was making back in the 1930s. Well, quite.
The curators suggest that Sherman’s work has never been more relevant than here and now, in the age of the selfie and the internet and Instagram and social media – but I disagree.
Watching my teenage kids and their friends has shown me that all my ideas about images and how they should and shouldn’t be used, assessed and consumed, belong in the Stone Age. The speed and sophistication of modern teenagers’ attitudes to movies, TV shows, stills, photos, ads and selfies is light years ahead of the kind of mainstream, dad culture represented by this exhibition.
For this exhibition – like most of the exhibitions I go to – was mostly populated by mums and dads, mostly filled, as usual, with grey-haired, older, white people, the majority of them women. No doubt some of the visitors have done courses in Critical Theory and Feminist Studies and are conversant with the numberless theories of gender and identity and performance which have been generated over the past fifty years, all of which can be liberally applied to Sherman’s work.
But a) Cindy Sherman’s basic idea – dressing up as ‘characters’ contemporary or historical or from fairy tales, and photographing herself – seems so old-fashioned, so pre-digital, as to be sweet and naive.
And b) I didn’t really believe anything I read in the wall labels about gender and identity and subverting this or that stereotype. In most of the photos she looks like a woman. When she was a young woman, she looks like a young woman, sometimes dressed and posed as a noticeably attractive young woman, pink towel about to fall off her lissom body as in a Kenny Everett sketch.
As she’s grown older, Sherman’s subjects have changed and, for example, the series of photos depicting fictional American women using cosmetics to appear younger than they are… well… that’s actually what millions of ageing American women do, isn’t it? I didn’t see that it was subverting any stereotypes. On the contrary, I thought almost all of her images reinforced the stereotypes so actively produced and disseminated by the mainstream American bubblegum culture which she so constantly refers to (all those compositions which look like scenes from movies) or which she has herself, personally, contributed to (all those fashion shoots).
For me the Untitled Film Stills series was the best series. It was the most modest in aim and so, somehow, the most effective. It had the most mystery and each one of the shots created an imaginative space for the viewer to inhabit and populate as they wished.
You may well disagree and find her later work funny or disturbing or inspiring or bitingly satirical, and I can see how different people – old and young, gay and straight, men or women – might get very different things from her work.
The one thing which is unquestionably true is that this is as definitive and complete an overview of a figure many critics refer to as ‘one of the most important and influential artists of our time’ (the Observer) as we are likely to see in our lifetimes.
So if you want to find out for yourself whether you like some, all, or none of Cindy Sherman’s work, you should definitely go along and check it out for yourself.
Video
This short video by Divento.com gives a good feel for the variety and layout of the exhibition.
Related links
Cindy Sherman continues at the National Portrait Gallery until 15 September 2019
Books & Boots 