Carnal Knowledge

Sex and the body at the Charged Image show at the University of Hartford

by Alistair Highet - September 2004

Go to any major art museum with a fresh pair of eyes and it will strike you that there are an awful lot of naked bodies around. And it has always been that way, from the Greek sculpture at the root of our representational tradition, through the pale nudes at toilet, or the fleet-footed youths of the Renaissance, up through Degas' women climbing in and out of bathtubs, and so on. As Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine art at New York University puts it, "Western art has always been about sex and bodies," adding "when you think of all the nudes depicted through the centuries, it's the bottom line. [If] it wasn't about sex, it was God. Usually it was both."

It's odd, then, that paintings of naked people can still shock us, and some are bound to be offended by what they see in The Charged Image: From the Collection of Douglas S. Cramer , an exhibit of about 40 works, largely by contemporary artists, on exhibit at the Joseloff Gallery of the Hartford Art School Sept. 7 through Oct. 17.

This is a seriously, big-time exhibit of some of the world's most heralded 20th-century artists, from the private collection of one of the world's most important living collectors. Cramer lives in a large, secluded house in the woods in Roxbury, in the northwest corner of the state. A founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he has been a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art since 1993 where he heads the acquisition committee for paintings and sculpture. He is also a television producer, responsible in whole or in part for shows like Peyton Place, The Brady Bunch, Bridget Loves Bernie, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, The Love Boat, Dynasty , to name just a view. Perhaps you've heard of them.

In other words, he is a collector uniquely placed to know what is going to be a hit and what isn't, to know what is hot in contemporary art, and a man with the means to gather the good stuff under one roof.

One of the things that strikes you when you look at the paintings in the show, is how quickly our sense of what is "tasteful" has changed. As Rosenblum -- whose catalogue essay accompanies the show -- points out, some of the work here, that would have been clearly sexual at one time, now seems quite drained of erotic frisson, like the Matisse drawing that is on the cover of this magazine ("Nu Debout," 1907-08), or the Picasso drawing of a standing nude ("Etude de Nu Debout," 1903). "The Matisse and the Picasso are so old-fashioned," says Rosenblum, "you almost can't believe it." Even Tom Wesselman's Pop pin-up "Open Ended Nude, No. 163" from 1987 seems almost old-fashioned and prudish, even though it shows a naked woman on her back with tan lines and nipples turned prominently skyward.

But certainly, as time has changed, the currency of certain images has become debased, or "reified" as some might say, so that artists have been compelled to go farther in order ripple the surface of our television- and Internet-saturated expectations, or even to keep up with the mundane realities of junior high school.

So among the images in the show that are kind of challenging are Damien Loeb's " Blow Job (Three Little Boys)," 1999 , which shows three preppy, blond-haired boys of maybe 11, speaking in the foreground while another boy is receiving a blowjob up against a wall from a girl of about the same age. Are we meant to be appalled? And if we are, where is that feeling coming from, since it is fair to say that these things do go on, don't they?

Then there is Kurt Kauper's "Cary Grant#3," 2003, which shows the movie star striding toward us in a bright, palatial Hollywood home, fully naked, smiling, dick-swinging. It's funny, and it's subversive, but again the question is why? Since, if even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked, didn't Cary Grant?

Says Rosenblum, sagely demystifying any big theoretical explanation for it all: "It's just contemporary reality; all of this is the way we are now, and we would expect artists to tell us, though I must say," he laughs, "I like to feel cool, but I was floored by Damian Loeb."

The painter Kurt Kauper, an assistant professor at Yale, will be speaking about his work and the exhibit on Thursday, Sept. 9 at 11:30 a.m. Asked if his painting of Grant unveiled is meant to shock -- if it is meant to advert to the now commonly held belief that Grant may have been gay -- Kauper responded in an e-mail that he wasn't that interested in Grant's "historical sexuality" so much as he as was interested in proposing questions "regarding sexuality: the sexuality of the maker, of the viewer, and even of the painting. If you know what I mean . . . And I'm interested in the cultural anxiety caused by contemporary representations of male nudity, which is, I think, related to sexuality. I was hoping that the gesture of painting a revered male icon in the nude would get at some of those interests."

While it is hard and a bit unfair to lump many of these artists' interests together, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that that "cultural anxiety" around sexuality as represented is a common theme. Take the cruelly satiric, over-inflated women of John Currin, the art world's currently established enfant terrible (whose untitled piece is pictured above, left), or Jake and Dinos Chapman's "The Island of Dr. Moron," which is in this show and pictured above, a kind of multi-headed child mannequin, naked, wearing sneakers, with long hair, many wanton faces, bristling with penises, like some kind of genetically engineered sex plaything. Is this a commentary on the current sexual free-for-all, or a nightmare scenario that predicts where we are bound to end up when sexuality is alienated from some notion of the integrity of personhood?

Perhaps the most talked-about artist of all in this show is Lisa Yuskavage, whose "Kathy, 2002" is reprinted on the opening page. Yuskavage paints women that could almost be out of the pages of Penthouse , only they are too ripe, too tawny, too pneumatic; they regard their own bodies with innocent but wanton fascination. Her figures are too sweet-faced to be entirely the object of a joke, and yet they fall off the edge of desirability into something narcissistically grotesque. Is this where the tradition of the nude in Western art has finally arrived, in a place where uncomplicated desire is no longer possible, and even our desire to look is slightly disgusting to us? "I only load the gun," Yuskavage has been quoted as saying. Whether we point it at somebody, or stick in our mouths, is apparently up to us.

The Charged Image: From the Collection of Douglas S. Cramer runs at the Joseloff Gallery through Oct. 17, at the University of Hartford, 200 Bloomfield Ave., West Hartford. It opens with a reception from 6 - 8 p.m. at the gallery on Sept. 7. Deborah Bright, of the Rhode Island School of Design will be speaking on "Sexuality As Cultural Construct" at 11:30 a.m. at the Wilde Auditorium on Sept. 8; Kurt Kauper speaks on Thursday, Sept. 9 on "Tastelessness and Taste" at 11:30 a.m.; Robert Rosenblum will host a symposium on Sept. 10 at 1:30 pm. with Douglas Cramer and several of the artists. For more information call (860) 768-4090.