Keep Your Timber Limber – Reviewed
A new exhibition of transgressive drawing at the ICA is a tour de force in skill and beefcake…
“Please be aware that this exhibition contains challenging imagery,” says a sign in the Institute of Contemporary Arts; there is no accompanying sign bearing any warnings about subtlety, however.
Warning or no, the proliferation of bulging male members on show could prove quite wearying rather than challenging; and anyway, it’s the oldest trick in the book and the default fallback of every third year student with no interesting ideas for their degree show. As with most things though, context is everything.
This is Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper), an exhibition curated by Sarah McCrory, exploring “how artists since the 1940s to the present day have used drawing to address ideas critical and current to their time”. Viewed through that prism rather than our desensitised and shock-fatigued late 20th/early 21st century one, KYTL proves much more fun.
Judith Bernstein’s huge erect cock and balls carries its weight once you consider the fact it is a reworking of an anti-Vietnam-war drawing she made in 1967, updated for the current wars being fought by the US and its allies. Bearing the stars and stripes (fixed unceremoniously at the business end of the erection), even today (if only in certain quarters), Bernstein’s social commentary will find its target.
From one extreme to another, Tom of Finland (real name Touko Laaksonen), by focusing on homoerotic archetypes evokes a celebration of gay culture. The approach served to glamorise as well as normalise the scene, leading to Laaksonen being hailed the “most influential creator of gay pornographic images” by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. There is gentle satire here, too, with depictions of cops and other traditional authority figures playfully partaking in sex acts.
Another artist plumping for the celebratory and scoring a 10 is Mike Kuchar, his muscle-bound beautiful men looking for all the world like they’ve escaped from the realm of another kind of fantasy art altogether, until you (very quickly) notice their lack of animal-skin loin cloth. Whether any loin cloth would cover their modesty is kind of moot however – if you’re looking for biggest members on show here (and let’s be honest, who isn’t eventually?), Kuchar probably prevails.
From joyous to ‘most likely to offend’, Cary Kwok’s attention is concerned with the moment accompanying ejaculation. Not content with showing us this instant of ecstatic vulnerability, Kwok chooses to dress three of her studies as a Jew, a dog-collared priest and a Buddhist monk – Kwok’s work, because (or perhaps in spite) of the combination of sex and religious figures, should illicit a response from even the most image-jaded amongst the exhibition’s audience.
A key flaw, despite the obvious links in subject matter, is the unease with which the work is juxtaposed, with little natural flow from one to the other of the eight artists involved – lost amid the more bombastically salacious images, for example, are Margaret Harrison’s water-coloured superhero-costume-clad transvestites (Captain America, above) and a solitary piece by George Grosz, demoting them somewhat.
Further, you have everything from the fashion illustration of Antonio Lopez (who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1987) to Marlene McCarty’s comment on “the ethical distance appropriate to their field of scientific research”, in which we see a gorilla with naked (twins?) either side of it, the trio grotesquely melded. In this respect, it all serves to be a little confusing.
What does run through the exhibition though is the skill with which the pieces have been rendered. 2013 has been something of a reassessment for drawing – William Kentridge at the Bluecoat, Tracing the Century at Tate Liverpool, and now this – and attention-seeking subject matter aside, there is enjoyment (of a kind other than sexual) in being able to admire the draftsmanship on display here.
Challenging? Not really. Pleasurable? Definitely.
Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) continues at the ICA until the 8th September
