The emphasis of the book is on pornography,
digital media, love and spirituality, themes which at first glance
would seem to have little in common but which individually or in
combination form a crystallization point in the work of many of the
artists involved and which seem to meet the needs and the spirit of
the time.
Pornography is a perpetual theme which for a long time now since the
Sixties has found its way from the backstreet dives into our everyday
culture. Examples on show range from surprisingly funny stills taken
at Cazzo's porn film shoots through Martin E. Kautter's intimate and
spontaneous photos of T-room sex; fanciful drawings of boys in
acrobatic sexual positions by Hannes Steinert; Henning von Berg's
self-mocking, exaggerated, very Californian pictures; to the radical
self portraits of Matthias Herrmann, who exclusively uses his own
person as subject matter.
The digital media, making contact with other gays and finding sex
through the Internet are in the process of transforming the ways gays
socialize all over the world. Instead of meeting in gay groups, bars
and in the subculture, the gay world now increasingly makes contact
at home on the computer screen. We are consequently witnessing the
development of a completely new aesthetic and artistic application.
Clarke Jackson of New York can now design an unreal world of Cyber
Gyms where what seem to be geeks in glasses seem to defy the laws of
Nature. And the Israeli Kai Arama can create distressing tableaux
teeming with monstrosities. Downloaded directly from the Internet are
the photos from dating services which Boris von Brauchitsch shapes
into compositions whose very bulk gives them new meaning.
Love and relationship are the theme of Alexander Schönfeld's
paintings from Freiburg and of the New York photographic artist Bill
Travis. Likewise the Russian-American Duo and couple Slava Mogutin
und Brian Kenny, whose onsite installation of photographs and
drawings is a somewhat wild gay variation of the usually homophobic
HipHop scene. The Spaniard Alexis W deals with the end of a great
love in his onsite installation and performance Te quiero.
The relatively large number of works with religious and spiritual
contents or elements is surprising. For example, themes from the
Passion of Christ are combined with sadomasochistic fetishes in the
Altar of the Viennese photographer Frank Gassner; in the strongly
sexualized Lord's Supper of Patrick Bartsch from Berlin; in the
overwhelmingly cruel comic-style paintings of the German American
Oliver Estavillo. Set pieces from Christianity are just as evident in
the hyper-realistic photographic work of Anthony Gayton who lives in
Vienna as in the series Rough Gods by Michael Alago from New York; in
the spiritual-pornographic Cyber Comic of Dirk Lang, The 120 Days of
Sodom, produced in collaboration with the Californian photographer
Raymond Angeles. Rinaldo Hopf presents a first selection from his
water colour frieze Karma, life-size nude portraits of miscellaneous
people in front of universal symbols of inspiration.
An exotic and confusingly undefined variation of queer identity
speaks to us from the photographic compositions of the American Fred
H. Berger, The Art of the Hustle.
Martin von Ostrowski depicts an up-to-date, totally Berlin form of
queer life with his gaudily painted CSD paintings and Nicholaus
Schmidt with the foreign penmanship in his portraits of Turkish
queens like Cihangir Guemuestuerkmen from the Kreuzberg disco
Gayhane.
Very different forms of concrete painting can be found in the works
of the Berliners Georg Weise and Wilfried Laule and equally so in the
creations of Peter Schauwecker from Munich.
And, as the cherry on the cake, Ralf König contributes rough
sketches from his comic drawings.
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