WHAT could have so easily been an explicitly political show about gay rights is instead a celebration of tender portraiture, writes Moira Jeffrey
Gallery of Modern Art, GlasgowWHEN I visited the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow this week, I was told there had been a number of serious complaints about the exhibition Sh(OUT). But visitors lured by recent Daily Mail headlines
screaming about hardcore gay porn will have been seriously disappointed by the lack of it.
In fact, in the rather reverential atmosphere of dimmed lights, the refrigerated chill of air-conditioning and a bronze funerary sculpture by Patricia Cronin, showing the artist entwined with her female partner (largely by that uncontroversial organ the toe) the atmosphere is far more mausoleum than flesh mag.
Sh(OUT) is the latest instalment of GoMA's ongoing series of shows devoted to the intersection of social justice and cultural issues. In the kind of tongue-twisting labelling that makes you wish we could just settle with a single word, the exhibition is devoted to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex art and culture".
If at times the rather worthy nature of such shows has sometimes been a little trying, they have been incredibly successful in both achieving visitor numbers and wider agenda-setting, and provide interesting markers and models of how galleries might understand their activities and audiences.
With Sh(OUT) it's important to put things in a bit of context. While we liberals have rightly got our knickers in a twist over the past couple of weeks about the temporary exclusion of titles by figures such as Gore Vidal and Stephen Fry from a new "family-friendly" Amazon search engine, all over the world gay men and women can find themselves in various states of exclusion, persecution, criminal prosecution and torture. Amnesty International, which is a partner in this project with Culture and Sport Glasgow, provides some grim statistics on the subject.
Published reactions to this show have varied from outraged comment by the Daily Mail on autopilot to one opinion writer's suggestion that as gay people are really just like the rest of us, they should stick to images that portray them being normal. Interestingly the aesthetic here tends to the queer, rather than gay. Gay culture, from Kylie's costumes to David Beckham's hairdo, is so mainstream as to be utterly invisible.
Here difference is foregrounded, sparkle is severely limited. Those images that have sexual content are frank and outspoken rather than sexy. Instead, however, there are many explorations of love and partnership, marriage and family, subjects these days barely visible in much contemporary art.
Sh(OUT) is really a show about portraiture and self-portraiture about bodies, how they're different from each other and how we use them differently. It is fairly defined by the identity politics of the Western world in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties and therefore haunted by the spectre of Aids and includes key figures from the era such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Catherine Opie, Diane Torr, Jack Pierson and, of course, the late Robert Mapplethorpe.
Cleverly, the curators have included 'Jim and Tom, Sausalito', Mapplethorpe's most notorious image. It is also his most bullet proof in terms of the censors after a US court found that it was not obscene. In a world drowning in internet porn and the sexualisation of imagery in our everyday lives, these photographs shock more by their austere qualities and sense of antiquated formality than their content. Mapplethorpe's aesthetic was always one of exquisite distance, of careful connoisseurship. 'Jim and Tom' seems now like a message from some ancient and remote culture. In contrast, the work of the American photographer Nan Goldin seems to predict entirely our current informal relationship with the image: our endless snapping and self-documentation. For decades now, Goldin has relentlessly recorded the lives of herself and her friends with a casual fearlessness, beauty and brutality. The work on show here is a moving memorial to her friend and muse, the transsexual artist Greer Lankton, who died of anorexia in 1996.
Interestingly, downstairs in another gallery and in another context which does no shouting at all, there is a coincidental display of some wonderful recent purchases by GoMA; vintage prints by the late American photographer Peter Hujar and an installation by Matthew Buckingham.
The outstanding Hujar, a huge influence on a new generation of documentary photographers, was a kind of melancholic version of fellow photographer Weegee, a nighthawk who documented New York after dark and captured his bohemian, intellectual and gay peer groups in transition.
Buckingham uses the slide-show format to tell the story of Charlotte Wolff, a Jewish pioneer of social medicine. In Berlin, in the Thirties, she was arrested by the Gestapo for dressing as a man and released only by a fluke when an officer recognised her as his wife's doctor. She fled to Paris and returned to Berlin in the Seventies.
Neither of these artists wears identity on their sleeves, yet their complex work is saturated by it. In contrast, Sh(OUT] is a bit of a heavy-handed exercise, but it is also a fairly comprehensive tick list, includes some prestigious loans and, in view of its consciousness-raising aims, probably benefits from its rather straightforward emphasis on figuration and portraiture.
• Until November 1
REVIEW RECOMMENDS
ART
GLASGOW ART FAIR 09The prestigious art fair features more than 1,000 established and emerging artists, with rare work by Adrian Wiszniewski, Ken Currie, Peter Howson and Steven Campbell among the highlights. www.glasgowartfair.com.
George Square, Glasgow (0870 220 1116), Thursday, 10.30am-8pm; Friday until April 26, 10.30am-6.30pm
THEATRE
WUTHERING HEIGHTSBollywood revamp of Emily Brontë's love story from Tamasha, the company that commissioned the play East Is East, which went on to inspire the film.
Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow (0141-429 0022), Tuesday-Saturday, 7.30pm (Saturday matinee at 2.30pm)
The full article contains 996 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
