Keep Your Love On
For all the disgust desire harbours when spoken aloud, it remains a life force endowed with possibility. Like a choice garment, it can re-route our day’s trajectory, lensing our take on everyday ephemera and interactions that otherwise amount to nothing. Indeed, our whole mode of being recalibrates when we embrace – or put on – our desire. For some, the dress-up is conspicuous. Your archetypal leatherman, for example, adopts a commanding prowess from the moment he steps into biker and chaps. For others, desire hides in plain sight, contained in that sweet spot of voyeur, dreamer and fantasist. Instead of flippant fetish objects, this plain-clothes opportunist wears an invisible jacket – common to one and all.
Yes, you too are the lover: they who dials up their desire when the whimsy of a moment takes hold. But where do you put it once the encounter peters? In the UK, we contribute to some 3.5 tons of unrequited love and forgotten crushes a day, leaving it to rot in the great garbage heap of shame. Fortunately, a few traces are salvaged from the rubble. Artists Ross Head, Neil Haas and Lisa Penny dedicate their practices to safeguarding these magical imagine-ifs, bridging the chasm between reality and fabulation. Forming a spectrum of intensity, together the trio chart desire from its infancy, through its growing pains, all the way to climax, balancing lust with endearment throughout.
In Head’s work, desire flickers in trepidation, haunting the manicured tiles of a swimming bath. Overhead, figures peek and claw at cubicle walls, the heterosexual matrix hanging in the balance. From the artist’s gaze, a site of mundane leisure takes on mystical significance, presenting opportunities for intimacy between men that only emerge when one puts their love on. While the male forms and their conventional surroundings are sometimes hard to differentiate in the paintings, this synergy of body and space introduces an alternative utopia built on memory. José Esteban Muñoz calls this not-yet-here – often based on a once-was – the ‘ghosts of public sex’. Summoning memories from a pre-AIDs era of gay culture, the artist renders these spectres on canvas, defiantly reviving them for our present. In the vein of Muñoz, we might treat Head’s work as a threshold between sterile monotony and the joys of cruising, both literally and as a method of world building.[1] However, this method is not engaged without resistance, and tensions between abject (see queer) desire and the wholesome release of exercise butt heads. Artificial day-glow clashes against earthy hues; windows demarcate the natural world outside and the contained vat of water inside. Together, these dichotomies mimic the ever-contested lines between homosocial bonds and homosexuality, the former a member in the natural order, the latter at home in the sticky artifice of saunas and bars.
If Head’s work is the foyer of desire where closeted steps towards fantasy begin, then Haas lights the way for its coming out. In these margins, the artist teeters between guilt and passing fancies, peeping through blinds at the boy next door before hastily closing them. At first, it sounds like a sad place, but with further immersion, its dreamy allure becomes clear. With Haas, stashed-away pin-ups from men’s fashion magazines of his youth move from the soft focus of his bedroom to the quasi-realities of his work. Rather than idling in the dead ends of repression or impossibility, he drafts something better: desire reified. The hunk’s curtained locks that vanish as soon as they appear are savoured with artistic license, and the woody notes of his fragrance are bottled for safekeeping. As this desire unravels further, a form of memory work begins. Items Haas once thought naff, in part because they revealed too much, return from the depths of adolescence. He finds himself infatuated by a leather jacket seen umpteen times before. Resplendent on a coated page, the prop of machismo enters his visual record of masculinity, romanticised further in colour pencil and flamboyance. In this vein, these markers of manhood verge on caricature, taking on a camp suggestion redolent of Warhol’s shoe illustrations. Allusions to the daredevil motorcyclist or mouthy punk are skewered by a queeny touch. Again, as Eve Sedgwick professed, homosocial spaces are always threatened with a potential to blossom into homosexual ones, and so masculinity is policed accordingly.[2] For Haas, this tension is fair game.
Where Penny’s concerned, softening masculinity with subtle accoutrements – be it an earring, meticulous grooming or deliberate sartorial touches – is part and parcel of her fascination with the male form. The splayed collar on a shirt or a man’s dramatic smoulder hark back to an original interest in eighties icons and dandyism, where effete touches trouble the performance of gender. It’s an ambiguity she cherishes, especially within a contemporary context of gender fluidity. Drawing on found imagery from gay porn, celebrity and Tinder, the artist confronts the problematics of anonymity in her work, often toiling with stylistic accessories and considered crops to control her distance from the subjects. By working across different planes, she can home in on peachy buttocks or the slick bulge below belted trousers, crystallising her desires without emotionally hurting herself or the mystery man.Of course, playing the field of dating apps can be a cold, if not clinical, affair, but Penny’s adoration for these fleeting characters reimbues the modern cruise with intimacy and vulnerability. At its most toxic, masculinity skews body image and behaviour, but at its best, it warrants sympathy and perhaps touch. Under Penny’s hand, the idyllic abs and bulging backs unwind, floating in bucolic settings, parkland and tropical paradise. Where blokey hedonism rears its head in today’s vice, cream chargers, dowelling and calico cloth provide a balm to bravado.
Beyond pure sex, Penny’s renditions of men support a running theme throughout the show: To fancy, gaze upon and be attracted to the male form can be more fruitful than coitus itself. In manifesting their desires for men on canvas, paper or Venetian blinds, the artists continue to contest and complicate masculinity, singing desire’s praises beyond the rubric of etiquette in an ongoing cruise.
Text by Joe Bobowicz, 2023
[1] Muñoz, J. (2019) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press.
[2] Sedgwick, E. (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, NewYork: Columbia University Press.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Keep Your Love On featuring Neil Haas, Ross Head and Lisa Penny
Artworks Project Space Barbican Arts Group Trust
20 – 29 January 2023