Queer subculture – pack and gang

The young man looks skeptically past the camera: David Armstrong, 18 years old, androgynous in appearance, with medium-long hair, in a dress, with a cigarette smoldering carelessly between two fingers, shot in grainy black and white that focuses on the face and the background blurs into blur. A beautiful photograph, sympathetic and at the same time with a great sense of the aesthetic value of the image composition – “David at Grove Street, Boston 1972”, taken by Nan Goldin, who was also just 19 at the time.

A beautiful photograph, but also a document of an artistic community between pack and gang. Goldin (born 1953), Armstrong (born 1954), Mark Morrisroe (born 1959) and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1953) moved in the queer subculture of the US East Coast in the 1970s and experienced the decline of social cohesion within the American one Society, the rise of the religious right, the drug pandemic and finally the AIDS crisis. And they each revolutionized the art of photography in their own way: with images that look documentary, but pursue their own artistic strategies. Goldin’s approach is deeply empathetic, Armstrong’s approach is old-masterly, Morrisroe’s approach is experimental, and diCorcia’s approach is elaborate productions that border on the film set.

The fashion photographer F. C. Gundlach, who died three years ago, collected all four artists, which provides an interesting counterpoint to the high-gloss aesthetic that Gundlach stood for (and whose own work can thus be viewed again under a new light). Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen is showing these works in a small, somewhat meaningless show entitled “High Noon”, which is a cabinet exhibition accompanying the retrospective “Blow up” by the neo-realist Swiss painter Franz Gertsch. Sabine Schnakenberg’s curation cannot be accused of being overly ambitious: What you see is a collection presentation, dutifully hung, arranged according to groups of motifs and, within this order, according to artists. This means that if Goldin’s self-portrait in patent and leather called “Nan as a Dominatrix, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977” can be seen, then David Armstrong’s “Andrew in Dog Collar, New York City, 1984” hangs in the immediate vicinity.

This isn’t original, but it does allow for a close look at the similarities and differences between two motifs from the BDSM context. And when you then observe how close Armstrong comes to the portrayed Andrew Utter, while Goldin layers a whole cosmos behind the titular outfit, a kitchen setting that has less to do with sexuality than with a lustful everyday life, precarious and luxurious, staid and glamorous at the same time , then that also says something about different artistic approaches.

Such a simultaneity of aesthetic strategies in the face of similar subjects permeates the entire exhibition. This becomes clearest in Goldin’s contributions (which are, of course, quite over-communicated, especially in Hamburg): When sexuality is discussed here, explicit desire plays into the depiction, as does the enjoyment of embarrassment and shocking violence. A picture like “The Hug, New York City, 1980” shows, on the one hand, an intimate embrace, but on the other hand, it also shows a hairy, strong male arm roughly encircling a delicate female body. And one can give the exhibition credit for the fact that gender roles are not always presented in such a clichéd way as they are here.

Especially since there is always a sense of off-color humor. A picture like Goldin’s self-portrait “Nan after being battered” (1984) mercilessly shows domestic violence, while the caesarean section scar “Ectopic Pregnancy Scar, New York City, 1980” is also a violent intervention into the artist’s body, albeit with pleasure and self-confident femininity, and the splatter scenario “Bloody Bedroom in a squatted house, Berlin, 1984” actually contains real ones Fun with horror. And if you put this next to the violence that Morrisroe inflicts on the photographic material in pictures like “Untitled (John S. and Jonathan)” (1985), then you also see that humor is a strategy here to confront the brutality of everyday life.

What gets a little lost is the political explosive power behind these four artists. The fact that the motifs presented from queer America not only offer a very attractive insight into a subculture, but were also an indictment of the conservative backlash under Ronald Reagan in the 80s, can only be guessed at in diCorcia’s fragile everyday productions. And “High Noon” just as studiously ignores the fact that these were created a few years later than the works of Goldin, Morrisroe and Armstrong, which play with radical authenticity. However, the exhibition also frees itself from the pressure to position itself in particular on Goldin’s political activism, which has become increasingly irreconcilable in recent years. Goldin’s retrospective “This Will Not End Well”, which can be seen in the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin until April, got caught up in the mills of the Israel-Gaza conflict, which now consistently overshadows the actual qualities of the Berlin show.

Be that as it may, “High Noon” ends with street views that Armstrong photographed in the 1990s. These are large formats, coarse-grained, deserted city landscapes in which only the titles give any clue as to whether you are currently in Potsdam, New York or New Haven. It’s probably melancholic, urban, timeless, great art. But also a bit disappointing, given the queer subversion with which the quartet shook up art years before. As if escaping into aestheticism was the only way out of the increasingly blatant claims of authenticity of the older exhibits.

»High Noon. Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe and Philip-Lorca diCorcia,” works from the Gundlach Collection. Until May 4th, Deichtorhallen/Halle for Contemporary Art, Hamburg.