“One day he started to peel off his clothes. I was horrified to see that
he was wearing the full Chelsea gear. It took all of my self-control to
stop myself laughing.”
Antonia da Sancha on Heritage Secretary, David Mellor, 1992
Performing masculinity
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Each man for himself, all of them facing
what our modern media has hailed as a ‘crisis in masculinity’. To moisturise
or not. To take to the gym or to the kitchen. ‘Metrosexual’ males are the order
of the day; Russell Crowe is unacceptably Neanderthal. Yet society is more brutal
than ever, with gang warfare and hooliganism on every corner. And not all of it
always sordid. Far from it. Television, cinema and computer games glamorise,
and feed our thirst for, gore. If the latest Bond films are anything to go by, violence
is the new eroticism.
A Brief History of Heroism taps this turmoil. It is a vast canvas, divided into
three poster-like sections, and background and foreground, by four vertical and
two horizontal white bands which function as a grid. At one moment, they are
frames for billboards or shop-windows, the next, markings on a sports-field.
They could be anywhere, are co-ordinates that seek the location not of a particular
place or time, but of the viewer. The groups in the three ‘windows’ look first
like gladiators battling it out in the blood-soaked arena. These were heroes in
the Roman world, captives or criminals who fought to the death but were often
eroticised in the process. Not for nothing was the emperor Marcus Aurelius’ wife.
Faustina, reputed to have bathed in the blood of the gladiator to whom she was
attracted.
On second glance, they are yet more mannered: the group to the far right,
a grotesque version of Rembrandt’s Abraham and Isaac of 1664 and the other
two, stills from a modern wrestling match. Only in the left one can we see the
umpire. The central scene showcases Abraham’s knife for a second time to bridge
the gap between ancient and modern. With whom do we identify? How do we
feel about the violence? Do the wrestling ring and arena equate? As Roland Barthes
wrote in his Mythologies (1957), ‘the function of the wrestler is not to win
but to go through the motions’. As is the case with Abraham, wrestlers perform
their masculinity.
Below them, mini-men gather in rows. Michelangelo’s David and the Dying
Gaul are relegated to the side-lines. What use are they now? If the triptych above
is about individual glory, this is about team-spirit, as swathes of figures in red
shorts and socks block an attempt at goal. What kind of hero are we? The use of
masks and blindfolds brings Kendo Nagasaki and other heroes from the world
of wrestling together with the villains of horror films like The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre, and protagonists of Italian improvisational theatre or Commedia dell’
Arte to underline the performative aspect. Masks are also familiar from Gay
iconography. Men are being asked to measure themselves against these poles, to
stand up and be counted.
Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus
The women in the painting are colourless. Only one of them, shown here
in two different versions, stands upright, and she is Eve – after the Fall.
The others recline, not so much on the canvas, as etched into its skin,
like tattoos on the forearm of a sailor. They are all Venus or adaptations of her,
an evolution of artistic imaginings from Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (c. 1510)
through Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), and Danae (1550-3), each complete with
their dog, and Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647-51) to Manet’s Olympia (1863).
Deprived of the sumptuous couches or crumpled bed on which they are accus27
tomed to lie, they float – figments of male desire that have been stripped of their
substance. The red sock on the foot of the male figure directly above Venus and
Cupid looks like a love-heart, rendering the reference cutesy rather than iconic.
Meanwhile, the scandal stirred up by Olympia is stilled, her all too knowing
gaze ‘dumb-ed down’ by her Betty Boop complexion. The necklace and flower
of Manet’s painting are a thing of the past, as is her right slipper which she once
discarded. More uneasy than provocative, she now wears a shiny, new red shoe
that marks her as the female to the males around her. Even the staring cat is a
cartoon, too separate and saccharine to be suggestive. It is the terrier in the foreground
that now commands attention. He could eat these dolls for breakfast.
One man and his dog. But what kind of a relationship is this? In the eighteenth
century, few portraits of the British gentleman were complete without
their canine companion, its presence as crucial in capturing their aristocratic
claims as were their stately home, and velvet breeches. Here, however, its master
is – despite his crown – still sitting it out between bouts in the corner of the ring,
hoping to snatch that victory. He tries it on for size, but too self-consciously, as
though in the spotlight, playing King Lear. Is the crown gold or is it paper? As
he touches his head in anxiety, the other male figure with which he shares the
stage hails his fans and touches his crotch. Very Robbie Williams: thrusting or
should that be camp? No socks or boxer-shorts here. The gloves are off. And the
prize for ‘Man of the Year’ goes to? Contemporary women are absent from Tom’s
painting, the traditional models for understanding male-female relations belittled
for being the clichés that they are, too sketchy and overused. Today, women
do more than stare back provocatively; they air-brush their own bodies, ‘kiss and
tell’, even jelly-wrestle at Cambridge garden parties. They have taken the male
view of women by the scruff of the neck and toppled its creators in the process.
Life imitating art and art imitating life
Is this empowerment? Far from it, in my view. ‘Doing it for the girls’ is not the
same as commanding respect as a woman. Rather all of us, male and female,
are manipulated by the media, bombarded by images which tell us how to
look, love, live. Never has the ‘anxiety of influence’ been so overwhelming. And
this is in a sense the message of Tom’s painting. Do we conform or rebel? Can
we win without violence, and with our dignity preserved? Heroism and heroworship
are wider-reaching concepts than ever, but so are the challenges that
they issue to identity.
This realisation lies at the heart of another art project in which Tom has
been involved: Anthony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth Project in London’s Trafalgar
Square, in which members of the public were given the opportunity to stand
where Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo sculpture had stood, each for one hour. This
time Tom was not artist but subject, up there at 2.00 am – in (you guessed it)
red boxer-shorts. In this way, he wonderfully brings his painting to life, art and
gender as performance. The price of a man’s fame is exposed as such: masculinity
‘with its pants down’.
A Brief History of Heroism is not the only one of Tom’s paintings to be crowded
with references to earlier artistic masterpieces. Some of these echoes are more
obvious than others: like those of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica in the ludicrous Jove’s
Lost Rape or of the contours of the Knidian Aphrodite in A Lover’s Discourse – a
statue which has spawned a host of sisters over the centuries from the Venus
de Medici to the page-three pin-up. But all of them reward discovery. Not in a
smug way (this is not Classicism as connoisseurship), but in bringing us face to
face with where we and our ways of seeing the world (have) come from. In the
process, we better understand who we are, and are trying or pressured to be, have
our own pretensions punctured.
Carrie Vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge
and a Fellow at Christ’s College, where she established the Visual Arts
Steering Group. She is a Historian and Art Historian who publishes on a
wide range of topics from Roman History through to Greek Art and nineteenth-
century sculpture. In 2006, she curated the Henry Moore Institute’s
exhibition Antinous: the Face of the Antique, the catalogue for which won
the inaugural Art Book Award. She is this year’s Hugh Last Fellow at the
British School at Rome and a Philip Leverhulme Prize winner.
