28/05/2009 London virtually
Are the tiny images that men post of themselves in various states of undress on the online hook-up site Gaydar “art”?
In the hands of artist Steve Rosenthal, they are. Rosenthal, who gave up a 15-year career in acting to pursue a new career as an artist, uses his collection of 32,000 tiny sex/nude avatars as the pieces of elaborate mosaics, works that comment on the closet, Hollywood and the death penalty rendered upon homosexuals in 88 countries around the world.
Predrag Pajdic, who met Rosenthal online, recently talked to the artist via online instant messenger about his work, and the meaning behind a Gaydar icon.
PP. Your latest body of work is called Mis-Leading Men. Why?
SR. I must start by saying that this is kind of weird, doing a virtual interview, but I guess that given the way the subtext images have been collected and the distance that has been created by the methods used to amass this catalogue – and not to say the way that we ourselves ‘met’ – this is somehow poetically just.
So, in response to your question, one of the intentions behind this series is to question the societal demands (and in particular the demands of multi-million pound industries like the Hollywood film industry and the music business) placed on the men included here to represent themselves as a ‘masculine’ male (whatever that may actually be) because within these industries the big money is deemed safest behind the image of a heterosexual male. It’s what society wants to see and wants to believe in.
Steve Rosenthal, Rudolph Valentino, 2oo9
In short, I wanted to depict the subtext to the characters portrayed, the underbelly of these artists who, for various reasons, have lived a repressed existence within the public glare – much as I suspect many contemporary artists are living today in PR relationships which protect the idea of a projected male identity.
The title Mis-Leading Men refers to the idea of misleading a public, an audience, where what you see isn’t the reality. It’s an extended performance as much as the characters these actors and singers play on the screen are, and the reality is suppressed or repressed or manipulated for its own ends.
I guess the title is also a bit tongue-in-cheek, the ‘Mis’ being a reference to the title of ‘Miss,’ nudging towards a little bit of campery and a comment on the gentlemen involved layered amongst the earnestness. Also I think it’s about highlighting the responsibilities that lay in the hands of these men who are, or were, potential role-models but have hidden themselves behind a mask.
Yes, society may have changed since the 40s and 50s and 60s, but we seem to have collapsed in on ourselves since the struggles of the 70s and I think that with the onset of AIDS in the 80s, the idea of camp or effeminacy or something not masculine have become like dirty words, especially and perhaps most surprisingly amongst the gay world where men deem to present or describe themselves as ‘straight acting,’ whatever that may actually mean.
I am not certain if I’m making my position clear here. I guess what I’m questioning also is the need for labeling, the need to pigeon-hole, as though society feels the need to shoe-horn everything neatly into position and not allow for any fluidity, whereas in fact most things are more grey than black and white, and bits hang over the corners of those boxes, the shoes are scuffed and the pigeon has a missing toe, and the means of categorization may no longer actually serve us very well.
It is kind of difficult for me to separate the concept used to amass the catalogue of images away from the images presented in portrait form. I think the two are so closely intertwined, the idea of performance. And something you mentioned is I think extremely pertinent: you described the catalogued images as ‘avatars’, which I thought was a perfect description to give them. A formulated character, found on the web, and interacting with other characters, a kind of hybrid fantasy world.
Steve Rosenthal, Rudolph Valentino, 2oo9, detail
It’s also about spotlighting our perceptions of the public and the private. For many people, so much of life is played out in the glare of virtual community websites where the smallest and most intimate details are published, publicized, documented – or fabricated – and it’s often hard to tell which. So it seems to me that perhaps a certain privacy has been lost.
Then again, many of the sub-text images are headless, which throw up all kinds of questions themselves. In fact I think if you were to analyze the catalogue, I’m pretty certain that the majority of the pictures fall into two distinct categories: those which are simply face/body shots, clothed and ‘presentable,’ and those which are anonymous – torsos, cocks, arses, etc. – which could belong to anyone and seem almost interchangeable. So it’s this notion of who is mis-leading who?
PP. Technically speaking, each of your portraits is a puzzle-like impression made of numerous sub-text images, collected from the internet’s dating sites for men. How did you collect all those images in the first place?
SR. When I first joined the site back in January 2007 I decided to use the available facility to catalogue the users who left a visible track, or rather who did not actively erase evidence of their visit to my page in my ‘friends’ drawer. At that stage I had no idea what I might do with that information. I had for a long while been making works primarily from text, and I imagined I might perhaps appropriate text from their profiles. It wasn’t until 2009 that I decided to use the information in such a way that has led to the creation of these works. It was just completely fortuitous that I had amassed such a catalogue because the computer program I use to create the portraits requires a huge amount of data to proffer up good results.
PP. This month you will show for the first time a selection of portraits from your Mis-Leading Men series. Which ones?
SR. Because the portraits are to be shown in a group show, with limited space and no over-all theme, title or concept to hold the eight artists work together, I wanted to show pieces which will sustain themselves as a small unit, able to converse with one another, where one image informs the next, which could also sit happily with the works of the other artists exhibiting.
The choice of which portraits to actually show has been a rather difficult one – in the end I have attempted to condense the essence of the series and have opted for three actors, Rudolph Valentino, Rock Hudson and Anthony Perkins, and three musicians, Elton John, David Bowie and George Michael. I believe that this selection spans a sense of time, situation and place and aesthetically will all work together. My original selection included James Dean, but on seeing the prints together at A0 size it was clear that he should be removed from the selection. It was then a choice between Anthony Perkins or Gary Cooper to fill his void.
Steve Rosenthal, Rock Hudson, 2oo9
It has also became clear that the series falls into two separate halves, the “performative” and the conventional portrait, and regardless of how much I liked a single image I really had to consider whether, as a small selection, these two elements should be mixed, so I have opted for the conventional portrait, where the artist is taken somewhat out of context, away from the day job and is perhaps offering up something more intimate or personal.
Steve Rosenthal, Rock Hudson, 2oo9, detail
PP. For Dogma, our group show in Zagreb, Croatia in October 2009, you will expand on this ‘avatar collage’ idea and take it one step further. The actors and musicians will be replaced by very different images. Let’s talk about that.
SR. Yes indeed. The Mis-Leading Men series actually came after the construction of the work we’ll be showing in Dogma later this year and although I think its subject matter is certainly fluffier and perhaps more easily negotiable as a body of work, it is none the less no less earnest.
The work for Dogma depicts the execution of the two young Iranian boys Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni who were tried and subsequently hanged under Islamic Sharia law in July 2005 for homosexual acts and then for further charges following their deaths which were inserted into the record books in light of the glare of publicity that this execution provoked – the later charges being of theft, rape and consumption of alcohol.
When arrested, they were respectively 14 and 16. They spent 14 months in prison where they were regularly beaten, received 228 lashes and then confessed to the crimes against them. Then on July 19th in Mashad, Iran, following interviews with the press, they were blindfolded and led to the gallows. Rather than using the standard 8ft drop for hanging, the boys were put on the back of a low lorry and then the vehicle drove off. Due to its brutality, this technique has been outlawed in many countries with legalized hanging because due to the shorter drop the person is tormented for several minutes before loosing consciousness. And in the photographs taken on the day, it is clear that the boys’ blindfolds have either slipped or were actively removed, so it’s more than likely that they actually watched each other die as they swung from their nooses.
PP. This is a horrifying story. The gay community living here in London today does enjoy freedom, but in many places around the globe this is not the case. There are still many countries where men would get killed if found out, mainly because of religious and political doctrines imposed in those places. You identified those dictatorships as well as a part of this project.
That’s correct. I have made a further series which depicts the eight heads of state from the countries that currently have the death penalty in place for homosexual acts. To me this is by far the strongest part of this body of work and carries with it both the richest essence of the methodology behind the work, along with the most potent political message, because it is current and it is happening today.
Yet, I believe the portraits are presented elegantly and with dignity, to depict these men from thousands of images gleaned from Gaydar is, I believe. poetically just. To use images which embody our right to utter sexual freedom, however oppressed we may occasionally feel, to manifest these odious men who persist in dictating repressive regimes and ideologies with their draconian and fundamentalist views is, to me, the icing on the cake of this style of working. I wish to present these portraits with the flags of each state or country overhead, declaring to the world that, on a daily basis, field marshal Abdullah Saleh, president of the Yemen, Dahir Rayale Kahin president of Somalil, his highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nayhan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates, his royal highness Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, Omar Hassan Ahmed Al Bashir president of Sudan, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, president of Mauritania, and Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed, president of Somalia breach such basic human rights by the use of the choice of four death options – being hanged, stoned, halved by a sword or dropped from the highest perch. Yet, just as surprising as this has been, my discovery whilst researching these issue found that there are currently 88 countries throughout east, middle, north, south and west Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, Melanesia and Polynesia where homosexual acts are still illegal and can by law incur being beaten tortured and imprisoned.
PP. What attracts me to your work is this strong political context and the need to talk about issues that many are ignorant about. Where does this come from?
SR. Wow, now that is a question. I would say that in this rapidly changing world, where little is static or stable, we are often hard on the generations that proceed us. We see not so much the world that was, but rather an articulated emblem for preceding attitudes, contexts, sensibilities and limitations deemed no longer acceptable to us.
I am concerned with the question of ‘why’ – what is the purpose of art now? How can it serve, what can it do? I guess that I perceive it as a thing that is not directly necessary but can keep us aware, and which boils down to something individual in terms of personal philosophy, where consciousness is triangularly a laboratory, a landscape and a playground.
I am not looking at the world from the standpoint of fulfilling a concrete or transparent dialogue, but rather with the objective of creating something out of nothing or nothing out of something.
PP. For those who don’t know you yet, I believe we should mention that your background is in acting. A couple of years ago, you decided to move on and study art. Why this shift? Why now?
SR. I was an actor for some fifteen years. It seems like a lifetime ago now but it was something that I loved. I had gone straight from school to the drama centre and graduated when I was 21. I had some amazing experiences, working with some fascinating and talented people on a variety of projects, but as the years went on I began to fall out of love with it and, for I would say the last three years I was acting, I began to question if it was what I really wanted to do for the rest of my days.
It all coincided with me getting a much better agent and I was going for sometimes 8 or 9 castings a day and up for much bigger and supposedly better jobs. Certainly more mainstream and commercial stuff, and it began to feel like a merry-go-round that I didn’t know how to step off from.
I was also fed up with the constant ‘waiting for permission’ that is part and parcel of an actor’s life. I would say that I was in a kind of general malaise. So my then-partner and I decided to go off traveling around the world for a year. We sold our property and were about a week away from leaving for India when I was diagnosed with an over-active thyroid. I had lost a fair amount of weight over about a six-month period and then had a rapid weight loss over a fortnight. I had been putting this down to our then-lifestyle of partying too hard and way too often. I had developed a slight tremor and, to be honest, I thought that I had fucked up my nervous system. Then with the rapid weight loss I was convinced that my body must be riddled with cancer.
Eventually I went to the doctor and I was told by my specialist that had I not been diagnosed at that time, it was most likely that within just a couple of weeks all my vital organs would have started shutting down.
This event was for me a massive wake-up call. I felt that I had been treading water for way too long but had no idea what else I wanted to do. We delayed our trip and were about to be homeless when a friend offered us the chance to DJ at an after-party once a week in Ibiza. We had never DJ’d before but had always held kick-ass parties at our flat. We couldn’t mix music, but decided that it would be purely about the music. No tricks, no showing off. So we said Yes and headed there for the season, the place we had been visiting on a regular basis to party ourselves silly since 1989, so I could rest and get myself better, with no drugs save my prescribed medication.
By October I had the all-clear from my doctor and we headed briefly back to England before setting off on the most incredible journey of discovery, where every single day was an adventure from morning to night. We traveled through India, South Africa, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Bali and then around to the States. It was on this journey, extracted from everyone and everything that you know, that we found the space to allow our heads to really breathe.
We both decided that we wanted to return home to London and go back to school. Steve (my then-partner) would do his MA in screen writing; he’d previously been commissioned by Film 4 to adapt his very first stage play into a film, which he did, but he felt that he had had no real training to do this and wanted to push himself further.
I decided to enroll at Camberwell to do a foundation course in art which, at that stage, I thought would then lead me to doing a photography degree. But once in the course I chose a fine art pathway, then went straight to Chelsea and graduated from there last July.
PP. How do you feel about your choice to become an artist?
SR. There’s a part of me that thinks “I wish I’d done this years ago,” but we are what we are, when we are what we are, so I guess the journey that has led me here informs everything that I do and I guess there are no regrets, just new experiences to look forward to.
When I compare my life now to that of being an actor, I think the greatest difference is one of autonomy. As I’ve said, as an actor you are always waiting for permission to do what you do. As an artist (and I still find it odd to call myself that,) I can make work whenever I choose.
The other strange thing now is how much more nervous I get about showing my work than I ever did as an actor. I imagine it is because as an actor you have someone else’s words, direction, costume, lighting, cast, etc., to hide or mask yourself behind. As much as you use yourself, your experiences or your imagination to embody a character, it is always a character. But when you show the work you do as an artist, it’s like being a stand-up comic. You are exposing yourself completely, your thoughts, ideas, its just very, very personal. William Hazlitt remarked that “man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”
PP. Tell me 10 things that make you laugh.
SR. Haha! That question, life, French, politics, tits, my belly, fat girls in high heels (oops sexist AND fattist) The Daily Mail, the Mirror, The Telegraph…
PP. LOL, well you can continue if 10 is not enough.
SR. LOL, no, ten is more than ample. I expected the next question to be what ten things make you angry? And I’d have replied, “see above”, LOL.
PP. No, I actually wanted to ask you what makes you horny?
SR. LOL, ah, now there’s a question. The older I’ve gotten, the less prescriptive it seems to be. I really don’t understand the man who only wants blonde, blue eyes, 5ft 11, etc., etc., or whatever the limitations may be, as it appears to me that you are missing out on so many possibilities.
When I see it I know, I just know. It may be a look or a smile or the back of a neck, a bulge in the pants or whatever. It’s really often random and really open. I don’t want to sound like a complete slut here but it’s just so often non-specific. A personality, a laugh, a frown… the possibilities are endless.
What makes me horny is “plain sexy”, and that can manifest itself in so many ways: tall, short, muscled, skinny, light, dark. Sexy is sexy, and that makes me horny.
Text: © Predrag Pajdic
Images: © Steve Rosenthal
