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Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10pm) W11, 1962, Oil on canvas, 71 15/16 × 48 1/16 in. (182.7 × 122 cm), Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo, Norway, SL.16.2017.44.1 Both figures are nude. Nudity in Greek sculpture was reserved for gods/ goddesses, warriors, and athletes. For years, nobody, except close friends, have seen my gay works. There is still a lot of prejudices in Russia, so it's impossible to publish them officially. Nevertheless last year I printed my first gay calendar with a circulation of 30 copies. Parkinson, R.B. A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World. London: The British Museum Press, 2013, 73.
His posthumous success has undoubtedly been bolstered by the fact that in 1984, towards the end of his life, Laaksonen founded a non-profit foundation with his friend Durk Dehner to preserve and promote his catalogue of more than 3,500 illustrations. The Tom of Finland Foundation has championed Laaksonen’s work so effectively that it’s now displayed at leading galleries including New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2014, the Finnish postal service even celebrated his impact with a set of commemorative postage stamps. And this month, the UK’s first public exhibition dedicated solely to his work opened at London’s House of Illustration (though the gallery is currently closed due to the Coronavirus crisis). Curator Olivia Ahmad says the show, produced in collaboration with the Tom of Finland Foundation on the centenary of Laaksonen’s birth, is necessary because he’s “one of the most influential figurative artists of the late 20th Century”. In response to these closures and the heightened atmosphere of fear and mourning in the community, we dedicated nine months to traveling the U.K., forcing ourselves into male-dominant or male-only spaces, filming gay bars, and creating an archive that would function both as an art work, a public resource, and a call to arms. There was an urgency to the project that drove us to such a gargantuan undertaking. Often, we would arrive in a city and a much-loved gay bar had closed its doors only days before. The feeling of loss permeated the archive, which has a ghostly, elegiac quality. Do you believe your work responds to––or critiques––hierarchies at play in the LGBTQ community?
One Emerging is a hybrid fictional documentary. It’s a collaborative portrait of two women whose paths crossed in Lesvos a couple years ago. One is a photojournalist who was documenting the refugee crisis on the island and the other is a young transgender refugee from Morocco who was in a camp there. Together we created parallel fantasy worlds that overlap through the narrative and projected image. You were previously involved in community organizing. How has that affected your artistic process? Where does the queer link come from? Henry Marvell Carr at the National Maritime Museum models the archetype of the idealised male sailor for us. An Ordinary Telegraphist, painted in around 1944, taps into the essence of the sailor as iconic. The figure of the sitter Maurice Alan Easton radiates male glamour. Idealised, vigorous, masculine, noble, brave, disciplined, able, virtuous, protective, handsome, strong – Maurice embodies a litany of symbolic or fantasy qualities we project onto his physicality. Winters, Riley. “Achilles and Patroclus: Brothers from Other Mothers or Passionate Paramours?” Ancient Origins. 2017. https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-europe/achilles-and-patroclus-brothers-other-mothers-or-passionate-paramours-008265 .
James is a graduate of University College London (UCL) and Drama Studio London. In addition to his media career, James has extensive PR and business experience and is an actor and filmmaker. He resides in New York City. Aristogeiton, the older warrior (left) lunges forward and offers a protective cloak for Harmodius. This may symbolize the warrior’s mutual devotion and platonic love to one another. Can you tell us about the work you’re showing at the Venice Biennale, Untitled (Holding Horizon) (2018)? Has the performance changed since its first iteration at Frieze London? That you can see Ivan Bubentcov's inspirations in his work -- Tom of Finland, Ettienne, Sean -- only enhances the experience. Below, in Ivan's own words, a bit about him and his work: Queer British Art 1861–1967 explores connections between art and a wide range of sexualities and gender identities in a period of dynamic change. The exhibition begins in 1861 when the death penalty for sodomy was abolished and ends in 1967 with the partial decriminalisation of sex between men. Legal persecution affected many, yet for some, this was a time of liberation – of people finding themselves, identifying each other and building communities.The handsome appeal of the sailor is not only aesthetic but also political. Male beauty is a propaganda tool and aspirational – to be heroic is to be beautiful. Set up as national figures for admiration, queer romance finds a visual language for expression. In spite of the Victorian era’s prudish reputation, there are many possible traces of transgressive desire in its art – in Frederic Leighton’s sensuous male nudes, for instance, or Evelyn De Morgan’s depictions of Jane Hales. Simeon Solomon attracted sustained criticisms of ‘unwholesomeness’ or ‘effeminacy’ – terms which suggest disapproval of alternative forms of masculinity as much as same sex desire. Yet other works which might look queer to us passed without comment. However, if these elements of his work are inspiringly subversive, the way Tom of Finland plays with imagery from the Third Reich is undoubtedly much more morally murky – even though Laaksonen unequivocally dismissed suggestions he might be a Nazi sympathiser. Laaksonen, who had sexual encounters with German servicemen stationed in Helsinki during World War Two, claimed “in my drawings I have no political statements to make, no ideology. I am thinking only about the picture itself. The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway – they had the sexiest uniforms!” Of course. I aim to raise questions about inclusivity, appropriation, and consumerism, but that’s not why I make work. I make for myself. What drives you to take on the roles of both director and model? Morales, Manuel Sanz, and Gabriel Laguna Mariscal. “The Relationship between Achilles and Patroclus According to Chariton of Aphrodisias.” The Classical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2003): 292-95.
The Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’. Dora Carrington had relationships with men and women but loved and was loved by Lytton Strachey, who was attracted to men. Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell lived together in Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. A chosen few of Duncan Grant’s male lovers made visits but Paul Roche was forced to camp on the South Downs as he did not meet with Bell’s approval. Bell’s husband Clive lived apart from her but they remained happily married. While sexual intimacy was valued by the Group, it was not the most important bond tying the members together. Their network was a profoundly queer experiment in modern living founded on radical honesty and mutual support. Demuth was an openly gay artist based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (USA). He is known by most museum-goers as a precisionist architectural watercolorist. Yet, Demuth also painted more homoerotic works of art set in bathhouses and other accepted homosocial environments. Your work often references music videos, magazine spreads, and advertisements. When and why did you begin working this way? We started filming gay bars with a GoPro camera in 2014, with no particular outcome in mind. Before we knew it Candy Bar, the George and Dragon, and Joiners Arms—all busy, successful, and culturally important gay bars in London—had shut their doors followed by a spate of other closures nationally. Between 2006 and 2017, 58 percent of LGBTQ venues closed down; it was an epidemic.Statues at this time were no longer static and archaic. Instead, they showed idealized realism and movement in posture as the figures place their feet forward and stand in contraposto (meaning, that weight is shifted to one side of the figure.)
A stereotype too far? Reading artworks from gay male perspectives, however, can risk occupying a two-dimensional or prejudicial view on the gay male experience. That to be gay, or resort to same-sex love or desire while at sea, is some sort of default or secondary option to being heteronormative. A lesser option perhaps, stigmatised in the lusty sailor trope. Let's consider the process of queering the sailor in art and its function. To be a mariner, or more explicitly to escape the societal conventions of life on the land was powerful indeed and recognised by queer audiences historically. Same-sex desire and affection was a facet of life at sea – in single-sex environments freedom of movement and access to different cultures afforded more options. Gay bars in ports around the world mirrored this, as did the spread of the queer language Polari (a way to speak openly and in code without overtly incriminating yourself). Where can I find this artwork?: The Louvre in Paris France in Islamic Art: The Modern Empires (1500–1800)The male nude is, of course, one of the oldest artistic fixations: The Riace bronzes, Greek sculptures cast around 450 B.C., depict naked, bearded warriors as exemplars of masculine strength and beauty; “Farnese Hercules,” a third-century B.C. marble sculpture of the mythical hero, once stood at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. Over the next 2,000 years, capturing the naked male form became an essential artistic skill, one that reached its apotheosis in Western culture during the Italian Renaissance, when homosexual desire was subtly expressed in Donatello’s bronze “David” (circa 1440) and Caravaggio’s painting “The Musicians” (1597), wherein the traditional female muse is replaced with a band of boys, partially robed in togas, referencing a Greek and Roman period in which homoerotica was a part of society. The artist was playing “a little erotic game,” says the retired N.Y.U. classics professor Andrew Lear, 59, who now runs Oscar Wilde Tours, a company that offers excursions focused on implicitly gay art and history in major museums. All three of these things may be featured if the tree setting is in fact, near a river. This illustration also brings forward an allusion to the Qur’an’s view of paradise with all the blisses of life from the poem in tact. Resource(s) Control. Acting as subject and muse, I work to convey my own fluid identity—an identity that bridges the binaries of gender and ethnicity. Can you tell us a bit about how your publication Indigenous Woman (2018) evolved? Addaura Cave Engravings (11,000 BCE).” A-Z Of PREHISTORIC ART , www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/addaura-cave.htm. Accessed 15 July 2018. May life provide all that you desire from three lips: those of your lover, the river, and the cup.”
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