Man and Woman Man and Woman at the Beach Art
This slice contains explicit imagery. Delight consider it NSFW.
A dude walks into a feminist art bear witness—bada-bum. Yes, that is a fully contained joke. The punch line is taking in a evidence called The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men (at the Cheim & Read gallery in New York Metropolis) and finding yourself confronted by mirror images of the reductive crap men have been throwing at women for centuries. Behind the desk-bound, at that place's an image of a beach hunk in a smiley-face T-shirt, followed by a Diane Arbus photograph of a "male primitive" with tattoos all over his confront. The worst is a xanthous carcass by Louise Conservative that looks similar a cross between a melting penis and, equally one critic put information technology, a "smooshed-upwardly kebab" on a carving postal service. Cindy Sherman offers, instead of her romantic self-portraits celebrating the infinite play of female person mutability, a muscle-bound plastic human-doll covered with pilus. None of this makes me feel very good equally a man. Which, of course, may be the bespeak—bada-bum!
There are a few positive images. Betty Tompkins is represented by 1 of her blurry sex activity close-ups, at in one case romantic and clinical. Grace Graupe-Pillard supplies a lovely realist portrait of a immature artist staring into his cell phone. The great Alice Neel has a painting of a blue-jeaned hippie, probably considering the gallery couldn't go her vivid portrait of the fantasist Joe Gould with 3 penises—even I find that 1 funny.
Then I run into information technology: a behemothic erection lovingly encased in a fist and painted in luscious expressionist sweeps of red and white paint. It's heroic, monumental, gorgeous. There are no other colors, just black and white turned red and white by minimalism and lust, which suddenly seem similar a perfect match. Blood-red Handed, Again was the title.
And then begins my introduction to Nicole Wittenberg. I track her downward on the internet and learn that she first came to public attention when she was just 24—and still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute—for paintings near suffering from scoliosis as a teenager. "I needed to know what was incorrect with me," she explained at the time. Here'due south how a critic for the San Francisco Relate described the result: "The young daughter in the painting, naked, slim and pale, has ripped her body open to examine her organs. The image is immediately shocking but as well strangely cute."
Her subsequent ascension came fast—in 2012, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave her its all-time young figurative painter accolade, praising her "unusual imagery and freshness." The Guggenheim bought one of her architectural-interior paintings, which evoke small-scale, spare stages, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquired her stylized black-and-white portrait of a young woman chosen Ann. She's been featured in grouping shows curated by artists such as the prominent figurative painter Alex Katz and 1980s fine art superstar David Salle, known for his ain employ of sexual imagery in jumbled canvases that boodle art history and contemporary life to celebrate information overload. "She's a rare bird," Salle says when I phone call to ask about Wittenberg. He praises her commitment to reinventing realism—or, as he puts information technology, "How do you describe a form? Traditionally, you do it by accentuating the lights and darks, which Nicole does in a kind of brutal way." And he's impressed with her determination to portray sexually angry men, a subject area that is "actually underrepresented in Western painting in any century," he says. "People think everything'due south been done, only that's not true." Wittenberg, Salle goes on, "dares herself to do precisely that which scares her."
I notice Wittenberg'southward electronic mail address and write her. From the beginning, she's surprisingly personal and communicative: "What's wrong with oversharing??! Isn't that a big part of beingness alive? I'grand and so annoyed by how much New York emulates Europe with all these potent classist social conventions." Occasionally, she mentions inviting me to her studio—just every time I try to set a date, she disappears.
Truth is, I have the fantasy of buying Ruby-red Handed, Again and accept been trying to go her to state a toll. Just she keeps dodging the question. Finally, she hints at the reason: "I must mention, a dick painting may be the most impossible thing to sell, ever."
That surprises me. Isn't modern fine art supposed to be scandalous? What near the shocks of surrealism and cubism? The outraged crowds at the famous Salon des Refusés show of 1863?
Non when information technology comes to men, she replies. You tin paint all the odalisques-reclining-on-a-couch you lot want, but the movie rule applies: no "pickle."
Despite the frankness of our exchange, the promised studio visit keeps not happening. I wonder if all the sex talk makes it more unlikely. Isn't that why we cordon off sex, to contain its disruptive power?
Finally, near every bit an afterthought, I mention that my wife, Kathy, also paints male nudes, including one with an erection.
Wittenberg writes back in seconds: "Your wife paints dick pics!!??!!!"
I transport her the proof.
"I honey it!" she responds.
Two days later, Kathy and I step off an lift into Wittenberg's loft. It's a set decorator's dream of an creative person'due south studio: the walls painted Platonic White, a hammock hanging between two I beams, the neon tumble of Chinatown six stories below. A miniature parrot flies around, occasionally coming to residual, like inspiration, on the artist's shoulder.
We're barely inside when Wittenberg starts peppering Kathy with questions about her ain work, curious what inspired the portrait I'd emailed, a frontal shot of a naked and obviously lustful immature human being.
As they talk, I get a risk to discover. At 38, Wittenberg is gorgeous in a low-central way you could pass on the street and only register a few steps later on: wide-spaced eyes, full lips, hair chopped short equally if she'd cut information technology herself in a mirror. No surprise that she'south modeled for other artists. In manner, she'south both intense and California casual, a mixture of her babyhood in Marin Canton (where her father was a lawyer, her mother an interior designer and teacher) and her spiritual abode in downtown New York.
These days, Wittenberg says, she finds sources for many of her paintings on Internet sex sites. Although she didn't start painting sexual imagery until 2014, she says she started looking at porn around the aforementioned fourth dimension that she decided she wanted to make art: "I was a virgin when I started watching that stuff. I was like, Oh! That's attractive. Even and then, at 13, 14, I already was really interested in the Renaissance artists, particularly Venetian painters like Veronese, Tintoretto, and Titian. They were making a lot of paintings of beautiful women, like a prostitute with gold coins falling on her. Women were shown in this very beautiful, very sexualized way that I thought was mysterious and fabulous."
At the time, Wittenberg was wearing a back brace for her scoliosis. She'd had two major spinal surgeries over a six-yr period, with long recoveries where she got to gaze out the window and dream. Later art school, she spent a twelvemonth in Italy making sculptures in glass and copying classical paintings, then moved to New York and landed a job staging shows for installation artist Anthony McCall. Working with projectors and moving lights stoked her interest in the function of space and light, ideas she explores in her interior paintings. But her desire to capture a mod sense of urgency prompted her to paint portraits based on images from long-distance Skype conversations with a friend in England.
Then, while diverting herself with the gay site ManHub during a bout of pneumonia, she found herself contemplating sex every bit a subject. Setting the video to slo-mo, she began drawing the moving images as they crawled across the frame. As it happened, many of the moving images on ManHub were ManSpokes.
This is where I should say something nigh the film critic Laura Mulvey and her theory most the "male person gaze"—that the movie photographic camera itself plays the role of voyeuristic male, implicating all viewers in the human activity of objectifying women and the world. That's what most of the critics who saw The Female person Gaze did. The Daily Animal called it "the best kind of payback," and the New Yorker invoked Freud's thought of schaulust: "the pleasure, always libidinal and sometimes pathological, of looking at someone else." Some huffy webzine scholar even went double jujitsu: Despite the "potential to open up areas of theorizing about how nosotros look at each other as gendered beings," the show failed because it reduced men to "the sign of a phallus," he sniffed. "There are other ways of looking at a woman or a human that do not diminish them as simply objects for visual pleasure or ridicule." He thought Wittenberg'southward painting was "magnificently angry."
Merely Mulvey's theory, like so many academic theories, is a little dopey. Who says that taking visual pleasure in a woman diminishes her? And Wittenberg tells me she doesn't think her painting is aroused. It's more "aggressive," she says, like the work of the male artists she admires. "That writer is some angry PhD scholar," she says. "He read too many books and forgot to autumn in love."
Probably the nigh famous piece of early feminist fine art—art with a distinct uplift-the-gender message—was Judy Chicago'south 1974–79 The Dinner Party, the installation of Neat Historical Vaginas now on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. But Wittenberg introduces me to a group of female artists of the 1960s and '70s who pioneered the painting of sexually explicit images of men as well, and soon I discover that the art world is in the midst of a veritable ManSpoke renaissance. Early last year, the Dallas Contemporary mounted a retrospective called Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, while the Mary Boone Gallery in New York City featured 1960s-era antiwar artist Judith Bernstein under the championship Dicks of Death—inspired by the scrawls on the walls of men'south bathrooms, she drew drawing penises shooting bullets or turning into giant menacing screws. Somewhen I find my way to the Fight Censorship Grouping, a girl gang of '60s artists who put this cri de chatte in their manifesto: "If the cock penis is not wholesome plenty to go into museums, it should non exist considered wholesome enough to go into women."
But Wittenberg's love of sexual material goes deeper than politics or fifty-fifty lust. She's looking for fresh ways to engage fine art'southward long history of sexual imagery, from the first cave paintings 12,000 years ago to the lingams of ancient India and the phallic statues of ancient Greece to more modern provocations similar Courbet's The Origin of the World, a close-up view of a woman's genitals that is still so upsetting it's been banned on Facebook. She's very interested in technical questions like the dissimilarity between "image and surface," applying high style to subjects that many people consider vulgar. She'due south also responding to other electric current artists who are exploring the theme, from Salle and Jeff Koons to Marlene Dumas, a prominent Dutch painter whose earthy subjects range from childbirth to peep shows to, yes, impassioned men. In 2008 and 2009, a Dumas evidence called Measuring Your Own Grave made an influential splash at both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. And of course, with frank sexual imagery now available on every laptop and with the porn manufacture outselling Hollywood, Wittenberg is engaging like a journalist with the hot topics and pressing problems (so to speak) of the modern earth. As she puts it, "When you're thinking about sex all the time, it has a funny style of wandering into the moving-picture show."
It certainly doesn't hurt that her predecessors are finally starting to sell their paintings; this year, the Carnegie Museum paid $350,000 for a series of Bernstein's "screw drawings" from the Mary Boone show. Boone'due south manager, Ron Warren, said that while male artists still find it easier to sell explicit work (information technology's considered "much more aggressive for females to apply sexual imagery"), the message of Bernstein's work—its critique of the link betwixt militarism and machismo—made it downright family-friendly. "I saw people bringing in their kids and explaining the piece of work to them."
When I electronic mail Bernstein for perspective, I inadvertently stumble into a minefield of feminist politics by starting with a general question about women who paint sex. "Women who piece of work with sexual imagery are frequently lumped together, when in essence their aesthetic and bulletin are very different," she snaps. Maybe this is because I enthused a little too much about Wittenberg, who rejects "identity art" and the notion that a adult female should paint from a female perspective—the closest she'southward gotten to that is painting the Flim-flam News building like a vaguely phallic still from a Leni Riefenstahl picture show.
Wittenberg put me in bear on with Betty Tompkins, who was more than fun. Nevertheless sounding 25 at 68, she laughed her way through most of a ii-hr visit to her SoHo studio. She found rejection by all the male-dominated galleries of the '70s "liberating" considering she could focus on what she really wanted, which was explosive imagery. "That was in the dorsum of my listen all the time—a charged image. Information technology was too late to do information technology like de Kooning and Hofmann—they were my heroes—and I didn't desire to be anybody's 2nd place." One day she was flipping through her husband's porn collection, and she framed the shots with her fingers. "I said, 'At present that's a charged image.'"
By now, it'due south getting tardily. I've been in Wittenberg's studio for almost three hours. She never seems to tire. She never sits down. She has shown us paintings of a beautiful naked woman straddling a log and paintings of an orgy based on a porn video she found by searching "afterwards school special"—she likes to apply weird search terms like "back to nature" or "grassy knoll" because they generate unusual images.
In one case she lands on a video she likes, she'll print out 50 dissimilar stills at different moments and play with them, "meshing" one drawing to the side by side. "I'll spend days just, similar, distancing myself from the photograph and living information technology, until the direction of the emotional content" sinks in. "I'd be like, Oh, that prototype really feels ruddy. You know?" Sometimes she's chasing something as uncomplicated equally a shadow, or a curl of the rima oris.
Wittenberg takes u.s.a. to her newest series: paintings of two men kissing so hard their faces almost merge into one. She'due south washed drawings, monotypes, paintings in blackness and white and in red and white. The latest is the size of a minor auto and by and large yellow, with streaks of drippy red that look, in an oddly beautiful fashion, like oozing blood. She wants to express all the "conditions of the kiss: the unwanted kiss, the loving osculation, the kiss of death, the kiss of Judas, the eternal buss of God." Eventually, she wants to do three faces kissing themselves into a unmarried face.
Finally, at my asking, she shows us the series of paintings that led to Red Handed, Again. She tells the story of the famous painter who first saw them. "I was fussing effectually, and he took the brush out of my mitt and he just pulled it right up as one stroke—'The dick is one thing,' he said. 'Part of painting is making a choice and sticking to it. Commit! Go with your gut!' "
This seems similar the correct time to ask the question that started this adventure. "You said to me it'due south the hardest thing in the world to sell these paintings," I say. "So what happened when you showed them to collectors and gallery owners?"
At last, she sits down. The very question seems to sap her energy. But her rat-a-tat answer reveals her true spirit—repeating her favorite give-and-take most 30 times in rapid succession, she says that art curators in both Miami and the Midwest asked for one of her paintings and insisted that Miami and the Midwest were ready for explicit male imagery, eager for it, hungry for it, drooling for information technology. So she sent a painting out and quickly got the bulletin that Miami and the Midwest weren't quite so eager for it or hungry for information technology or drooling for it after all. "And then it'due south been sent to Miami and back, and to the Midwest and back, and now this guy is calling me from Los Angeles for a show in Oct, and I'one thousand inclined to send him the same dick."
Why?
"Considering I experience like it'southward the most digestible 1 in the studio—it has nice colors, it's kind of a softer image. It'southward slightly more decorative."
I look where she's pointing. It's ane of her yellow ones, very pretty.
"In that location doesn't seem to exist any real home for any of these," she continues a bit sadly. "It doesn't go in the kids' room; it doesn't get in the living room; information technology doesn't go in the dining room. Ornament is still an of import element for painting, and when you have something with an aggressive subject matter, it doesn't know its identify."
But does she intend to go on doing them, I ask, even if they don't sell?
"Aye," she answers. "I mean, I might die with all these dicks, for all I care."
At that moment, her parrot lands on her shoulder, and Wittenberg breaks into a smile. She takes the bird in her hand and pushes its feathers apart. "Await at those colors," she says.
This article originally appeared in the March 2017 upshot of ELLE.
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