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So what is gay art?
One idea is that it is art done by gay artists on gay subjects for other gay people. Although this may be a necessary first step, I find it separatist and far too accepting of the ghetto. John Perreault, 1981 |
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Nelson Hendricks, 1996 The main objective of the exhibition The Gay Body is to demonstrate how the sexuality of gay men is manifested in contemporary art. Presenting a broad spectrum of representations of the male body, this exhibition is intended to help demystify the strategies used to identify and recognize the gay body in visual representations. To exhibit the gay body is to take a position: this is a political act, of course, but also one that recognizes and promotes awareness of a certain form of sensibility specific to gay artists. This recognition makes it possible to inscribe the gay body within the social landscape, and to specify the resonances of identity in the materiality of images that are set apart by appearing together in one and the same exhibition venue. These artists’ sensibility attests to their “lucidity with respect to the social theatre, which they have acquired by playing several roles, by maintaining a distance in relation to themselves, in response to an ever-felt yet never articulated exclusion.” The advent of gay liberation in the 1970s, in both the United States and Canada, gave birth to a new form of art that came to be known as “gay art.” From them on, numerous debates struggled with the proper way to categorize works of art produced by gay artists. For some, this was a matter of definitions, while for others it involved the bringing to light of the autobiographical experience of gay artists in their art. Yet far from generating a consensus, the label “gay art” was understood as referring to a reductive and even ghettoizing enclave, one that did not allow for an explication of the full range of artists’ concerns. Today, this debate, although somewhat abandoned, it far from over. Rather, it now signals a shift in the concerns of gay artists, who, busy carving out a place for themselves in the world of art, seem to be privileging the representation of their sexuality by proposing various possibilities for interpretation intended to expand the range of their representational practices. Without going quite so far as to use tactics with double meanings—which would not, moreover, allow for the objectification of their personal and intimate experiences—they are interested in developing a plastic language that brings together the artistic act with specific content. For some, the body serves as a platform from which to present their sexuality, and/or to express their desires. Others are interested in cross-dressing—an ultimate sign of marginality—as a way of foregrounding the facticity of the social values attached to sociosexual roles. Yet others raise questions about the stigmatization of the gay body in those media that treat AIDS as a sign of the perversion of gay sexual practices and reinforce prejudices and stereotypes that contribute to homophobia. Some represent the gay body in terms of its erotic and sensual power, while others, in the hope of raising awareness, inscribe it within the structure of their art as a positive model of affirmation and sexual liberation. For still others, the body attests to daily life practices within which the community model and couple relationships further the recognition of shared affinities. Diversity and multiplicity characterize all of the works brought together for this exhibition. Twenty-four artists raise questions about the representation of the body in their art as a motif in the exploration and presentation of their sensibilities. This questioning enables them to adopt critical positions with respect to traditional visual representations, to sustain their quest for identity by manipulating the appearances of the body (that synonym of traces both individual and collective), in the process giving themselves a certain degree of artistic autonomy. It is a great challenge to bring together, under the rubric of “gay art,” practices that represent a particular sensibility, a desire for legitimacy and a wish to effect the self-realization of a gay identity through an opaque mass of sociopolitical constraints. It is through the close examination of the specifics of identity defined in the representation of gay codes, which are sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, that a new category of representation is formed. Accordingly, it is by bringing to light the numerous strategies used to represent and decode the lines of communication between gay viewers and images that we can talk about a new thematic complex and the blending of shared meanings. The sharing of gay iconographic codes constitutes a specific and particular architectonics that encourages distinctions between these codes, which contribute to the foregrounding of practices used to represent the gay body. To take an interest in the modalities of gay representation is to raise a number of questions. To what extent are artists aware of their “gayness?” How is the influence of their sexuality manifested in their art? How do gay artists negotiate the apparatus of sociocultural codes to actualize their sexuality in their creations? Is it possible to represent gay sexuality without representing sexual acts? It is through such questions that the representation of the gay body becomes conceivable. The rubric “gay art” will serve simply as a catachresis to designate a reality for which no appropriate term yet exists. Our questions must bear, therefore, on practices of representation rather than on the appellation “gay art.” In contemporary visual representations, the gay body manifests itself through the presentation of iconographic codes and semantic referents constituted in the objectification of sociosexual and cultural actions of the gay community. Whether active or passive participants in this community, gay artists express themselves by proposing their sexuality as a locus for learning and communicating real experience, all the while critiquing media-promulgated stereotypes which they dispute, reject or adopt. It is through the examination of the detours, strategies and perversions of subversive images that the gay body comes to light. As a matrix of identity, locus of desire and mark of difference, the body transforms itself in order to more effectively reappropriate the expression of its lived experience. Performative and posing—anything but transparent—the body struts and strolls like an object of admiration intent on accentuating its numerous guises, in order to better defy the social order and signal its own belonging to a community. The different forms of the body’s self-representation make it possible to establish a list of the codes that help to identify the reference points of identity, and bring to light the relationships between viewers capable of recognizing and interpreting these codes. This staging of the body indicates that it is culturally marked, that it defines itself in the performance of a set of expressive actions and in the taking on of “attires” that allude to acting gay. To act gay is to foreground one’s differerence, while specifying the commonalities one shares with others. The body tends to function “like a language through which one is spoken rather than a language in which one speaks, a language of nature that all at once conveys the truest part of oneself because it the least consciously controlled or controllable.” The body serves as a skin/membrane onto which gay desires are projected, in addition to being the (permeable and malleable) material for a staging of the games of appearance to which it itself is subjected. Constrained to play stereotypical roles, the body is perceived as a “revelatory undertaking” that is articulated in the modification and shaping of one’s corporal appearances. Thus the representations of the body in this exhibition feature the iconographic, formal and semantic resemblances and differences that explicate the many frameworks of utterance of gay codes. This bringing together of works in one and the same space enables us to elucidate the presence of the gay body in the arts by stipulating that certain types of representation are privileged by the artists. We have grouped the works by type of representation in order to construct a typology of the varied knowledge and skills and “will to know” based upon the gay body that circulate in art circles and the gay community. The first grouping centres around the theme of The Masked Body: The Transvestite, the Cowboy and the Leather Man. It draws attention to the multiplicity of identity-specific “outfits,” and fosters recognition of the strategies employed by the body to more effectively affirm its difference. The second grouping privileges the theme of The Performed Body: Daily Acts and Practices, and reflects an interest in the sexual act as a political gesture performed in daily life. The intimacy of the couple is translated into mutual expressions of feeling and sexual practices as modes of emancipation of gay desire, and as ways of claiming rights and freedoms for gay men. The third grouping, The Suffering Body: HIV-AIDS, is intended to register gay artists’ concerns with the ravages wreaked by HIV-AIDS in gay communities, and signals the magnitude of this ever-present threat. Finally, the fourth grouping, The Exhibited Body: The Masculine as Signified, shows how the male genre has been constructed as a way of expressing gay identity through questioning about the social and historical position of the gay man. Translated by Donald McGrath
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The Masked Body:
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The TransvestiteDavid Rasmus Legacy (Andy) By presenting men attired in wigs and makeup, David Rasmus shows that the facticity of sociosexual (gender) roles is a construction, a fabrication of identity. By dissolving and blurring the reference points specific to each sex, he undermines sexual categories while specifying the signs of difference. Cross-dressing participates in the objectification of the body as a signifier of social and cultural prescriptions, and encourages the metamorphosis of the body on behalf of a more adequate self-definition as an individual. |
 David Rasmus |
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The CowboyDenis Lessard Série Marlboro As visual testimony, the selected images of the male, whose visual history has served to index his social position, help to redefine maleness within the social landscape. Lessard, as a meticulous archivist and collector, assembles disparate images that, once juxtaposed, acquire a potential for homoerotic interpretation. “I suppose that gays have probably always decontextualized images of men in order to tacitly admire them, re-codify them and use them as instruments of identification, contact and recognition.” The Série Marlboro installation is intended to provide an example of how the appropriation of media images allows the eroticism of the male body to emerge along with its potential for seduction and for strategies conducive to the identification and recognition of the fact of gayness. |
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Claude Bibeau
La Saint-Jean Bibeau’s painting takes its place within the range of representations of the gay body by virtue of its historical and iconographic references, attesting as it does to a strategy employed to affirm gay sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s. Well before the public displays of Gay Pride Day, gays gathered together only within the context of cultural events that were open to everyone. Unable to differentiate themselves from the population at large, gay men put in place a system of dress codes that enabled them to recognize one another. One of the most well known of these codes was the handkerchief hanging from a back pocket of a pair of jeans. The placement of the handkerchief (left or right pocket) designated the kind of sexual activity sought (sodomy, fellatio, etc.), while the colour of the handkerchief symbolized the individual’s preferred sexual role (active/passive, S&M, etc.). |
Claude Bibeau |
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Evergon |
Evergon Gunfight at the Ok Corral Seven pairs of cowboy boots, seven pairs of briefs and a slice of bread? Recollections of an evening spent around a camp fire and childhood memories evoke childish, furtive and short-lived adolescent sexual games. The outfits are liminal artifacts that attest to the presence of young boys wishing to satisfy their sexual drives—the game serves as a pretext, as a means of masking homoerotic desire, which is, although threatening and condemned, still legitimate. Group masturbation, the ostensible objective of the game, encourages premature ejaculation at the expense of the “late-comer,” who has to eat the slice of bread as a sign of restitution or punishment. Illicit and secretive, these acts reinforce the feeling of belonging to the male gender, and foster the recognition of affinities shared among people of the same sex. |
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The Leather ManDaniel Saint-Aubin Je pense selon ce que je suis Inspired by the male models of the pornographic magazine Studio Colt, Daniel Saint-Aubin has created a genealogy of the gay body. He has combined several historical characters within the same pictorial space in order to stress the importance of gayness as a mode of apprehension of the constructed real. The writer, Greek statuary and the leather man appear in the composition as actors personifying the ideal of male beauty in history. The leather man’s central place in the composition could serve as a metonymic figure for the aesthetic-sexual attributes of the male gender, which are anchor points for the recognition and identification of erotic appeal. |
Daniel Saint-Aubin |
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Yvon Goulet Sans titre Yvon Goulet works as a visual historian, searching for cultural artifacts in Montreal’s gay village. His paintings, which are inspired by festive and cultural events in that community, enable him to express daily reality, record the events in question and feature the male body as an active participant within the gay community. “I articulate the world in which I live—in a word, the gay village. Unlike many other artists, I take the male body not as an end in itself, but as a tool that allows me to move toward the representation of urban life, and toward a social statement about my epoch.” Forever cut up, divided and constructed, his paintings juxtapose numerous episodic fragments that are associated with gay values and that, once assembled, form a multidimensional vision of the gay community. |
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The Performed Body: Daily Acts and Practices |
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Anne-Marie Labelle
Entrez voir…, from the series “Scène de vies conjugaies” Anne-Marie Labelle presents a series of photographs that reveal the intimate worlds of gay male couples. Like a reporter, she has documented the practices associated with life à deux. By establishing a relationship of trust between herself and the individuals she photographs, she has been able to imbue her images with the feeling of intimacy. This approach has enabled her to show how the sexuality of gay men constitutes a set of actions that is constructed on a daily basis. |
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Martial |
Martial 1-888-505-1010 Committed, determined and sometimes even provocative, Martial sees artistic creation as a place for reflection. At the heart of his concerns, gay sexuality appears as a partial endorsement of social stereotypes, which he submits to further questioning in order to better combat homophobia and racism. Representation of the male body encourages the presentation of gay sexuality as a motif for the expression of cultural practices and as a focal point for the affirmation of identity. Pacificatory and mediating, the body serves as an instrument for the diffusion of claims on behalf of individual rights to expression. “When I draw two men making love, I am not thinking of a specific audience, because gay sexuality can also draw the attention of heterosexual men and women.” |
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Marcus Leatherdale Mona By substituting a male model for a female one, Marcus Leatherdale has reinterpreted Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. This game of cross-dressing exemplifies the numerous strategies employed by the body in the metamorphosis of its appearances. Imitation and simulation foil social norms governing appearance as categorized by gender. The marginal sexual attire of the cross-dresser serve as a springboard for social prejudices that are, more often than not, revealed in the pairing of the stereotyped appearances that one associates with each sex. |
Marcus Leatherdale |
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Attila Richard Lukacs |
Attila Richard Lukacs He’s dead, I’m alive… Inspired by the great masters of the Renaissance, Attila Richard Lukacs has created a mythological fresco featuring the skinhead as the model of contemporary male beauty. Lukacs has said: “I am not a gay illustrator, although my work has a homosexual content. But why not: I’m homosexual and I don’t hide it. I prefer to paint cocks more than breasts.” Lukacs paradoxically invests the male body with uncommon apprehensions— a gay/skinhead (female/male), two identities that normally do not have referential affiliations in the collective imagination. With reference to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, he has painted an Eden in which gay sexuality exemplifies the relational mode for people of the same sex. Forming a contrast with media images of the violence inflicted upon gays, this representation of an idyllic place without any restrictions or social constraints confronts the popular image of the homosexual in the presentation of a world where harmony reigns supreme. |
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Yannick Pouliot Sans titre By assembling photographs taken from gay pornographic magazines, Yannick Pouliot presents the male body as an actor that performs its identity through a sexual relationship. Cut up and fragmented, the narrative constructs or regulates the development of the story, while the photographic indistinctness, which attenuates the chromatic disparity, denotes the semantic and formal links between the images. The uniformity of the flesh tones recalls the sensitivity of the skin as an erogenous zone and creates the illusion that we are dealing with the same characters in each of the photographs. |
Yannick Pouliot |
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Johannes Zits Boxeurs Zits’s digitized collages recall the lack of representation of the intimacy between gay men in art. References to Francis Bacon and David Hockney emerge from the co-penetration of bodily masses, while Rainer Fetting is made figuratively present through the revelation of acts normally carried out behind closed doors. This enactment of intimacy between men helps to define a new model for the affirmation of gay sexuality and, by the same token, fosters recognition of the many possibilities of a relationship constructed on a daily basis. Domestic space tends to circumscribe those actions carried out in places conducive to emotional exchanges, and to demystify the sexual practices of gay couples. Integrated into the world of interior decoration magazines, the male nude eroticizes places by objectifying representational practices associated with pornographic images. |
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THE SUFFERING BODY: HIV/AIDS |
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Hamish Buchanan
Sans titre, from the “Veiled Men” series Buchanan’s photographs of veiled men refer both to the mourning of the gay community devastated by the AIDS epidemic, and to the fluidity of culturally constructed social roles. The transgressive wearing of this exquisite glistening veil with its moiré pattern makes it possible to attribute to males feelings that are normally proscribed to them. The veil serves as a basis for the redefinition of stereotypes defined in accordance with social norms. It presents itself as an alternative, a compromise in the management of gender categories, and even as a representational strategy to counter the dominance of heterosexual roles as the one and only model of sexual expression. |
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Claude-Maurice Gagnon Patrick au voile, no.11 Gagnon, who is concerned with questions of gender and religious iconography, presents a male model in order to bring out the body’s androgyny as a distinguishing mark. “Through a veiled character who is ecstatic in a natural setting, I am trying to attest to the relationship with religious images, with those of both Christ and the Virgin. In addition to bringing out the androgynous dimension of the model—the limits of the masculine and the feminine—I want to show our relationship to absolute desire and sexuality, as well as to the Christian iconography that has marked our individual and collective consciousness.” Gagnon’s work, therefore, implies the idea of a critique of religion which, in its role as an oppressor, does not support gay communities in their fight against HIV/AIDS. |
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Gabriel Routhier Portrait au masque The figures of an angel and a tortured body collide in Gabriel Routhier’s sculpture. The cut-up and scarified body reveals the torments of men in this time when to be ill is to be stigmatized. Reserved yet candid, the body makes itself vulnerable in order to make way for the sensate. Satyric interpretation and the traces of illness unite to defy social blindness. The mask recalls the equation SILENCE=DEATH, and the wings, momentos of a better and more hopeful world, attest to social maladies where nothing but viral traces remain as evidence of a historical saga played out without actors, because it dispenses with identity. |
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Darlinghurst Heroe Traces of desire, the life instinct and marks on the body, synonymous with struggle and the indelible tattoo of suffering, are made concrete in the materiality of the process of creation. André Martin has written: “I was fascinated by some very tiny transparent crabs that dug their shelters in the sand by hauling out little sandy balls which they arranged neatly around their holes. This created strange configurations on the surface, fragile rosaries somewhere between braille and calligraphy. It was only when I saw them on the contact sheet that I thought of enlargements of viruses.” Darlinghurst Heroes is a literary creation, a novel, a fictional narrative recounting the path taken by a doctor caring for patients suffering from AIDS. It employs visual creation and doubling: viral contamination as a sign of the ravages of illness and of the catalytic power of creation. The presence of the virus signifies the absence of the stigmatized—or, indeed, dispossessed—body, vestiges of the ill that brings to mind intimate relations with the other, rooted in the sand. |
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THE EXHIBITED BODY: THE MASCULINE AS SIGNIFIED |
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Kevin Crombie Trousse de base : Mâle In response to the pressures that the media have exerted upon the aesthetics of the male body, Crombie proposes an effortless and magic solution for attaining ideal bodily beauty. Carefully wrapped and marketed, each part of the body corresponds to the stereotypes of the ideal man (muscled, tanned, free of hair, etc.). In order to vaunt the merits of his product, Crombie specifies that this survival kit is essential and contains all the qualities needed by the modern man. Moreover, to each part of the body the artist attributes a particular adjective: proud, strong, virile, resistant, unyielding, brave, etc., as a trademark. This sales tactic is designed to ensure the product’s effectiveness and reassure the client that satisfaction is guaranteed. “You no longer need to worry whether or not you have the required male qualities. From now on, you can buy them!” |
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Andy Fabo Sans titre, from the “Somniloquist” Series Andy Fabo’s work represents an intermediate stage between different periods in the history of representation of gay people. By juxtaposing ancient and recent homoerotic photographs, he creates a world in which the mnestic traces of a collective consciousness blend with the present. This bringing together of the past and present signifies a desire to elucidate the subtleties of the gay body, to reinscribe them in history as evidence of a past founded on the same experiences. By pairing photographs of body-builders with his own personal photos, the artist maintains a relationship of equivalence in the representation of the body, one that serves as an anchor point for the fragmentation of the illustrated story and for a coordination of gay identity in the making of art. |
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Paul Lacroix Sans titre Like an archaeologist, Paul Lacroix collates incongruous materials which he takes directly from surrounding nature. His great fascination with the forms of the male body keeps spurring him on to create architectures—at times drawn and at others sculpted—that, surprisingly, underscore the sensuality in matter. His drawings and sculptures bring out certain parts of the male anatomy—particularly the penis and buttocks—which he privileges in order to better accentuate the homoerotic power of seduction that emanates from them. |
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Skin, 1997, acetate, metal, latex, 14 cm x 12 cm x 2 cm, 50 pages, collection of the artist Magnetic Attraction, 1997, 8.8 cm x 5 cm x 2.5 cm, hair, magnet, acetate, Japanese paper, 20 pages Wanted, 1997, acetate, glass, latex, 12.6 cm x 8.8 cm x 6.3 cm, 26 pages, collection of the artist La dernière cène (2nd expanded edition), 1996, leather, paper, screws, 11 cm x 12 cm, 47 pages, collection of the artist |
Fascinated by the rituals of masculinity and the techniques used to adorn the male body, Éditions Production Gray creates artists’ books in which the media images and stereotypes associated with performative acts and the male gender are called into question. At times fragmented and at others whole, the body serves as a springboard for the identification of the various strategies used to reveal masculine identity. Skin attests to the objectification of the male body as a sexual symbol, while Magnetic Attraction evokes references to the world of fantasy, masturbation and puberty. Wanted suggests that identity is constructed through the imposition of sociosexual roles by specifying the importance of the rituals that marks the stages of sexual development. La dernière Cène recasts the Biblical episode of the Last Supper by investing it with a homoerotic charge that helps to free the sexuality of gay men from the prescriptions of the Catholic religion. |
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Robert Laliberté Transmutation Robert Laliberté proposes a new way of looking at the aesthetics of the male body by privileging the black man as a model for the expression of difference. This difference translates into an accentuation of the model’s bodily forms, one designed to more effectively bring out the constructed aspect of the body. The wrapped and camouflaged body serves as a metonymic figure for the social prejudices that make the black man an object of contemplation which exists primarily in the collective imagination. The composition accentuates the power games at work in the breakdown of the societal mass into dyadic categories—black/white, hot/cold, looking at/looked at, oppressor/oppressed, nature/culture—that tend to subordinate sexual, racial and ethnic minorities. |
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Carlos Quiroz Aperture F8 At the crossroads between the pornographic and the erotic, Carlos Quiroz’s photographs feature the penis as an object of contemplation and the point of emergence of male sexuality. Ever stoic and detached, his accentuation of the penis’s varying appearances (over and above its power to arouse) presupposes the vulnerability and fragility of the virile member. The penis allows itself to be captured by the photographic lens as if it possessed a life of its own. Taken up with itself, and occasionally even offended, the penis adopts strategies to thwart the viewer, who, at a first glance, cannot conceive of what he is seeing. This play of appearances not only specifies the chameleon-like quality of the penis, but tends to democratize the power we attribute to it. |
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Matthew Dayler Unititled (David 2) Dayler, who is interested mainly in the actions of the model posing before the photographic lens, creates images of the male body that foreground its eroticism and sensuality. The ageing male body is used for its fetishistic dimension, in that it reveals attraction and sexual experience. As actor and performer, the body plays a role in presenting a range of appearances in which the presence of sartorial attributes allude to the practices of cross-dressing. Made theatrical, the body’s appearance serves as a springboard for ritual practices of the gay community, and participates daily in the objectification of the various public manifestations of the gay body. |
Matthew Dayler |
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Angela Grossman Son of Man Two men, a bath, a flower. An orphan, the man quickly abandons hope. References to the story of Narcissus come through in the actions of the male character (the son), who unceasingly contemplates himself in what was previously the model for identification and imitation. From one generation to the next, homoerotic bonds are communicated in the objectification of reminiscences and memories that have been passed down and shared. There is no more room for identitary dualism, for absence has become synonymous with autonomy. The place is conducive to repose and encourages the expression of affinities between men, without any constraints or culturally determined prescriptions. |
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John Perreault, “I’m Asking: Does It Exist? What Is It? Whom Is It For?,” Art Forum, no. 19 (1980-81): 74. |
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