Judith Bernstein’s Fucked By Number at the Keep Your Timber Limber exhibition at the ICA, London. Photograph: Mark Blower/ICA
Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) explores how artists since the 1940s to the present day have used drawing to address ideas critical and current to their time, ranging from the politics of gender and sexuality, to feminist issues, war and censorship.
As the title implies, there’s nothing sheepish nor restrained in this show. It displays male superheroes ready to spring into action while wearing restrictive feminine outfits, muscular cavemen ogling one another and men of religion ejaculating on themselves. The appropriate opening for the exhibition is thus Fucked by Numbers, a 8 metre long graffiti of a penis firing a US flag. Numbers being scribbled around the phallus to details the statistics of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many died, how many refugees, how many dollars spent, how many US army veteran suicides, etc.
Judith Bernstein’s work is a contemporary version of an image she first made in 1967, to protest the war in Vietnam.
Judith Bernstein. Union Jack-Off Flag, 1967. Courtesy Judith Bernstein and The Box LA
In case the Brits feel left out by the artist’s disapproval, the Union Jack-Off Flag, with the words ‘Jack-off on US policy in Vietnam’ awaits the visitor on the other side of the wall.
If Bernstein’s drawings bring the spotlight on male urges to display power and to destroy, Cary Kwok‘s work looks at male vulnerability at the moment of orgasm.
I was amazed by Kwok’s blue biro drawings. But i can’t remember having ever been so felt so embarrassed when watching some artworks.
Cary Kwok, Blind Date Buffet, 2008
Cary Kwok, Cum to Barber (1930s New York City), 2013
Cary Kwok, Muscle Toss, 2010
Cary Kwok, Cum to Father, 2010
The drawings of Touko Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland, played an important role in popularizing gay culture. His depictions of homosexual encounters are jolly, humorous and carefree and that’s precisely what made them revolutionary. Before him, homosexuals were represented as sad, pervert, dirty and clandestine men. Tom of Finland clad them into police or sailor uniforms, leather outfits and lumberjack attires -that would later be seen on the member of the disco group Village People- and let them frolic in woods and changing rooms.
Tom of Finland, Untitled, 1959
Tom of Finland, Untitled (Two men at poster), 1963
Tom of Finland, Untitled, 1962
In an interview with Charlie Porter, Curator Sarah McCrory says that Marlene McCarty has been looking at women who work with primates and their relationships that have broken beyond ethical and moral boundaries. Women who have been looking after apes and let them sleep in their marital bed, either as if they were children or in different ways. She’s looking at confusion within sexual roles.
“My hominid images are all also based on true-life narratives of intense relationships between humans and apes”, the artist further explained. “I’m interested in the idea of hybridization (a term used in the study of evolution to indicate those gray areas where one ‘species’ interbred with another). The process of evolution has been cleaned up for our basically Calvinist/Puritan Western thinking. We uphold very clear distinctions of various species (especially our own) as they’ve developed from one another, but what doesn’t really get talked about is that sometimes one species would begin to appear alongside another and there was most probably interspecies breeding. (Example: Homo neanderthalensis more than likely bred with Homo sapiens, although most schoolbooks would simply present them as one following the other.)”
Marlene McCarty, Group 8 (Karisoke, The Virungas, Rwanda. September 24, 1967. 4:30pm.), 2006
Keep Your Timber Limber might well be one of my favourite shows in town this Summer. I will however agree with the ever grumpy Adrien Searle when he writes that some of the artists don’t quite fit into the show. The fashion illustration of Antonio Lopez seemed a bit meek in the exhibition context and i couldn’t quite see the point of adding one drawing by George Grosz that shows over-fed members of the bourgeoisie followed around by skinny figures.
More images:
Judith Bernstein, Dick in the Head Series, 2010
Margaret Harrison, Captain America 2, 1997
George Grosz, Stickmen meeting members of the bourgeois, 1946
Mike Kuchar, from Prehistoric Pets, 1980-90
Curator Sarah McCrory gives a tour of the ‘Keep Your Timber Limber’ exhibition at the ICA
Judith Bernstein painting Fucked By Number at ICA
Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) is at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, until September 8 2013.
Small photo gallery in The Guardian.