| Matthias has asked me to write about his Texpieces, the
many text pieces, in which his body becomes the prop to illustrate a text, or
to appear to illustrate a text, or to pose in the simulation of illustrating a
text, any text, any text that strikes his fancy, so that all all texts become
sullied, as it were, or penetrated - as an odour penetrates a carpet - with the
possiblity of being illustrated by these vulgar gestures and this profane body:
all texts are sound bites waiting to be dirtied by these infantile, appealling
and erotic tableaux, waiting to be transformed into the subvocal accompaniment
to a slapstick schtick, the passion of St. Herrmann, he who is overcome by a drunk
and bumbling libido. The role of the text becomes reversed, or even debased, in this flip-flop world, to become the illustration to the image, or perhaps to the form of presentation, which is stuck somewhere between photography a nd performance, between Freud and the Marx Brothers, between Jeff Stryker and Jerry Lewis... like Michel Foucault presenting prizes on The Wheel of Fortune. * Textpieces are like codpieces: they enclose and suggest, they frame a hidden set of meanings and potentialities, which the artist invites the viewer to open in the private confines of his imagination. The actual meaning is beside the point: it is the ultimate engorgement of imaginary and even contradictory meanings which the viewer teases out of the photo which is the point. We are meant to feast on these photos, not for what they are, but for what they might be, for what we can create out of them. Like pornography, they require the participation of the viewer to complete the event of their viewing, their 'enlargement', as it were, and the ultimate stimulation of an explosion of meaning. * Silliness often has been the most difficult quality for our academic art world to accept. Yet silliness is one of the great gifts which the gay psyche - that most bruised and vulnerable and childlike of presences - brings to this world of suffering. We accept seriousness (and even pompousness) without question, and make them the subject of scholary discourse. But silliness questions the nature of dicourse itself, calls into question the structure of meaning, creates of criticism a parody of itself: meanings collide like bump-'em cars in a circus of excess. * We who must hide in the night, who must pass for other than that which we are, are well aware of the rewards of simulation and of dissimulation. We know to knit our codifications into a thick brambles of protection, that they may be penetrated only by the initiated. * Silliness is a strategy to escape analysis or reduction of even detection. * Camp is the great trump card held by our kind: with it we inhabit the world of our oppressors with flagrant disregard for our position in society - as the cultural slime gathered by night in the industrial interstices of our cities, relegated by day to the service sector where our gifts of healing can be disguised within the lesser roles of hair dressers and decorators, hospital orderlies and entertainers. With camp we put on power as a sort of outrageous decoration and flaunt it in the faces of our superiors. We wield irony as our sword, but also our scapel. We are the modern shamans, dressed to kill. We are the warriors. We are the masters of twentieth century military strategy. We have learned on the battlefield; we are prepared "to die for the love of boys." Our generals have given their commands: "When in doubt, overdress.", "Always make a big splash." * The Textpieces are hybrids: Matthias has layered media conventions and cultural conventions into a leaning Tower of Babel. His sources for this Dagwood sandwhich are from a new culture, a culture which began in the fallout from the 60s: Interview Magazine, Boy George, Vivienne Westwood, and Bruce LaBruce, not to mention muscle boys, drag queens, and the world of fetish. With these ingredients he builds his idiosyncratic structures. The cultural hybrid is familiar to us now. Yet Matthias' photos have a wit and a density, a way of accepting and celebrating "low culture", which might put the cultural maven on guard. He throws us into a posture of non-acceptance: "Well, NOW he's gone too far!" - or even the age-old melody: "But is it art?" We look askance, and by doing so reveal more about ourselves and our cultural biases than about the photos themselves. As always, the power to offend is the power to reveal. * Eroticism, homoeroticism and vulgarity have been the artists' concubines for centuries. And the outrageous children of these flagrant unions, the artworks themselves, are often ignored before they are embraced: Chaucer's tales, Michelangelo's slaves, Mapplethorpe's black men, Herrmann's erections. A collector acquaintance of mine says that when he looks at art he looks for "the innies and the outies". If they are not there, it is not art. * The Textpieces proliferate, like fungi, like rabbits. They are a sort of cancerous union of language and image producing hybrid offspring that defy classification - no, more: they call the entire classification system into question. They are the doctor's nightmare world of genetic irregularities. AA Bronson December, 1998 Published in Textpieces 1996-1998 |