Art, Flesh & Eros
| For those of you wondering how things went at the Gallery 51 opening of the "North Adams Illustrators" show on Thursday, Susan Bush gave us a nice online write-up at iBerkshires.com yesterday.
As inevitably happens when I get interviewed, of course, I threw out at least one undercooked remark that calls for subsequent modification. When Susan asked me how the "North Adams Experience" compares to the "New York Experience," I joked and am correctly quoted as having joked, "The New York experience is one of not getting stuff into a gallery, for one thing!" |
|||||||
 |
|||||||
| Now it’s a fact that no gallery in New York ever gave my work the kind of generous wall space I’m enjoying in Gallery 51’s current show. But my jest in Susan’s interview leaves the impression that I spent 25 years being totally locked out of New York’s gallery scene, and that’s not a fair statement, since a few of my comic strips were welcomed into occasional group shows of underground, gay, or political comics during those years. For example, I was especially pleased to be a small part of a large exhibit at Soho’s Exit Art several years ago. | |||||||
| Lust! Passion! Turgid protrusions! Where’s a gay cartoon supposed to go to get its rocks off? (The Leslie-Lohman Gallery, of course!) | |||||||
| But the warmest welcome I received during those years came from the Leslie-Lohman Gallery at 127-B Prince Street, when their curators invited me to fill a large case with my comics and drawings for a group show they mounted back in the spring of 2003. They couldn’t have been more gracious and I would be remiss if I didn’t publicly thank them for giving me that much attention. | |||||||
 |
|||||||
| Leslie-Lohman’s mission is rather specialized, of course. To quote from the gallery’s web site, "The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation … was established in 1990 to provide an outlet for art work that is unambiguously gay … by gay and lesbian artists with an emphasis on subject matter that speaks directly to gay and lesbian sensibilities, including, erotic, political, romantic, and social imagery." The show I was part of zeroed in on the aforementioned erotic category and was called Deliciously Depraved. My drawings ranged from sweet sexplay between Wendel and Ollie to kinky fantasies to sexual politics to gay porn.
It was all work I am proud to have done and proud to share with others because of my core belief that nothing good comes from puritan efforts to separate out the erotic parts of our lives and imaginations from the rest of our human comedy and declare those parts unfit to be portrayed in art. It’s also a branch of my work that goes unrepresented in my current show on North Adams’s Main Street, there being nothing to suggest that the average citizen of North Adams is of the same mind as me about sexual explicitness in cartoons. I can identify. I felt the same way before my mind was expanded by underground comic books. Leslie-Lohman, on the other hand, is not interested in displaying my cartoon depictions of anthropomorphized vegetables or silly comic strips about ghosts or my recent experiments with cartoon surrealism. I’m proud of those drawings, too, but they’re not what Leslie-Lohman’s gallery exists for. So I’m still waiting for the social walls to erode that separate my erotic imagination from my non-erotic imagination. That will only happen when America loses its irrational terror of sex — sex as it’s experienced by everyday people, straight and gay: funny, clumsy, undignified sex between people grappling awkwardly for honest human contact and sensuality. Not the phony, sleazy, heavy-breathing sideshow-mirror distortions of sex that pass for erotic sophistication in today’s mass media. Someday maybe we’ll allow all of human experience to be rolled together into one big ball of good-humored affirmation. Until then, be grateful that galleries like Leslie-Lohman exist to nurture explorations of humanity’s forbidden naughty bits. "Depravity" is often in the eye of the beholder. |
|||||||