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LONDON — I know we all have bigger concerns now — the swelling hospitals, the swooning markets — but I can’t stop turning over the case of Benjamin Griveaux, the French politician who dropped out of the race for Paris mayor last month.
He had been direct-messaging a woman on Instagram, and he sent her a video of himself performing a solo sex act; an artist got a hold of the video and leaked it online, and within a day, his political career was over. The video wasn’t cute — he foolishly sent it from his official account, and the camera angle was all wrong — but l’affaire Griveaux seems to demand a new recognition of how men picture themselves today.
Haven’t most men of my generation, as our phone cameras got sharper and the dating app pools got more selective, taken a libidinous bathroom selfie? Won’t these images surface, even if we were smart enough to crop out our heads? Isn’t it statistically certain that a few of the prime ministers of 2050 sent nudes of themselves this week?
Maybe we should talk then, chaps (and otherwise identified readers), about men and photography. I’ve been scrutinizing the fashion editorials and Instagram promos that display a new gender fluidity, with doelike models whose pronouns I cannot guess. I’ve been watching, too, as a new fascist machismo takes hold in the political sphere and in its digital reflections, and as men have embraced a virulent, even violent misogyny in the face of economic and social crisis. Masculinities soften and harden, and men fashion themselves in new ways, against new backdrops, with new tools. And if gender is a performance, social media has given it the intensity, and sometimes the reach, of a Hollywood production.
I fear you won’t find much of these changes in “Masculinities,” a soggy and slothful exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London through May 17. It’s a photography and film show, and it includes 50 artists, men and women, but its research is thin and its surprises are few. What does it mean, anyway, to be a man? What do you have to wear, to sound like, to look like? Valid questions, but you could toggle between Vestiaire and Tinder on your phone to get profounder answers than here. (The show tours later this year to the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in southern France, and then to the Gropius Bau in Berlin.)
“Masculinities” isn’t dumb, so much as dated, and could have been mounted 25 years ago with hardly any change to its theoretical model or its artist list. The curator, Alona Pardo, has stuffed the Barbican’s galleries with more than 300 works, but relied too much on innocuous classics from the 1960s to the 1990s: Peter Hujar’s orgasmic youths, Robert Mapplethorpe’s bodybuilders, Rineke Dijkstra’s bloodied bullfighters, Isaac Julien’s Harlem Renaissance reveries.
Its ideas are superannuated and unworldly; though the show includes a smattering of African and Asian artists, it hobbles forward on the crutches of decades-established Western theory, familiar from any undergraduate syllabus. (On the walls are not one but two large-type quotes from Laura Mulvey’s 1975 standby “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which every art history student learns to trot out for the final exam paper on the male gaze.)
Its grand subtitle, “Liberation Through Photography,” suggests some nebulous (and possibly queer) political engagement, and some artists and models here have indeed used the camera to forge truer or more just images of themselves and those like them. The careful portraits of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the Nigerian-born British photographer who died in 1989, gave a stateliness and elegance to gay black intimacy amid the homophobia of the Thatcher years. Catherine Opie’s important but well-worn photographs of butch lesbians take markers of masculinity — the dangling cigarette, the painter’s-brush mustache — and redeploy them with sex appeal and naughty humor, for political advocacy.
But “Masculinities” principally offers a sequence of stereotypes: sometimes celebrated, sometimes criticized, almost never deconstructed. We get soldiers, cowboys, surfer dudes, frat boys and leather men, each in their own box; another box is assigned to black men, who are uncomfortably segregated from the other gents in this show. We are promised that these artists somehow “destabilize” gender norms, but, by this show’s own measure, so does a James Charles makeup tutorial.
There’s also a careless elision here of masculinity and patriarchy — which, as Mesdames Thatcher and May could remind visitors, are not the same thing. I revere the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase, but his fictionalized portraits of his extended family, complete with impostors taking the roles of absent wives and daughters, overturn expectations of studio portraiture much more than of maleness. Ditto Richard Avedon’s “The Family,” a 1976 photo essay from Rolling Stone of Washington power brokers, including President Ford, Henry Kissinger and the Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham. More are male than female, but this is not news.
“Masculinities” is in desperate need of art that pushes past our presuppositions about men — such as Bas Jan Ader’s “I’m Too Sad to Tell You,” an art-world cult classic from 1971. The high-romantic Dutch artist trained a camera on himself and then, silently, began crying his eyes out. Why he is crying we never learn, but it becomes an almost violent jag, and recalls Young Werther and the Romantic tradition as much as female silent movie stars. Four years later, Ader set sail on a small craft on the Atlantic, and was never seen again: lover and conquistador, vanished on the horizon.
A really good show about masculinity in photography and video would include more artists like Ader, for whom gender is just one node in a network of concerns, associations and connections. Or artists like Matthew Barney, whose work demonstrates that maleness and masculinity can slip and reconstitute in profounder, more three-dimensional ways than a mild “destabilization” of stereotypes.
Above all, it would wrestle with how men (and women, and others) look and think and act today, and acknowledge that manifestations of masculinity have changed somewhat since the era of Tony Blair.
How much, really, do these 20th-century forms of masculinity clarify the wild international popularity of BTS, the gender-bending Korean heartthrobs? How much do they teach us about sports stars like Neymar, the champion footballer and world-class crybaby, or Caster Semenya, the world-champion female sprinter barred from some competitions because of her high testosterone levels? How about Elliot Rodger, the young Californian whose demented “incel” manifesto preceded a killing spree near a college campus? What sort of masculinity is performed by the Bernie bro, or the wife guy, or the e-boys of TikTok?
Making sense of these new masculinities would require an engagement with economic conditions, political formations and technological networks that may be inherited from the last century, but are not remotely the same. Artists are already looking at these conditions: Cécile B. Evans, say, with her wistful simulations of men-machine hybrids, or Daniel Keller, with his forensic dives into the digital cesspools of the alt-right. But we will have to wait for a bolder and more ambitious exhibition to show us these images of man.
Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography
Through May 17 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; barbican.org.uk.
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