"After Everything".

Weil, Harry Jacob

Like the Spice Gallery, Brooklyn NY June 20 * July 6, 2008

There's a new sexual revolution now taking shape among younger artists who are not only challenging art world stereotypes, but also increasing visibility of homosexuality in popular culture. The road to equal rights has been a long and winding one, without mentioning the major U-turn instigated by the AIDS epidemic. Yet today most Americans, while not necessarily being more comfortable with homosexuality, have witnessed it becoming part of the mainstream, running the gamut from Will and Grace to Brokeback Mountain to Doogie Howser's love life. The unfortunate result of all this media hype has been the almost universal fascination with hotties and Muscle Mary types, often to the exclusion of the fledgling, somewhat murky outlands of gender, separatism, and the occult of the male body.

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Enter the "post-gay" worldview, where precise sexual identification no longer holds. "Post-gay isn't 'ungay,'" explains Out editor-in-chief James Collard in the NY Times (June 21, 1998). "It's about taking a critical look at gay life and no longer thinking solely in terms of struggle. It's going to a gay bar and wishing there were girls there to talk to." In the case of "After Everything: Gay Directions in New Art," it is a group of eight artists who examine the shifting fortunes of gay culture in what curator Dylan Peet calls a "post-everything society.... There is a new generation of gay men who came out at 16, took their boyfriends to the prom without hassle and hardly see the point of going to a gay bar. The things that have made gay culture special and apart from society at large are becoming obsolete."

For example, Christopher Schultz's photo-based periodical Pinups takes its cue from early liberationist gay porn. But unlike the usual fare, here each page forms part of a larger image, giving readers the option of constructing their own life-size nude bear or cub. According to Schulz, "When I started Pinups I knew the type of guy I wanted to photograph wasn't like the typical guy you see in print, but I wanted to treat him as though he was." Clearly, these models are not run-of-the-mill fetishes, but just regular guys--if hairy pudgy men with potbellies can be so described. Operating as throwbacks to a post-Stonewall style of deviant confrontation on the one hand, while treating the smooth continuous masculine form to an origami burst of fragmentation on the other, the images in Pinups confound and even out the twinks and hunks collected in most gay rags.

If Jesse Finely Reed's C-prints are less overtly erotic, it is only at the expense of stock gay imagery, like when he sheds light on dark nightclub interiors or portrays bars of soap as horribly grungy--the very opposite of how these sacred icons are normally perceived. The Merchandise (2005-06) series shows headless, hyper-sexualized models with airbrushed pecs and other marks of masculine pulchritude. The result is uncanny versions of the sort of images commonly traded on craigslist.com and other gay chat rooms. In his ongoing photographic series, If You're Lonely ... (not included in this show), Reed photographs men he met online, though rendered as backlit, vaguely threatening silhouettes of sexual promise. Moving on to more hallowed ground is The Cock: Bathroom View #1 and View #2, New York, NY, 2002 (2002), two inkjet prints of seedy bathroom cruising areas plunged into dazzling daylight. In it, Reed goes straight to the heart of the classical meet-and-greet of gay secrecy and anonymity.

Part of this new, mostly younger gay sensibility revolves around a reported lack of intimacy even in the most technologically advanced networks. Ian O'Phelan's Portrait (2008), a graphite and mixed-media drawing on canvas, offers a ghostly phantasm of a lost or missed virtual connection. Conjured from the well of online mystique, the tactile layers of dripping white paint engulf the sketchy outline of evanescent availability. The rest of the work in "After Everything," however, takes a more sanguine approach to these rapidly growing rifts in community solidarity. Sean M. Johnson shows groups of bears and cubs at mischievous play in donut eating and pinata contests, or at a slumber party, making it entirely unnecessary for Goldilocks to make an appearance. Steed Taylor paints roads with highgloss latex tattoo designs, which, just as bodies vanish beneath the signs of tribal initiation, appear and disappear under the lights of passing cars. Joseph Heidecker uses found figurative images and discarded materials to highlight the constructed nature or "mask" of gay selfdom, what he calls "the revealing and concealing nature in people." Darren Lee Miller does much the same, mainly by photographing contrived tableaux of half-remembered scenes--like jails, fire stations, and communal showers--where sexuality and power inevitably collide and collude.

Clarke Jackson's EXTREME_ankleGYM (2004) inkjet series portraying an imaginary gym in which .various voyeuristic scenes are enacted, is a hilarious poke in Matthew Barney's eye. Based on an actual encounter in a health club where Jackson saw an older pear-shaped guy inexplicably exercising his ankles alone, obviously concealing a camera in his fanny pack. Jackson proceeds to fill in the picture for us, revealing the equipment and gym bunnies in all their voyeuristic glory. He poses the question that if the webcam phenomenon is now the universal order of the day, what else are we engaging in but a communal blindness to our unusually broad consumer base.

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