| Intro-Bind Dear Mister: your image, these images, fill me with many feelings of pleasure and solidarity. But for the sake of getting into you and not polluting your visuals with my disease, I will try to resist empathizing and remain a voyeur. You make me both horny and sad: if I ever start to roll my eyes back in my head, you whack them back down with your dark humor. The extensiveness of your self-portraits have an accumulative effect, virility in the midst of decomposition. Is that on target or am I projecting my own morbidity? Regardless, I admire that you let it all hang out, so close to the homo-ideal, yet sufficiently used. If in some manifestations you appear too clean-cut, you are a proper Grotesque. In this I delight. The Barthesian Corpse Matthias Herrmann’s photographic works do not fight, but fuck, with the idea of his own flesh as Total-Image. In the hotel series, site-specific to the make-believe homes, the restriction of using minimal to no props in available settings works in his favor. He creates persona the frozen impulsive moment. Its life depends on neither truth nor fiction, but the mythology of his sex. His cock, whether seen hard or floppy, is never shown recessed. Counteracting the deadly tableau pose, the tools of his trade are didactically posed, as to be a mockery. To look at Herrmann’s work, his roles as photographer, subject, and prop, within the Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida concept of Total-Image, it is certain that death becomes him. Thoughts on Faggotry and Sexual Repulsion Through the past decades, homosexuality remains a culture of desire, even in the face of assimmilationist agenda and death. Hedonism dominates the gay tragedy. It resonates alongside, or in spite of, sickness. Herrmann’s playful horniness, often with the assistance of text quotations, wanks off at a higher pitch. That could be cheeky, ironic, or entirely sincere. The repetitive state of genital arousal is a male power trip, but the displaying of the anus and welcoming position of the legs is the passive homosexual abomination. Further, the keistering of anything from a champagne bottle to a fire extinguisher hose—while they could be the pranks of an isolated, hypersexual teenager—in this context are defiant. And, defiant to that masculine active cock or passive hole, he brings in the element of feminine drag. Certainly not trying to pass, this cross-dressing is insincere. The style of women’s clothing Herrmann wears in some scenes seems almost as random as the hotel furniture: ratty wigs, inexpensive “sexy” lingerie, undergarments that, if structural, are ill-fitting. What you don’t end up with is a chick-with-a-dick. With his serious gaze and muscular physique and porn-size cock, Herrmann mocks his own sexuality and dares to become Ridiculous. This is complex image-wanking, a rejection without letting go. It’s also lonely, this. Welcome To The Dark Side Post-HIV-infection, there’s a continuation of theme in Herrmann’s work, he holds ground above this nagging sagging human flesh, but by revealing sickness there is an inherent slant, coupled with an apparent indulgence in mood: these hotel diaries continue to document Herrmann as pornstar, underwear model, pervy horn-pig, but his compulsion to exhibit has taken on a dead-pan edge. There is also an increasingly introspective, melancholic feature: still lifes (with or without spunk), packages of HIV meds appearing as their own persona, available pornography. Total-Image: I feel sexy (but my eyes say sick), my cock is rock hard (but I’m wearing this stupid wig again), I feel like showing my asshole (even if it is ragged and ulcerated). The material is not so different, it still has fun, yet it is haunted by the specter of HIV and drug therapy. With the information of diagnosis comes a viral perception of bloody tissue in the toilet, or cum on the fruit bowl, that cannot be denied. Even with the shame equation aside, this is a different quandary than Hannah Wilke’s Intra-Venus series: death is not nearly so close for Herrmann and his sexuality is still plugged in. For those of us who like their art front-loaded and their sex objects on the used side, he’s not only plugged in, but turned on high. Ron Athey Published in Hotel V, 2007 |