Sexual Impropriety And The Male Artist – Do We Care?

Posted: January 31st, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: art | Tags: art, artists, photography, politics, popular culture

At the same time that I came across the latest American Apparel ads, I saw a piece about a picture of photographer Terry Richardson standing with a number of male models during a photo shoot for a Diesel ad campaign.

(I figured everyone covered up just enough to be rated PG-13 “ish”.)  For those who wouldn’t recognize him, Terry Richardson is the guy on the left holding his junk, shirt on and pants down.  Given that Richardson has a reputation for scandalous behavior with female models, the blogger Frockwriter posits that perhaps this is the photographer’s attempt to show that his lascivious antics are not sexual harassment of women (per se).  It is far from the first time Richarson has taken his clothes off on set, and various female models have come forward and asserted that he manipulates young models into taking their clothes off.  The details are a whole other story, but suffice to say that Richardson reputation precedes him.  The result are some incredible, sexually charged photographs.

In light of its gratuitously porn-like ads, my response to American Apparel is to shop somewhere else.  Which begs the question of what the appropriate response to a “creep” (the apparent word of choice from those who have worked with him) is when that creep is a talented photographer.  The conversation seems oddly timely as we wait to see what will ultimately be the repercussions for a presidential candidate for his piggish behavior.  As Gail Collins asked in her op ed piece in the New York Times  this past Sunday, “Do you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?”  Artists are not altogether unlike politicians when it comes to sex (yes, wild overgeneralization on so many fronts, but it’s a good one, no?).

Is Richardson’s work exempt from judgement in a way that a t-shirt isn’t because it is art.  To some extent I think the answer is “yes”.  That is, the pornographic nature of the American Apparel ads seems to be particularly gratuitous because it overt pornography shouldn’t be a critical with selling a bathing suit.  And American Apparel certainly is not the only company selling bathing suits, t-shirts, underwear, or whatever else it may be.  Don’t like how they conduct their business and there are plenty of other places to go.  Richardson being a talented artist means that it’s not just as easy as going to another photographer.  Do you like the other photographer’s work as well?  Is Richardson’s behavior sufficiently egregious to warrant forgoing his talent?  But more than that, challenging the viewer, making the viewer uneasy, injecting a charge of sexuality and confrontation, is all a vital part of the end product.  On occasion his pictures are just gratuitous and offensive and not worth a second glance.  When his photographs are great, however, it is the fact that they are brash, beautiful, difficult, uncomfortable, simultaneously seductive and off-putting, that makes them great.

All images Terry Richardson via Photobucket.com

The excuse that they’re all doing it is pretty lame.  Every toddler learns that doesn’t justify anything.  Still, someone once said to me that if you impeached every president who exploited his power for sexual conquest you would be impeaching almost every president.  Extreme ego and desire for power often go hand in hand with success and drive in politics.  Not always, but there is an extent to which the flaws are part and parcel of a package that is extremely well suited to the job.  And history would suggest that the same may be true for artists.  Sex, pornography, the lusty consumption of the body of the female model, have been components of a heck of a lot of great art for millennia (if you go back to the ancient Greeks it’s the lust consumption of the body of a young male model, but it is, in essence, the same thing).  It doesn’t excuse a photographer allegedly coercing a naive and eager young model to give him a hand job.  But an obsession with sex — lurid, controversial, distasteful, when made concrete in the form of a lascivious artist — emerges in the work as a quality that draws us and appeals to us, that makes the work interesting or draws our attention.

I don’t have anything good and conclusive to say here.  It’s a conundrum.

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