Critics have to make grand gestures. It’s a way of intoning authority. It is also a rhetorical necessity in order to justify the subject, meaning: The critic attempts to substantiate why what they choose to write about is important. This usually surfaces as an effort to distinguish the subject—be it an artist or an artist’s work—from its contemporaries, elevating it by pointing out what the critic believes to be timely and unique aspects of the artist or artist’s work.
But Philip Gefter’s piece on Ryan McGinley in the NYT gets sticky when he tries to single out McGinley’s work as the benchmark for new queer representation. Read on…
My main contention with this article is when it attempts to set McGinley apart from his contemporaries by his portrayal of homosexual subjectivity, which is mainly based on this passage:
Holland Cotter wrote that …the treatment of gay male bonding [italics mine] “feels refreshingly direct and immediate, autobiographical without being narcissistic,” Mr. Cotter added. “Among other things it’s part of a new approach to the visual depiction of gay life in art.”
Whatever is meant by “gay male bonding” I can only imagine, but Cotter’s comment rides on a criticism that gay art (meaning: subjectively homosexual art that is made by literally homosexual people) has always drawn, that homosexuality and the homosexual experience is nothing more than indulged narcissism. If McGinley’s “new approach” in depicting “gay life in art” is to snap a shot of two of his friends making out in the shower, ok, I can understand how this is spontaneous, consequence free, post-AIDS-guilt frivolity. But it also could be read as an age-old example of the social privelege middle-class people have to flaunt their alternative lifestyles without having to worry about social repercussions (think hippies and hipsters). The photographs speak nothing of politics, and in contrast rest on the ability to shrug off the threat of public scorn. People from lesser socio-economic backgrounds rarely have this advantage.
Consider also that a gay artist (I’m drawing that conclusion through Cotter’s conjoining of “autobiographical” and “narcisistic,” which, used the way it is, must mean that McGinley himself is gay; one isn’t able to level that criticism against gay representation that is portrayed by a heterosexual artist) living in NYC has very little at stake depicting real scenes of “gay male bonding.” If anything, this kind of subjectively passive photography was made possible by more serious, politically oriented social movements in art and politics (thinking Mapplethorpe and Keith Herring), and, in actuality, suggests a very contemporary political apathy, which is more timely than, say, non-narcissistic gay art.
Either way, Gefter is using this quote to substantiate the assertion that Ryan McGinley is a photographer of distinction and originality, and, specifically, IS NOT NARCISSISTIC.
But read on where the piece discusses McGinley’s latest project: A cross-country road trip (completely financed by McGinley to the tune of $100,000), not to photograph America or the people of America, but to photograph his same friends. He paid all of his friends stipends, travel expenses and lodging so they could bus around with him. I’m not sure if there is a more literal example of artistic narcissism than to make a photographic book about America that is completely disinterested in people outside one’s own inner circle. Why bother photographing people I don’t know when the people I do know are the only people that matter to me? This is surely narcissism’s insular hallmark.
Furthermore, it’s difficult to trust Gefter’s approach to writing about homosexual representations in art when we come across this phrase:
The skateboarders, musicians, graffiti artists and gay people in Mr. McGinley’s early work “know what it means to be photographed,” said Sylvia Wolf, the former curator of photography at the Whitney, who organized his show there.
Affiliating ”gay people” with skateboarders, musicians and graffiti artists, that is, to equate gayness (an identity derrived from biological predispositions) with what are vocationally derrived indentities is kiiiind of outrageous. The only correlation can be that perhaps these kinds of people (if we can in fact call them kinds of people) could all maintain marginal status in society. But the intent of this passage is to assert that a gay person’s willingness to be photographed in the act of being gay is equivocal in its social and individual ramifications as a skaterboarder or musician. This is ludicrous, especially considering homosexuals have the most at stake in outing their activities, ranging from imprisonment (for the act, still on the books in some states) to physical violence and death.
There is a lot to speak of regarding photography today, and there is a lot to discuss in terms of the youngest generation’s work, realizing that this generation has grown up without a need to question photography’s uses and with a sense of entitlement that will make their autobiographically oriented work interesting to look at. But this article does little in the way of opening a true conversation about what those things will be.
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“But it also could be read as an age-old example of the social privelege middle-class people have to flaunt their alternative lifestyles without having to worry about social repercussions (think hippies and hipsters). The photographs speak nothing of politics, and in contrast rest on the ability to shrug off the threat of public scorn. People from lesser socio-economic backgrounds rarely have this advantage. ”
This powerful statement in your essay raised the following thoughts within me as a working class-raised person who sometimes traveled in similar art cricles and always felt the wilt of disconnection.
- Would Ryan McGinley be open to hearing your criticism of his work? I wonder, because, in my mind, it is the most important response to his work that he will ever get at this point in his career. It cuts to the heart of his practice and to its relevance outside of the world of his coterie.
- Artistic complacency allows the chic (and predominately, insistently, white) young gay male bohemian art of “The Male Gaze” exhibition that’s getting attention to never (or rarely) interrogate the implications behind the content or the composition.
- “The Male Gaze” exhibition repeats (without sufficient interrogation and with a frequently retrograde softporn approach) the worse permutations of the dlist.com aesthetic of erotic gay recreation and narrow insiderism.
- It’s a bad sign when people use a word like “gaze” without seeming to understand the political urgency behind the much debated film critic Laura Mulvey’s feminist psychoanalytical understandings. In fact, a feminist understand would be good for the artists in “The Male Gaze,” or at least a healthy dose of women’s sensibilities–but even to suggest such a think among some gay male coteries is to offend them. As you say, it’s so cavalierly convient to ignore political urgency and to translate it into unchecked leisure pursuits.
- In the dlist.comesque incessant insiderism of the “The Male Gaze” exhibition, “thin white boys” (“boys” because youth is a fetish) get pride of place while a few differently constituted beauties wallflower the edges in an effort to make the aesthetic feel like it’s not the work of closet bigots who don’t even know and would take pains to examine their own bigotries. They would brush such examinations aside with the words “that’s just my preference” without understanding that preferences often flower from our racial and class consciousness and subconsciousness.
- In fact, the bigotries point to how much so many (if not all) gay male sex cultures (and artistic documentations of them), *regardless of race*, are tremendously bigoted and, for the most part, very internally racially segregated with the larger well funded cultures privileging narrow thin white male beauties above all else; like the willfully, gladly racist seancody.com which openly, and offensively advertises for “caucasian” models only as if they think that they will not make as much money by showing darker skinned or Asian models; and one Asian and one African American model in the backlog does not count for much in this aesthetic; and interracial connections are rarely celebrated and given maximum exposure, on any side of the spectrum, be it white, brown, or beige in gay sex cultures, unless the interracial connection is fraught with racial overtones, suggestions of violence or outre power plays.
- By softening these permutations into frequent vapidity, the gentrified mostly white gay art of the “The Male Gaze” exhibition only reenforces the problems that are almost never talked about unless critics like you raise them and then, in today’s world, the criticism gets brushed aside with the question, “why are you so serious, darling?” Or, worse still, principled criticism gets attacked with much harsher words.
- Even Paul Sepuya’s work, one of the lone guys of African descent in this new young gay male art firmament, privileges white male bodies and presences and the gay brooklynesque set; and that’s despite Sepuya’s self-portraits and an occasional brown skinned model.
- This is all about the socio-political laspes within the content. But the content is fed by the composition and the compositional structures that these artists set their subjects within hardly probe the depth of what is being depicted.
- In fact, like bad late Mapplethorpe, the aesthetic (even when the shots have the sheen of apparent spontaneity) is so emptily commercial. There is rarely any attempt to question the way the composition feds into the unthinking politics of seduction and surface engagement that is so endemic to advertising and to porn (soft or hard).
- For me, art begins to prode deeply when it is not about repeating money-hungry, segregation-happy seductions; rather it probes deeply when it is about the content and composition of human fallibilities–the troubling ways that we cope (or fail to cope) with a world that is a lot harsher than a self-financed photographic roadtrip.
I went to “the Male Gaze” exhibit in DUMBO over the weekend, and was sadly disappointed. There wasn’t much to it in the first place, in the sense that it didn’t seem very thorough, like it was thrown together without too much thought. OR, as if the curators just wanted to rest on the provocative nature of the idea of the show without getting down to do some serious work curating and coming up with an in-depth presentation of contemporary gay work.
I have to say, the Ryan McGinley picture on display was the most compelling image in the exhibition. On its own, one can read a political message in it: a twink, crouching deeply into a designer shopping bag.
There was one other nice piece (I don’t know the name of the artist as there were no tags to indicate what art was by which gay) that was a series of comic-style pages adhered to a giant column in the middle of the gallery.
I see your point, Counter Critic, about that one Ryan McGinley image; but, compositionally, I just feel that more has to be done to draw out a political meaning or the set-up in the image could actually look coquettish and a hide-and-seek play with consumerism. I saw Paul’s work and was glad that he was included. Yes, good curatorial vision does indeed include putting up explanatory tags and other editorial work. As some French say, Tant pis…
Oh heck. Coquettish is a good thing. I mustn’t be too strident (repeat 10 times).
Great discussion here – with woefully low amounts of participation. This, and the following comment, are one of the very very few examples of actual online criticism about this work – which seems insane for how popular it is and how influential it is on young photographers. I’ve got a lot to say on the subject – but I figured I’d just post up the essay I wrote a couple weeks ago in response. I hadn’t found this post at the time (I’m doing further research for a similar paper right now) or I would have cited it!
Here’s my paper:
http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/blog/ryan-mcginleys-endless-summer/