What We Do in the Shadows

Benoît Prévot (b. 1968)

Quote of the day

Dame Elton John, discussing his new exhibition of his photography collection in The Guardian:

One surprise in The Radical Eye show is the framing of the images, which is, well, a bit bling – gold and silver gilt rather than, as he puts it, “boring bloody black”. That will, I say, almost certainly annoy the purists. “Oh, they can fuck off,” he says. “All I am saying is, look at them in a different way – as magnificent works of art that should be magnificently framed.”

"A Forgotten Model" by George Platt-Lynes

Indeed.

The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the collection of Sir Elton John is on at Tate Modern until 7th May 2017.

"We are not used to seeing a penis"

Do you find this shocking?

...or this?



Or any of them?











I like to think that male nudity is natural and pleasant (even if the "New Puritans" of San Francisco disagree - but that's America, where "moral outrage" is a money-making scam trend). We tend to think of Europe as being rather progressive where nudity is concerned.

However, apparently the Nackte Männer exhibition has caused quite a stir under the starched petticoats of the burghers of Vienna.

Read more on the BBC.

Tobias Natter, the director of the Leopold Museum said:

"It's quite unusual for an exhibition to focus on the depiction of the male nude. Surprisingly we had many exhibitions dealing with the female nude body, but so far never an exhibition which features the male nude. Somehow it is a taboo.

"On the other hand, we see that the male nude is getting a new presence in modern contemporary society. He is now on posters, he is on stages, he is getting more and more normal."

Erich Kocina of Die Presse newspaper said of the outrage:

"We are not used to seeing a penis - I think that is the main problem for people”

Ain't that the truth?

Nackte Männer: Nude men from 1800 to the present day is on at the Leopold Museum of Art until 28th January 2013.

Gay as Artform

“The history of art, which is usually based on assumptions of continuity, is not easily integrated with the history of homosexuality, which is conventionally premised on alienation.”

Paul(ine) and I minced off to the venerable Gay's The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury yesterday evening for the launch of American Professor Christopher Reed’s book Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, with a presentation and talk by the author. Excellent and informative stuff, indeed.

The book covers everything from ancient Greece and Rome to primitive Native American and Polynesian art, and European art from medieval times through the present. He traces the progression of the way gay (erotic and non-erotic) depictions progressed from completely acceptable (the marriage of Emperor Basil I to another man) through the idealisation of the male form in the Renaissance (Michaelangelo's David), to Caravaggio's dirty angels, to Ingres and his Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon (below), to the deliberate titillation and simultaneous condemnation of homosexuality in Victorian times (culminating in the persecution of Oscar Wilde), to modernism and Tom of Finland.



Prof Reed has a particular disdain for the way that many scholars seem to link "the outsider" that is conventionally assumed to be the artist - particularly those of the so-called avant-garde movement - with the world of the homosexual. In his words:

"The institutionalisation of gay and lesbian identity into organisations seeking the political and social normalisation of homosexuality...was often marked by disavowals of flamboyantly visual manifestations of minority sexual identity. At the same time, an examination of the history of modern art from the position of the history of homosexuality explodes myths of the avant-garde as either an arena of freewheeling inventiveness or a safe haven for misfits.

On the contrary, the avant-garde often exploited homophobia to attract attention while energetically suppressing affirmative expressions of sexual deviance and policing the behaviours and beliefs of artists who aspired to its rewards. Groundbreaking visualisation of the physical and emotional bonds between people of the same sex, therefore, often originated outside the avant-garde in realms of popular culture before being appropriated as avant-garde spectacle."

This was a fascinating exploration of a subject, and we did enjoy the experience, despite Professor Reed's heavy concentration on some daft American examples of modernism (seemingly all done by friends of his).

The book itself, at £27.99, remained (sadly) out of reach of our pockets...

Art and Homosexuality - A History of Ideas

Gay's The Word bookshop