Winner of Claridge’s first Royal Academy Schools Art Prize, the young performance artist Daria Blum has taken to their ArtSpace to point fingers at you – no, me – no, her. 

LUX Magazine: What is the significance of the pointed finger?

Daria Blum: The gesture of the pointed finger has appeared repeatedly within my work, and in this performance I was interested in investigating its multiple meanings through subtle changes in direction and tension, using it to claim attention, cast a spell, blame, or ‘point the finger’. The sculptural works in the show also reference this act of deflection through the use of the pop filters, which are used to deflect air from reaching the microphone when speaking or singing into it. The mic stand sculptures emphasise the absence of the voice, which is an important aspect within the exhibition — I’ve been thinking about the demand for (live) performance, within my own practice as a ‘performance artist’ but also within the arts more broadly, and even though I ultimately ‘give in’ by performing this piece, there is a reluctance to speak, to sing, to be perceived.

In her performance for the exhibition ‘Daria Blum: Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot’, Blum stares down the audience, slowly directing her pointed finger to each member.

After her live performance, Blum makes her way through the audience and slips out the door at the back. The performance then takes on a digital aspect, transporting the audience into new worlds.

Blum appears on screen, continuing to point her finger as she makes her way through an abandoned 1970s office building.

Blum’s performance takes place amongst her ‘Redeflect’ installations that combine microphones, stands, and digital prints.

Portrait photograph by Melanie Dunea

Marina Abramović has been tortured and almost killed, by her own audiences, for the sake of her art. She has also redefined the genre and democratised it. The world’s most celebrated performance artist, whose works span five decades, speaks to Darius Sanai ahead of a major retrospective at London’s Royal Academy

In The Marina Abramović Method, a board game-style card set recently issued by the world’s most celebrated performance artist, you are told to spend an hour writing your first name, without pen leaving paper; walk backwards with a mirror for up to three hours; open and close a door repeatedly for three hours; and explore a space, blindfolded and wearing noise-cancelling headphones, for an hour. Some of the instructions, given on large, Monopoly-style cards, are more onerous: swim in a freezing body of water; move in slow motion for two hours. But none of them come anywhere close to asking users to inflict on themselves the suffering and danger Abramović has put herself under over five decades of pushing the boundaries of art.

As she explains below, the Method was intended to take its users away from their phones, and put people in contact with themselves, inspired by her own journey, over 50 years, to understand her own body and mind. Purchasers of the card set can be grateful that Abramović does not suggest they train to become her. The New York-based artist has been lacerated, tortured, cut, stabbed, asphyxiated, rendered unconscious, and more, in the name of her art. She first came to public consciousness in the 1970s with performances like ‘Rhythm0’, in Naples, when she stood in a studio for six hours, provided the audience with implements including a scalpel, scissors, a whip and a loaded gun, absolved them of responsibility, and told them to do what they wished. She did not flinch as she was assaulted, cut, and manipulated.

Marina Abramović in a scene from her performance ‘7 Deaths of Maria Callas’, in 2019

Other performances in the same era saw her render herself unconscious; in 1997 she spent four days scrubbing bloody, rotten cow bones in a performance of protest against the war in former Yugoslavia. Possibly her most celebrated performance, ‘The Artist is Present’, which remains the most significant performance artwork in the history of New York’s MoMA, she spent a total of 736 hours sitting static in the museum’s atrium while visitors lined up to take it in turns to sit opposite her (among those who did: Lou Reed, Björk and James Franco).

So, what would Marina Abramović the person, rather than the silent artist, be like? Catching up with her ahead of a major exhibition spanning her life’s work at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (dates to be announced), I was prepared to interact with someone as brutal and scarred as she has a right to be, but was surprised to find a pleasant, highly articulate, methodical, thoughtful, quick-witted and humble interlocutor. Her thoughts on cancel culture and the effects of social media on creativity are as sharp as the scalpels she once offered the public to cut her with. Her answers are art in themselves.

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LUX: I have been playing around with The Marina Abramović Method: Instruction Cards to Reboot your Life.
Marina Abramović: The Abramović method came from my long search for how to train myself as a performance artist to be able to really understand my body and mind. For that, I went to different cultures, I went to deserts, to Tibet, to shamans – lots of places to work in different retreats and to try different techniques. This is really dedicated not so much to artists or performance artists, but to everybody. Everyone – farmers, soldiers, politicians, factory workers, young children – can do this method. The exercises are very simple, which I think is beneficial, and it puts you in contact with yourself. I also liked the idea of creating cards, so they’re playful. You have that playfulness, like in a game: you close your eyes and pick a card up and do the method. This exercise is my effort to go back to simplicity, away from technology and video games, away from all this presumption that takes you away from your own intuition.

Marina Abramović cutting crystals whilst exploring Brazil in 1992

LUX: Your performance over the years has involved a lot of danger, personal suffering, and challenges to yourself.
Marina Abramović: In my cards, there is no suffering, no bleeding, none of this stuff. I am not responsible for anyone else, only myself. To me, one of the biggest human fears is the fear of pain. It’s interesting to me that if I stage painful experiences in front of an audience, when I go through this experience to get rid of the fear of pain, and I show that it’s possible, I can be inspirational for anybody else. It doesn’t mean people have to cut themselves or do dangerous stuff, but to understand at the same time that pain does not have to be an obstacle. You have to understand what it is and how to deal with it in your own life. If you look at rituals in different cultures, every initiation conquers the moment of pain, and it really strengthens the body and mind. If you’re afraid of something, don’t sit there and do nothing about it, go through it and have this experience. That is the only way you can be transformed, getting out of your comfort zone.

LUX: Are you trying to change the audience through your performances?
Marina Abramović: The only way that I can get all this attention and understand what I’m doing is to show courage and ability at the same time – that I’m vulnerable, but I also have the guts to do it. Two things. An artist should be inspirational to other people. They have to have a message, to ask questions, not always to have an answer. The pain, the suffering, the fear of dying: these are all elements not just of contemporary and classic art, but the history of humanity.

LUX: Were you always very brave as a child?
Marina Abramović: I was. It was not an easy childhood, to start with. I had a very strict, military upbringing. I was also very sick as a child. I suffered from a condition that caused long durational bleeding, a bit like haemophilia but different, so if I had a tooth taken out, for example, I would have to be in bed for three months sleeping so as not to choke from the blood, because it wouldn’t stop. I had lots of obstacles. Being raised under Communism contributed as well – Communism is all about being a warrior, not caring about your personal life, and sacrificing your life for something. When I came to the West, everybody looked so spoilt to me.

Marina Abramović in a scene from her performance ‘7 Deaths of Maria Callas’, in 2019

LUX: Does it affect the depth of what modern Western artists can create if they haven’t suffered or seen difficulty?
Marina Abramović: The young generation has a whole different set of problems than I had. Their problem is a feeling of being kind of lost and melancholy, of apathy and a lack of belief. You can’t generalise, and of course there will always be one Mozart in every generation, someone who starts creating art at the age of seven. But the others have a lethargic way of life. Everything is available to them. They don’t need to fight for anything. Computer, video games, ice cream: whatever they want, they have it. When I was growing up, I was allowed ice cream once a month if I was good, and mostly I was not. All of this is different. So, I always see them as spoilt, but at the same time it doesn’t come from them, but rather their parents. It’s complicated. I think it’s important now, the idea of the Forest School learning model. They have it in England. Kids can come to the forest and make their own fires, to find food, to learn simple survival techniques. I think it’s a way of going back to simplicity. Simplicity is the way to survive.

Read more: Sophie Neuendorf’s Inside Guide To The Venice Biennale

LUX: Before, in the 1980s and 1990s, people were either creators and artists or they were audience. Now, everyone is a creator. Does that devalue real art?
Marina Abramović: Some years ago, I was invited to go to Silicon Valley to talk to tech people about art, and to my incredible surprise, I found out that they seriously believed that Instagram is art. That was so surprising to me. Instagram is, to me, a very personal way of seeing the world and sharing it with other people. It’s a tool for communication. It’s so far away from art. Art is so different. Also, now, with NFTs and all this new technology, all anyone is talking about is how much it costs and the amount of money that can be made. It has quickly become a commodity. But I really don’t see content, real profound ideas that can move me and bring me emotions, and I think that’s what art is about. [Digital media] unifies people and breaks the borders between countries and individuals, but this is not art. I’m sorry, but it’s not art.

LUX: Has there been a fundamental change in art since the 1970s or 1980s?
Marina Abramović: It is so different. The needs of society are different. In the 1970s, there was so much experimentation. There was incredible freedom in the art scene. Now, we are facing political correctness and diminished creativity in so many ways. So much art that we were doing in the 1970s would never be possible now, because it would be so scrutinised and criticised that galleries and museums would not show it. This is something that, unfortunately, does not help creativity right now.

Portrait photograph by Melanie Dunea

LUX: Are people stopping themselves from creating because of political correctness?
Marina Abramović: The true artist does not care about this shit. They don’t care. They will always find a way to do things, if not publicly then it could be underground. Historically, that has always happened. Artists cannot stop creating. It’s an urge, like breathing. You can’t question it. You wake up with ideas and have to realise them. This is your oxygen.

LUX: Do you think the West – what we used to call the ‘free world’ – is going to have a movement of underground artists because they can’t express themselves publicly?
Marina Abramović: I really think so, yes.

LUX: You are taking over the Royal Academy in London. What will we see there?
Marina Abramović: The Royal Academy is, for me, a very big obligation – an honour. I care so much about this show right now, because it’s showing what makes my 50-year career. There will be some really important major artworks from each part of my career of 50 years, but also there will be a big amount of new work, which nobody will have ever seen before. There will be a reperformance element, with young artists reperforming my early works, which I introduced some years ago. Some of my contemporaries say a performance cannot be reperformed – I disagree. And then I am also preparing my new work, which I can’t talk about because I’m superstitious, but I’m definitely doing a personal performance. The show is called ‘Afterlife’. I like this very ironical title, because I’m still alive. I have waited a longtime for this show, because it was supposed to be in 2020 but then Covid came, so it was postponed for three years. You know, at my age, three years is a long time, so I’m really looking forward to the fact that finally it will happen.

Marina Abramović in a cave whilst exploring Brazil in 1992

LUX: If you had been brought up now, in America, compared to when you were brought up in what was then Yugoslavia, would you still be the same artist?
Marina Abramović: I don’t know. I was very happy where I was brought up. At that time, I read all the books that Americans don’t. Not all of them, of course, but generally Americans don’t read. I was very happy with my education. It was so intense. Full of poetry and art and everything.

LUX: Do you still put yourself in as much danger and physical stress as 20 years ago?
Marina Abramović: I have to say, ‘The Artist is Present’ was a hell of a performance and I was 65, my dear. I could never do this when I was 20, or 30. I didn’t have the willpower, wisdom and determination. There was no way. I needed time in order to have the strength. You get strength when you get older and not younger.

Read more: LUX Art Diary: Exhibitions to see in May

LUX: Do you fear getting older?
Marina Abramović: Not so much now – sometimes, when I wake up on a rainy day with pain in my ankles and shoulders, but not generally.

LUX: Do you fear anything?
Marina Abramović: Of course, I fear. Everyone fears things. I have a childhood fear, that if I go to the deep sea, a shark will come and eat me. Even if I go to the ocean and they tell me there aren’t sharks there, I know that the shark knows I’m there and is going to come for me. But that is an old fear from childhood. Like everybody else, when I go on a plane and there is turbulence, I’m immediately writing my testament. I fear. But I think it’s natural, it’s living, you’re living, you’re alive. You’re not immune to fear. Nobody is.

This article appears in the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

In 2019, German embroidery artist Jess de Wahls had her works removed from the Royal Academy gift shop after a blogpost – in which she outlined her views on gender identity politics – was deemed transphobic. The Royal Academy has since apologised, emphasising the importance of freedom of speech. Here, Candice Tucker speaks to the artist about the experience, her practice and future collaborations

1. You’ve established yourself as an ‘enfant terrible’. Can you explain what that means exactly?

I was branded that, rather, by Hand and Lock, which is this old-fashioned embroidery house in the West End – it’s over 250 years old, I think. I did a bit of work with them over a period of years and I guess it’s because I’m not your average dolly embroiderer. They did a story on me and that’s what it was called and I thought I’ll run with it, it works! I’ve done a lot of vulva embroidery and I’ve got the Big Swinging Ovaries label and I think that’s where it came from and I thought well I guess that’s true because I kind of go against the grain of what people perceive as embroidery.

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2. Your work explores themes such as the environment, contemporary feminism and female liberation. Do you think there is a natural link between these interests?

There has always been a natural link for me. It wasn’t something I set out to do and embroidery wasn’t something I set out to do either – I just fell into it, naturally.

Traditionally, embroidery and needle work have been seen as women’s work. The recycling bit, for me, is connected in the sense that I am a big fan of trying to reuse things so I almost exclusively work with recycled materials. I embroider onto old fabrics, usually old clothes or bed linen or anything I can get my hands on. When I used to do the Retex sculptures (short for recycled-textile-sculpture) it was purely from donated clothes from friends and family and people that like my work which I cut apart, so that links together with the whole textile aspect.

Feminism was always something I was curious to explore through my work. As mentioned before, embroidery or textile art in general has always been sidelined as women’s work, and regarded as somehow less than mainstream art. I’ve been taking quite a stand over the years now to make a point that embroidery is just as much art as any other medium, but it wasn’t that I thought “I’m a feminist and therefore, I have to choose textile art”, it all just kind of connected. There’s no ulterior motive behind it.

3. How were you first introduced to textile art and embroidery?

I used to paint and draw storyboards, but I sort of fell into textile art when my goddaughter was born and I wanted to make something tactile for so I used some of my old clothes. The last time I had sewn something before that was when I was in primary school. I made a little soft toy for her and I really loved the process of stitching, so much so that I thought, “Why haven’t I done this before?”

After that, I did a lot of sewing which ended up turning into my Retex sculptures that became more and more intricate the more I went with the fabric and the textile. I never studied it so I just found my way through what medium I wanted to work with next. Embroidery happened naturally because the backgrounds got tinier and tinier, and more and more detailed. Now, I pretty much only do embroidery. I find it addictive.

I’ve always been fascinated by meticulous, tiny works of art where there’s lots of repetition, and really, there’s nothing more repetitive than stitching because you get into this flow state and you can go for hours and also do something else whilst you’re doing it. I have a Zoom stitch group – we meet every other day and for 2 hours, we just chat while everybody works on their own projects. It’s kind of like back in the day when women used to meet to stitch. There’s something really soothing about it.

4. How do you think art manages to act as a platform in raising awareness for issues such as equality and the environment?

In a way, I think art has always [raised awareness], it’s just now that the mainstream is taking more notice. Artists have always expressed their worries, concerns, likes, dislikes and fears through their work, but with social media, and the internet, we have much more exposure to [both art and these issues]. Look at Frida Kahlo and her work: she was expressing very similar things early on.

Read more: Helga Piaget on educating the next generation

I do find it a little difficult now because there is so much political art that it becomes a bit like propaganda where I’m not sure how good it is and how much it takes away from the quality of the art. There is also such an incessant need for labels for everyone and everything, which is interesting to me because I’ve sort of become a feminist artist and although the majority of my work is about feminism, it’s also only one of many things that I’m exploring. At the moment, there are a lot of feminist issues that that I’m looking at through my art, criticising or applauding, but that’s not to say that’s what I’ll be focusing on next year when there might be something else that’s more on my radar. There are some really good things about the internet, it allows people to reach broader audiences that they wouldn’t have been able to access before, but [the overload of information and content] can be difficult to navigate.

5. What was the importance of the Royal Academy’s apology with regards to freedom of expression?

Obviously, I welcome the apology. Sadly, over the last two years, I had become almost used to that kind of behaviour. People were really shocked to see what had happened because it was the first time this had happened so publicly, other than what happened with JK Rowling, but that’s a different story because she’s at a different level to me. It was shocking to see that an art institution like the RA would go along with the social media pressure because ultimately that is what it is, and there is a danger in that. I think we should be able to look at art and separate it, to a certain extent, from the artist.

Of course, people are free to disagree with me. They said it’s not freedom of speech if you don’t let people voice their concerns about your views and I’ve never said that they shouldn’t be able to voice them. It’s not freedom of speech if the consequence is that I have to worry about my livelihood and that of my partner and friends. Within art, I think, there are guidelines for hate speech, which I haven’t broken: I don’t hate anyone. So, yes I am glad they apologised publicly. A lot of people were hoping I was going to court, but it’s much more important to have a public stand on this, and I know there are a lot people who disagree with that too, but then, what do you want from art?

Ideas don’t go away just because they are prohibited: they go underground and they fester when they are not being examined. I, as an artist, should be able to say something that isn’t hate speech, and people should be free to say, “That’s rubbish”, or “I agree with you.” To me, that’s what art is about. The way [this whole thing] has been misrepresented as if I am trying to punch down a minority is nonsense: in my opinion, I’m standing up for women. I’ve been open for conversations about my thoughts on this for a long time and they have only every been met with dogma.

If the big art organisations start examining every artist, they won’t have any art on their walls anymore and if only certain thoughts are allowed to be expressed, then we will have a very narrow view of art and life.

6. Do you have any upcoming projects?

I’ve done a couple of webinars with Baroness Nicholson. She wants to get me involved with the Yazidi women in the war camp and bring embroidery there, which I would love to do because in South Africa there are a lot of women who were raped in the war and they work through their trauma with embroidery, which can be super healing and soothing.

There’s also a group of women artists that I’m working with in the background and a couple of curators, we are trying to put on an exhibition about ‘cancelled’ artists, particularly women artists. Who knows, maybe I can convince the Royal Academy to give us a space!

Find out more: jessdewahls.com

Installation view of the ‘What’s Up’ exhibition curated by Lawrence Van Hagen in Hong Kong

Lawrence Van Hagen set out to start a travel tech company, and somewhere along the way, ended up curating a successful series of art exhibitions dedicated to supporting emerging artists. Now, Van Hagen runs LVH art, a business dedicated to helping clients navigate the international art market. Here, we speak to the entrepreneur about his unexpected career path, his favourite places to see art and how to start building a collection.

Lawrence Van Hagen

1. Can you tell us more about the What’s Up exhibitions and how you found yourself in the role of curator?

I started a travel start-up and in order to raise funds for it I decided to curate an art show. I wanted to curate a show since my family is in the arts. My mother has her own art foundation, collects, curates exhibitions and writes books on art. We decided to curate a show called What’s Up based on what’s up today in the art world with a focus on artists to look out for, whether they are young or established. We had the first show in Soho, New York with two spaces, 50 artists and 100 artworks. The next show turned out to be even more successful than the first.

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We have now had shows in New York, London, Hong Kong and Seoul. I work closely with my mother. It’s more my project, but my mother gives me a huge amount of advice and help. It is nice to be able to bounce ideas off one another. The good thing about working with family is trust, you know for sure with family. My mother has kind of been my mentor and taught me what I know today since I didn’t go to art school. However, since I was a kid I was immersed in the arts and always lived with art which led me to start started collecting at a young age.

2. Do you see yourself as a mediator between established and new artists?

A big thing I do with the shows is I tend to bring emerging artists or mid-career contemporary artists together with very well known names. I blend them and create a dialogue between both. I find similarities in inspiration, historical aspects, colours or medium between the established and emerging artists. I do the shows this way since I think that it is interesting and I believe that in order to attract people to a show with emerging artists, you need work by household names as well. Also, when you have younger artists at a show, it keeps the older generation more current. This way of curating shows has enabled me to have a client base from 20 to 80 years old. The older collectors have the most amazing collection of well known artists but now consider acquiring work by a young artist from the shows. I have noticed that the public enjoys shows set up this way.

3. Do you buy art for its beauty or as an investment?

My taste is very classic, I tend to focus on art that is more beautiful than conceptual. However, one thing I tell everyone including myself is to focus on buying what one likes. Whether it is beautiful work or not, it is important to know that you love the work. Second, it’s important to consider investment. For me, it’s a factor of the acquisition in my collection. If it is a very young artist, I tend to not look at it. However if I spend a certain amount of money, it has to have an investment purpose. I will not just spend a big amount of money on something I like, it has to also be of value and something I believe in. One thing to know about the shows I do is that many of the artists we showcase are artists that my mother and I collect. I love to promote the artists from my shows. Lastly, it is more important for people to find what they like, than to have an advisor tell them if what they like will be a good investment.

Artworks featured in one of the ‘What’s Up’ by artists Franz West, Stefan Bruggemann and Lucio Fontana

4. Which artists’ work do you have at home?

I have a selection of young and old artists. I have beautiful work by Georg Baselitz, who is a well known German painter and sculptor. I have two works by a young artist Donna Huanca, who is based in Berlin. She is an incredible artist, who just did a show at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. In my entrance, I have a work from the 90s by the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. I have work by Sean Scully, Stefan Bruggemann, Stanley Whitney and George Smith. In the bedroom, I have a beautiful 60s Kenneth Noland. There’s a lot more too.

In my house, I mainly have contemporary work, but with simple classic older artists. Most of the younger artists are a part of my collection and the other work is from my mother. I tend to borrow as well. I always move the artwork around in my flat to create a different aesthetic. I am lucky because the ceilings in my apartment are very high which is rare in London, so I can hang up 3 metre work. It is important for me to keep a lot of art in my house since it is my passion and profession, and I also throw dinner parties where friends come over and they can see what I do. A few pieces of art makes a big difference to a home.

5. Best place to see art in London?

It depends what type of art you are looking for. In terms of galleries, if you want to see more established artists or big shows, all the major galleries from David Zwirner and Gagosian Gallery in New York to Simon Lee in London are great. In London, if you want younger artists, it is good to go to the east end or south of London where you have Carlos Ishikawa and Emalin gallery. When it comes to museums, my favourites are Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery for contemporary art. Tate Britain and Royal Academy are also great. Auction houses always have incredible work. If you are not looking for a curated show and you just want to see beautiful paintings, I would recommend the private view before sale at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips. The auction houses have anything from contemporary to established and renaissance pieces. Lastly, to be honest the number one place to see art in London is in people’s homes. Often artists have incredible work in their homes since they trade with people they know.

6. As travel was your first business venture, what’s your next destination?

My next big trip is to Indonesia. I want to visit the Raja Ampat Islands on New Guinea. I also want to see the Komodo Islands with the Komodo dragon when I am there as it is close by. I travel every week as it is part of my work and I love it. I get to see many beautiful places on work trips, however it is still work for me. Therefore, my personal travels are very meaningful and I like to travel quite far to experience something different. My last big trip was to the North Pole. I like to do adventure trips. I am not a very resort-y person, but I always make sure the adventures are mixed with comfort. If anyone needs a travel guide, I am the guy to ask!

Follow Lawrence Van Hagen on Instagram: @lawrencevh

Interview by Andrea Stenslie

‘Male Nude Eating Cake’ by Georgiana Wilson

Whilst the female body is a commonplace subject in art and historical discussion, representations of the male body remain limited. Artist Georgiana Wilson discusses the troubling stereotypes cast by the classical male nude

This month, the Royal Academy opened an exhibition of Renaissance nudes that plays up to the current zeitgeist by showing equal numbers of naked males and females. In any large European collection of figurative paintings, the Uffizi Gallery or the National Gallery for instance, one would expect to find rooms full of female nudes, their reclining, smooth bodies without pubic hair and arranged for the male gaze. Feminist activists and art historians have persisted in challenging this discrepancy in the European art canon through academic debate (Griselda Pollock, 1970s), public protest (the Guerrilla Girls, 1980s) and even physical attack (suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914), confronting the female body under the male gaze.

If you walk through such a gallery looking for a vulnerable, male body laid bare in the same fashion as the painted women, you won’t find one. Female genitalia are accurately depicted at least 13 times in the National Gallery’s collection of paintings, but you will see only 3 penises. Similarly, exhibitions, books and essays focusing on the male nude are rare in comparison to the thousands dealing with the female body in art. Why has the female body been given so much attention whilst the male body remains almost unscrutinised in art-historical discussion?

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Perhaps men have not been painted unclothed because until now the patriarchy has stood largely uncontested in the Western world; there has been no call to analyse its presence in painting, whereas from the 1970s the feminist movement has invested in re-examining the female nude. The male body in the history of painting does not appear to have changed much. What one does find on a long walk through the National Gallery are countless heroic, statuesque men in active poses (far from the trope of the passive reclining women) with drapery covering their genitals.

Even when these male bodies are depicted as broken or weakened, for example in paintings of the crucifixion, Pietas, Gericault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’ or St Sebastian pierced by arrows, they all share a kind of autonomy that commands our gaze. These ‘broken’ men groan or sigh in pain whether we look at them or not, whereas the countless unclothed women rely on the (male) gaze for completion.

‘Meringues’ by Georgiana Wilson

The gendered tropes of European painting reveal a lot about how our societal expectations for men and women have evolved and I find what we see in the history of the nude disturbing. I would like to draw a link between the heroic, powerful modes in which men have been repeatedly painted and the societal pressures for men to present themselves as invulnerable and ‘masculine’. I believe that a form of this prejudice still exists, with damaging effects that can be recognised in all walks of public life, most troublingly in mental health statistics. The finding from the Mental Health Foundation that suicide is the single largest killer for men under 45 in the United Kingdom demonstrates what is at stake when we think about our societal perceptions of masculinity; this restricting perception can be traced through the history of the male nude.

To understand why the male body has been depicted in such an unchanging manner throughout centuries of painting one must look at the influence of the art academies across Europe, artist run organisations that proliferated from the 17th century, whose aim was to improve the professional standing of artists and provide teaching. The Royal Academy in London is a prime example, a prestigious benchmark of the established art world since it was founded in 1768. The practise, revered since the time of the Renaissance, of painting nudes from first plaster casts of antique statues and then posed models was adopted by the Academies, making the life class central to artistic training.

But why has the female nude persisted as the subject of choice when across all the European academies, with the exception of England, female models were not hired until the 19th century, because of the fear of ‘indecency’ (that they might be prostitutes). Since only male models were hired to pose in academy life classes, it is surprising that the male nude hasn’t been explored in more nuanced ways. The type of body that the academies chose for the life classes certainly has something to do with it; soldiers or boxers that resembled the marble heroes of Ancient Greece were picked to model for drawing classes, harking back to the classical ideal upheld by Michelangelo, Raphael and Rubens. In 1808 a group of academicians actually held boxing matches beside the Parthenon Marbles, forging a link between the classical past and contemporary ideals of virile masculinity.

Read more: PalaisPopulaire & Berlin’s Cultural Revolution

Choosing muscular models who recreated the poses of antique sculpture came to acquire a moral connotation in the European academies. Since the mid-18th century, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s writings that associated the strong, masculine Greek body with virtue and democracy had hugely influenced the conservative art of the academies as well as antiquarian scholarship. This preference for the classical male nude can explain why the naked male body has been depicted in such a rigid manner since the Renaissance: it set a paradigm of heroic masculinity and a conservative, moralising standard for contemporary male viewers.

There is another aspect of the male nude that has remained the same for centuries: it is still comparatively rare and shocking to find a penis in an art gallery. By the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, as women were being allowed to attend academy life classes, unease over the idea of a naked man posing meant that the model was required to wear bathing drawers, then wind nine feet of fabric around them, and finally secure the whole outfit with a belt for maximum concealment. This Victorian prudery was mirrored in the ‘fig leaf campaign’, whereby male statues’ genitals were covered up. A custom-made plaster fig leaf had to be placed on the cast of Michaelangelo’s ‘David’ when it was given to Queen Victoria in 1857, to ‘spare the blushes of visiting female dignitaries,’ according to a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum. After this, the male nude was censored.

By the 19th century the unclothed male body had become taboo in Europe for its potential to overexcite or shock (female) viewers. I don’t think we’ve progressed far from this. Despite the fact our ‘period eyes’ (M. Baxandall) have become used to the naked female form in mainstream image culture, in the context of an art gallery, pictures featuring male genitalia are still controversial. This was illustrated by an exhibition in Vienna, Naked Men (2012) that presented modern artworks depicting the naked male form. Ironically, the exhibition’s poster, featuring three naked footballers (by Pierre and Gilles) had to be suppressed before the show had even opened. Even recently, a series of advertisements for the centennial show of Egon Schiele’s graphically contorted, erotic self-portraits were censored on Facebook and had to be covered up in public spaces in Berlin and London. ‘The paradox is that we think we live in a very liberated society but the male nude still troubles people,’ said Xavier Rey, a curator of Masculine / Masculine, a Musée D’Orsay exhibition in 2013 that also displayed images of the male body from the 18th century to the present.

It is worth acknowledging another development that has subverted the male nude: outside the conservatism of the European Academies, queer artists were depicting men in intimate, tender and challenging ways. But these works were viewed as marginal and thus had little influence on the 19-20th century mainstream art establishment in Europe. I would argue that such artists are still disregarded. Robert Mapplethorpe was the first artist to exhibit an image of male genitalia in 1977 in a gallery. His nude and BDSM photos of oiled, flexed muscles and submissive male bodies in leather and chains aggressively confronted the viewer’s perceptions of masculinity and sex, but these portfolios are still viewed as ‘obscene’ and ‘on the edge’, despite their hundred-thousand- pound price tags. Other queer artists such as David Hockney have tried presenting the male body as more tender and vulnerable; Hockney’s most famous LA poolside landscapes of flat, bright colour engulf the nude body, distanced in a picture space that curtails any sense of intimacy for the viewer. If artists like Hockney and Mapplethorpe have tried and succeeded in the past, why has the mainstream subject of the male body remained so conservative that a full-frontal male nude in a painting is still considered surprising? Is it because of sexual politics?

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‘Pillowed’ by Georgiana Wilson

We are not used to the vulnerable, naked male body because we do not expect to see men as defenceless or passive. These roles are more normally filled by women: the trope of the ‘Venus Pudica’ as old as Ancient Greece, Titian’s many Venuses, prettily laid out for the viewer’s sensual pleasure on silk cushions, and the commodified women’s bodies of 20th century advertising. What does this say about our ‘Western’, that is Central European, English-speaking society’s definition of gender? Surely today, in our progressive society, when the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are supposed to be moving towards increasingly fluid and non-binary definitions, we should be comfortable with the concept of a, dare I say, ‘feminine’ man? The way in which men are depicted in painting can reveal a lot of our societal prejudices about masculinity, because those very pictures have been shaped by social prejudice.

Today, the heroic male bodies of 19th century painting have been replaced by the trope of the ‘anti-heroic’, fleshy man; Lucian Freud’s portraits of Leigh Bowery and Ron Mueck’s hyperreal sculptures are instances of this. Many of Freud’s male nudes are almost forensically repellent: he scrutinised his subjects intensely until they became as dehumanised as pieces of meat. Ron Mueck’s exaggeratedly detailed sculptures of naked men, scaled up or down, also expose their imperfect physicality, with every enlarged pore or microscopic line of hairs producing discomfiture.

These artists paint a bleak picture of contemporary masculinity, but it is also a prescriptive one in which the strong male body has been displaced in favour of a species of emasculation. Whereas in Western society women are ‘allowed’ to be openly weak, to cry, self-scrutinise and admit vulnerability, men are not. But thanks to Rachel Maclean, Tracey Emin and Cindy Sherman female bodies in art have developed beyond the passive, reclining, hairless trope of the past, into a polymorphous range: powerful, confident, undignified and even funny.

I have argued that the new trope of the un-male male body in art reveals a startling truth about our discomfort towards vulnerability in men. CALM charity, which works on male mental health, states on their website that, ‘we believe that there is a cultural barrier preventing men from seeking help as they are expected to be in control at all times, and failure to be seen as such equates to weakness and a loss of masculinity.’ If we cannot produce and comfortably consume art that depicts tender, powerless male bodies, then we cannot readily conceive of a man as anything other than the invulnerable ‘ideal’ of ‘masculine’ that has, until now, been taken for the norm.

To view more of Georgiana’s artworks, follow her on Instagram @georg.kitty

‘Flag’ 1958, Jasper Johns. Courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago.

‘Fool’s House’ 1961-62, Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns is one of the most influential artists in America’s contemporary art scene, known for his appropriation and defamiliarization of everyday objects, most notably the US flag, which Johns first painted in 1954.  ‘Something Resembling Truth’ at the Royal Academy, London is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to be held in the UK in 40 years. Spread across several large galleries, the exhibition confidently steers us through Johns’ career beginning with his iconic symbols, including several versions of his famous stars and stripes. Yet, more intriguing, as is so often the case, are the works that come later: dark, morbid collages with decapitated limbs and limp, inanimate objects that force us to recognise the paintings as objects themselves.

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‘Painting with Two Balls’ 1960, Jasper Johns. Collection of the artist.

In ‘Painting with Two Balls’, the canvases are prised open with small balls, resembling the googly-eyes of a rainbow coloured cartoon monster, to expose the wall behind, whilst ‘Watchman’ depicts the sawn off legs of a figure sitting upside down on chair with colours merging into a shadowy gloom. Johns challenges our perceptions by grabbing hold of the familiar, stretching, mutating, chewing it up and spitting it back out again. It’s an exhibition that deserves time and consideration.

Millie Walton

“Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth” runs until 10th December at the Royal Academy, London