The supple line Tom of Finland (Touko) is entirely devoted to
articulating the robust bodies of young men. Always hung, hard and
willing, they represent a state of imperishable bliss.
In the gap between the artist’s
idealized fixations and the reality of flesh, the audience for Tom of Finland’s
drawings live. The drawings arrest time, which ticks onward. They are a
time out that never ends, all coming and no going, all light and no
dark.
Some who disdain his work
are homophobic, but there are other reasons for giving it a
pass. The artist created a heavenly world, a place where, in Wallace
Steven’s phrase, ripe fruit never fall. If there were such a thing as a wave forever hanging at its
crest, surfers would shun it.
Heaven is where the
imagination goes to die. Even in the literature of the faithful, hell
is where the action is, which is why scholars say
Milton was of the devil’s party. What do mine eyes with grief behold?
asks Lucifer, Milton’s fallen angel. It’s easy to love Dante’s Inferno while failing to finish (or start) his Paradiso.
Tom of Finland refused to acknowledge that joy must end. Aesthetically, he is saved
from irrelevance by the elegance of line. If painters of
perfect flowers are minor, then he is minor. His interest in youth never faded in the eternal sunshine of his mind.
Set
in the political context of his
time, however, the artist who died in 1991 at age 71 is a hero. To
delineate a version of the beautiful
which mainstream culture rejects is a brave act. Just as a
single man in 1989 stood up to the tanks in Tiananmen Square, Tom of Finland stood up to hatred by articulating its opposite. His art is the
flower that anti-war protesters in the late ’60s placed in the
business
end of National Guard rifles. Make love, not war.
A suite of his drawings is on view at the Greg
Kucera Gallery as part of a group exhibit titled, I.D.: Individual
Demographics. (More on ID soon.)
Wednesday night at 7 at the gallery, Blowing Up Demographics,
a discussion moderated by Mary Ann Peters, features playwright
Ki Gottberg, and artists
John Feodorov and Margot Quan Knight.
I would like to know why every time someone dislikes seeing homosexual men in erotic or sexual encounters they are immediately labeled as “homophobic”? Is it impossible to have a traditional moral value system and still be respected in the arts? Perhaps.
I saw the Tom of Finland show and what I saw was an illustrator with a great sense of line and nothing more. (I kept thinking of how alcohol addiction is treated with pain and sorry by those looking in at the poor addicted soul, while sexual addiction is viewed as being free and uninhibited. A disease is a disease is a disease…)
Hello nyartist63: It’s hard to know with a comment such as yours if it’s real. Fact or fantasy, it expresses a blind, burrowing mole consciousness. You’ve strung phrases together that don’t make sense as a collective. If you dislike seeing evidence of homoerotic but are swell with hetroerotic, then, yes, you’re a bigot. Yr second question: Thank God yes. It is impossible to be respected in the arts and be so prejudiced. (Yay, art world!) The rest of what you say is nonsense. The birds have eaten the bread crumbs leading out of your forest. Rebake and try again.
Thanks very much Another Bouncing Ball for your comments. You have reaffirmed for me the sad condition of the art world, and also why no one ever really talks about art per se anymore (form, line, color, the power of opposites, etc), but rather about special interests and how they should be further promoted.
Just to clarify a little for you I hope, I was referring in my original comment to the old argument between form and content. I remember arguing a long time ago with a good sculptor-friend about which was more important. He of course took the content side while I adamantly pushed the form as all important. (I also find it self-revealing that in our enthusiasm for “proving our points”, neither of us thought that perhaps both were important.)
When I said that the drawings by Tom of Finland had a great sense of line and nothing more, I was being harsh on the form side of things, not paying attention to the content which as you already know I do not like. And to clarify that view, it seems to me that these drawings have a beautiful line and strong form, but in a very illustrating sort of way. They reminded me a lot of drawings by comic books artists–something which Picasso or Matisse drawings never could do.
And by the way it would take far too long and involve too many ideas very foreign to you for me to explain how I also disapprove of hetroerotic work as well–if I want porn I can just buy a magazine or use the internet.
Thanks again Bouncing Ball for that educated and kind snap judgment of my values and sense. Such is the world and the arts today. But I have hope.
Hello nyartist63: I agree about the illustration. Tom of Finland is close to being a straight up illustrator but I think saved by the otherworldly purity of his line. About your dislike of homoerotic imagery. I’m just an art critic, but you’re on my blog, so I feel I can make a personal suggestion to you.
You need to do something about your bigotry. What if you knew somebody who disapproved of images of black couples? Wouldn’t you suggest a trip to reeducation camp? I suggest you befriend a homosexual, if you can find one willing to assume the missionary position. Studies show that the more gay people somebody knows, the less chance there is of that person failing to see them as fully part of the human community. What you call traditional morality is not morality at all. Sincerely, good luck with this. We all seek. We all fail. Some failures are less acceptable than others, and yours is off the charts.
Dear Another Bouncing Ball,
As I read again what I wrote, I can understand the misinterpretation that my comments can cause. I take part of the blame for this lack of clarity, and apologize vehemently from the beginning. I definitely should have been more careful, rather than shooting from the unclear-ideas-hip as I did in my initial message.
Just as a side note, I am new to the world of blogs (is it that obvious?), but am not sure I will continue (Reminds me of AM radio talk shows which I never listen to; at least your blogs are interesting). I never suspected that my comments would actually get shown; I was writing more to you personally, ABB, which is why I didn’t bother with grammar or thought completion, but no excuses; live and learn. Oh well.
Now concerning your advice about getting help, I am sorry to say that here is where you go so woefully astray. I have had many homosexual friends, including my roommate in college, and have always gotten along with them wonderfully. If any sort of character categorizing is to occur, I would say that the homosexuals I have known were some of the friendliest–in a Platonic way (I think)–and fun people. I miss some of them and never have had a problem being friends with gay persons.
Once again your snap judgment of my personal well-being is surprising; but maybe the cause is the need for you to read and write so much every day that you sometimes do not read carefully enough.
A proof of this can be gleaned from your comparison of gays having sex to black couples having sex and the subsequent accusation; this strange claim completely misses the entire point of my objection. You completely redirect the topic away from the question of the validity of openly sexual acts portrayed as art and their potential offensiveness to many people, over to an issue of race or sexual orientation.
This is what I meant when I said that “special interests and how they should be further promoted” has become the main topic of art talk. I am making no judgment on a persons sexual orientation or race, but rather on the portrayal of the act in itself. I am asking why a certain level of criticism cannot be waged against the subject matter without immediate recourse, as you have done oh so clearly, to ad hominem arguments and insults.
If you shove into my face pictures of blatantly sexual acts by either homosexuals OR–as I mentioned before but which you seem to have conveniently ignored–heterosexuals and tell me it has value on a social and/or artistic level, then I will object.
I remember getting into a similar, and equally fruitless, discussion on this with another art critic who was my teacher at the time concerning Eric Fischl. As much as I like his forms and to a degree his handling of paint and color, it always seemed to me that he was stuck on sex as the great subject matter.
While sex is definitely an interesting and worthwhile subject to paint, its glorification to the neglect of other and perhaps deeper or more subtle psychiatric/spiritual matters often seems Fischl’s goal. I will be happy to be shown a more substantial Fischl; but I will also be very surprised to find it.
None of these comments, of course, mean that using sex as an important and deep subject is wrong. Far from it. It merely means that there are others, in case we forget.
All I am saying is that I would like to see more than just men screwing or wanting to screw in art. The same goes for couples or individuals or females. It all seems like merely glorified porn to me. There is an incredible beauty and sense of otherness within the sexual act that these portrayals only mock. Perhaps this deeper and more penetrating side is so often ignored because the vulgar side of it is so captivating, as the “reality” shows on MTV so clearly prove.
You think I didn’t read you carefully? You didn’t write carefully, which you, probably uncarefully, admitted.
Although I struggle mightily trying to understand why anyone would concern themselves with the bedroom business of others(aren’t the expulsion of bodily fluids private moments?), I can at least say that I’ve come up with a partial understanding of the conversational devide that exists between Regina and nyartist.
The way I’m understanding it is that a vacuum has developed as so many decided to vacate the metaphorical closet of sexual secrecy and a socialiological need for a new bogeyman is required to fill the void. Hence, out of the closet comes the homosexual and in goes the homophobe, am I right?!?
Very nice posting. I liked it.
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