Sorcha Dallas

Julain Gothe’s, angular, multi-panelled display window sculpture, ‘Painted White in a Spirit of Rebellion’ (2003) was the focal point of his recent striking debut solo exhibition with the same title. Elevated behind glass its sharp witted, aggressive, thrusting, prickly, and edgy attention seeking form appeared like a backdrop for an undisclosed drama. Relying on an irreverent take on sculptural abstraction, the work emphasizes the potential for comic absurdity as well as the uncanny violent and threatening nature of non-objective shapes. There seemed to be nothing neutral about its white paper surfaces attached like skin or drapery to a delicate steel frame. It could equally be read as an elaborate exoskeleton or an abstract embodiment of a complicated figure. A thorough cross referencing of the disparate sources and influences incorporated indirectly or hinted at by its unusual contours – among them 50s Italian ‘Stil Novo’ furniture designers such as Renzo Zavanella – would lead to a view of the work as being something of a sculptural hybrid or oddity. A cacophony of allusions and quotations of neo-classical and ultra-modernist fragments melded whimsically into a greater paradoxical whole, making the work a sort of unique mutant prodigy.

Formally the work contains questions and the artist’s responses to many sculptural dilemmas, but they are responses that favour expressing irreconcilable differences. For instance: it is abstract but has figurative creature like elements; it appears autonomous but is also situated and referential; tangents cut through its horizontal and vertical axis; it has a monumental character yet is constructed in a lightweight model like way; and, it is both flat or picture-like yet encourages viewing from all sides – even its unapologetic theatre set backside.

The sculpture’s stylistic hyperbole, spatial riddles and internal conflicts seem less idiosyncratic when appreciated from a sexual politics point of view. Sitting in the otherwise bare gallery Gothe’s vitrine work Raphael/Gywneth (2003) provided an obvious clue to those who might have missed this point while appreciating the main sculpture from the street outside. The vitrine combines more folded paper panels with photocopies of inspirational material including: a roof painting by Jose Maria Sert, a designer chair by Raphael, and etching of muscular legs by Hendrick Goltzius and a photograph of a body builder Casey Viator. It is an expression of taste and desire that conflates homoerotic semi-nudes with abstraction and interior design. Responding to this interplay one viewer apparently remarked something like: ‘well he’s not afraid of form’ which captures the spirit. In this way the vitrine makes explicit what is implicit in the sculpture – namely a Modernist setting. Here Gothe’s works involve a witty inversion – the extreme machismo of abstract sculpture ( or arguably Modernist in general) and body sculpting sports are rendered decorative and desirable by the homoerotic gaze – if thereby they’re not completely disarmed in the process, at least their power might be redirected for pleasure and therefore greater good.

One of the potential problems of admiration of muscular males or using them in art is that Fscism’s strong men – crude dumb fighting machines, tried to eradicated their predecessors – the ambiguous aesthetic and sexually emanicipatory male nudes of the early 20th Century art like those painted for example by Sascha Schneider (1870-1927). (Schneider who for a time was forced into exile by the threat of a homosexual scandal, is taken as an example here because apparently he wished to establish a body building school to provide a supply of suitable model stock for his works (1)). But Fascism’s fanatic homosocial warriors, regardless of what some of its adherents might have been up to with each other, of course were also fanatically and lethally homophobic. Anyway it’s extremely easy to distinguish potential good lovers from ideologically corrupted beefcake.

Thinking about the 40s and 50s perhaps it is also not much of a stretch to the work of Francis Bacon who, uncorroborated source told me, spent a short time as an interior decorator, and who also liked his work behind glass. In Bacon’s vivisected portraits of rough guy friends and lovers concerned like specimens in an abstract space that operates like cell there is an analogous triangulation of desire, figures and abstract form. The difference being that Gothe’s works operate with a cool detachment that is the benefit of hindsight while still reflecting a struggle against external forces, and the need to create armour-like cladding albeit paper-thin.

1. Andreas Sternweiler, ‘Kunst und schwuler Alltag’, exhibition catalogue ‘Eldorado – Homosexualle Frauen und Manner in Berlin 1850-1950. Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur’ Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1984, p82.

DOMINIC EICHLER