Love, Pain and the Whole Damned Thing

Steve Cox examines the vulnerable male figure in Tough and

Tender.
Help, I'm alive
My heart keeps beating like a hammer.
Hard to be soft,
Tough to be tender
Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train.

Help Im Alive- Metric

Curated by Dr. Christopher Chapman for the National Portrait Gallery,

Canberra, the exhibition Tough and Tender brings together artists Robert
Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Chris Burden, Collier Schorr, Warwick Baker
and Rozalind Drummond. Some of the exhibitions themes are: bodily sensation,
emotional vulnerability, and a yearning for connection. The images of male figures
in the show are of particularly interest because they intersect with notions of the
homoerotic, adding complex layers to now-dissolving tropes of masculinity.

Larry Clarks photographs of tough (and tender) teenage boys were made
during a period when the photographer was vicariously reconnecting with his own
scarred adolescence. His boys possess Caravaggesque vitality. One teenager is
shown asleep on a bed with an erection visible beneath his jeans; another stares up,
naked, from a bath; a gang of nude kids gathers on a mudflat. Others, full of
bravado, preen before mirrors or are shown on the mean streets, overflowing with
unbridled sexual energy, grabbing their crotches as they search for thrills and
mischief. "Since I became a photographer, Clark once said, I always wanted to
turn back the years. Always wished I had a camera when I was a boy. Fucking in the
backseat. Gangbangs. A little rape. 1 Because of the boys assertive phallic pride
there is also, inevitably, a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism to the images,
regardless of the actual sexuality of the various boys depicted.

Images of admiration and affection between males, or of mens desire and

intimacy, are always freighted by a complex psychosexual, gender-specific subtext
under which it is impossible not to consider them, at least in part, homoerotic.
Throughout western art, the recurring image of the homoeroticised male figure
appears as either: the classical or mythological nude; the Arcadian nude; youthful

1 Larry Clark, quoted in Sherry B. Shapiro, H. Svi Shapiro, Body Movements:

Pedagogy, Politics and Social Change, Hampton press, 2002, p. 66.
vigour; the fascist body; or the feminised male - which includes images of
martyrdom, such as the crucifixion of Christ and the execution of Saint Sebastian.
These visual tropes are as current today as they have historically ever been; they
simply transmute slightly to suit current prevailing cultural and social needs.

Homoerotic images may encompass the full range of male bonding, from
platonic to explicitly sexual, and this is so whether the artist expressly intended it or
not. Within our heteronormative society the homoerotic image bears the same
specific social stigma reserved for the homosexual person. It is therefore always
viewed as other no matter how liberal-minded is the viewer. Indeed, the very fact
that erotic has a homo prefix at all permanently separates and isolates this area
of human sexuality from the heteronormative variety. It can therefore only be
understood by its difference to the status quo; and the status quo is resolutely
heterosexual. Any discussion of an image being homoerotic is also necessarily a
discussion of social, moral, religious or legal proscription.

Collier Schorr has spoken of the difficulty faced by straight men or female
photographers wishing to make images of the male body today.

Gay men, historically lacking power, sort of cordoned off the entire male race as a
subject I always feel that the connection between myself and the boy or man when
Im shooting is very clear: he is aware that Im a woman and hes clearly posing for a
woman. Its a very different kind of picture. I dont think men can take the kinds of
pictures I take of men because men pose differently for women. 2

Her dreamy images of shirtless youths in idyllic country landscapes possess an

undeniable homoerotic connotation due to the fact that traditional gender roles
have here been subverted. Free of the braggadocio of Clarks tough street boys,
Schorrs youths are metaphorically feminised, appearing in the soft, tender poses
historically reserved for female subjects, or the submissive nude male figures in
Christian iconography.

When we look at images in art of the female nude, or images of the socialised
feminine, our responses are defined by deep-seated heteronormative conventions.
Unconsciously, we accept the erotic possibilities of the straight male response to
such images because this is reinforced wherever we look and wherever we go. But
when we look at similar images of men, there is no equivalent response; it can even
be unclear as to whom the images are addressed in the first place. Similarly, images
that represent the various ways that men may interact are still looked upon as
outside the norm. An image of a naked male, for instance, carries with it an
enormous emotional impact in our society because it is so unusual for men to be
seen unclothed. In western art the naked male has been virtually invisible for the
last four-hundred years. The exception to this rule occurs in the two main themes in
which the male nude, historically, was permitted by the Church. Both of these

2 Collier Schorr in conversation with Thomas Demand, 032c.com, 2008.

involved themes of pain and suffering; the first was Christ, scourged, crucified or
lying dead on his mothers lap; the other was the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian,
who has since become a cypher in contemporary art for an ideal of masochistic
representations of gay oppression. Both of these figures embody the simultaneous
notions of masculinity and femininity, toughness and tenderness. Both are
examples of the abject, penetrated male: one by nails; the other by arrows.

Nan Goldins beautiful image of two men passionately kissing has a manic
desperation about it. The act appears urgent, transgressive and hurried, as if the
couple is about to be torn apart. The image has all the dramatic intensity of a
Caravaggio narrative. Such tender intimacy between men is hardly ever seen in
public, whereas heterosexual intimacy bears no proscription whatsoever. Some
years ago at a major exhibition in Melbourne I watched Goldins slideshow featuring
images of intimacy between various lovers. Four heterosexual couples walked out in
disgust when the comparatively few images of men having sex appeared on the
screen, interspersed with the acceptable straight counterparts.

Robert Mapplethorpe here reminds us that he was one of the great American
Classicists. The images in the exhibition do not depict one of the queer subcultures
that he documented at the height of his career, nevertheless, homoeroticism blasts
through each photograph, which include: a naked young black man; a nude teenage
boy supporting himself on a pale rostrum; a man, Marat-like, in a tiled bath; a
sculpture of a beautiful African boys head; and the spectral, phallic image of the
photographers skull-adorned walking stick.

In our time of gender-flux, where rigid modes of accepted gender-behaviour

are rightfully dissolving, there is no longer a correct way to be a man or a woman.
The very poignant images in this exhibition remind us how fragile the construct of
male gendering is. The figures are exposed in all their conflicting softness/hardness;
machismo/femininity; beauty/ugliness; toughness and tenderness.