Musings of a Down and Out Artist

‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.’ – Henry Miller

Through the looking glass

I found this article on a nude photo exhibition in Bangkok in the Bangkok Post and thought it was hilarious, but first a note from the artist  -

Images of sexy naked bodies typically challenge the possibility of responding objectively to the terms of their representation. Any implication of prurience, voyeurism or the potential to be turned-on or turned-off complicates the matter of clearly deciding what it is we are looking at and how it might be interpreted.

Such a vexed response is compounded by the fairly widespread and misguided (if not stupid) assumption that sexual imagery is somehow self-evident in what it is and does and therefore doesn’t demand a close examination of its codes, conventions and its affects.

I write this as an introduction to a groundbreaking exhibition of photographs by the late ML Toy Xoomsai, a pioneer of nude photography in Thailand in the late ’40s, because Kathmandu Gallery’s PR performs a humorous feat of schizophrenic description. On the one hand, these black and white girlie pin-ups are described as “an act of defiance against the power of the fascist state and its imposed social order”. (They were produced during the nationalistic reign of Field Marshall Pibulsongkram). And, on the other, they reflect “Thai male fantasies concerning the opposite sex”.

This double-speak reveals the challenge of deciding the significance of contentious imagery: ML Toy’s photographs simultaneously mean (or “mean”) two radically different things. Of course, there is no reason to believe that “Thai male fantasies” cannot be theoretically construed as politically defiant; but such a great claim for photographs of naked women does short-circuit the cultural interest of what we are actually looking at (ie the forms that these fantasies allegedly take). And one might imagine that there is lot to say about “Thai male fantasies” about women!

As we know, sexual imagery has historically been caught up in public debates about “freedom” (of speech, of expression, of the self). Remember Miles Forman’s movie The People vs Larry Flynt (1996), which portrayed the publisher of Hustler magazine as a virtuous defender of democratic values in his court battles over the right to distribute pornography. But when sexual imagery circulates outside of a heady context, as ML Toy’s now do at Kathmandu Gallery, what can we make of it, so to speak?

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I will leave it there but if you want the rest you can google it, so to speak. The writer is Brian Curtin, an Irishman, I guess not the same as his namesake, the Irish court judge caught with child porn on his computer who was acquitted as the search was deemed illegal.

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