| In my bedroom is hanging a tiny artwork by a young Canadian named Steven Shearer.
Shearer works in old-fashioned media like charcoal on paper or oil on canvas,
however all his preparatory studies are done using the high-tech medium of computer,
where he combines clichéd lyrics from pop songs with mathematically-precise
graphic formations, which are ironically reminiscent of the patterns found on
neck-ties and pyjamas.1 Now this would seem to bear little relevance to the photo-based,
porn-deconstructivist work of Matthias Herrmann, whose "blue dick" photograph
hangs above my desk. This image of his erection celebrates the phallus in all
its glory, and for me is a porn equivalent to a high modernist moment in its exquisite
beauty and simplicity. The open space of my living-room, housing my desk and its
think-tank aura, would seem an unlikely spot in which to hang a work by Herrmann,
whose investigations into gender, representation, visual transgression and sexual
taboo would naturally suggest the more intimate space of the bedroom. Yet despite
the unabashed sexuality and coy humour that provokes us in Herrmann's work, it
has for me always seemed a highly theoretical project, one that explores the very
crux of our identities, insofar as they are formed by gender and may be outwardly
(re)defined by the accoutrements with which we adorn ourselves. Likewise, the
high art/low art dialectic that informs Shearer's work would suggest the more
formal setting of living room in which to dwell. It is, in fact, the text in Shearer's
piece that puts it in my bedroom. It reads, "Spy on me at home," and
it is this text that leads us back to Matthias's new piece Hotel 1, which has
inspired this essay. In this text I find an invitation that teases, an offer,
a challenge, a promise of something hidden, something private, some secret waiting
to be divulged that may be found in the bedroom, or perhaps in the hotel room.
. .
The hotel. . . The hotel and the countless allusions that singular word brings to mind. The hotel itself is a highly public site, marking the passing through of thousands of individuals of different nationality, marital status, and class - a veritable ghost history of transience. But primarily, it is your 'home away from home,' bringing us to the hotel room as a place of secrecy and privacy: the hotel room becomes a site for transactions or trysts, and you may leave your (true or false) identity at the lobby. That it is 'away from home' allows all sorts of behavior usually kept in check in the domestic arena. The hotel may also be a place of obscene luxury and decadence. If you're lucky you can purchase accommodation at a five star hotel of the type we see in Matthias' photographs, an aristocratic palais called Hotel Imperial in whose rooms you may link your presence to that of international heads of state, rock stars, film goddesses, socialites, and millionaires that once stayed there, and took part in countless unknown (yet maybe imagined) activities there. Seeing Matthias' work, I remember the luxurious European hotels that formed the backdrop for Madonna's movie Truth or Dare, and the comings and goings of boy-toys with whom she frolicked in slightly-debauched glamour. Matthias's work also brings to mind the many fashion photographs one finds in Vogue by that genre's king, Helmut Newton, who has used five star hotels for photo-shoots of models posed in attitudes of contrived lassitude, their seductive allure being the natural outcome of the combination of youth, beauty and money. Hermann's work is probably closer to the work found in Newton's coffee-table photographic compilations, such as Sleepless Nights or World Without Men where femme-fatales romp and 'act out' scenarios under Newton's direction. However, the lesbian overtones of Newton's aggressive vixen-women offers a fantasy to the male, heterosexual gaze. Herrmann, however, circumvents the heterosexual, fetishistic commodification of beauty and desire inherent in all fashion photography, where the models are objectified as much as the garments/accessories they are meant to display. Remember that Herrmann is not only the photographer, he is also a model: he exposes himself in every exposure; he is both subject and object of each picture. The role-playing and outlandish, often camp mise-en-scene that Herrmann has employed for our delectation places this work much closer to the pornographic film (both gay and straight) than fashion photography. In fact, the impish wit present in much of Herrmann's work is constantly poking fun at the conventions of pornography. His references to these conventions directly addresses the objectification that arises from sexualized representations of the female as well as the male body, whether in advertising, media, or the more extreme case of pornography. Yet Herrmann's spaces are 'naughty boys' spaces, and for this reason, the Hotel 1 project is perhaps a kissing-cousin to the activities of Oscar Wilde in Victorian London, especially the scandalous tales of rent-boy parties in expensive hotels that were unearthed during the damning trials that led to his incarceration.2 This brings to my mind the recent mapping of queer spaces in the urban geography - identifying certain sites and associated activities that, until fairly recently, had to remain covert.3 Locating and establishing the relevancy of the places of gay culture and interaction allows an authority and legitimacy to the furthering and maintenance of gay social production within, or on the margins of, any dominant society. The upscale hotel lobby was once a site that, between the Second World War and the 1960's, was employed by the well-heeled of the gay community in the service of the pick-up.4 Through the recognition of certain codes of appearance or behavior, dapper young men could discreetly meet or cruise in the lobby and then take the chosen company elsewhere. Herrmann, of course, proves obsolete the necessity of any covert 'sign recognition' in a public setting and furthermore, takes the 'elsewhere' upstairs to the privacy of the rooms. Not only does the hotel room now become inscribed with queerness, the book format of Herrmann's artwork (being mechanically reproduced, and thus capable of wide circulation), allows the penetration of other and unforeseen places with queerness: these books will travel across international borders, invade the spaces of high art (the galleries, the museums, the libraries), disrupt any 'family viewing' qualities left in the places of the cultural intelligentsia such as the art collection, our coffee tables, our bed-time reading on the night-stand. The best place for Herrmann's Hotel 1 book must surely be in our homes, in our bedrooms, under our downy pillows. Yet where are we, the viewers, in the picture? We have become initiates into this secret site of fantasy. Naturally, our position is highly voyeuristic, yet we are not Peeping-Toms with our eyes at the keyhole as Sartre would have it. We may explain this with the question, why the double-fetishization of the male body? If he already possesses the phallus, why then the inclusion of so many fetish objects (wig, harness, dildo, lacy lingerie) for assurance against loss or sexual difference? The fetish objects function to re-turn our gaze, offering the castrating "forth look" Laura Mulvey discusses as disrupting the pleasurable, voyeuristic consumption of the object (usually a woman) on screen who does not look back at the viewer.5 Even when Herrmann's eyes do not penetrate the camera lens (and by extension, the spectator), the fetish objects do it metaphorically for him. Hermann not only returns our avid gaze, he actually encourages it - Hotel 1 is an incitation not only to look, but also to know. The unusual scopic economy with which we engage in Herrmann's work must be coupled with an unusual circulation of knowledge between viewer and viewed. But what kind of knowledge could we gain here, aside from the obvious knowledge of what fantasies were enacted behind the closed doors of this swank hotel room? But even this is questionable: we remain unsure of where the boundary lies between reality and fabrication. As opposed to the documentary authenticity read into the photographs of an artist like Nan Goldin (who also takes highly-personal pictures of herself and her friends), Herrmann's photographs offer no epistemological certainty regarding the truth to any of these pictorial scenarios. One never knows where the 'real' Matthias ends and where the play-acting Matthias begins. The images in Hotel 1 are not shot, or captured, they must be said to be revealed, as a source of knowledge which is offered up of the unbounded sexual pleasures available to our bodies (and identities), and thus these works may not be seen to function as visual evidence; instead they perform as visual confessions. This places the viewer in the role not of passive consumption, but in a highly active role, indeed that of a catalyst for these visual confessions to work. Michel Foucault has discussed the role of the confession in Western society as the key method for the creation of knowledge of sexual practices, indeed of sexuality itself as a discourse in history in which some "truth" could be evoked.6 Foucault argues that the history of sexuality since the eighteenth century should not be viewed in terms of a prudish (Victorian) society whose aim is repression and censorship, which suggests power structures attempting to silence the individual. On the contrary, since the refinement of the ancient technique of the confessional as a means of purifying and liberating the Catholic conscience during the Middle Ages, the confessional, as a form of incitation or coercion to speak about sex, has been employed in the proliferation, multiplication and dissemination of a discourse of sexuality, which through the evolving, (disciplining) disciplines of medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy and (often religious) morality, its continued practice is ensured by guising the discourse as scientific inquiry and analysis. The discursive excess described by Foucault as being the outcome of the proliferation of confessional techniques may be paralleled to the visual excess inherent in Herrmann's work as a whole, which mirrors pornography's address to the viewer in its intimacy, yet unsubtle and unapologetic repetition. The confession is a technique which pre-supposes the presence of a listening (or in our case, viewing) audience: the truth in any secret is most valuable when it is told, not kept hidden. Foucault has written: "Is it not with the aim of inciting people to speak of sex that it is made to mirror, at the outer limit of every actual discourse, something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time difficult and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge?" 7 This talk about sex, from patients to doctors, children to parents, subject to psychiatrist, guest to talk-show host, has long been seen to revolve around a power that is held within the speaker, who, in enunciating the truth about him or herself, is in return offered redemption, forgiveness, therapy, or liberation. In this process, Foucault reverses the traditionally-held notions of where the power and indeed, the pleasure, reside, arguing that, "the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained)."8 In fact it lies within the one who asks the questions, the one who listens, the one who remains silent, and the one who is allowed to know. Then Matthias' Hotel 1, if viewed in Foucauldian terms, may seem to construct a surprising subversion of the power dynamics that initially seem so obvious in his self-revelatory oeuvre. The agency that may seem to reside within the one who exposes himself, within the one who contravenes the existing representational norms, is actually given up, although not without the generosity and courage of the artist. This places the viewer in the curious role of interlocutor, who may be seen to extract the confessed truths from the artist. This power dynamic does not remain simple, however, for like the complex fluctuations of power involved in S & M, the rules of the game are reciprocal and as such, subject to agreement, trust, and change. Could we have an inverted panopticon here? Matthias watches us watch him, perhaps reversing the disciplinary regime through which visual control manifests itself. Matthias has assumed his role in the game, now are we ready and willing to assume ours? Moreover, we should ask ourselves, "Can I keep the secret. . .?" Notes: 1 Steven Shearer, born 1968, resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. Published in 4 Publications 1997 |