Linda Yablonsky, the Contributing Editor of ArtNews
has a piece on nudity and art which is a bit revealing, a bit surprising and overall a good read.
It's revealing in the sense that it shows the writer's dependency on New York to anchor most of her issues, points and references. It's surprising to have her tell us that
"with male nudes in full display, pornography a common source material, and explicit imagery the norm in galleries and museums, sex in art has become fun, disturbing, raunchy, even cerebral." Two standards of nudity exist: one for men and one for women.
She quotes artist
Carroll Dunham, (in whose paintings the penis has been a recent motif, as he's better known as an abstract painter) as saying:
"male sexuality has been one of the least represented things in our culture except in pornography. Historically, painters were men getting women to take off their clothes to paint them. But I see a phallus as part of who I am, and I have a right to make it as an image. Why weren't they interested in their own bodies?"
Dunham may be right, but in an art world obsessed with the trend of the new and who did what first, I have a nepotic and provincial bitch with the penis painting issue, as anyone who is anybody in Washington, DC knows that our own
Manon Cleary has painted the male penis for many years, and even appeared on an HBO special about sex, painting the penis in her own unique neo-classical manner. Problem is that Manon shows in Washington, DC and since ArtNews magazine all but ignores the DC area, she would have never come within the radar of Ms. Yablonsky, although Manon's penis paintings received enough press and interest that they came to the attention of HBO!
And if the "new" issue of marrying pornography to art is raising eyebrows lately in Gotham, then they certainly raised them here as well, as this
1997 review in the Washington Post notes:
Fraser Gallery is showing charcoal drawings of nudes by F. Lennox Campello. The subjects are mostly women Campello found on X-rated Web sites. He then arranged to meet and draw them. The drawings are very dark and the artist's abundant use of shadow effects can be heavy-handed and irritating. But in a few of the works he manages to find a delicate balance between the black charcoal and cream-colored paper resulting in a grainy, film-noir effect, making his subjects, traffickers in mass-consumption prurience, seem tough but vulnerable, like a flowering plant in a sexual wasteland.
And more recently of course, was the whole flap caused by the
Scott Hutchison nudes in Bethesda, which even merited a spot in our
TV local news.
So Yablonsky is essentially right in isolating this trend, but what's "new" or "trendy" is sometimes a re-hash of what has been outside the tunnel vision of the writer. And just as I am tunnel-visioned to mostly what happens in the Washington, DC area visual arts, her vision and time is, as one would expect, focused upon NYC and art world superstars.
This could be partially solved if her magazine paid more attention to the rest of the nation's art scene(s), and became somewhat less NYC-focused, but that will never happen.
