Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography (3.5 stars)
Barbican, London til May 17th
Despite its title, there’s little in the way of liberation on display in this exhibition, leaving the subtitle hanging there like a question. But perhaps that’s the point: to generate questions, debate on that complex subject of the significantly pluralized ‘masculinities’. What makes a man? Such a massive topic requires some focus, of course, and the curator, Alona Pardo, has limited the work to the past 60 years, and even this feels too broad.
It’s a vast exhibition with over 300 artworks, not all of which, for my money, earn their place. Covering two floors, much of the first half felt redundant, over familiar, even hackneyed, representations of men, the inclusion of which relied too much on accompanying text for any sense of why they were being shown.
For me, it gets interesting on the second floor, where we’re given queer, black and feminist takes on masculinity, and here’s where the critiques start to appear and the monolithic edifice of straight, white masculinity is attacked in interesting and challenging ways. In the room of women’s art, particularly, there is, at last, a bold and playful turning of the tables, although the theory employed here feels dated and slightly irrelevant.
Laura Mulvey, anyone? Where’s Judith Butler, or some more recent feminist theory, to frame these pieces by Annette Messager, Laurie Anderson and Marianne Wex, whose pieces from the 1970s on man-spreading are wonderful.
There’s no Ajamu X and very little on drag queens and the portraits of drag kings by Catherine Opie, whilst wonderful, feel short-changed in terms of the significance and context provided. Her portraits of adolescent sportsmen, it claims, show vulnerability, but all I see are impenetrable portraits of a particularly insipid masculine stereotype.
Cassills is described as a trans-masculine performance artist, which for those not in the know would be forgiven for thinking the images accompanying these texts are of a cis man or a transman, but Cassills transformed his female body without testosterone or surgery, just extreme body building and steroids.
Where are the contemporary queer subcultures like bears or radical faeries? Or discussion of incels, the alt-right? Where is Genesis Breyer and Lady Jaye P. Orridge’s Pandrogeny project?
Too often the show feels like Masculinity For Beginners and takes fewer risks than I had hoped it might, but then not everyone visitor will have a Phd in queer theory and gender studies, or have 30 years of experience of studying and living masculinity from a queer position, so its common denominator take on masculinity at times didn’t really feel aimed at me, which is, perhaps, fair enough. It has certainly attracted huge crowds and I couldn’t get to study in depth of all the art on display.
I loved Thomas Dworzak Taliban portraits of fighters posing with flowers and guns and holding hands, retouched to look like they are wearing make-up, Kandahar, Afghanistan. What a find! I was also very excited (intellectually, you understand) by Tracey Moffat’s film spying on hot surfer dudes changing out of wet suits in car parks. Acting as a counterpoint to these male bodies in their prime are the wonderful self-portraits by John Coplans of his vulnerable aging flesh.
I did enjoy the show and discovering plenty of new artists and work, but I left feeling a bit disappointed that there was little in the way of genuine liberation. Exploration, or investigation through photography, yes: there’s plenty of that. Critique, despite the insistence within the commentaries accompanying the artworks, which often felt like they were claiming a great deal for work that without these claims, viewed with the curatorial context and interpretation, felt more mainstream than the curatorial comments suggest.
Or, in the case of Knut Åsdam’s video of a male crotch pissing in his pants, Untitled: Pissing (1995), the accompanying text for which focuses more on the pissing in the pants as shame and vulnerability. It makes a fleeting mention of the rather vague “eroticism” of the video but doesn’t mention, for example that there are straight men who like to be pissed on by women (the late 19th century Sexologist Havelock Ellis, for example, got off on his wife pissing on him) but gives no hint to those not aware that it has been predominantly a gay male sexual act, and no mention of the fact that the guy’s bell end is clearly visible through the fabric.
I also wondered why there was no discussion of the work’s title. If it carries the subtitle ‘Pissing’, I thought, is it really ‘Untitled’? Doesn’t that title suggest a radical uncertainty and the beginning of a consideration of the paradoxes and multiplicities at work? The 30 minute film is a repetition of the same sequence, punctuated by a few seconds of black screen, which, for me, calls to mind Judith Butler’s notion of reiteration: the repetition of the gesture, and the gaps between providing space for subversion.
I’d still recommend you visit but I’d suggest starting with the upstairs gallery before taking in the less radical representations downstairs. For all its talk of intersectionality, the show’s organisation into closely themed topics felt like it undermined that claim as I walked through. But there’s still plenty of great work on display and the exhibition is a powerful contribution to the important conversation about the meanings of modern masculinities, toxic or otherwise.
Like the rest of the World the Barbican is on an hiatus, but whilst it is closed you can order the Masculinities: Liberation through Photography Catalogue Hardcover – April 21, 2020 by Alona Pardo (Editor), Jonathan D. Katz (Contributor), Ekow Eshun (Contributor), Tim Clark (Contributor) from Amazon
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
