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Feminist Art Examines Men
A very sexy art exhibit is now showing at Columbia College’s A + D Gallery. It’s called Girl on Guy: The Object of My Desire. This feminist art show includes pieces by 24 female artists who all love men. For Chicago Public Radio, Blair Chavis reports.
**
Ambi: GALLERY SOUNDS
Girl on Guy
is unapologetic. There’s a painting of a naked man in the gallery’s
street level window. Inside: a red love seat and the 21st century
version of mix tape—an mp3 player loaded with love songs. Student
Nicholas Spence was wandering through the back of the gallery. He was
sandwiched between a case of plaster casts of male genitalia, and the
photographs of men in front of their mother’s station wagons.
SPENCE:
It seems in art, more recent art, that it’s very hard to depict
something in a softer sort of way. Like, usually, it’s either, if it’s
a naked body it’s a sexual reference or theres just not a very large
group of people doing pleasant art that is sexually related.
The
show juxtaposes sex and domesticity. Curator Marci Rae McDade wanted to
create a show that deals honestly with female desire. She says feminism
led some women artists to hide their love for men.
MCDADE: You
can be a strong, talented, confident, independent woman who loves men;
loving men and being a feminist is not a contradiction.
McDade
calls this show a “love letter” to men, touching on vulnerability,
trust and relationships. Artist and former Chicago resident Julia
Hechtman, captures vulnerability on film in her piece, “Air Guitar
Series.” She invited male friends and strangers into her studio, to
perform air guitar to their favorite music. She took close-up
photographs of the men’s faces in the throws of ecstasy.
HECHTMAN:
We’re not accustomed to seeing grown men in emotional states and I was
really interested in what it would be like to have these sort of
intimate photographs made of people that I wasn’t intimate with. \
The photos are almost voyeuristic.
HECHTMAN:
The intimacy of the distance between me and the subject would allude to
a sexual act—like between the subject and the photographer. It’s the
same kind of framing you might get for a close up in a porn.
Hechtman
says she wanted to blur the line between emotional states: you can cry
out of joy or pain. Air guitar is a way for these guys to mimic and
embody the sexual prowess of rock stars. South Side native, artist and
self-proclaimed groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, takes rock star
idolatry to a different level with her piece “Three Sailors and a
Girl.” “Cynthia Plaster Caster” is an artist pen name she developed in
the 40 years she’s been casting rock stars’ private parts. Plaster
Caster’s pieces in this show—are of three musicians from different
eras. Her work began with a simple, art school homework assignment.
CASTER:
Trying to figure out one Friday afternoon how I was going to meet Paul
Revere and the Raiders and get their attention away from all of the
other wannabe groupies, and very impatient to leave my art class and go
downtown to the hotel. The last thing I heard from my teacher was to
make a plaster cast this weekend of something that’s kind of solid.
She
didn’t cast Paul Revere and the Raiders, but she later met and cast
Jimi Hendrix among other musicians. Plaster Caster says her work is a
fun a way of immortalizing her love for talented men. Music plays
another role in a performance installation in the show,“Vaquera
Serenede, The Rise of La Cueruda Negra.” In her work, Nigerian artist
Denenge Akpem examines identity and vulnerability. Akpem grew up
listening to country music and fantasizing about cowboys. Later, her
fascination with Afro-Mexican culture seeped into that nostalgia.
Ambi: INSTALLATION MUSIC
The installation, accompanied by this music, is a scene set around Akpem’s object of desire—the cowboy, or vaquero.
AKPEM:
Where is the space for vulnerability? Where is the man, in the sense of
it’s all about him but at the same time, or it’s about the maleness and
the desire for it—but then, how do you allow space for it?
A
large color photograph hangs center depicting Akpem kneeling dressed in
vaquera attire, with three female mariachi performers behind her, they
stand amidst a kitschy white canvas backdrop resembling a desert scene:
real sand, plaster cacti, a wooden gun, and a video screen showing a
setting sun.
AKPEM: Everything about it is about these symbols
of the absent love. I’m trying to simulate being out on the range,
singing for, dreaming of, gazing to the clouds, for that man I love.
Ambi: INSTALLATION MUSIC FADES
Despite
being sensitive and sometimes comic, Columbia College art history
professor Amy Mooney says the exhibit is still controversial.
MOONEY: We’re still not entirely comfortable with this idea of women consuming, desiring, wanting the male body.
Ambi: GALLERY NOISES
Back in the gallery, student Nicholas Spence says as a man, he doesn’t feel exploited by this art.
SPENCE:
They’re portraying men in a positive light, as opposed to just
objectifying them. It just seems like a very wholesome kind of exhibit.
This show appears to be taking a step back—asking us to
remember the human element in an ever-changing political movement. Like
many women today, Curator Marci Rae McDade is trying to find a middle
ground between the bra burners of the past and the torch bearers of our
present and future.
For Chicago Public Radio, I’m Blair Chavis.
“Girl on Guy” will run through November 3rd.
Release date: 10/11/2007
   
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