Ryan McGinley – Oliver (2005)

With how much I take the piss out of him, it would be easy for someone to conclude that I hold McGinley’s work in contempt.

It’s altogether more complicated than that–and the above image has shifted my opinion some.

He works primarily in color–and has a damn solid eye for it. For all that appears to be going on above and all that those appearance suggest and elide w/r/t what happened prior to this/after this moment, the more I look at it the more I’m convinced that the instinct behind this is the orange polish on her toe nails outset against the tiles.

…

McGinley is not just associated with color work–he work is entirely preoccupied with youth–which leads to a potent and frequent criticism of his work as an uncritical, inherently ageist and cliche celebration/commodification of younger being better if not at least more attractive.

It’s a critical tact with which I agree. However, I think my mixed feelings on his work up to this juncture, have more to do with the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever really felt the criticism is necessarily supported by the work and more that the work seemingly goes out of its way not to acknowledge that such a reading is possible.

It’s something that has always bugged the fuck out of me. I mean: I’ve always read it as McGinley’s work being about immediacy; photography is a medium heavily steeped in immediacy so what would you put in front of your camera if you wanted to focus laser-like on immediacy? What’s more immediate than being young?

However knee-jerk, it makes sense conceptually. But it feels to my as if an artist can grasp that, then he ought to also be able to preempt an obvious criticism by varying the work in such a way so as to complicate facile criticisms. And that just isn’t the case.

My reaction has always been–we’ll that’s lazy/sloppy. Except neither of those words really fit the work.

…

I also struggle with his editing. Once you’re attuned to his obsession with immediacy, his work clearly turns a very tight orbit around that fixed point. Beyond being in color, his photos/images almost always feature motion–which can run a gamut from 2011′s phenom Parakeets to pieces that seem haphazardly composed, poorly focused and motivated by capturing an unrepeatable moment.

That’s the other thing that I’ve had trouble working out–there are scads of photographers doing more groundbreaking things with color. I can’t think of anyone working with a body of work as thoroughly singular as McGinley. (And by that I was brought up that one of the things that makes a work of art such is a nearly impossible degree of difficulty in recreating it by a similarly able technician–for as much as I loathe the unrefined aspects of his work–I would not want to be tasked with recreating it.)

…

Back to the orange toenails for a minute: if you buy that the work hinges on immediacy then perhaps color is largely the impetus for the work–since working via photography and putting young people in front of your lens pretty much ensures the result will suggest something about immediacy of experience. (It also reconciles a lot more of the otherwise questionable editing choices.)

…

I recently encountered 2005′s Kiss Explosion for the first time. It’s almost certainly that prank where you take a swig of soda and then kiss someone while spitting the liquid out. The image definitely evokes that but it also evokes, well, snowballing. (It’s most likely not snowballing as that would be rather a lot of semen, methinks.)

And it occurred to me that perhaps the criticism about deification of youth is camouflage.. or perhaps, stated a better: a red herring?

…

It feels to me as if sex is always hovering just beyond the periphery of the work. Yet, when it does enter the work head on, it’s presented as interesting but no more privileged than anything else presented as interesting in the work. Further, sex as presented as sex regardless of the gender presentation/identification of the participants.

In other words: it’s all queer af.

But go back to the photo above: I’m arguing that it’s about the color of her toenails. The title is Oliver, though… and you sort of have to believe Oliver is holding the shower head against his abs. Is he getting ready to join in the action behind him? And if so, how? Or has he already participated? And if so, how has he participated? Or, is this all staged for the camera?

Either way it is interesting how often in his work, McGinley seems to be hiding queer coded sex positivity right there in plain sight.