Meet Taylor Mead at Boyd Satellite

Shocking? A male nude? Masculine/Masculine: The Nude Man in Art From 1800 to the Present Day, a thorough exhibition which included more than two hundred sculptures and paintings related to the subject took place at the Musée d'Orsay in 2013, and according to the curator, "the paradox is that we think we live in a very liberated society but the male nude still troubles people." This month, Boyd Satellite gallery is testing its visitors with three photographs of  a naked Taylor Mead taken by Andres Serrano. A collection of selfies made by Blake Nelson Boyd as part of the Taylor Mead photobooth series, paintings, drawings and memorabilia complete the exhibition Taylor Mead in Exile.
There is no way to avoid the three giant photographs (60"x 50") organized like a triptych at the entrance of the gallery. The unconventional portraits of Taylor Mead, cut at the level of the upper thighs, are showing a decrepit body supported by a cane, staged in provocative poses: contrapposto on the left, full derrière in the middle and prominent display of sexual organs on the right. He is obviously enjoying the session and above all, the then eighty six years old artist appears perfectly comfortable with his body. On the same wall, the series of photo-booth pictures taken in 1995 by Boyd look like miniatures. A younger Mead sits in different costumes, from tin man to Superman or Mickey Mouse, relishing the roles. Mead was a poet, an actor and also a painter. Five of his abstract and semi-abstract paintings surrounded by almost twenty of his drawings on the opposite wall attest of that. Each piece tells a short story and the subjects vary, but exposed genitals and cats provide most of them. A projection of the "Lonesome Cowboys", a film by Andy Warhol featuring Mead as one of the actors, next to photographs in black and white of Taylor Mead and friends, provides a sampling of the artist as an actor. Memorabilia, including cane, hat, glasses, a copy of  "On Amphetamine and in Europe" published in 1968, even a sample of his ashes, give a museum-like quality to the exhibition, a celebration of the artist's life.

Serrano's photographs steal the show. Nude? Male nude? Old male nude? One can see plenty of buttocks while visiting the Uffizi in Florence: warriors, athletes, ephebes or angels, but nothing like this. Serrano is not the first to show ugly old men, Lucian Freud comes to mind. The classical poses and the use of chiaroscuro, a venerable technique, with a black background shadowing the pale flesh, make the compositions a pastiche. Serrano and his sitter are a prefect match, both relishing controversy (remember Piss Christ from Serrano? ) What makes the photographs provocative? When looking at a nude, we are expecting to find beauty, but beauty cannot be old according to stereotypes. I found the nudes beautiful because genuine. Mead is not afraid to expose himself, embracing his appearance, his frailty, with a wink in the eyes, defiant of time, for ever young. What disturbs the viewer is that the photographs, like mirrors in fairy tales, represent the time to come. The recoil at first look is a learned behavior, similar to looking at spiders or snakes. Is not art supposed to bring us out of our comfort zone? To quote Mead:" You want to play around with poets but you don't want any of the dangers or consequences."
Mead is not in exile, he has found a place in New Orleans.

photographs by the author:

Taylor Mead pill bottles from Blake Boyd's collection

from the "Nude" series, Andres Serrano, 2012

Affinities,Vincent van Gogh and Antonin Artaud

                                                                                                                                                       
The Musée d'Orsay presents an exhibition inspired by a short essay from Antonin Artaud published in 1947, a few months before his death: Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society. A walk through a dark cave filled with demented shrieking (female) voices, failed attempt to bring the visitor into the world of madness, is followed by a more conventional display of Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, photographs of Artaud by Man Ray, a copy of his book, documents in glass cases and paintings on the walls. Van Gogh's late works are arranged in a somewhat organized fashion, like four self-portraits aligned in chronological order, the earliest with a sharp gaze, bathing in bright blue swirls followed by a disheveled, emaciated, haggard madman surrounded by a somber blue background, illustrating the artist's rapid decline. Across, Dr. Gachet his physician, who according to Artaud destroyed the painter and the genius within him by jealousy, looks quite harmless and worn out in a melancholic portrait. Close by, Paul Gauguin's Armchair, 1888, refers to another protagonist in the last chapter of Van Gogh's life. The succession of famous paintings describing benign subjects, landscapes, gardens, forests, flowers,Van Gogh's surroundings including his bedroom, made me wonder: what makes the paintings so riveting? Artaud offers an answer in his book in which he describes Van Gogh's search for the myth behind everyday objects.
The poet, writer, actor, was also drawing and painting. The second part of the exhibition is an occasion to discover his works which leave a lasting impression summarized in one word: possessed. The "Théâtre de  la Cruauté", 1946, depicts the four persons he was the most fond of lying in an opened coffin decorated with garlands of words and "La Projection du Véritable Corps", 1946, an idol encircled by incantations. "Les Corps de Terre", a gift to his physician's wife at the psychiatric hospital, represents stick-like bodies, skulls and a life-size red hand with the lines in the palm obviously predicting a tragic future. Two self-portraits, one defaced by angry dots made with a pencil shows an artist with a wild gaze and floating hairs, the other, an appeased  but sad Artaud, complete a display of mainly drawings. His art is all about torments, fears, obsessions, anger, repression, ultimately death and could be qualified as Raw Art. Artaud himself appears in seven black and white films projected for the occasion.
Wheatfield with Crows, allegedly Van Gogh's last painting with the crows as omen of the artist's near demise, is splashed on a giant screen and brings the visitor to the third part of the exhibition, a gathering of landscapes around Arles, the hospital, forests, flowers, and the famous hypnotic Starry Night, all coming alive around the room. This is a fecund period for the artist who produced paintings with a maniacal tempo during the last months of his life, almost seventy oils in seventy days after he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise where the landscapes take a Northern flavor. A side room filled with watercolors and drawings completes the exhibition.
How can one add to the description of the works made by Van Gogh himself in his letters to his brother or by Artaud in his book?
With his exacerbated sensibility, Artaud provides an in-depth analysis of Van Gogh's work, sometimes emotional due to his affinity with the painter. Their common history of mental disorder and subsequent internment, their alienation from a world that did not understand them created a bond between the two artists, at least according to Artaud.
An exhibition inspired the book in 1946, the book inspires an exhibition in 2014, combining the power of words and images.

No photographs allowed at the exhibition
Photograph by the author at the Musée d'Orsay