Welcome to the Mainstream
The assertive sexuality of new gay artists
By Robert Brett Goodwin

The artist Slava Mogutin has decorated the windows of the Barnes and Noble bookstore on 6th Avenue and 12th street to celebrate the release of his new book of photography, The Lost Boys. Innocuously filled with prints and props (a hockey mask, Russian military paraphernalia), and a blow up of the book’s cover, the windows give little indication of the naughty behavior that Mogutin has documented between the covers, which would certainly raise the eyebrows of more than a few passers-by. An openly gay journalist and poet who fled his native Russia for New York City in the early 1990’s, Mogutin is a leader among the new generation of gay male artists who are boldly celebrating their sexuality and operating within the mainstream like never before.

At “The Male Gaze,” a group exhibition of more than 20 mostly young gay artists held at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn this summer, the feeling of a sea change was palpable. As societies have begun to absorb such phenomena as celebrities coming out on the cover of People magazine, television shows like “Will and Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” and metrosexual marketing campaigns; not to mention civil unions, gay marriages, gay adoptions, gay single parents, etc., there is a counter reaction within gay culture, which is reasserting its marginalized status. “The art we’re showing argues for a new kind of alternativism that reacts against the mainstream of the culture, ” said the curator of the show, Nicholas Weist.

Mogutin, who exhibited photos from The Lost Boys in the exhibition, is nothing if not an alternative to the mainstream. Born in the Siberian city of Kemerevo, which Mogutin calls “the Detroit of Russia ,” he moved to Moscow as a teenager, where his work as a journalist earned him both critical acclaim and official condemnation. The radical content of his openly gay writing, which outed several Russian celebrities and politicians, had the government pressing three criminal cases with a possible prison sentence of up to seven years. Mogutin’s fiction and poetry is about sex, disgust, nostalgia, and the dazzlingly foul Russian body politic. In a story titled “A Curious Family,” two parents beat their daughter because the government has made them ineligible for a council apartment. In “The Death of Misha Beautiful,” Mogutin describes fellating an ecstasy-addled boy in a string of Moscow alleys and doorways during a police sting. It was those stories which led to government charges of “propaganda of brutal violence, psychic pathology, and sexual perversions,” “malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence,” “inflaming social, national, and religious division,” and “open and deliberate contempt for generally accepted moral norms.”

At 21, Mogutin was one of the last political dissidents to be deported from Russia. With the help of Amnesty International and PEN America, he settled in New York City, the first Russian to be granted sanctuary in the United States based on sexually orientated persecution. He took up photography as a way to get around the language barrier, and began to star in adult-oriented films like Bruce La Bruce’s Skin Flick . After Putin came to power in Russia, the charges against Mogutin were dropped, and he began to make periodic trips home, photographing his friends and the derelict buildings they lived in. The Lost Boys is a product of those trips, with images ranging from the overtly sexual to the sweetly sentimental; Russian ravers, street hustlers and military cadets, skinheads and football hooligans, skaters, punks; boys from the margins of society. “They are living on the edge, creating and defending their own identities on the outskirts of corporate consumerist society. To me, they are the real heroes of our time. ” The Lost Boys captures them in vulnerable and shameless moments. In one picture, a man is sniffing his lover’s underarm, in another two skinheads spit and urinate on each other. Slava says he would never ask a model to do something that he wouldn’t feel comfortable doing himself. “I really enjoy photographing people in vulnerable, intimate situations. And I enjoy sharing those pictures with others. ” His pictures recall the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, among others .

Mogutin refuses to conceptualize or pre-plan a piece, preferring instead the strong, immediate, visceral connections that happen on the spot. He uses disposable cameras, believing that fancy equipment is not necessary for a beautiful shot. Slava recently began collaborating with his boyfriend, the American graffiti artist Brian Kenny, under the name SUPERM. SUPERM installations combine photography, video, sound, text, drawings, graffiti, stencils, murals, collages, sculptures, and found objects to expose the fissures between different groups in society. Their most recent exhibition, “But Her Majesty’s Roast beef Curtains Wouldn’t Open For Him,” at the Blow De La Barra gallery in London, caused a stir earlier this year because Slava was denied entry into the UK. The centerpiece was a farcical monument to consumer culture. Furniture, sportswear, and tourist tat was slammed together with hazard tape. A photograph of Queen Elizabeth II was embellished with a hairy mustache, recalling the punk aesthetic of the Sex Pistols. Homoerotic photographs shared wall space with American-style police targets that had been covered in graffiti. Two school desks were covered in scratches, and sketches of bulldogs.

It certainly isn’t new for gay artists to use sexually charged imagery. The history of gay artists is rife with controversy: Andy Warhol and his 13 Most Wanted Men at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, which was covered up on the orders of Governor Nelson Rockefeller; the censorship, closure, and protests surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s retrospective at the Corcoran gallery in Washington D.C.; the National Endowment for the Arts’ attempt to revoke the $10,000 grant it had given Nan Goldin for her AIDS-related exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing; the defacement in Chicago of ACT UP posters showing same-sex couples kissing in 1990 , etc. This history has led to a long tradition of complex codes and hidden recognitions. David Wojnarowicz, writing on his Sex Series in 1990, asked, “Are you comfortable looking at these images of obvious sexual acts in a crowded room? Do you fear judgment if you pause for a long time before an image of sexual expression? ” Explicit as it was, the Sex Series dealt with the oppression and suppression of sexual images. In 2007, the new generation of gay artists like Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenny are trying to put that history behind them. They approach their work with unfettered abandon, and give no indication that they ever had any qualms about their sexual orientation. Instead, it is celebratory and uncomplicated.

One of the questions no one has really answered is what is going to happen to artists and works that endorses this new museum. Established museums build their collections over long periods of time. They exhibit works that belonged to their kings, queens etc. as well as establishing process of buying. Museums rarely buy art works, they are donated works and loan arrangements with other museums. If they buy its because a piece once belonged to the patrimony of their country. Most contemporary museums, that do buy and commission art, have very restricted budgets. Which keeps the art market stable. There have been times of volatility in the market but it has corrected itself. Of course there is always art works worth millions no matter the market.

For the performance 50 Most Beautiful Boys at Peres Projects in Los Angeles (2004), the Beijing born, Canadian raised, Brooklyn based artist Terrence Koh sang into a microphone while two young boys--child actors hired from a Hollywood agency and selected for their “really great nipples ” -- played drums covered in jewels unraveled from chandeliers. Mirror shards hung on threads from the ceiling. The room was covered in white powder. Bruce La Bruce (the same man who directed Skin Flick) shot the video of the performance, which was later sold in a limited-edition white box which included three books, a poster, a rectangular piece of white felt, a white card with the words "boy drowned and crystal cried" written in silver text, and a small, white object made of clay. Lately Koh has been casting objects out of white plaster; an ornate box, a classical bust; and placing them in vitrines, so the viewer can look, but not touch or use them. Koh got his start by launching a website under the alias “Asianpunkboy.” Having declared that “Asianpunkboy” is dead, he now goes by “Koh Bunny.” His work, heady with images of bunny rabbits, sex, and death, is playful, ephemeral, and enigmatic. He constantly references his homosexual predecessors (50 Most Beautiful Boys is an obvious reference to Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men), but the connections are muddled. Explanations are never given, and the real Terrence Koh remains inaccessible.

Koh’s cryptic objects and elusive personality recall another well known artist of the previous generation, Robert Gober, whose modified wooden cribs and porcelain sinks, sculptures of donut bags, and disembodied legs and torsos (some of which appear ambisexual) similarly refuse any insight into the “real” person behind them. Gober’s objects, like Koh’s plasters, have been rendered useless. Likewise, Felix Gonzalez-Torres kept the audience at arm’s length. His work was highly conceptual, constantly referencing themes of AIDS, death, and the body’s decay. His Untitled billboard (1992); an unoccupied bed, still inhabited by the presence of its owners; was inspired by the AIDS-related death of his boyfriend. Koh references death too, but he does not share the quiet and contemplative qualities that Gober and Gonzalez-Torres are known for, favouring instead a brashly narcissistic posture. This “look at me” attitude is what sets him apart from his forebears. Koh was not featured in “The Male Gaze,” perhaps because he has already had too much exposure. But as an uninhibited gay exhibitionist, he certainly would have fit the bill.

“The Male Gaze” also featured text pieces on yellow post-it notes by Joel Ovelman, which were scrawled with messages such as “promise to sleep with party promoters,” “drink that $1.50 Bud before going into the bar,” “research study participant: 25$ per visit,” and “refuse to pay more than $25 for a nineteen yr. old.” In a previous exhibition at the Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery (2004), Ovelman covered the back room with photographs of trees taken in Central Park’s “Ramble” section, which is a well-known cruising spot for sex. A wall in the front room of the gallery was lined with plastic sandwich bags that had been filled with the discarded condoms found throughout the city. Ovelman has been hinting at a return to the very kind of debauched, Dionysian lifestyle that many gays looking to be more accepted in the mainstream would prefer to leave behind forever. His references to sex--solicited and casual, but protected--cover the same subject matter as the politically engaged group ACT UP of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, who created the infamous poster by Gran Fury which stated, “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” But his attitude is vastly different from the stern tones of ACT UP. It is irreverent and relaxed. Gio Andrade, known as “Black Peter,” a name taken from the folkloric elf who brings ‘bad’ presents to ‘bad’ presents on Christmas, installed a graffiti piece with the text “I will fuck you if you help me get a record deal” in the gallery’s toilet.

Of course, the elephant in the room is AIDS. A generation of gay men has now grown up around the AIDS crisis, and their view of the world has been informed by the politics, both radical and conservative, of the era. Born in the 80’s, they are too young to have experienced the worst of the AIDS crisis or identity politics firsthand. Many have barely experienced gayness as a threatened condition. These artists grew up with AIDS being a fact of life, which may point to why they seem so ambivalent about it. It is a generation too young to have experienced the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s, eager to restart the bacchanalian party and move on. But despite a decline in HIV infections overall, major urban centres have been experiencing a worrying increase in infections among gay men. AIDS is not over, and it should not be forgotten, no matter how much people would like to push it out of their minds. Perhaps then the most important piece of “The Male Gaze” is Banner (2006-2007) by the American artist Christian Holstad: a party decoration, hanging out alone on the wall, with the words “INFECT OTHERS” spelled out in bright colours. There is certainly a place for celebration in the gay art world, but powerful pieces like Banner should not be forgotten.

Robert Brett Goodwin

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