Movie posters made obscene by pictures of naked men are the specialty of art photographer Rinaldo Hopf
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By Gerard Robinson
Friday, January 14, 2005
With the exception of a sunny portrait of Quentin Crisp taken in 1995 in New York
City, the photographs and posters of the German photographer and illustrator Rinaldo
Hopf are remarkably ugly — which, I hasten to add, is obviously the point.
I can imagine fans of the photographer calling them “honest”; others
may just find them rude and invasive.
The photos might be by John Waters if Hopf had a sense of humor. The work is
being exhibited under the title “Subversiv,” which is a fancy way
of saying, “If you don’t like them, you’re not hip enough
to appreciate the grotesque.”
The monograph produced by the exhibition looks like a document from the ‘60s:
direct lighting, fruity colors, whacked out subjects. In one,” Bridge
Markland” (2000), a naked bald woman — a flower child — with
her nipples covered by red tape holds flowers in her hands and stares blankly
up at the photographer as if waiting for the answer to a question. In another,
entitled “Werner Rogglin” (2002), an aging queen with a bad toupee
stares down at the camera querulously. He might be asking, “What do you
think you’re doing?”
What’s being subverted here could also be called discretion and good
taste. I felt uneasy about the way the photographer seems to be exploiting his
subjects.
Hopf is not in the same class as Diane Arbus (who, God knows, also exploited
her subjects for their oddness or eccentricities). But whatever you think of
Arbus, she tricked up an unmistakable style of portraiture that was fascinatingly
all her own.
Here Hopf works close in, in in-your-face, bright, garish colors; but he produces
no image that you want to linger over. One glance at each one tells you all
you need to know: What was the subject thinking in allowing the exploitation?
Take the blasé photograph of a naked young woman “Tina Maria”
(1997) in a beret smoking a cigarette in what looks like a movie theater. The
photo is unerotic — as a matter of fact, anti-erotic — the lighting
is harsh, the color is saturated. The picture, like the seated nude, just sits
there waiting for you to avert your gaze.
In another, “JN Ulrick Desert & Stephen L. Schmersal” (1998),
a naked black man reclining on a couch with a basket of flowers balanced on
his head is fanned by a white man wearing only briefs. The fan has photographs
of Martin Luther King on it. I guess you would have to ask the photographer
what this cracked piece is supposed to be about.
Can it be that the photograph is racist? Or is it an ironic, post-modern comment
on racism? It seems to hint at some kind of subservience of white men to black
men. Anyway, you have to ask: Why is Martin Luther King being used this way?
In perhaps the most bizarre picture, entitled “Arschvoli-Charlotte von
Mahlsdorf” (the real-life transgendered subject of the play “I Am
My Own Wife, 1997), an elderly white-haired woman smiles as a much younger male
companion paddles her.
There are a couple of homoerotic photographs in the show itself. But most a
lot more are in the monograph, including the best of the bunch, a man in a suit
jacket and tie getting a blow job in a junk yard. In another shot (also not
included in the exhibition) he urinates into a partner’s mouth.)
A couple of other pseudo-biblical nudes, two men on stone steps that, let us
imagine, is an ancient ruin (“Alfredo & Husseyin in Berlin,”
2003), look as though they are auditioning for the ‘60s rock variety TV
show “Shindig,” with their arms fully extended a la the Supremes’
“Stop in the Name of Love.”
But the real homoeroticism in this artist’s work are movie posters over
which he has overlaid — scrawled might be a better word — gold-leaf
and ink drawings of naked men. Ralf Köenig, who wrote the monograph, calls
this series a “personal graffiti/glorification … set against authentic
elements of pop culture, (which creates) a new collectibility in and of itself.”
Hardly.
None of these artifacts is particularly collectible. Do you really want a poster
of “American Psycho” or “Shaft” with naked-man “graffiti”
layered over them?
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