Love, Pain and the Whole Damned Thing: the vulnerable male figure in 'Tough and Tender'. (VAULT Magazine, 2016)
Help, I'm alive
My heart keeps beating like a hammer.
Hard to be soft,
Tough to be tender
Come take my pulse,
the pace is on a runaway train.
‘Help I’m Alive’- Metric
Curated by Dr. Christopher Chapman for the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, the exhibition Tough and Tender brings together artists Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Chris Burden, Collier Schorr, Warwick Baker and Rozalind Drummond. Some of the exhibition’s themes are: bodily sensation, emotional vulnerability, and a yearning for connection. The images of male figures in the show are of particularly interest because they intersect with notions of the homoerotic, adding complex layers to now-dissolving tropes of masculinity.
Larry Clark’s photographs of tough (and tender) teenage boys were made during a period when the photographer was vicariously reconnecting with his own scarred adolescence. His boys possess Caravaggesque vitality. One teenager is shown asleep on a bed with an erection visible beneath his jeans; another stares up, naked, from a bath; a gang of nude kids gathers on a mudflat. Others, full of bravado, preen before mirrors or are shown on the mean streets, overflowing with unbridled sexual energy, grabbing their crotches as they search for thrills and mischief. "Since I became a photographer”, Clark once said, “I always wanted to turn back the years. Always wished I had a camera when I was a boy. Fucking in the backseat. Gang bangs. A little rape.”[1] Because of the boys’ assertive phallic pride there is also, inevitably, a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism to the images, regardless of the actual sexuality of the various boys depicted.
Images of admiration and affection between males, or of men’s desire and intimacy, are always freighted by a complex psychosexual, gender-specific subtext under which it is impossible not to consider them, at least in part, homoerotic. Throughout western art, the recurring image of the homoeroticised male figure appears as either: the classical or mythological nude; the Arcadian nude; youthful vigour; the fascist body; or the ‘feminised’ male - which includes images of martyrdom, such as the crucifixion of Christ and the execution of Saint Sebastian. These visual tropes are as current today as they have historically ever been; they simply transmute slightly to suit current prevailing cultural and social needs.
Homoerotic images may encompass the full range of male bonding, from platonic to explicitly sexual, and this is so whether the artist expressly intended it or not. Within our heteronormative society the homoerotic image bears the same specific social stigma reserved for the homosexual person. It is therefore always viewed as ‘other’ no matter how liberal-minded is the viewer. Indeed, the very fact that ‘erotic’ has a ‘homo’ prefix at all permanently separates and isolates this area of human sexuality from the heteronormative variety. It can therefore only be understood by its difference to the status quo; and the status quo is resolutely heterosexual. Any discussion of an image being homoerotic is also necessarily a discussion of social, moral, religious or legal proscription.
Collier Schorr has spoken of the difficulty faced by straight men or female photographers wishing to make images of the male body today.
Gay men, historically lacking power, sort of cordoned off the entire male race as a subject… I always feel that the connection between myself and the boy or man when I’m shooting is very clear: he is aware that I’m a woman and he’s clearly posing for a woman. It’s a very different kind of picture. I don’t think men can take the kinds of pictures I take of men because men pose differently for women.[2]
Her dreamy images of shirtless youths in idyllic country landscapes possess an undeniable homoerotic connotation due to the fact that traditional gender roles have here been subverted. Free of the braggadocio of Clark’s tough street boys, Schorr’s youths are metaphorically ‘feminised’, appearing in the ‘soft’, tender poses historically reserved for female subjects, or the submissive nude male figures in Christian iconography.
Barbarossastrasse, 2001.
When we look at images in art of the female nude, or images of the socialised feminine, our responses are defined by deep-seated heteronormative conventions. Unconsciously, we accept the erotic possibilities of the straight male response to such images because this is reinforced wherever we look and wherever we go. But when we look at similar images of men, there is no equivalent response; it can even be unclear as to whom the images are addressed in the first place. Similarly, images that represent the various ways that men may interact are still looked upon as outside the ‘norm’. An image of a naked male, for instance, carries with it an enormous emotional impact in our society because it is so unusual for men to be seen unclothed. In western art the naked male has been virtually invisible for the last four-hundred years. The exception to this rule occurs in the two main themes in which the male nude, historically, was permitted by the Church. Both of these involved themes of pain and suffering; the first was Christ, scourged, crucified or lying dead on his mother’s lap; the other was the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, who has since become a cypher in contemporary art for an ideal of masochistic representations of gay oppression. Both of these figures embody the simultaneous notions of masculinity and femininity, toughness and tenderness. Both are examples of the abject, penetrated male: one by nails; the other by arrows.
Nan Goldin’s beautiful image of two men passionately kissing has a manic desperation about it. The act appears urgent, transgressive and hurried, as if the couple is about to be torn apart. The image has all the dramatic intensity of a Caravaggio narrative. Such tender intimacy between men is hardly ever seen in public, whereas heterosexual intimacy bears no proscription whatsoever. Some years ago at a major exhibition in Melbourne I watched Goldin’s slideshow featuring images of intimacy between various lovers. Four heterosexual couples walked out in disgust when the comparatively few images of men having sex appeared on the screen, interspersed with the ‘acceptable’ straight counterparts.
Robert Mapplethorpe here reminds us that he was one of the great American Classicists. The images in the exhibition do not depict one of the queer subcultures that he documented at the height of his career, nevertheless, homoeroticism blasts through each photograph, which include: a naked young black man; a nude teenage boy supporting himself on a pale rostrum; a man, Marat-like, in a tiled bath; a sculpture of a beautiful African boy’s head; and the spectral, phallic image of the photographer’s skull-adorned walking stick.
In our time of gender-flux, where rigid modes of ‘accepted’ gender-behaviour are rightfully dissolving, there is no longer a ‘correct’ way to be a man or a woman. The very poignant images in this exhibition remind us how fragile the construct of male gendering is. The figures are exposed in all their conflicting softness/hardness; machismo/'femininity'; beauty/ugliness; toughness and tenderness.
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