Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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“A place for us to see each other”

May 12, 2024

(Some photos of male bodies and allusions to sex between men, but no naughty bits and no street language — just not to everyone’s taste)

The end tag to a New York Times story, “At Frieze, Photographer of Gay Life Seeks ‘a Place in the Sunshine’: Stanley Stellar has documented gay New York, on the streets and in his studio, for decades. Now he steps onto his biggest stage”, by Erik Piepenburg, on-line on the NYT website on 5/3 (in print on 5/4); from the story:

From May 1-5 [AZ: yes, the event is now over; my life has been difficult, and I’m doing the best that I can], Stellar will step onto possibly his biggest stage when Kapp Kapp, the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery run by the twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp, shows his work at Frieze New York, the annual international art fair that returns to the Shed at Hudson Yards.

On view will be 15 of Stellar’s “Piers” photographs: assertive portraits and lazy-day snapshots of the mostly gay men who claimed the decrepit West Side piers as social and sexual turf in the 1970s and ’80s. Many photographs will be shown in color for the first time; “Stanley Stellar: The Piers,” a related book of photos, has been reprinted timed to the fair.


(#1) “Piers Roof July 1, 1978”

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography | Leave a Comment »

The gay handshake

May 11, 2024

(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.

The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:

— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)

— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others

— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public

This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and society, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

Stanley Stellar’s couch

May 8, 2024

This is a reposting, on this blog, of the complete content of a 5/2/11 AZBlogX posting “Stanley Stellar’s couch”, original link:

http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/29466.html

The 2011 posting includes a link (still valid) to Stellar’s own website, which is packed with wonderful content and kept up to date, and even includes his gmail address, so that he can make himself available to men interested in being photographed by him.

Today’s blast from the past is relevant to the current moment: the 2024 edition of the international art show Frieze New York (May 1-5, 2024) included 15 historic photographs by Stellar reproduced for the first time  in color. As reported in the 5/4 New York Times:

Titled “The Piers: In Color,” the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery Kapp Kapp presented Stellar’s Kodachrome vision of New York City’s west side piers of the late 70s through 80s, a pre-AIDS paradise mostly remembered in black and white. Stellar’s color photographs recall a vibrancy and texture often omitted from visual history.

More Stellar in a posting to come. In this one it’s just the couch.

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Male art, Photography | Leave a Comment »

A custom-made eggcup

May 4, 2024

Today’s holiday news: today is (at least) three holidays, one deadly serious, two entertaining. I will discourse later about Four Dead in Ohio Day (remembering the 1970 Kent State shootings), Star Wars Day, and (in the US, where May 4th is 5/4) Dave Brubeck Day (for the 5/4 time signature in music). (Oh, there’s also a very local holiday, the Palo Alto May Fête, lightly connected to Cinco de Mayo, which is tomorrow — but the fête is always on a Saturday.)

But first, the actual topic for today: a custom-made eggcup.

The eggcup, 3D-printed in purple and pink plastic, was given to me last Saturday by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recognized that I could use a lightweight, nearly unbreakable replacement for the white porcelain eggcups and demitasse cups that I’ve using for my five daily dosages of medications (an hour before breakfast, with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, at bedtime) — the porcelain resources I’ve gradually been destroying, smashing by accident because they’re too heavy and slippery for my disabled hands. EDZ’s intention is that there should be more, enough that I can retire the remaining porcelain cups. No more little shards of glass on the kitchen floor.

A photo (inexpertly achieved with my new little camera) of the 3D printing and the porcelain alternatives:


In the front, the 3D delight, looking very purple in the photo; then, on the left, a demitasse cup, and on the right, a conventional eggcup

Two more 3D eggcups have (just) now appeared. Two to go.

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Technology | 5 Comments »

Rabbit hordes will shake the darling buds of May

April 30, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; this is Lepus Eve, that fearful moment before the rabbit hordes of May descend, in a cloud of fragrant muguets, to ravish and despoil the golden youths of spring, the band of bros, of buddies, bonding to spread their seed and alliterate aimlessly: Bunnies Bash Buds

Two images for the day: a cinematic account — Night of the Lepus — of the threatening rabbit hordes; and just one of those adorable buds at risk in this moment of peril: Dean Young. serving as the embodiment of the vulnerable golden youths of spring.

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Posted in Art, Gay porn, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language acquisition, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv | 3 Comments »

Andrew Salgado

April 28, 2024

Coming past me on Pinterest yesterday morning, some really impressive portrait paintings with abstractionist interventions, along the lines of the one below, the left panel of two:


(#1) Andrew Salgado, The Painter’s Apprentice (2014)

Unlike many of the artists I’ve posted about on this blog, AS and his personal and artistic histories are widely available to the public; there’s a Wikipedia page, tons of stuff on his website, and plenty of open (in fact blunt and unapologetically opinionated) interviews that are both informative and thought-provoking. You don’t have to wonder about his childhood — he talks about growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan with enormous affection — or how his personal life, as, as he puts it, a “young gay white guy” with a longtime male partner, living a new life in working-class London, and so on, plays out in his work — he’s happy to reflect on all the stages he’s been through in ten years, and on being an artist as a business, an enterprise that requires planning and salesmanship.

So: not only are masculinity, sexuality, and social identity recurrent themes in his art, they’re also prominent aspects of his presentation of self: as a guy guy, offhandedly but also defiantly queer (like, don’t fuck with me, dude, or you’ll be sorry), and simultaneously working-class, practically minded, playfully imaginative, and genuinely erudite.

AS came to me as paintings I’d never seen before but was bowled over by, paintings with no context at all. I’ve already given you a lot of context, so I’ll jump right in with more paintings, recent ones (in many ways unlike the early painting in #1, and strikingly unlike this year’s work so far, mixed-media depictions of flowers — floral atlases crossed with Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe). Then to biography and art criticism.

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and plants, Male art, Masculinity, Music, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

A Promethean hepatical

April 26, 2024

The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.

In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.

Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):


(#1)  Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke

That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and sports, Language and the body, Masculinity, Metaphor, Myths | 1 Comment »

Jack Hughes’s hooray for Hollywood

April 16, 2024

Caught via a Pinterest posting, the London-based illustrator Jack Hughes’s 2020 spread for Entertainment Weekly celebrating 18 LGBTQ entertainers:


(#1) top row, from left: Janelle Monáe, Freddie Mercury, Kate McKinnon, Ricky Martin, John Waters, Dan Levy; middle row, from left: Ellen DeGeneres, Rock Hudson, Laverne Cox, Lily Tomlin, Kristen Stewart, Lil Nas X, George Takei, Ryan Murphy, Cynthia Nixon, Marlene Dietrich; bottom row, from left: RuPaul, Elton John

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music | Leave a Comment »

The Tunnel of Self-Love

April 16, 2024

From the annals of cartoon understanding: about today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which an unaccompanied young man in classical Greek attire inquires about the reflectivity of the water in a Tunnel of Love:


(#1) In case you didn’t recognize (a pop-cultural version of) the figure of Narcissus from Greek mythology, the young man sports a buckle with a big N on it; meanwhile, you need to recognize another piece of pop culture, the amusement park ride the Tunnel of Love (which largely disappeared about 80 years ago as an actual amusement park phenomenon, but lives on as a trope in songs, movies, and tv shows) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

So, yes, you need to bring cultural knowledge to bear on understanding the cartoon — to seeing that it’s hilarious that a Narcissus figure would buy a single ticket for a ride through a Tunnel of Love (designed to provide about 6 minutes alone in the dark for couples to get steamy with one another) and want to know how reflective the water in it is: can I see myself in it?, he needs to know; can I become one with that beautiful man in this dark monument to love?. But all this cultural knowledge is second-hand, coming to us through the distorting, simplifying lens of pop culture: not the myth of Echo and Narcissus, but just a guy foolishly falling in love with himself; not actual amusement park rides, but their pop-cultural echoes in cartoons and the like.

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Posted in Art, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Myths, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Lit up in Paris by amz

April 15, 2024

From Ned Deily, reporting from Paris on Facebook today, this shop sign, suggesting that amz is everywhere:


(#1) As you can see, this isn’t Arnold Melchior Zwicky, but Anne Marie Zahar, of LUMINAIRES DECO DESIGN ANNE-MARIE ZAHAR CRÉATION (website here); what she’s selling is lighting: a small number of high-concept (and expensive) floor lamps and ceiling lights

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Posted in Art, Design, Furnishings and tools | Leave a Comment »

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