Tag: nudes

Tamara de Lempicka – Les deux amies (1923)

I’ve realized that the art world is neither as progressive or avant garde as I would’ve hoped.

Invariably, when the subject turns to how to hold shitty male artists accountable for their exploitative fuckery, someone asks when criticism of him as a person will lead to the ‘cancellation’ of his work.

This is a straw man argument–no one is suggestion that Picasso be excised from the canon; instead: the proposition is that we maybe mention that his works are full-throated missionaries of misogyny. Given that fact, it might be responsible to make this explicit to consumers of his work.

But I think I’m just going to ignore the straw man argument and treat the supposition as serious: why the hell would you ever need fucking Picasso when there’s Tamara de Lempicka?

Source: dazeddigital.com

Peter Hujar – [↑] Reclining Nude on Couch (1978); [↖] Robin Brentano {1} (1975); [^] Sarah Jenkins with Head Brace {3} (1984); [↗] Bill Elliot (1974); [+] Fran Lebowitz at Home in Morristown, NJ (1974); [↙] Candy Darling on Her Death Bed (1973); [↓] Lucia Rudenberg (1979); [↘] Pregnant Nude {Lynn Hodenfield} (1978)

When one of my classes stipulated that I would be required to see one from a list of five current big ticket exhibitions in the San Francisco area, it wasn’t a choice–at least for me: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life all the way.

He was not only phenomenally gifted, I count him as one of my personal art heroes. (He also made one of my favorite photos of all time–the center image in this photoset I posted back in 2015).

The show is at BAMPFA through November 18th and I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it’s always great to get a chance to look at work actually emanating physically from the body of any artist you adore.

My sense of the show was that the curators wanted to downplay the degree to which Hujar’s being gay during the AIDS crisis up to an including death as a result of AIDS related complications of pneumonia informed his work. The things I walked away from the show thinking about had to do with the way he chose to install shows (arranging the framed photos two high and then stretching the length of the wall in such a way that no portrait would sit next to another portrait, and no landscape would share an edge with any other landscape, etc.) as well as the fact that he apparently loved taking pictures of animals just as much as people. (There are a lot of cow pictures, for those of you who love mammals of the bovine persuasion.)

There was at least one great anecdote: apparently my aforementioned favorite photo caught Richard Avedon’s eye during it’s exhbition. So much show that he got in his car, zipped over to the gallery, double parked and ran upstairs with a handful of cash to buy it.

I was talking with my teacher about it and he at first didn’t agree with my characterization of the show but subsequently relented that he did find it odd that the show didn’t mention that apparently Hujar held Robert Mapplethorpe in abject contempt. One problem, it seems Mapplethorpe was desperate for Hujar to be his friend. (So much so that he used to give his work to Fran Lebowitz in an effort to get her to mediate some sort of relationship between them. I take fiendish pleasure in this story as I def. prefer Hujar to Mapplethorpe.)

The other thing I thought is that I’d be quite frankly shocked if Hujar didn’t wield an outsize influence on Joel-Peter Witkin, actually. The photo of Sarah Jenkins with Head Brace (above) predates most of Witkin’s work and shares a very similar tone and aesthetic.

[↑] Lisa Yuskavage – Reclining Nude (2009); [↖] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↗] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [+] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [←] Helias Doulis – Untitled from Blossoms of Solitude (2016); [→] Alexandre Haefeli – Untitled from The Company of Men series (2016); [-] Source unknown – Title Unknown (2014); [↙] Ismael Guerrier – Sacred Garden #1 (2018); [↘] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↓] Source unknown – Title unknown (19XX)

Follow the thread.

Everardo García González – [+] Re-nacer (2016); [↖] La Espera (2018); [↑] Tu cruz (201X); [↗] Desprenderme (2016); [-] Proceso (2018); [↙] S’Acrofa (201X); [↓] Title unknown (201X); [↘] El deseo de… (201X)

The aesthetic of González‘s work feels like a deconstruction of fantasy art from the late 80s/early 90s steeped in sci-fi/survival horror video games then filtered through a metal-culture inflected preoccupation with the subversion of Xtian iconography.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the male gaze-y-ness of the work from a macro perspective–there’s an inescapable vein of feminine embodiment with death/apocalyptic tropes as well as a sense that as the viewer you are a party to a sort of theater of the vaguely macabre/unsettling in a way tending more towards authorial, marionette like control of elements than a sense that what is seen is authentically correspondent to any sort of lived experience on the part of the women depicted; the religious icon side of things pushes it decidedly towards objectification.

But with regards to the more post-apocalyptic goth tone and the impressively faux photorealistic rendering, this actually overlaps with something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately–namely: I’ve realized that I am increasingly disenchanted with contemporary photography/image making. Usually, I encounter something a couple times a month that becomes a mini-obsession; those hat stick around for longer than a week or two go on to become things that I come to love.

I’m finding stuff I dig still, definitely. But either I’m no longer tapped into the right Tumblr realm or there just isn’t as much top notch work getting out lately? Mostly, the stuff that is meshing with me tends to be older stuff that I somehow missed out on and am only know digging into.

Being the type of person who needs constant input, I’ve been delving–increasingly–into the work of illustrator. This isn’t entirely surprising. I was a huge comic book nerd in the mid-90s. Sadly, I wasn’t into the artier stuff then and preferred the more blockbuster fare.

But I’ve actually dived fairly deep into Geof Darrow’s back catalog and am finding a lot of ways his work is illustrative of discrepancies/shortcoming between my personal vision and my creative output. (González illustrates the connective tissue between a rather outlandish notion I have for installing my work at some point in the near future and reinforces the value of the time I’m spending with Darrow’s drawings.)

Source: everardogarciagonzalez.blogspot.com

Eric and Chris Phillips – Porn Resistance | Berlin for Pornceptual (2016)

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
                   —Duane Michals

Nudity is an art.
Besides, art is only nudity. There’s no more art, only too much
civilization. Art is barbarious. Art is loneliness. Nothingness is
perfect nudity.
                   —Raúl Ruiz

Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.
                   —Andy Warhol

image

[↑] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↖] Zishy – Arya and Bailey Room Mates (2016); [↗] X-Art – Raw Passion (2016); [+] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [←] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [→] Source unknown –  Title unknown (201X); [-] Source unknown – Title unknown (2015); [↙] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↘] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↓] Nubile Films – Title unknown (201X)

Follow the thread: GIF Exception Edition