Confronting the Abject Meets Queering Spaces

From Springhole.net [x] [x]

Food-Colored Skin

Not only is purple prose obnoxious; sometimes it’s downright racist. For some reason, writers have a fondness for describing dark complexions as “chocolate" or somesuch.

Study for George Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil by Hans Bellmer, 1946

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Britt Salvesen and artist Catherine Opie on the occasion of LACMA’s presentation of three Robert Mapplethorpe portfolios: The “X Portfolio,” which features sadomasochistic imagery; the “Y Portfolio” of floral still-lifes and the “Z Portfolio” of nude portraits African-American men.

LACMA installed the three portfolios — apparently the first time an American art museum has exhibited them since the late 1980s — in October, 2012. They’ll remain on view in the museum’s Ahmanson Building, in a gallery just inside the front door, through March 24. Salvesen, who organized the installation, hung the three portfolios in staggered horizontal rows on dark red walls. 

No artist has more thoughtfully mined Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre than Cathy Opie. Just as Mapplethorpe considered and re-considered self-portraiture, so too has Opie. This is a detail from an early Opie self-portrait: Bo from the series “Being and Having” (1991). In 2006 I wrote this about where some of Opie’s work comes from.

Opie was the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2008. Her “Twelve Miles to the Horizon: Sunrises and Sunsets,” is on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art through March 24. She will debut a new series of work at Regen Projects in Los Angeles later this month. Opie is widely considered the foremost synthesizer of Mapplethorpe’s work: Not only has Opie also focused her lens on leather and SM communities as did Mapplethorpe, but she shares his interest in portraiture and composition. 

holy crap