FLESH AND FLAIR
THE QUEER MEN'S EROTIC
ART WORKSHOP PRESENTS
"BOY BORDELLO
By JIM EIGO

You look very uptown tonight, Mr. Eigo,” says Charles Leslie, guiding force behind the Leslie/ Lohman Gay Art Foundation. The occasion? The opening of “Boy Bordello”, an exhibition of some 180 works on paper by more than 60 artists of the Foundation’s Queer Men’s Erotic Art Workshop, slated to fill the walls of the Foundation’s big, comfortably downtown Wooster Street gallery from January 16 until February 17, 2007. The show’s made possible by a grant from The John Burton Harter Charitable Trust; four of Burt Harter’s unapologetically erotic canvases hang at the gallery’s entry like the current show’s household gods.

The gallery tonight is packed with lovers of male figurative art that’s not afraid of its innate sexuality—the sort of work that artists have been producing in astonishing variety and quantity at the Workshop since its founding by artist Harvey Redding in December 2000. Workshop artists meet twice a week in the Foundation’s former gallery on Prince Street in sessions run by Redding and fellow artist Rob Hugh Rosen. There the artists work from a live model or two, attractive guys who strip down and strike explicitly sexual poses.

What triggered Charles Leslie’s remark? I’d put on a suit, white shirt and tie. “It’s not every night I attend a bordello,” I replied. “I figured it would be better if the boys thought I really had money.” Tonight most of the boys in question are on the walls. (The scores of sexy men trolling the gallery for artworks, a major attraction at any LLGAF opening, don’t count.) A prominent exception is Workshop model Doug R., indisputably carnal as he lounges on a centrally placed couch in thin jock and tight tee, as invitingly sloe-eyed in the flesh as he is in the striking headshot of him by Robert W. Richards hanging nearby.

A little flesh and a lot of flair are hallmarks of installations at LLGAF, a tonic amid the needlessly serious big-white-box style of presentation that prevails in most of the rest of the art world. For “Boy Bordello” the big space has been divided into five small wide-open rooms. This arrangement affords a viewer both intimacy (one can focus on a corner of the show) and its utter opposite. Stand in the proper spot, you can see into all five rooms with just a turn of the head and bask in the buzz of color and shape as all 180 works speak to you (and each other) at once.

Installation details amplify the sensual hum. Walls have been covered in deep shades of colored paper—orange, green, baby blue, pink, purple, red—evocative of old-school brothel. From a certain distance the viewer might read the repeating figure on the “wallpaper” of the opening room as stylized lilac—no, wait a minute, that’s a penis! This witty evocation of the Victorian, and the queering of it, is picked up in the elaborately shaped, outsize cardboard frames, outrageously faux baroque, that nestle each and every work. Designed and decorated by Redding with a convoluted pattern of curlicues, they’ve been executed by a crack team of artist volunteers.

This high-volume installation seems right for the carnival underway on the gallery’s walls. Highly erotic individual works echo or dissent from each other in both their subject matter (guys portrayed, poses they strike, featured body parts, attitudes, bits of costuming, roles played) and their execution (style, medium, size and color of sheet, color of line, degree of realism or abstraction). Works can engage in duets or trios or a whole raucous chorus with other works in proximity or clear across the gallery. And it all shifts as the viewer moves around.

When, for example, model Brian K. shows up in two, three, four or more works, his baseball cap backwards, sniffing a jockstrap, but in different sizes, colors, croppings and aspects, from different angles, the dreamy sense of off-kilter recurrence is subtle as an aroma. But along the exhibition’s widest axis, sparks from scores of comparisons and contrasts can crackle and ramify across the highly charged space like lightning. The thunder that follows is the sound of my pulse as the heart pumps all available blood into that part of the body that at this moment most demands it.

Right now I’m trying to focus at the same time on several versions, warm and cool, tender and brutal, realistic and abstracted, of two different blowjobs, one man standing as the other kneels to pay his respects, viewed from front, back and in profile—models Duke Rivers and Dave A. as seen by artists Elliott Gerber and Grant Arnold Anderson, and models Gonzalo and Bobby as seen by John Kirslis, Chuck Nitzberg and Yuan Jen Hsiung. The five works, stunning enough when seen separately, together provide a master class in looking hard at a subject. And I’m working so hard to keep all five drawings at once in my improbably wide frame of vision that I nearly tumble into the lap of the eternally lolling Doug P. Despite his undeniable allure, I’m pretty sure that the boy I’ll be buying tonight will come in a more manageable two dimensions. I’m in the market for an artwork.

In most works in the Bordello, a sexy stud makes a bold show of his sexuality. One amid them is grippingly intimate, private— should I even be looking at it? Brian Bednarek renders Alex’s nakedness in thick, modulated lavender and in close-up. We only see the seated model from thighs to the top of his chest. His cropped body fills the frame. A scratchy pink pencil molds the model’s flesh into shape and infuses it with a dormant but palpable sexual energy. From a certain distance this crepuscular drawing feels more like a painting, belatedly Impressionist in its muted chromatic glow. Alex’s soft uncut cock, understatedly focal, is at once magnificent and so fragile that the viewer is happy for the imposing grotto of thighs that protect it. I want to protect it too—so I buy it.

...

Jim Eigo is freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Archive.

A catalog of “Boy Bordello” designed by Elliot Kreloff, features 40 drawing from the exhibition. The catalog is available in the gallery or by contacting the gallery.
$15 nonmembers, $10 members.
(shipping and handling not included)