The urge to objectify is more a male urge than a female one, and painting is one of the most personal and succinct methods of male objectification of the female.” “Painting has always been essentially about women, about looking at things in the same way that a straight man looks at a woman. That, Currin argues, is the real history of art. Women in his work, by contrast, are potent objects for men to perv over. Like the Wizard of Oz, the penis in Currin’s oeuvre is laughably impotent. “The viewer wonders perhaps if the member is not connected to the man’s groin, but instead a stand-alone appendage, proffered to the woman as a mere signifier of desire – one that is attached to no real source of power,” wrote the critic Naomi Fry. A Brylcreemed male co-worker sits opposite clutching a huge erect penis that one critic described as facing off against the breasts as in a game of Rock Paper Scissors. In his 2002 painting Office Workers for instance, a woman sits with her shirt open, breasts plonking on to the desk. When men and women meet in his paintings the result is often ridiculous. With a few dabs of gouache, he changed those women’s fawning smiles into grimaces, as if symbolically castrating these alpha assholes. In 1997, his Jackass paintings subverted mid-70s magazine ads showing white males at the top of their game – bare-torso grill masters, tennis pros in white, golfers in argyle sweaters – all surrounded by bevvies of adoring women in bikinis. Well, to the extent I hate anybody, I hate men more than women, I guess.”
I always wanted to look at men in a way that I could make a little more sophisticated than I have, but I think I’m not really capable of really visually complex thoughts about men.”Īre you a misogynist? “Misogyny’s kind of a dumb word. But enough about Currin and me, two 60-year-old straight white men surrounded by naked painted women. Thirty years on, we’re sitting in another gallery, Sadie Coles HQ in London, surrounded by three of his latest paintings.
#Word among us free
You can’t use your own attractiveness as a get out of jail free card.” As an American, I’ve always felt outside the painting tradition … like a bumbling tourist “It’s one thing to do that when you’re an attractive young man – another when you’re bald and old. They weren’t so much about women as about myself.”Ĭurrin says he could get away with behaving so aggressively because, back then, he was very good looking. That said, I think the paintings were the first really good paintings that I made because I was in total identification with the figures – which is partly why they were so misogynistic. Var gform gform||(document.Why did he write so derisively about the women he painted? “I was feeling terrible about myself, terrible about my love life, terrible about a lot of things.
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