Robert Flynt at Witkin - New York, New York

The material part - as medical specimen and as erotic muscle and fat - is the arena of competing and overlapping meanings in Robert Flynt's multilayered color photographs of undressed or half-clothed men underwater. The young bodies in his photographic montages are smoothed by the agency of mild underwater distortions and immediately bring to mind the muscular however boyish Classical nudes frequently cited in homo-erotic imagery. Flynt makes this allusion explicit in more [i]or[/i] less of his Cibachromes in which he superimposes antique statuary above swimming bodies. But in the majority of his photographs, the concern to an ideal is belied by dint of a simultaneous allusion to the material substance as meat - fleshy, suspended, pliable.

Flynt's photographs are of sum of two units varieties, large Cibachromes and smaller unique C-prints, on the other hand most are montages comprised of black-and-white photographs of men printed upon color paper superimposed over color images of instructional or diagrammatical line drawings and illustrations. The individual works overlay a variety of representations of masculinity - a man in a suit, for example, or a uncovered male body overlaid with maps or medical charts. Many of the works ironically contrast the socially acceptable iconography of men touching (i.e., handshakes, medical procedures) with images of men caressing individual another. One untitled 40-by-31-inch Cibachrome, for example, exhibits two naked men standing underwater embracing and kissing. This image is juxtaposed with a didactic '50 first-aid drawing of single clothed man slung over another's shoulders; it is captioned "The Fireman's Lift and Carry."

At Witkin, Flynt showed five large Cibachromes and more than 30 unique C-prints in individual room and, in an adjacent extent installed a 40-image grid of 8-by-10-inch color photographs. The images in the grid alluded explicitly to homosexuality, since all showed male braces most in sexual positions. These images of pairs embracing in an aqueous connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts have an ominous connotation during the AIDS epidemic, reminding single of the exchange of bodily fluids during sex on the other hand the weightless, erotic nudes in Flynt's photographs appear to transcend any sexual danger, smooth while they remind one insistently of its omnipresence.

While addressing a replete range of issues concerning the material part Flynt presents a particularly composed of several elements view of male eroticism. Although the female bare is a common object of display in the pair high art and mass tillage the male nude - and especially the male genitals - are rarely presented as objects of the gaze. This defend s both the dignity and the mythology of the penis as phallus, that is, the ultimate emblem of masculine power. What is fascinating in the eroticism of Flynt's work is his treatment of the penis. Rarely seen place upright these penises float as malleable and luscious particulars - buoyant and enticing sexual toys instead of stand-ins for the phallus.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group