Week of March 19, 2009, Issue #700
COVER
Polaroids: You oughta be in pictures
POLAROIDS proves to be more than just an exploration of Lukacs’ process
Adam Waldron-Blain / adamwb@vueweekly.com
Although his painting-centred practice includes a variety of works, Attila Richard Lukacs is best known for his large-scale paintings. His scenes of nude or semi-nude skinheads, workers and soldiers are known internationally, and these form the backbone which POLAROIDS: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris is built around. Only a handful of these are hung, representing Lukacs’ current practice as well as a few examples of his past works from the late-’80s and ’90s. They are surrounded by too many Polaroid photographs to count, Lukacs’ studies, reference materials and experiments, painstakingly grouped together by Michael Morris.
The main function of the Polaroids is to develop a two-way relationship with the paintings, not entirely unlike what we might imagine their relationship is inside of Lukacs’ studio. Lukacs’ paintings are in part assembled from these Polaroid studies, each containing just one or two figures, with his large canvases containing figures found in several photos, often presented here close by. At its simplest level, then, Morris’ archive gives us a view of Lukacs’ process which we might otherwise miss.
But the number of Polaroids is overwhelming. As a simple archive, the collection of photographs seems like it would be of little interest aside from instructing us about Lukacs’ techniques, and indeed the huge number of 12-photo grids can seem impenetrable. The images have a kind of sameness, a uniformity which is to be expected as we watch a time-lapse narrative of Lukacs asking his models to perform variations of each pose until he finds just the one that he needs.
Although this sameness can make the Polaroids difficult to appreciate, at the same time it is quite fascinating. Although the models are often naked, they bring a kind of uniform with them even without clothes. Even when they stray from his favourite skinheads, the figures carry parts of their subcultural identities with them in their haircuts, their visible exercise regimens and the props present, whether a hoodie or a pair of boots. This individualized authenticity of the model expands the functioning of the paintings, where we can see the same figures transposed into larger scenes and made sure of themselves by the uniqueness of their painted body.
Lukacs’ paintings are delicately balanced between logical unity and a jarring sense of the unreal, and each one contains several layers of reality that we understand separately as we experience the work, starting with Lukacs’ most clearly visible artifice in his paint and in nonsensical or non-naturalistic elements in the paintings, as he invokes a flock of flamingoes or floating text in “Camouflage.” The central figures of the paintings are where most of this complexity lies, as we are forced to reconcile the presentation of these figures, which exist between the heroic nude and the salacious, perhaps pornographic photograph, with our ideas of what the subcultural aesthetic they carry with them represents, as well as what the are doing.
Beyond this play of sex and violence, explicit or implicit depending on the painting, the Polaroids present another tense level of fiction. Separating the figures from their unreal surroundings and isolating them, their sense of exaggerated, muscly masculinity is changed significantly. In the paintings, despite their performances, the figures often seem curiously unaware of themselves, as to permit too much self-reflection would be to endanger their value as either fascists or pin-ups, by allowing just a touch of what is perceived as a femininity into their sealed-off, painted realities. Instead, their situations and actions seem routine, despite their nudity and sometimes absurdity, and Lukacs leaves his subjects with their grim facial expressions which are themselves a part of their uniform, a kind of posture of hardness and authenticity.
In the photographs, however, we not only see this exposed as a fiction, but we see another construction of Lukacs’ models, this time much less sure of themselves, their authenticities even more dangerously held. Play acting with wooden beams as guns and dressing in costumes is at once antithesis and integral to Lukacs’ heroic/erotic masculinity. But the extent of the performances and their motives are very unclear, as the photographs imply one last reality, that of the model outside the studio, which we can only imagine. It is impossible to determine what part of their social performances, beyond the artificial world of paint, is this kind of pretending and what parts are backed by conviction. V
Until Mon, May 18
Polaroids
Works by Attila Richard Lukacs
Collected by Michael Morris
Art Gallery of Alberta (10230 Jasper Ave)
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