THOMAS
HELLSTROM
Sustained Attention:
Projects 2000-2008
Thomas Hellstrom
Photographs in the Present Tense
By Steven Gdula
Feature article appearing in
Britain’s art and lifestyle magazine reFRESH
available now in North America at specialty
news agents and Barnes and Noble stores.
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text-
Aubade: Boys
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Solo Exhibition:
PULSE NY 2008
Aubade:
Aubade: Jen
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Aubade: Drift
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Aubade: Single
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Sugar
is Combustible:
Photo
Diary 1999-2008
from: December, 1999
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project-
Forgetting
Lesson:
from: Forgetting Lesson I
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Third
City:
This Afternoon
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Solo exhibition:
SCOPE NY 2007
Souvenir
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Publication:
Anonymous 2007
Contact: Feature Inc., NYC
Unremembering
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Solo Exhibition:
Buzzerer Thirty, NY
2005
Epilogue: Passenger
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Statuary:
S Ioannes De Deo
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Capitoline
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Pergamon
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Exhibition:
Scope Miami 2005
Pablo’s Birthday
Cinema:
Thereafter
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Solo exhibition:
The Armory Show, NYC, 2006
Emissary
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Publication:
Camera Austria #81
Reconnoiter
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CV & Contact:
CV
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Thomas Hellstrom photographed by Jennie Gusewell, January 2008
For further information regarding
purchase or exhibition availability please contact:
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Europe’s leading site for Contemporary Art
Thereafter #06
2000-03 Digital c print mounted to plexiglass, 16 x 23 inches /
40.7 x 58.4 cm
Exhibited: TODAY’S MAN
John Connelly Presents. NYC 2003
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo 2003
Feature review:
THE NEW
YORK TIMES
August 8, 2003
ART REVIEW |
'TODAY'S MAN'
By and About Men, and They're Running With It
By HOLLAND COTTER
TODAY’S MAN
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery
Tokyo, Japan
October – November 2003
John Connelly
Presents
526 West 26th Street, 10th
Floor, NYC
July 19th - September 13th
2003
Catalogue
The White House is
concerned. The Vatican is upset. And honestly, who can blame them, with so much
normality up for grabs? Marriage and the family are under revision. Sodomy is,
suddenly, not a crime. Gays are in Congress, in pulpits, on prime-time television.
When I tell you that a show titled "Bravehearts: Men in Skirts" opens
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall, you'll see how far things have
gone.
The good news is that
in contemporary art they've gone even further, judging by the evidence of
"Today's Man," a dandy group show at John Connelly Presents in
Chelsea. It includes some 50 small pieces by as many artists, from senior
figures like Alex Katz and A. A. Bronson to a raft of youthful prodigies:
Mathew Cerletty, Nick Mauss, Spencer Sweeney and the one-namers Asianpunkboy
and Phiiliip, to mention a few.
The theme is simple:
men making art about men. Naturally, it raises expectations of a gay show,
which "Today's Man" both is and is not. Explicit homoeroticism is all
but absent. Straight artists tackle gayish themes. And the artists who are gay
seem to have scant interest in "we're here we're queer get used to
it" declarations.
The fact is, everyone
concerned is used to it. Gay culture has traveled so deep into the mainstream
in recent years that a presumed opposite like straight, once headed in a
different direction, seems to have come along and in certain cosmetic ways
merged with it. What accounts for this? Time, for one thing. Most of the
artists at Connelly are too young to have experienced AIDS or the identity
politics of the 1990's firsthand. They're beyond self-acceptance in terms of
sexual identity; they've never known it as a threatened condition.
But such confidence
has pluses and minuses. Thanks in part to path-clearing feminist and gay art of
the past, young artists can draw on a vast pool of cultural references: to
fashion, crafts, pop music, Saturday morning cartoons, art history,
advertising, digital technology, flower power psychedelia, horror movies,
spirituality, science fiction, pornography. The list goes on.
With so much tinder,
sparks are bound to fly, and inventive artists like Christian Holstad, Scott
Hug and Eli Sudbrack, a k a Assume Vivid Astro Focus — all in the Connelly show
— have been generating considerable heat. But they have done so in funny ways,
some of which recall the camp phenomenon defined by Susan Sontag in the early
1960's. "Camp is a solvent of morality," she wrote. "It
neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness." That fits. So does
her description of camp as depoliticized or apolitical, though, of course,
political can be defined in many ways.
But I am
oversimplifying the current situation, which is pretty complicated.
"Today's Man," in a shorthand way, provides a lot of information
about it, including a sense of the variety of masculinities in circulation.
Some are not so new. The three suave men in Alex Katz's 1985 painting
"Twelve Hours No. 1" might have stepped from a Paul Stuart catalog;
Richard Phillip's portrait of the rapper Curtis Jackson relies on off-the-rack
gangsta glamour.
A meticulous drawing
by Mr. Hug titled "Michael Magnan" also adheres to a prototype, the
action-hero cartoon, but slyly customizes it. The hero named in his title is
the young artist Michael Magnan, creator of the fashion line Do Not Provoke Us,
who contributes a drawing of his own: a high-1960's paisley-patterned image of
a cosmic everyman cut out in silhouette from clouds.
Three tiny Photo
Realist paintings by Everest Hall depict action-heroes of a different kind,
namely those found in gay pornography, including that antique model of Marlboro
Man machismo, the "clone." This erotic ideal is entertainingly
updated in a florid, wet-dream drawing by Mr. Sudbrack; in a fabric collage by
James Gobel; and obliquely in cave-man images by Bill Adams and Billy Grant.
Certain artists seem
to have looked with care at fashion illustration: David West in his reedy,
Bernard Buffet-ish ink portraits of friends; Kentaro Kobuke in a Picassoid
figure, all angles and points; and Adrian Garcia Gomez in his vivid tattoolike
"Geve," with its snaky body and aura of gilt flames.
A stylishly
nonchalant ink sketch by Phiiliip, a songwriter and musician of expanding
renown, gives a lot of space to writing, some of it crammed into a
thought-balloon attached to its supine male figure: "I feel so elegant, so
fancy free." For light-touch virtuosity, though, nothing matches Mr.
Mauss's drawing "Kenneth Okiishi, Reluctant Effeminist," a
half-materialized portrait of a fellow artist set among miniexplosions of
bright color.
Several other people
at Connelly — Paul Brainard, Sam Gordon, Paul P., Justin Lieberman, Matthew
Keegan, Pieter Schoolwerth, Christophe Hamaide Pierson, Arnoud Holleman — also
deliver polished figural work; Tim Lokiec, has 1960's Rockport School
expressionism down cold. Interestingly, no two pieces look at all alike; it's
as if each artist lived in his own remote galaxy, with periodic visits to the
common conceptual pool. Maybe it's just the art that Mr. Connelly has chosen,
but idiosyncrasy seems to be a style of its own.
This goes for
narrative work, too, from Rob Thom's painting of drama in a fast-food
restaurant to Hernan Bas's picture of a boy threatened by an octopus from his
"Little Moby Dick in the Net" series. Dan Attoe's nocturne,
"Looking Through the Dump" and Thomas
Hellstrom's apparitional "Thereafter No. 06," one of the few
photographs, share a Romantic, visionary mood, but nothing else.
Visionary is also the
word for Jeff Davis's drawing of a pile of placidly smiling male heads bathed
in celestial light and Jules de Balincourt's "Men's Safety Center,"
with its somewhat alarming image of what looks like an internment camp with a
rainbow-beamed searchlight.
My best-of-show in
the narrative division, however, is split between two completely unalike
pieces: Michael Wetzel's painting "Fairfield vs. New Canaan," in
which a Civil War battle rages among flowered bedsheets hung out to dry; and
Nick Lowe's astonishing "Arabian Workout," a pumping-iron tableau of
insanely precise detail executed in the most basic of media, pencil on paper.
Not everyone is so
formally orthodox. Philippe Perrot paints with topical antiseptic; Asianpunkboy
uses a mixture of bodily fluid and Pepto-Bismol to embellish a portrait
embossed on paper. There are only two sculptures, both good: a white plaster
life-mask titled "Vincent" by Mr. Sweeney, and Marco Boggio Sella's
imposing bronze bust of a military type with a Pinocchio nose.
With its urgent tone,
a text-and-image collage by the filmmaker T. J. Wilcox could be from another
world: it's about a fire-breathing transsexual activist from Seattle who climbs
electric poles to deliver consciousness-raising messages, of a kind that can
leave political and religious powers-that-be unnerved. And at least one other artist,
Mr. Holstad, seems interested in keeping such tensions alive.
In a recent show at
Greene Naftali, he presented an installation of all the images he found filed
under the label "gay" in the picture archives of the New York Public
Library. When he copied the images, he sorted them into categories: "Drag
queens; porn; Gay Rights/protests; AIDS; trying to be like straight people
(passing); Military; Art." Protest pictures turned out to be the largest
selection.
If there is little direct evidence of an activist spirit in
"Today's Man," that may be a sign of the times, a generational thing,
and could change. Meanwhile, the show's decentered concept of masculinity
amounts to a political statement in itself. And there's Mr. Holstad's
contribution to consider: a photo-collage of a faunlike nude boy — the imp of
perversity, surely — peering out from behind a sofa in a White House reception
room.