Planet Homo

Made in China

Words Have Meaning pt.1

 

Polish Art Exhibit

  Blue Noses, An Epoch of Clemency, 2005
The National Museum in Warsaw aims to chip away at prejudices against sexual minorities in Poland with an exhibition about homoeroticism in art.
“Ars Homo Erotica” (11 June-5 September) has already met with criticism and threats of demonstrations. “The situation in Poland is sensitive as a result of the plane crash in Smolensk,” said exhibition curator Pawel Leszkowicz, referring to the event in April in which President Lech Kaczynski was killed. “The patriotic atmosphere that has pervaded the country has increased the power of right-wing groups. Therefore, I am not certain what will happen when the exhibition opens.” The show is due to open during this summer’s election of a president to succeed Kaczynski, who was a former mayor of Warsaw.“Ars Homo Erotica” is a survey of homoerotic imagery from antiquity to the present. The majority of the exhibition will feature classical works from the National Museum’s collection, juxtaposed with contemporary art. The director, Piotr Piot­rowski, said its emphasis will lie on eastern Central European art because “here the battle for equal rights for homosexuals continues”.
There have been a number of voices speaking out against the show. At the end of 2009, Stanislaw Pieta, an MP for the conservative Law and Justice Party, declared that, just as paedophilic and zoophilic art does not exist, “neither does homosexual art”. More recently, an “Open Letter in Defence of the Good Name of the National Museum in Warsaw” was published in right-wing publications. The signatories included artists, journalists, historians and politicians.
Piotrowski, who became director of the National Museum in 2009, is determined to transform the institution. He has said that he wants to revitalise the image of the museum, and he believes “Ars Homo Erotica” will “change this institution, this city and this country”.
The National Museum, the largest in Warsaw, has a rich collection of ancient art, an extensive gallery of Polish painting, and a large collection of foreign masterpieces but its strength lies in 19th-century Polish painting.
During his term as mayor, Kaczynski banned Warsaw’s gay pride parades in 2004 and 2005. This move was widely believed to have contributed to him winning the 2005 presidency.

The Euro Pride parade will take place in Warsaw in July. Meanwhile, the capital’s Zacheta National Gallery of Art has been showing another controversial exhibition: “Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe” since March (until 13 June).

By Julia Michalska

Strange Beauty

 
Life magazine’s May 12, 1947 “Picture of the Week”:

“On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. ‘He is much better off without me… I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody…,” she wrote. Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.”

McHale’s New York Times obituary, “Empire State Ends Life of Girl, 20″:

“At 10:40 A. M., Patrolman John Morrissey of Traffic C, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a swirling white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the Empire State. A moment later he heard a crash that sounded like an explosion. He saw a crowd converge in Thirty-third Street.

Two hundred feet west of Fifth Avenue, Miss McHale’s body landed atop the car. The impact stove in the metal roof and shattered the car’s windows. The driver was in a near-by drug store, thereby escaping death or serious injury.

On the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray of the West Thirtieth Street station, found Miss McHale’s gray cloth coat, her pocketbook with several dollars and the note, and a make-up kit filled with family pictures.”

Wiles’s photo inspired Andy Warhol’s print “Suicide (Fallen Body)…”

Farewell to Felix Lance Falkon

Arsenalia reports that Felix Lance Falkon, author of the seminal 1972 book A Historic Collection of Gay Art, passed away on April 19.

According Arsenal Pulp Press publisher, Brian Lam, Felix Lance Falkon was a pseudonym; he was a very private man (from an era when it was not okay to be out), and chose to keep his identity as well as his city of residence from the public.

Arsenal Pulp Press published a new edition of this book, entitled Gay Art: A Historic Collection, in 2006. Read more at Arsenalia.com.

Don't Touch That

Looks like some people have figured out how to end the tedium of many modern art performances: get involved and touch back. In a what-did-you-expect-moment, a new art show features a bunch of nude people essentially sandwiching visitors and then getting upset when people touch them. In this modern art world, you should stand, motionless, and feel nothing.

New York's Museum of Modern Art is well accustomed to the challenges of protecting its priceless collection from visitors' prying hands. But in its current show, a retrospective of performance art by Marina Abramovic, it has rubbed up against an unexpected problem.

The Artist Is Present features a rotating set of actors in teams of eight who stand facing each other or lie on the floor, dressed only in their birthday suits. The directors of MoMA knew the production would push against the boundaries of propriety for some, but what they hadn't anticipated was that a few of the visitors would be overly tactile in their interaction with the art.

Both female and male actors have reported incidents where they have been touched or even groped while performing in the nude, while some say they have been pushed and shouted at.

One performer, a dancer called Will Rawls, told the New York Times that an elderly man rubbed his ribs and then touched his backside. "As he was passing me he looked me in the eyes and said 'You feel good, man.'"

Rawls alerted a security guard and the man was escorted out, his 30-year membership of the museum revoked.

To some extent, Abramovic, a New York-based artist from Serbia, invites controversy and contact. One of her pieces in the exhibition, a 1977 work called Imponderabilia, has a naked man and woman facing each other in a gallery doorway. To pass through to the next room people have to squeeze between them, though they do have the option of using an empty doorway should they find this unpalatable.

The museum said there have only been a few irregular incidents and stressed that it had prepared its security staff thoroughly for the challenges of having nude performers in its spaces.

What Most Likely You Will Not Be Wearing

Fashion. Style. Trend. Guide. Fashion Week has come and gone and our friends are now at Magic in Las Vegas surveying the current trends in the men's market. You are probably not on the edge of your seat about these activities unless you are in the business of fashion. But reports will soon be coming about what you are suppose to wear: "This Spring, expect to see a lot of earth tones carried through the spring and into summer…which unfortunately includes Orange." What's wrong with Orange? Someone out there has determined that orange is out, this Spring. The question is: are we listening?

What is for certain is that fashion is expensive. In the new March issue of Esquire, a pair of J. Press wool trousers cost $550. A two-button mohair silk and cotton jacket costs $3,400. And presumably, this is something that will last just one season.

Fashion shows are nothing less than theater and should be considered as such. They are costumes and in many ways point to nothing about reality. Surely, no one is going to the Food for Less looking like something out of Where the Wild Things Are.

On the other hand, a recent listen to conservative talk show host Michael Medved revealed that is American and our right to be slobs, so clearly some sartorial guides are needed. It is the rules that seem to be the most annoying. For example: Don't wear socks with sandals. Why not? As one expert put it: I understand that when it is chilly outside we all dream of the warmth of the summer sun, but wearing socks with sandals doesn’t make the seasons change any faster. " If you want to wear sandals this badly, move to a warmer climate." That sounds like an opinion, not a reason. And in the end, isn't that what all guides and rules are—opinions of people who have decided they know more about what you should wear then you do?

Mark Your Days

 You may remember him from his all too brief role as French charmer, Luc Laurent, on ABC's hyper-drama television show, Brothers and Sisters, or his role as Dante in the Sex in the City movie, or as a runner up on Dancing with the Stars. A certified beauty, Gilles Marini (who resembles a young Udo Kier) is a French actor born to a Greek mother and Italian father. That beauty can be seen twelve times a year with the new Gilles Marini calendar. Photographed by Fred Goudin, the monies raised for the calendar help out the Maximum Hope Foundation, an organization that helps the parents of terminally ill children.
This exceptional publication is the result of the hard work and strong friendship between Gilles Marini and Fred Goudon, an award-winning professional photographer. It was by chance these two met, almost 15 years ago, while Gilles was fulfilling his military obligations in Paris. In fact, it was Goudon's keen eye for talent that launched Marini's career into the world of modeling.
The calendar is available here.

Remember

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1918)

Life's Difficult Choices

Pantone Unveils Color of the Year for 2010: PANTONE 15-5519 Turquoise

Color, it's one of those things you take for granted. It's always there and it is one of the few things that humans, collectively, agree on. We like it. One of the major keepers of colors is Pantone, a company that makes reference books for designers to match colors. In fact, it is called PMS (Pantone Matching System). Well, believe it or not, colors have fashion and in 2010, hold your New Mexico jewelry, it's turquoise: Pantone LLC, a global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries, today announced PANTONE® 15-5519 Turquoise, an inviting, luminous hue, as the color of the year for 2010. Combining the serene qualities of blue and the invigorating aspects of green, Turquoise evokes thoughts of soothing, tropical waters and a languorous, effective escape from the everyday troubles of the world, while at the same time restoring our sense of wellbeing.

Eye Candy Golden Iris Award: Physique Model of the Year

This entry comes from our friends at unzipped where 5'6" model Joseph Sayers has won an award for the "physique model of the year". In a flurry of adjectives. unzipped recalls the events surrounding the release of Hudson Wrights images:
Well into October, Edilson Nascimento had this award in the bag. That ended when Abercrombie model Joseph Sayers completed his degree in biology and returned to work full-time. First, Joe was a mouth-watering sensation in Golden Iris nominee Rick Day's photos for the new Rufskin campaign. Then, in November, photographer Hudson Wright took Joe to Palm Springs and shot the game-changing session. As soon as the photos from the desert trip were released, the gay blogosphere lost its shit, and the images spread across the web like a Southern California wildfire driven by Santa Ana winds. Wright's images are perhaps the hottest of the year, and Joe looks unbelievable in them. His level of physical perfection is on par with marble masterpieces in statue collections of the world's finest museums. Joe is clearly the juiciest slice of beefcake this year. He's Eye Candy ju dour, for sure. See more pics of Joe, and find out who earned honorable mentions, after the jump.

via blog.unzipped.net

V MEN

The new Summer VMAN is homodelicious and ripe with erotica.

For the weekend

Robert Rauschenberg

One of the art world's greatest painters has died. Robert Rauschenberg, who along with Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns (with whom he had a long relationship) was a major player in the Pop Art movement of the 60s. Read the entire obituary here.

Black and White

Michael Roberts just gets better and better. Photographer and style director for Vanity Fair, Roberts has been creating visual poetry for decades. This month, his new book, Shot in Sicily is being published by Steidl Books. Photographed over twenty years, SIS features an array of homoerotic images with distinct reference to master boy photographer, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden.  Or as the press release states: His camera captures the beauty of youth, crumbling temples, traditional Easter parades, and the theater of daily life to recreate the allure of Sicily, even for those who have not yet been there. It is testimony to the power of black and white photography, with an evocation of Avedon, in those astonishing Paris years.         

Great Art: Robert Sherer

Opening Friday at the Lyman Eyer Gallery, 432 Commercial St. in Provincetown, artist Robert Sherer evokes childhood as many of us imagined it: joyful, innocent and very physical. The works are pyrographs, which are wood-burned images created with actual camp craft materials such as leather, wood, tarpaulin, lanyards and grommets. "Like many American boys I grew up in a world of sports, camping, scouting, and war gaming. The secret rites of passage and relationship intrigues played out in the locker rooms, pup tents, and tree houses helped to define me as a man. Because my youth most closely resembles the classic illustrations of camping guide books and scouting manuals of the 1950s and '60s, I have found it necessary to derive my biographical drawings from these visual resource materials." Sherer, himself a former Boy Scout, grew up in Alabama. “I had a classic American childhood. My dad worked in the aerospace industry doing contract work for NASA. Knowing my dad was building rockets for the moon put stars in my eyes.” Like fellow artist, Eric Fischl, Sherer's work is playful, yet matter of fact. The stirrings of attraction, affection and sexuality are rendered in an illustrative style reminiscent of the 60s, but with meanings that explore the generally untold, and unseen homoerotic side adolescent youth. In addition to the the pyrographs, Sherer is stunningly brilliant at appropriating the styles of neo-classical masters Boucher, David, Ingres, Jerome, and Bougereau, which has brought about censorship charges from the religious right who claim that Sherer perverts God’s natural order by placing men in women’s positions. Not unexpectedly,they are completely missing the point. It is astounding that an artist of this caliber should be subjected to criticism, but the infamy, in itself, has provoked a far greater awareness of his work. They are simply, beautiful. To see the full range of his talent visit www.robertsherer.com.
Note to George Michael: start collecting.

“Sherer perverts God’s natural order           by placing men in women’s positions

Chris von Wangenheim

Vmagazine pays tribute to one of the greatest photographers of the 70s, Chris von Wangenheim. Renowned for his violent, decadent images, Wangenheim clearly helped define an era by pushing photography to the acceptable limits. While photographer Bruce Weber would be exploring the sensual, erotic side of men by shooting an entire issue of GQ (unheard of today), Wangenheim, whose images appeared in all the great fashion magazines, would explore women and occassionally men in a completely different light, literally. Dark, sinister, provocative and more then hinting at violence, he met his own untimely death by a car accident in 1981.

Talent

Photographer Karim Sadli

February: Water

The Cutting Edge of Art

The art issue of West, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine featured a piece on performance artist, Ron Athey by Kateri Butler.
Athey's art, which many find repulsive, is a combination of theater and self-abuse. Most notably, a performance in 1994 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which in part was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, led to a Republican Inquisition and a nearly complete meltdown of funding for arts in America.
An excerpt from the article:
"Ron is fearless in his work. The only true darkness is that which comes out of the hidden and misunderstood. He doesn't flinch. Oh, but I do. Especially when I see him the day after a performance, blotches of yellow and purple where hooks had pulled his face into a garish mask, or barely formed scabs where he had cut himself. I admit I'm one of those people who shivers and turns away during such scenes—yet one of the most powerful parts of a Ron Athey performance is the collective physical reaction that sizzles through the audience when he impales himself on a Judas cradle, say, or teases a rope of pearls out of his ass. Which is critically acclaimed, by the way. "Ron Athey's asshole," Amelia Jones declares in the spring issue of TDR: The Drama Review, "has its own place in the history of contemporary performance art."

YOU HAVE MALE

What a Relief

Italian police unearthed a hidden cache of Roman reliefs believe to hidden by grave robbers. 12 panels were found near Fiano Romano, just north of Rome. The reliefs date to the late 1st century B.C. and are believed to have decorated a tomb.

A Photographer Shows in Brooklyn

For twenty two years the Wessel + O' Connor Fine Art Gallery has showcased homoerotic photography, featuring some of the most significant names in the genre: Steven Arnold, Jim French, George Platt Lynes, Herb Ritts, Bruce of Los Angeles, Steve Klein, George Hoyningen-Huene and John Dugdale among others. Tonight in a show entitled "Schooldayz," they feature the work of the young Brandon Herman. Born and raised in a small suburb outside of San Francisco, Brandon's work is a combination of stark realities set in stark illusions. Using mostly friends, companions and objects of desire, his work pays homage to the ordinary while transcending it by the sheer reality of taking a picture.
"When I take pictures they become my reality and the photographs become important mementos, proof that for a few hours at a time I got together with my friends and made my fantasies come true." It should be noted that in his myspace profile, he lists his profession as a "plastic surgeon", which might be apt as he undermines reality, suffusing it with movie-like lighting with deep saturations of color redefining the ordinary. His work is showing January 11-February 24. The Wessel + Connor Gallery, 111 Front Street, Suite 200, Brooklyn, NY.

 

Celebrity Photography

Under pressure. The photographer has less than thirty seconds to compose, light and take THE photograph. There are no retakes, celebrities don't come back. Watching photographer Michael Davis shoot under these extraordinary circumstances is to understand a kind of grace under fire. It also makes one reexamine the art of celebrity  photography in general: if a photograph taken on the spot, without stylists, make-up or even an art director can be this good.....
Actor, writer, director (Little Children) Todd Field with Academy Award winner Sissy Spacek. Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu and the ultimate gentleman, Morgan Freeman.

The Place to be this weekend...

This weekend in Palm Springs, Ca. is hot. There is the Eighteenth Annual Palm Springs International Film with 80 world or U.S. premieres of upcoming major international films, seminars, and intimate on-stage interviews with movie and media personalities like Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Nolan, Kevin Costner, Peter Bart and Leonard Maltin. Brad and Angelina will be there. Tonight is opening night with the premiere of "Outsourced".
Tomorrow night the m modern gallery, presents Blow Up: A photography exhibition of amazing Hollywood images taken by legendary Hollywood photographers. Featured is the photographic work of three legendary celebrity photographers, Michael Childers, William Claxton and Douglas Kirkland. The opening will be followed by a party at the swank Viceroy Plam Springs Hotel.

Sexy Art

In the next few months Planet Homo will be sponsoring a photo exhibit that will be hitting major cities in the United States and hopefully Europe. Featuring the work of Joe Oppedisano (pictured), Karl Simone, Brandon Herman,  Michael Childers and Mel Roberts, the show will look at the state of male erotic photography past and present. Men have been photographed since invention of the camera. There has always been a special quality and story attached to images. During the early 50s and 60s, photographing men was usually done under the guise of athletics, fitness and wrestling generally in jockstraps. Nudity, though prevalent was also against the law. Photographers were arrested, files and images confiscated.
With an evolving culture the late 70s and 80s, photographers such as Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts expanded the notion of photographing men by shooting them in naturalistic and less tableau settings.
Throughout all images of men there runs a current of exploration, a discovery of form eliciting a revelation about what is to be male, to be seen, to be alive. And that has not changed in the current climate of digital photography and the abundance of images to be seen on a daily basis.
This exhibit explores the relationship between images both old and new. Photography is essentially timeless, and male photography is virtually without fashion, instead always focused on the object of desire, revealing only the relationship between photographer and model.

Art Opening

If you happen to be wandering around Palm Beach a few days before Christmas, stop by the Holden Luntz Gallery for an amazing group show entitled, "Dreams, Fears and Desires". Featuring the work of Brandon Herman, Eric Ogden, Kerry Skarbakka, Bernard Faucon, Cig Harvey and Lynn Goldsmith.

Some of the names may seem familiar. Lynn Goldsmith has photographed kids, children and many, many celebrities including a stint as Michael Jackson's personal photographer. Bernard Faucon has been at the forefront of creating surrealist images most notably the beautiful Summer Camp book. Brandon Herman is a New York photographer originally from the Bay area and a recent graduate of the famed RISD (Rhode Island School of Design).

There is an odd coherence in the grouping of these photographers. Naturalistic and Surrealistic images gliding over the human landscape exposing our dreams, fear and desires.