Masculinities | Barbican London
MASCULINITIES: Inspiring new show on at the Barbican. So many ideas and critical perspectives to take in on one visit. It’s great to see a show that gives you so much to think about and a sense that a lot of it has slipped in there below the radar. Some of the portraiture is exceptional, subversive, playful, layered, transgressive.
Athleticism is often perceived as a proxy for strength, which is itself equated to masculinity, thus constructing the deceptive notion that strength and social power rely on how masculine one is. In Catherine Opie’s (b.1961, USA) series High School Football — comprised of formal portraits in which young players gaze directly at the lens — her subjects reveal a vulnerable youthfulness that stands in direct contrast to the stereotypes of masculine virility associated with American football culture and the perception of athletes as aggressive, hypercompetitive and emotionally disconnected. Photographed between 2007 and 2009 in locations across the US, from Hawaii and Alaska to Texas and the artist’s home town of Los Angeles, High School Football foregrounds the vulnerability of young male athletes in the precarious moment between youth and adulthood.
Israeli artist Adi Nes’s (b. 1966; Israel) evocative colour photographs often recall scenes from art history while also exploring homoeroticism. In his meticulously staged series Soldiers, for which he photographed young men performing as infantry soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces, Nes makes clear the connection between culturally dominant masculinity and the masculinity of the Jewish combat soldier, a figure perceived in Israeli culture as an emblem of good citizenship. His cinematic images of soldiers sleeping, resting, smoking and generally larking around are all grounded in his own experiences as a gay Mizrahi Jewish man. Nes not only infuses his images of the military with homoeroticism but also reveals the strong homosocial bonds that exist between soldiers. As well as inscribing the queer body into the military imagination, Nes also cast a young man with an amputated arm to pose in one of the images in the series, further breaking down the narrow confines of military-sanctioned masculinity.
Exploding with psychosexual drama and tension, Polish-born, New York-based artist Aneta Bartos’s performative series Family Portrait. 2015-18, alludes to the way portraiture is often a process of artifice and construction. What began as the intention to document her father, a retired bodybuilder, before his body started ageing, quickly turned into a collaborative project: Bartos brings herself into the frame to usher In a disquieting and challenging variant on the father—daughter dynamic, one seemingly untethered from societal expectations. In Apple for instance, Bartos’s father holds an apple while Bartos stares directly to the camera and by extension at the viewer, calling into question the biblical narrative of the fall of man.
