whitehot | June 2011, Attila Richard Lukacs @ Johnen Galerie
Attila Richard Lukacs: POLAROIDS These homosocial images emblemize Lukacs' fantastic world – a cultivated sexual landscape where women are wholly absent. As one girlfriend remarked to me after seeing the exhibition - it is a constructed plane that, like in the use of the conventional hetero-male-gaze, excludes women as a potential participant in spectatorship. Admirers of Attila's earlier work will recognize some of the models from his large-scale, tar-covered and gold-leaved Caravaggist canvases. They are known for their heroic, homoerotic depictions of pedestrian labourers, hunk skinheads, obedient soldiers and beefy construction workers.
Replete with political tensions and erotic fury, they describe hyper-masculine societies and radical gay subcultures. Without locating itself as anything expressly identity-based or as 'gay-issue' art, Lukacs' work manages to take on a sexual-political assertion by virtue of its relatively radical content. As Earl Miller has contended of his practice - despite being apparently apolitical in approach, through the investigation and representation of his own life and desires "...the work takes on a position of resistance. The apolitical nature of the work becomes accidentally subversive". It's here that we can locate Lukacs' practice as particularly Queer (denoting not necessarily a sexual proclivity, but, as in the sense of Leo Bersani, an active political resistance to ideological norms).
During the gulf-war, for example, he created a series of paintings describing the life and management of military cadets – ambiguous, obedient drones in situations of rigorous rituals. It is through the cadets' indefinite relation to portrayed authority that a rift is opened in the hegemony; we are exposed to the formative elements of their strict dressage.
Lukacs, himself a military-school alumnus, seeks to undermine authority and expose oppressive ideologies through image-making. In doing so, he enters constructed political situations with paid models that often border on exploitation itself. In the unclothed and abrupt display of these Polaroids, we are given a glimpse into the psycho-sexual setup wherein Lukacs captures the models' awareness of being unsettlingly transformed into an image. Polychrome fingerprints dotted and smeared in oil at the edges, the objects reveal themselves as entities in the oeuvre of Lukacs' performance-based socio-sexual inquiries. Equally a study in desire and spectacle, his photos are evidence of a performative examination of complex power-relations and objectification.
Morris apparently met Lukacs in 1985 at the celebrated 'Young Romantics' exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where Attila exhibited alongside his 'Futura Bold' confederates Angela Grossmann, Graham Gilmore, Derek Root and Gen-X harbinger Douglas Coupland. When Lukacs moved shortly thereafter to Berlin his relationship with Morris evidently ripened: there the two discussed art and history and went to the public museums in Berlin to study the masters. Morris takes credit in edifying his pupil on the chiaroscuro techniques of Caravaggio.
In a similar way, Lukacs performs his Queer identity, and exposes social currents not of discrete gay cultural forces but of emergent Queer voices over the last thirty years. His presented gaze (read, 'gays') reveals a subversive underworld of Queer image and desire. Perhaps for Lukacs the photos are a type of Queer Lacanian mirror, which supports an authoritative, epic and desirable self-image. It allows a (wary) relationship between the ego and the body, and also between the real and imagined. This echoes the deliberate tension between the real and fantastic we see in his canvases, and also recalls the idealization of 'Nordic' perfectionism in Nazi Germany.
This problematical idealized beauty, for Lukacs, is linked to the political, anarchic energy of skinhead neo-Nazis and anti-fascists alike: the evolution of the iconography progressed into diverse subcultures - both exhibitive of hyper-masculinity. The fetishization of this imagery seems to stem from Lukacs' attraction to the radical and sexual energy that defined the anarchic Berlin he encountered just after the fall of the wall. His formal explorations arise from the sexual tension of objectified erotic forms, and the macho agency of butch, Queer subcultures. The Polaroids are the unadulterated vantagepoint from which we witness his performative play with power-roles and political structures. Straddling the threshold between sexual vigor and irate hostility, Lukacs' practice is the uneasy setting where masturbatory-fantasies meet history-painting.
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