 |
 |
ARTICLES
The City as Image
The Bangkok-based art writer and curator Brian Curtin examines the process of a city being imaged, especially in times of strife, through a short interview with the Los Angeles-based artist Richard Hawkins, whose recent paintings address the seamier side of
I am writing this in Bangkok just after the deadly clashes between anti-Government protestors and the Thai army ceased and the city is beginning to pick itself up, sporadic acts of arson and the possibility of underground groups seeking revenge notwithstanding. I sat out the violence in my home in
However, we may choose to apprehend such images. Just before the violence broke out, I visited the studio of a MFA painting student and the term ‘simulacra’ came up in our conversation. To illustrate the meaning of this word, I mentioned Baudrillard’s comment that the Gulf War never happened: he argued that media images of this war were so familiar they rendered it non-specific. In general terms, the simulacrum is, as we know, a copy without an original. Throughout the crisis in
I am interested in artists who grapple with received, stereotyping, images. Some time back, I interviewed the LA-based artist Richard Hawkins; he visits
Why did you begin to make paintings of the
Because, personally, I think it’s going away. Older versions of it already have, according to every old ex-pat I talk to. Whether it changes from the top down because of pressure from the West to “extend human rights to all” or from the bottom up as gay ideologies assimilate and become more homogenised – anytime rainbow flags and pride parades start popping up, prostitution and May-September romances are shoved back into the closet – it already seems changed in the years I’ve been visiting.
While there are certain things in the paintings that are ubiquitous in Thailand (Heineken and Johnny Walker bottles, those little wooden cups that your bill comes in etc.), I was also hoping that the paintings would have a kind of wider appeal and represent strip-shows in LA, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, parts of Europe or the whole beauty pageant phenomenon in the Philippines. The most important thing was to portray a milieu that seems to be rapidly disappearing from gay culture: bars where younger men come to make a buck and older men are happy to provide them with it. These bars seem to have always existed in the past and still thrive in certain cultures but with the rise of new gay identities built around Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues and gym memberships, they seem much fewer and farther between.
The dynamic between older and younger men is arguably a very immediate impression of the boy bars.
My preference, actually, is for beer bars and host-bars. But these places don’t make for very interesting paintings. Imagine a series of paintings that are more representative of how I spend most of my time in
The distortions in your paintings are humorous. Is there an element of mockery? Do you identify with any of the figures you represent?
I think I'd prefer the word ‘exaggeration.’ In starting these paintings, I looked a lot at American Scene painters like Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh because both recorded a rapidly changing culture, the first rural and the second urban. More as painters rather than photographers, they chose to exaggerate the ubiquitous in order to emphasise it. Rather than mockery, I'm often charmed or delighted by a bar boy’s shy plumpness, a lady-boy’s pigeon-toes or the look of astonishment on an aging gentleman face. And I probably identify or at least empathise with all three.
Sometimes people see grotesqueness in my work where I was merely intending the Rubenesque.
You originally came to
In 2000, I did do research into the Japanese photographer Tamotsu Yato, a friend of Yukio Mishima and chronicler of naked festivals and the burgeoning bodybuilder community in 1960s Tokyo. Yato was influenced by Western gay photography of the 1950s, but transformed it into something unique (and hot, I might add).
One of the most interesting things I stumbled upon with the Yato research was a Japanese difference in ideas of gayness. Specifically, private sexual acts were understood as much different from public presentations of self. In other words, it was true in Yato’s time and still true to some extent today, that if you got drunk one night and slept with a man, you didn’t go out the next day and buy a rainbow keychain. You either liked it or you didn’t and you’d just wait and see what happened the next time you had a few too many.
Though Thailand is a much different culture in many ways, the bar boy scene offers a refreshing perspective on the Western bars I grew up with and, though it’s rapidly changing, seems to offer some kind of relief from the relatively homogeneous ideas of Western gay identity I’m used to (and often fed up with).
Do you square these interests with critical accounts of race, sexuality and representation?
Being a kind of amateur sociologist is one of the things that often inspire my work and I’ve begun to build up a pretty extensive library on sexuality post-Foucault. There have been a remarkable amount of books published in the last decade or so: Gregory Pflugfelder on postwar Japanese homosexuality, Gilbert Herdt on transgenderism and Melanesian ritualised sexuality and Maud Gleason’s book on Roman masculinity. These are four favourites of mine. Also, I did a series of paintings and collages about Native Americans based on research into the religion and culture of the American Southeast from the mid-18th century onwards. The politics of resistance and assimilation are of great interest to me.
(Brian Curtin is an Irish-born critic and curator based in
