Brian Finke’s ‘Most Muscular’ features images shot over two years at bodybuilding competitions. (Photo courtesy Clamp Art)
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By STEPHEN D’AGOSTINO
Friday, November 18, 2005
You will probably enter Cheim & Read gallery to take in “Late Male
Nudes” with a head full of preconceived notions about what Andy Warhol’s
work looks like. You’ll think Mickey. You’ll think Marilyn. You’ll
think color and repetition.
All this show gives you of the Warhol you know is repetition. And though the
subject matter is as iconic of gay culture as Marilyn is of pop culture, it’s
not easy to appreciate this exhibit.
“The Late Male Nudes” contains more than 50 images, which can
be divided into two types of work. Nearly half of the works allow the viewer
to be a voyeur. Looking at the photographs, the viewer might feel that he is
spying on something he’s not meant to see. A man on the stairs, pants
down, shirt up, penis fondled.
The problem with these works is that they don’t seem genuine. The man
in the stairwell didn’t end up there as the result of some perverse erotic
desire. He ended up there because Warhol placed him there.
It’s the second type of work, however, that makes a visit to Cheim &
Read worthwhile. The photographs in this show are not titled, making it difficult
to direct the viewer to these works. However, you can find them by looking for
photos that employ the use of the model’s shadow. These photographs seem
imitative of the artists who preceded Warhol — from ancient sculptors
to modern painters — in the study the human form.
In some photographs, Warhol managed to span the history of figurative art
in a single image. While he posed the model to portray the body as it really
is, he also used a clever trick to include the model’s shadow as a subject
as well. With exaggerated curves and shapes, the shadow portrays the body in
abstraction. In other words, Warhol did with shadow what Matisse did with paint.
Even the repetition in these works, which at first might seem maddening for
its monotony, offers multiple opportunities for the viewer to appreciate the
subjects, and it creates an image more captivating than would a work consisting
of only one photograph.
If “Nudes” leaves you starved for color, there’s an easy
remedy just up the street with Clamp Art’s exhibit, “Most Muscular.”
Like Warhol’s show, this is an exhibit of photographs of the human form.
And that is just about where the comparison ends.
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| One of Andy Warhol's 'Male Nude' images from 1987. (Photo
courtesy the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts) |
“Most Muscular” is the work of 29-year-old artist Brian Finke.
He took these photos over two years at professional and amateur bodybuilding
competitions around the country. Most of the works are larger than Warhol’s
and all the subjects are larger than life. Unlike the best images in “Nudes”
that rely on shadow, Finke’s works rely on light. So dazzling is this
light, in fact, it’s easy to think the photos are lit from behind. They’re
not. And coupled with this light is gaudy, outrageous color — pinks and
purples and blues of bathing suits and g-strings, blond-out-of-a-bottle hair,
and the unnatural orange glow of skin tanned for the occasion.
The bodies of Finke’s subjects are as exaggerated as the forms Warhol
created with shadow. To be so massive as to look like the Thing of “Fantastic
Four” fame or to be a woman with muscles that most men would be proud
of takes a lot of years — and I can only imagine what else.
Yet these bodybuilders showing off their goods seem more real than Warhol’s
man on the stairs showing off his. Though the subjects are obviously serious
about what they are doing, there is humor and lightheartedness through many
of Finke’s works that seems lacking from “Nudes.”
“Most Muscular” doesn’t need “Late Male Nudes”
as an opening act to be enjoyable. It’s a treat on its own.
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