MAYBE it doesn't signal the arrival of a major arts movement and maybe it is simply a symptom of another consumer-driven microtrend, but it would seem that something is afoot in the modern art world and it concerns what you could call, for lack of more comprehensive terminology, a burgeoning of gay male art.
You can place it at galleries such as John Connelly Presents or Daniel Reich in Chelsea, or at Peres Projects in Los Angeles, or creating a splash in the sales booths at any of the virally replicating art fairs. It is also, most recently, shown in"The Male Gaze," a just-opened group show at the powerHouse Arena in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, that makes clear how a new generation of artists is addressing itself frankly to the varied and mutating shapes of novelty.
Even though there are some artists such as Jack Pierson on view at the gallery in Brooklyn, most belong to a generation born in the'80s and too young to have experienced AIDS' brunt or the identity politics of that era firsthand. Many, as was noted by others have experienced gayness as a condition that was compromised. Thus they seem to have skipped past self-acceptance and the hoary dramas of the closet, and proceeded directly to forms of expression which are disgusting, exuberant, celebratory, bawdy and not infrequently marked by the spirit of juvenilia that the (heterosexual) photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark has been mining for ages.
"The art we are showing," said Nicholas Weist, the curator of"The Male Gaze," an assembly of more than 20 largely young gay artists, among them such collectors' darlings as Christian Holstad, Scott Hug and Michael Magnan,"argues for a new kind of alternativism that reacts against the mainstream of the culture." Not surprisingly, that includes.
No single art show is a Stonewall, naturally, and this burgeoning scene is hardly equivalent to a struggle for its cultural ramparts. Yet there are signs that something livelier is at play than some arbitrary shows in a select group of galleries.
Read the story that is main
ADVERTISEMENT
The most persuasive evidence of this could be the harvest of gay art publications that line the shelves in outposts of civilization such as the Printed Matter artists' bookstore on 10th Avenue.
; and Daddy, a spray-painted, limited edition production that comes vacuum-packed and using a customized T-shirt attached.
Photo
CreditCourtesy powerHouse Arena
There are others, from Sweden, Poland and Germany and also hipster outposts throughout Canada and America. If some titles weren't too raunchy to be printed 17, An individual would list all of them.
This isn't to say the magazines are pornographic, even though the images they present are sexually candid. They, like much of the homosexual art being made -- so much art and music and culture of all types -- seem to hybridize a generalized fetish for youth culture, for the small and the romantic and apolitical, for self-exposure. They are as whimsical as among the tunes of the Devendra Banhart. They've a proudly aura, but these days, what, does not?
Almost all of the magazines are brand new, which is to say that their issues were produced within the year. And, just as important, said Mr. Bronson, many are among the top sellers among the tens of thousands of names Printed Matter displays.
"I'm not positive if I'd say what's happening is a motion or a moment," said christening art Vince Aletti, an independent curator and photography critic for The New Yorker, referring to the most recent iteration of gay culture.
Yet, as David Rimanelli, an art critic and longtime contributor to Artforum, stated,"There's this huge efflorescence of artists right now doing this kind of work." There are an awful lot of people, gay or otherwise, he added,"making intimate, slightly vague narratives," of the kind that artists like Mr. Hug and Mr. Magnan have turned into an a minor industry with K48, their print magazine collaboration with other musicians along this loosely federated circuit. Their publication is polished in its posh that each issue comes with an accompanying CD and, lately, a back cover ad for Dior.
The Christening Of Homosexual (2017)
It is probably an exaggeration to say that it started with Butt, yet it seems obvious that this Dutch zine with its trademark pink pages and its air of 1970s outsider culture provided a template for a passel of imitators.
"I adore Butt," stated Bruce Hainley, a critic and curator who's the associate director of criticism and theory in the graduate program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif..
Nostalgia remains a running manifest as a longing for what, through the gay art scene, from a distance, resembles the utopian days of pre-AIDS and revolutionary politics and sex.