Shagadelic
The running gag of the Austin Powers movies is that Austin's sexually liberated swinger philosophy is constantly at odds with the uptight, politically correct world of the Nineties and Oughties. I was reminded of this when visiting the exhibition British Art and the Sixties at the National Gallery of Victoria today (touring from Tate Britain). Most of the work is only interesting historically: artistically, it's as dead as a dodo, and I think it's significant that the NGV chose not to use the Tate's original and rather ambiguous tagline "This was tomorrow".
Pop Art relied heavily on images of women taken from girlie/nudie/soft porn magazines, and modern-day curators writing explanatory labels for these works have quite a job on their hands. Their solution in this exhibition is in fact quite simple. In every single instance in which some kind of 'sexy' image of a woman is used, we are told categorically by the label that this represents the artist's 'critique of the objectification and commodification of women', or words to that effect. In some cases, it's arguably true, as in a Richard Hamilton work comparing aspects of American cars to female anatomy (hey, it seemed profound 40 years ago). But there are many cases in which it's not so clear, and the texts offer nothing like a quote from the artist to substantiate the clairvoyant assertion. There are definitely examples where the artist is dealing with something he does get his jollies from.
In itself, this would simply be the standard PC schoolmarmishness of modern cultural institutions, but in this particular exhibition, there's an added twist. The show also contains one of David Hockney's paintings of a man taking a shower, and, as I'm sure the curators are aware, Hockney based these paintings directly on gay porn magazines of which he was an avid collector. He talks about this in David Hockney by David Hockney, one of the most entertaining memoirs ever written by an artist, after Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography. Now, it doesn't seem to be presuming too much to guess that Hockney actually enjoyed this subject matter, but funnily enough, the curators don't find anything problematic about this, nor do they feel the need to invent a fiction about him 'critiquing the objectification of the male body'.
The running gag of the Austin Powers movies is that Austin's sexually liberated swinger philosophy is constantly at odds with the uptight, politically correct world of the Nineties and Oughties. I was reminded of this when visiting the exhibition British Art and the Sixties at the National Gallery of Victoria today (touring from Tate Britain). Most of the work is only interesting historically: artistically, it's as dead as a dodo, and I think it's significant that the NGV chose not to use the Tate's original and rather ambiguous tagline "This was tomorrow".
Pop Art relied heavily on images of women taken from girlie/nudie/soft porn magazines, and modern-day curators writing explanatory labels for these works have quite a job on their hands. Their solution in this exhibition is in fact quite simple. In every single instance in which some kind of 'sexy' image of a woman is used, we are told categorically by the label that this represents the artist's 'critique of the objectification and commodification of women', or words to that effect. In some cases, it's arguably true, as in a Richard Hamilton work comparing aspects of American cars to female anatomy (hey, it seemed profound 40 years ago). But there are many cases in which it's not so clear, and the texts offer nothing like a quote from the artist to substantiate the clairvoyant assertion. There are definitely examples where the artist is dealing with something he does get his jollies from.
In itself, this would simply be the standard PC schoolmarmishness of modern cultural institutions, but in this particular exhibition, there's an added twist. The show also contains one of David Hockney's paintings of a man taking a shower, and, as I'm sure the curators are aware, Hockney based these paintings directly on gay porn magazines of which he was an avid collector. He talks about this in David Hockney by David Hockney, one of the most entertaining memoirs ever written by an artist, after Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography. Now, it doesn't seem to be presuming too much to guess that Hockney actually enjoyed this subject matter, but funnily enough, the curators don't find anything problematic about this, nor do they feel the need to invent a fiction about him 'critiquing the objectification of the male body'.
posted by cuckoo at
6:05 PM
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