Literature, dance, art explore masculinity
Acclaimed creators, including writer Paul Auster and artist Mark Bradford, are examining what it means to be a man in the modern world.
MEMBERS OF BLACK GRACE PERFORM 鈥楳INOI,鈥� WITH ARTISTIC DIRECTION BY NEIL IEREMIA.
COURTESY OF SIMON WILSON
In novelist Paul Auster鈥檚 recent book 鈥�4 3 2 1,鈥� young Archie Ferguson closely observes the fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands around him. He knows his own father, Stanley, best, so he judges him most harshly. Stanley spends so much time at work he becomes distant, something his son 鈥渞esented, or at least felt bad about, or that frustrated him, or made him angry, or some other word he hadn鈥檛 thought of yet.鈥�
This anger, frustration, and struggle to connect is also evident in a piece New Zealand choreographer Neil Ieremia calls 鈥淐rying Men,鈥� part of a larger work that will confront what it means to be a man in the modern world. Ieremia, whose Black Grace contemporary dance company toured the United States this spring, juxtaposes three dancers onstage. One crying man could be a child of the 1950s like Archie, exploring how to move in the world as a man. The others could be his younger self and his father. Love is evident, but so is the inability to express it.
This artistic preoccupation with the male role is taking place in a time of advancing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and an energized women鈥檚 movement. Another artist musing on these topics is Mark Bradford, whose 鈥淪hade鈥� opened last year at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and recently moved to the Denver Art Museum and the neighboring Clyfford Still Museum.
Bradford studied Still鈥檚 legacy and then created work of his own. Still numbered his paintings. Bradford, who is gay, named his monumental multimedia 鈥淪hade鈥� paintings for styles of drag performance, which opens up a conversation about the machismo of earlier abstract expressionists, a subtext to the racial concerns that also are part of the show. Rebecca Hart, Denver Art Museum鈥檚 contemporary curator, said Bradford, who will represent the US at the Venice Biennale in May, is reading one of the fathers of abstract expressionism 鈥渇rom the vantage point of race and difference.鈥�