Gay Art: A Movement, or at Least a Moment
Quote:
MAYBE it doesn’t signal the arrival of a major arts movement and maybe it is just a symptom of another consumer-driven microtrend, but it would seem that something is afoot in the contemporary art world and it concerns what you could call, for lack of more comprehensive terminology, a burgeoning of gay male art.
You can spot it at galleries like John Connelly Presents or Daniel Reich in Chelsea, or at Peres Projects in Los Angeles, or making a splash in the sales booths at any of the virally replicating international art fairs. It is also, most recently, displayed 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 sexuality.
...
“I’m not sure if I’d say what’s happening is a movement or a moment,” said Vince Aletti, an independent curator and photography critic for The New Yorker, referring to the latest iteration of gay culture. No one does.
Yet, as David Rimanelli, an art critic and longtime contributor to Artforum, said, “There is 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 obscure narratives,” of exactly the sort that artists like Mr. Hug and Mr. Magnan have turned into an a minor industry with K48, their print magazine collaboration with other artists along this loosely federated circuit. Their publication is so polished in its chic, mixtape naïveté that each issue comes with an accompanying CD, a fold-out poster and, lately, a back cover advertisement for Dior.
Works from "The Male Gaze" can be seen at the Powerhouse Arena's web site. (A warning -- it's one of those annoying Flash pages that may not be friendly to everyone's browser. I had no luck at all getting Internet Explorer to open it. Mozilla did it just fine though.) |