delirium clemens

 (1)
The successful exhibition Naked Men unveils male nudity: full-frontally.

In German there are terrific words to name the best & overrated piece of a man: Pillermann, Pimperling, Schniedelwutz, or the rustic Austrian term Zumpferl. But whereas female breasts and other naked truths are shamelessly exploited in art and advertising throughout history, male nudity has been subject to stricter rules or even to an image ban at times.

An exhibition in Vienna’s Leopold Museum, which became talk of the town fast in Fall, has tried to close that flesh-colored gap. Instead of being modest, the makers decided to show all they had right from the start: a larger-than-life male nude with a clearly visible penis was placed in front of the museum’s post-modern staircase to shock devout local Muslims as well as bigoted American tourists: fully frontal nudity Continental style! The colorful exhibition posters that show three soccer players of different skin color (nude of course) with their little big friends in all stages of initial erection were promptly castrated with black paint at several locations over the city. Whose penis envy had led to action, could not be ascertained; radical women’s groups seemed rather amused or pleased than outraged. (2)

The exhibition itself is not at all a cheap peepshow, but curated in a quite serious way. The tour starts with a peek into Antiquity and then leads particularly through the last 250 years of art history. The individual exhibition rooms are based on the following world- and penis-moving assumptions:

1. Heroes are traditionally represented as visible penis-carriers, from Achill to the sportsmen of our day – regardless how hard the Vatican tried to put fig leaves on ancient torsos.
2. The “golden age” is often depicted as homosocial bathing scenes of male bonding.
3. In the battle of the sexes in art, the man was for centuries relegated to the background until, around 1900, he may also come to the fore.
4. The naked male body is less a representation screen of desire, but rather of suffering (also see Jesus Christ).
5. After 1968, the protest potential of the naked body has been discovered, and thus the penis (eg. in Viennese Actionism), while
6. postmodern female artists focus to the naked male body – stripped of his insignia of power – especially as an ironic symbol of inadequacy.

From the visual materials on display, you must not expect too much extraordinary stuff; you will rather notice how many dicks you have studiously ignored so far while museums of art history.  More productive are some exhibited works of contemporary art.

My two favorite artists in the exhibition are clearly central European: The performance artist Tomislav Gotovac, who used to be one of Zagreb’s living legends, has a naked, fat and bearded old man – namely himself – adjust to the same pin-up poses which are usually taken by the girls in sex magazines.

 (3)

Even more efforts had to be made by the Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra in 1999 to make their video project Men’s Bathhouse happen: in order to film secretly how naked men behave in a nudist environment where they feel completely unwatched and comfortable – in this case in a Budapest spa – she was provided by a makeup artist not only with artificial beard and chest hair, but also with a fake penis. The camera was hidden under her towel; however, the preparatory video of Ms. Kozyra’s acquisition of manhood is probably more impressive than the footage from the bathhouse itself.

 (4)

Whether (wo)man goes home with deep satisfaction after having seen this exhibition, I do not know. In any case it is amusing and instructive, especially when you consider that Mr. Leopold – long before he built this museum, ie. when he started collecting a then unknown artist by the name of Egon Schiele – was actually an ophthalmologist and his son & successor a shrink. So you must take a deep breath, look forward to your next therapy session and hope that during your next visit to the sauna (especially after excessive weight gain during the Christmas break) no Polish artist lurks there in the dark to film dick.

*

Text (c) Ruthner & LIDOVÉ NOVINY, 2012 > German original text

Photos (c) Ruthner (1+2); csw.art.pl (3); tportal.hr (4)

Exhibition extended until 4 March 2013 !

This entry was posted on 6 January 2013 at 12:53 and is filed under Uncategorized with tags art, art history, Austria, Europe, exhibition, gender, masculinity, nudity sexuality, review, Vienna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.