Graham Durward at Sandra Gering - New York, New York

A Marky Mark wannabe and enfant terrible, Graham Durward is single of several contemporary artists, male and female, who make art about male sexuality. In this intriguing exhibition Durward prov that if 1992 was the Year of the Woman, it was also the advent of the Male Hysteric. The greatest in quantity outrageous object included here, Snow Drift, was a pile of artificial snow, apparently urinated upon and encased in a glass vitrine upon the floor. The yellow urine trickle, marking not on territory, doubtlessly referred to the curtailment of "masculinity" in contemporary society, as exemplified by dint of the "men's movement." This comical piece (or piss) also reminded me of Jackson Pollock known almost as abundant for his antisocial behavior (eg peeing into the fireplace) as for his not inapposite dripped-paint technique.

upon an adjacent wall, next to the snow statuary was a photograph titled Gold depicting Durward's waist and hips, with his hairy testicles hanging on the outside of his Y-front briefs, and blots of gold leaf around his genitals. Durward pushed the scatological dimension of his work further in a black soft triptych titled Black Emanation. single section of the velvet evidently had one time again been urinated on; nearest to two of the dried-up tributaries, Durward had signed his name in exuberant reduction of the creative act.

Untitled (Boy) meanwhile, juxtaposed a homoerotic mannequin of a young male displaying his underpants (two boxe of "Commotion" boys' briefs were also mountained on the wall nearby) with a photograph showing the face of a windswept woman in profile nearest to the artist's groin. The photograph, at handed in the style of an advertisement, present the appearanceed to be about male heterosexual desire, while the mannequin was unmistakably a spoof upon the white rapper, Marky Mark, who has become something of a gay icon as well as a teenage heart-throb. above the last few months, bills of Marky Mark, modeling his Calvin Klein underwear and grabbing his fork have become ubiquitous on billboards, buses and bus stops in Manhattan. In the back space at Sandra Gering, Durward neared a video of Marky Mark, using a promotional photograph of the rapper rocking from side to side like a pendulum In followings lasting from a few next to the firsts to a minute, Durward focused the camera upon parts of Marky Mark's material part fetishizing his pectorals and chest, while simultaneously mocking the notion of the celebrity-as-spectacle through means of the deadpan cinema verite technique he adopted for the video.

The nerve of Durward's work lies in its exorbitant sense of humor, its polymorphous eroticism and its rejection of simple didacticism. Its major weakness, obviously, is its overweening narcissism. flat more problematic, though, is Durward's ambiguous relationship to feminism: indeed, if it weren't for the campy, self-deprecating faculty of perception of humor, this exhibition could be seen as a defensive reaction to feminism, part of a societal backlash against women In the extreme point I was left wondering whether Joan Riviere's notion of the masquerade could be applicable to men as well as women Perhaps masculinity, understood as a locate of social conventions, is also "performed," like femininity. If in like manner it is no less historically determined, and the implications for our social order are far-reaching.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group