Date: Fri, 25 Aug 1995 07:56:56 -0400
Subject: Dieter Appelt / Male Desire 


   The New York Times, August 25, 1995, p. C18.


   Photography Review: A Student of Time Who Catches It on the
   Fly

   For Dieter Appelt, bodies under strain are objects of art.

   By Charles Hagen


   In some respects, it is simply an accident of personal
   history that Dieter Appelt is classified by curators and
   critics as a photographer. In his long career, Mr. Appelt
   has produced paintings, sculptures, engravings and drawings
   as well as photographs, and many of his best-known works
   are based on his own ritualistic performances.

   But Mr. Appelt was trained as a photographer, and is now an
   influential teacher of photography in Berlin. And as the
   current retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim
   Museum's SoHo branch makes clear, it is photography that
   links the many threads of his art.

   The sheer diversity and uneven nature of Mr. Appelt's
   output has made it difficult for American audiences to get
   a clear view of him. The Guggenheim show, organized by
   Sylvia Wolf, an associate curator of photography at the Art
   Institute of Chicago, goes a long way toward remedying
   that, tracing the development of his work from somewhat
   derivative performance-based pieces of the 1970's to the
   often gripping, meditative explorations of time that he has
   made in the last decade.

   Aspects of Mr. Appelt's early work will probably seem
   familiar to followers of postwar German art. His emphasis
   on performance, for example, suggests the influence of
   Joseph Beuys; like Beuys, Mr. Appelt refers to his
   performances as "actions," though his pieces lack the
   overtly political dimension of the earlier artist's works.

   Instead, Mr. Appelt's performances from the 1970's stress
   physical endurance and primal experience; he often appears
   outdoors, nude and caked with mud or marble dust. For a
   series of images from 1977, for example, he built a tower
   of tree branches in the middle of a lake in northern Italy,
   then photographed himself posing nude in stances that
   echoed Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of Vitruvian man, with
   arms and legs outstretched.

   In a 1976 work, Mr. Appelt whitened his body to suggest
   decay, then hung by his feet from a tree; for another
   piece, from 1977, he wrapped himself in a piece of cloth
   and crawled across a muddy field. In each case he recorded
   the event in striking black-and-white photographs.

   With their emphasis on the body and strain, Mr. Appelt's
   grueling performances seem more closely linked to the
   intensely physical work of the 1960's and 70's by such
   Austrian artists as Giinter Brus and Hermann Nitsch. Even
   the torn bandages that Mr. Appelt wrapped around his hands
   and head for many pictures recall a well-known series of
   photographs documenting a performance by another Austrian
   artist, Rudolf Schwarzkogler.

   Mr. Appelt, who was born in 1935 in Niemegk, in eastern
   Germany, began his career as a singer, performing with
   Berlin's opera company for 18 years before turning
   full-time to photography in 1979. The sense of drama and
   self-presentation from his stage career may also have
   influenced his photographic works.

   But what most strongly distinguishes his pieces is the
   stress he places on the photographs of his actions. His
   work exploits a paradox about Conceptual art, performance
   art, installations or any other kind of art that uses
   ephemeral events to eliminate dependence on traditional art
   objects: that the photographs recording the events become,
   themselves, art objects.

   Thus, Mr. Appelt's early pictures are both documents of his
   performances and strongly suggestive images in themselves.
   His 1980 photograph of himself wearing wings and perched on
   a rock in a cave in southern France, for example, presents
   the possibility of flight but also of destruction;
   similarly, in a picture from 1977-79, his body appears to
   float above a black, gravelike pit cut into a snowy field.

   Despite the symbolic richness of many of Mr. Appelt's
   pictures from the 1970's, it is only in recent years that
   his art has come fully into its own, as he has extended his
   interest in physical endurance to include a wide variety of
   events that take place over time. In the process it has
   become obvious that Mr. Appelt's main subject is time
   itself, both in its own right and as a metaphor for change
   and physical deterioration.

   In a series of self-portraits from 1988-89, he photographed
   his face, with his eyes closed, for exposures of up to an
   hour; crossed threads, visible in the center of the image,
   allowed him to position himself for the camera.

   For other pictures he photographed small industrial
   objects, which he placed on a turntable connected to a
   strobe unit. Using a camera with an open shutter and a film
   coated with a very slow emulsion that he mixed himself, he
   exposed each image up to 50,000 times.

   A grid of photographs made with this elaborate process is
   one of the most spectacular works in the current show. Some
   of the pictures are blurred, while others seem only to
   quiver slightly, as if the enigmatic metal objects were
   charged with a hidden energy. In effect, Mr. Appelt made
   the objects carry out actions of the sort he himself had
   performed in earlier works.

   Other works present landscapes recorded over time. A 1991
   piece consists of a grid of 30 photographs of the rippling
   surface of a river; in 1993 he photographed tangled
   underbrush while rotating the camera, producing vertiginous
   tunnels within each of the 24 images in the final work.

   Unfortunately, the Guggenheim show offers little
   explication of the performances on which many of the
   pictures are based, instead presenting the photographs as
   self-explanatory. For a fuller understanding of the
   connections between actions and images, viewers must
   consult the handsome and informative catalogue that
   accompanies the exhibition.

   This failure to guide the audience is especially
   regrettable because Mr. Appelt's challenging art cuts
   across familiar genres. The winding path his work has taken
   can be difficult to follow, but as this tantalizing show
   demonstrates, the results easily justify the effort.

   Dieter Appelt's works remain at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo,
   575 Broadway, at Prince Street, through Nov. 5.

----------

   The New York Times, August 25, 1995, p. C27.


   Art Review: Waking Up to Dormant Gay Imagery

      [Photo] A detail from the painting "Scott as Ganymede,"
      by John Button.

   By Holland Cotter


   "Male Desire: Homoerotic Images in 20th-Century American
   Art" at Mary Ryan Gallery is one of a handful of shows that
   have emerged from the 25th anniversary of the gay
   liberation movement last summer.

   They have been large and small. This one is a modest,
   scattershot affair, mostly of works on paper. But despite
   limitations in size (50 pieces) and some questionable
   curatorial decisions, it offers bare-bones guidelines for
   the more ambitious projects that one hopes will follow.

   The show has been organized by Jonathan Weinberg, a Yale
   art historian and the author of the book "Speaking for
   Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden
   Hartley and the First American Avant-Garde," a
   ground-breaking study of homosexual content in American
   art.

   Mr. Weinberg's use of sexual orientation as a lens for
   historical inquiry has prompted the predictable head
   shaking, even though it has long been deemed a perfectly
   acceptable basis for considering the careers of
   heterosexual artists, from Rembrandt to Picasso.

   But whatever one's thoughts on the viability of his
   approach, there is no question that Mr. Weinberg has
   brought a set of revealing investigative tools to bear on
   his subject, both in his book and in this show.

   Chief among them is historical perspective. Although gay
   and lesbian studies are moving full steam ahead at present,
   in art history the field is still in its infancy, and most
   exhibitions tend to limit their focus to contemporary work
   where same-sex issues are stated loud and clear. "Male
   Desire" has its share of recent work, but it also reaches
   back, if glancingly, into the rich terrain of between the
   wars.

   By adopting a wide historical specyrum, Mr. Weinberg
   proposes that the sexualized image of the male body has
   carried different meanings in different eras and that
   homosexual content is by no means always conscious. By
   mixing homosexual amd heterosexual artists in the show (as
   the exhibition "In a Different Light" did recently in San
   Francisco, he suggests that esthetic fashion and political
   beliefs can play as important a role as sexual orientation
   in creating "homoerotic" images.

   Such factors prove particularly pertinent in the case of
   the 1930's graphic works that make up roughly half the
   show. The pumped-up laborer in "The Working Day" (1933), by
   Hugo Gellert, uses an image of sexualized physical potency
   to heroize the American worker, while the crisp,
   classicizing nude in Rockwell Kent's "Hail and Farewell"
   (1930) is an emblem of spiritual longing from a time when
   artists were trained to draw from the male model. Both
   figures are charged with sexual tension; neither were
   homosexual in intent.

   Even in the 30's, though, the potential for ambivalence was
   nervous-making. A lithograph by the populist painter Grant
   Wood, titled "Sultry Night" (1937), depicts a nude farmer
   dousing himself with a bucket of water. Harmless enough,
   one would think, though the print was declared pornographic
   by the United States Postal Service, which banned its
   transport through the mail.

   Paintings by Paul Cadmus from the same period also
   encountered censorship, but for reasons easier to
   understand. In his work, homoeroticism assumes a distinctly
   homosexual content, and in the process skewers a number of
   cherished notions.

   The classical ideal heads underground in Mr. Cadmus's
   "Y.M.C.A. Locker Room" (1933), which transforms a series of
   antique sculptural poses into a satire of male-on-male
   seduction. Subversive in a gentler way is a 1961 painting
   by John Button (1929-1982) titled "Scott as Ganymede," in
   which the myth of the homoerotic desire of a god for a
   mortal is replayed with a difference. The nude youth
   awaiting Zeus, who descends in the disguise of a rapacious
   eagle, is a sunny, good-natured portrait of Button's
   long-time lover, the sculptor Scott Burton.

   Political art in the style of paintings done for the Works
   Progress Administration also takes a hit (or earns a wry
   homage, depending on your point of view). Tom of Finland's
   militaristic, leather-clad buddies from the 1950's and
   scenes of gay bars by Marc Lida (1957-1992) turn Gellert's
   brand of working class hero into truly anti-establishment
   softcore porn cartoons. Lida's work, incidently, gains
   additional interest for having roots in the overtly
   homosexual art of the 30's itself. He clearly emulated the
   erotic watercolors of Charles Demuth, who at that time was
   depicting exactly the same milieu.

   Mr. Weinberg's linking of such images over time has wit and
   point, although not all the work in "Male Desire" is a
   revelation. David Hockney's illustrations for the poems of
   C. P. Cavafy, for example, influential and stylish as they
   are, are also overly familiar, and the gender-bending
   glamour of Andy Warhol's 1975 silk screen of Mick Jagger is
   looking pretty tired.

   Wonderful to see, on the other hand, is an artifact that
   can hardly be counted as art at all: a battered scrapbook
   of snapshots compiled by Button around 1960. Titled "A True
   Story of Two Men," it is the visual record of his early
   years with Burton (who died of AIDS in 1989), documenting
   camping trips, museum visits artd family dinners. While
   showing barely an inch of bare flesh, these pictures are
   homoerotic in the deepest sense.

   This personal mini-history is a reminder that while many
   gay artists are now openly claiming their place in the sun,
   a systematic survey exhibition of gay art in America --
   like that of feminist art, with which it overlaps--has yet
   to appear.

   There are practical reasons for this. The isolated presence
   of Mr. Weinberg's book only emphasizes the vast amount of
   research yet to be done. The current political climate
   insures that financing will be slim. And at a time when
   definitions of racial, sexual and cultural identity are in
   flux, the very notions of "gay" or "homoerotic" are -- as
   "Male Desire" suggests -- in the process of being sorted
   out.

   In any case, "Male Desire" is only the vaguest of
   prototypes for such a project. Its omission of female
   artists is, of course, a major conceptual flaw, and its
   consideration of homoeroticism is still much in need of
   refinement. Still, its attempt at historical variety is a
   step in the right direction. Mr. Weinberg may be just the
   person to get a comprehensive show off the ground. He
   should certainly be encouraged to do so.

   "Male Desire: Homoerotic Images in 20th-Century American
   Art" remains at Mary Ryan Gallery, 24 West 57th Street,
   Manhattan, through Sept. 16.

   [End]










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