Gaylife Section X | Thursday, February 28, 1985
Power and Vulnerability in ‘Looking at Men’
The Mystique of Maleness on Display at Artemisia Gallery
By Albert Williams
Power and vulnerability. Sexuality and chastity. Being and doing. They’re all part of the “mystique” of maleness—interconnected and forever at odds.
Looking at Men, an ambitious new art show opening Friday at Artemisia Gallery, 341 W. Superior, offers a wide variety of imagery along this theme. The three curators—Artemisia collective members Michelle Fire and Anita David, along with guest co-curator James Garret Faulkner—say that it just turned out that way.
“Our aim was just to gather together as many quality images of men as possible, with no axes to grind,” says Faulkner.
That helps explain the show’s certain casualness—including the fact that art by gay men, lesbians, and heterosexual women and men hang so comfortably side by side.
The result is refreshing in this time of “power-packed” male imagery dominating the media. Some of the paintings in Looking at Men are explicitly sexual (Lee Gordon’s Friendly Neighbor Series, for instance, depicts Day-Glo blow jobs), while others have a more implicit sexual content—both homo and hetero. Others, even some nudes, are resolutely asexual. None of the work is “commercial,” but all are contemporary.
There are solitary portraits as well as couplings. Among the most touching entries are a series of photos by Columbia College graduate student Doug Ischar, showing young men frolicking at the Belmont Rocks and weathered old men dancing together at the Reno Gay Rodeo.
Looking at Men is a follow-up to Artemisia’s Looking at Women last year, also curated by Fire, David, and Faulkner. The main difference between the two shows, Fire feels, is that this time,
“We’ve lost the violent impact of the earlier show, the violent interaction of the sexes. This show is more centered; there’s more feeling of repose. A lot of it is straightforward beautiful work—the man, his dick, his paintbrush…”
The new show draws together established artists such as Jim Dine (Dorian Gray at Opium Den), Vito Acconci, Nereldo de la Paz, Phyllis Bramson, Leon Golub, Michael Tropea, Jane Wenger, and Paul Georges, along with younger newcomers like Ischar and Michael Popilek, whose nude self-portrait is a fine study in skin tones.
“In addition to our going to dealers and collectors, a lot of it was word of mouth,” says Fire. “We paid studio visits to artists who’d never shown.”
This kind of risk-taking has always been what Artemisia is about. Founded in 1973 by 20 women seeking an alternative avenue to show their work, the gallery-collective was named after Artemisia Gentileschi, a 17th-century painter whose best work had been credited to her father. Twelve years and three locations later, Artemisia has often come under attack for championing the offbeat, the original—art that offers cultural insights through its imperfections as well as its beauty—while gaining an impressive reputation as a foremother and prominent member of Chicago’s fast-growing River North artist space/gallery scene.
The curators deliberately avoided asking artists who had shown in Looking at Women to participate in this year’s exhibit—with one notable exception.
Chicagoan Fred Escher was represented in Looking at Women with a startling, deliberately ugly picture of a man pissing on a reclining woman. In a woman-oriented show put on by a feminist art gallery, it was a shocker. But men get equal time from Escher: This year, he has a picture of a man urinating into an electric fan, which splatters his urine back at him.
“It’s called Pissing in the Wind,” says Faulkner with a smile.
The stated purpose of Looking at Women is to present the art “in such a way as to leave the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions about the portrayal of men in art.”
One notable, and slightly disturbing, aspect of these pictures is that they almost all lie on the surface. The show is creative, orderly, and mostly good-looking, but also somehow complacent. There are a lot of nudes here, but very little nakedness. The work is less probing than reflective—the viewer coming for emotional insight or a sexual turn-on is likely to find a mirror instead.
“These are what’s being done of men today,” says Anita David. “This is how men are presented to the world today—and how they present themselves.”
Looking at Men is on display at Artemisia Gallery, 341 W. Huron, March 1-30, with an opening reception Friday, March 1, from 5 to 8 p.m. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information, call 751-2016.