In the mail yesterday from Max Vasilatos, a postcard version of this portrait of singer and songwriter Ari Gold by Joe Phillips:
Gold has been openly gay from the beginning of his career, often weaving themes about relationships and sex between gay men into his music (usually in various “black” styles). He’s also enormously sexy and enjoys displaying his body. In the work above, Phillips has chosen to depict Gold, in gold (a little visual pun), doing a Pits ‘n’ Tits display, one type of sexualized presentation of the male body in the mass media and in male photography (some links here).
Phillips does mainstream comic art and also depictions (often comic and sometimes over the top) of gay male life, featuring enthusiastically sexy young men. Max has been sending me postcard versions of his stuff for some time now.
December 25, 2010 at 4:53 pm |
I find the reflections in the gold rather odd — the wall makes me think he’s in a shower at a gym, which makes buildings an odd thing to be reflected. So, my original reading of context must be wrong, or the artist is screwing with the viewers.
December 25, 2010 at 6:42 pm |
Yes, I was puzzled by this as well. The buildings were not in the reproduction on the postcard, but the card had been too damaged in transit to make a good scan, and the most similar image I could find on the net had too few pixels to reproduce properly in postings. So I posted the only good one I could find, though I was puzzled by what I suspected were ghost images of buildings — but from where?