On the Sexual Objectification of the Black Male Body à la McLaren and Westwood

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood: 

'Naked Footballer' T-shirt (SEX, 1975) 

Image via: bonhams.com 

 

By the end of the seventies the feared yet desired black male body 

had become as objectified as it was during slavery, only a seemingly positive 

twist had been added to the racist sexist objectification ... [1]  

 

 

I. 

  

The argument against the objectification of black masculinity is fairly straightforward: to reduce men to racialised sexual stereotypes and physical attributes rather than recognising them as individuals is dehumanising and degrading - stripping them of both agency and dignity (as well as their clothes). 

 

Frantz Fanon made this case over seventy years ago, pointing out how the idea of a black man as hypersexual, aggressive, and animalistic is one that originated during the colonial era and was used to justify slavery and violent oppression.

 

In his seminal 1952 study, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes about the way the white world works its diabolical magic, transforming the black male subject into nothing but a BBC: "no longer do we see the black man; we see a penis: the black man has been occulted. He has been turned into a penis. He is a penis" [2]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Not that this particularly troubles those working in the arts who happily borrow from the world of pornography in order to appear transgressive, often relying on stereotypes while claiming to challenge social taboos. 

 

Famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, for example, loved to fetishise the black male body and produce homoerotic imagery for elite consumption [3].    

 

And punk fashion designers Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were also not above jumping on this particular bandwagon in the early-mid 1970s, producing a T-shirt featuring a naked image of the NFL player Maurice (Mo) Spencer [4] with a semi-erect penis (see above).  

 

Commonly referred to as the 'Naked Footballer' (1974), this shirt was one of the very earliest designs created for SEX, their notorious boutique at 430 King's Road and is now discussed not only in the context of punk fashion, but also racial and sexual politics.   

 

Interviewed in 2008, McLaren was still defending the design and insisting that his intent was to confront the deep-rooted racial fears and sexual stereotypes clung to by the British public in the '70s - and of course garner publicity for the store [5]. 

 

Yet, as with other ideas and images intended to be radical and subversive, McLaren and Westwood's commodification of a racialised and sexualised body just to shock and perhaps terrify white onlookers is questionable to say the least. 

 

It could be argued - and argued quite convincingly - that they were simply reproducing tired historical tropes. That in this case the punk context ultimately changes very little and any positive twist had no lasting liberatory impact. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (Routledge, 2004).

 

[2] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Press, 2008), p. 147. Fanon's original French text - Peau noire, masques blancs - was published in 1952 (Éditions du Seuil). 

 

[3] To be fair, that's a debatable statement - at least in part. On the one hand, Mapplethorpe did take explicit photographs of black men and his prints were mostly intended for wealthy white collectors and museums. But, on the other hand, defenders of his work - including some of his models - argue that his 1986 Black Book - featuring 96 nude images - was a celebration of black male beauty and classical form and didn't merely reduce black men to nameless (and often faceless) sexual objects.  

      As a queer artist working during a time of sexual liberation, Mapplethorpe's work arguably operates under different parameters, leaving the definitive judgment of his intent to the viewer. Readers who wish to make their own mind up on this subject can purchase the most recent edition of The Black Book (Schirmer/Mosel, 2010) on Amazon UK.

 

[4] Spencer played in the NFL during the years 1974-78. In late 1969, when still a teenager, he modelled for an adult physique magazine called Bob Anthony's Beefcake. When McLaren came across the image in a gay bookshop on a visit to New York in 1973, he determined that it had to be appropriated and become part of his own conceptual art project - a project that would eventually produce the Sex Pistols; at least two of whom, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, were photographed wearing the shirt.    

 

[5] "Satisfyingly for McLaren", writes Paul Gorman, "local residents complained when these T-shirts were displayed in the shop window." Later, during a police raid on SEX, the 'Naked Footballer' shirts were removed along with the (still more controversial) 'Two Cowboys' shirts. However, the authorities decided against including them in the charges of indecency that were brought against McLaren and Westwood. 

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), pp. 220 and 268. 

 

 

Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses!

Horses, horses, horses, horses! [1]

I.

 

Yesterday morning, I was in a central London café sipping a mint tea when, suddenly, from the other end of the street, a commotion was generating ... 

 

I looked at my companion, who wanted to run. But we stayed sitting as a pair of terrified horses - including a white horse drenched in blood - galloped past, causing chaos as they collided with vehicles and shocked observers [2].

 

And not only did I hear Patti Smith singing from out of the remote past, but I remembered also something D. H. Lawrence once wrote: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived." [3]

 

 

II.

 

Today, still upset at seeing such noble beasts in obvious distress, I ironically went with a friend to the Horse Hospital, to take another look at the artwork of Gee Vaucher, which, to be fair, is better than I first thought (even if the overtly political nature of the work does get a bit tiring).

  

However, the thing that really caught my attention was a nude female mannequin, posing provocatively, wearing a horse's head mask and standing before a large red plastic bin at the top of the ramp that leads to the first floor ... 

 

As my friend, a longtime member of the kink community who was distinctly unimpressed by Vaucher's work amusingly remarked: I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Fig. 1: Patti Smith photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover of her album Horses (Arista Records, 1975): click here to listen to the three-part track 'Land' (part one: "Horses" / part two: "Land of a Thousand Dances" / part three: "La Mer(de)"). 

      Fig. 2: A mannequin with a horse's head was one I took at the Horse Hospital earlier today.

     Fig. 3: Quaker (the dark horse in the foreground) and Vida (the white horse bleeding profusely), taken in central London yesterday.  

 

[2] This sounds as if I'm recounting a nightmare, but it actually happened. Apparently, five military horses were spooked and bolted when building materials were dropped from height at a construction site in Belgravia, next to where they were on a training exercise. For a BBC news report, click here.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 102. 

 

 

Piss Artists 1: Andy Warhol (Piss and Oxidation Paintings)

Cover of the exhibition catalogue 

Gallerie Daniel Blau (Munich)

6 March - 13 May 1998

 

 

I. 

 

For most British people, a piss artist is one who likes to get drunk, act the fool, produce shoddy work and generally waste time. In other words, one who gets pissed a little too often; pisses around a little too much; and pisses people off more than is deemed acceptable. 

 

However, for some of us the term also triggers thoughts of Warhol, Chadwick and Serrano and here I would like to discuss a urine-stained series of works by the first of these three piss artists, Andy Warhol ...    


II.

 

In June 1979, none other than American pop artist Andy Warhol walked into 430 King's Road and purchased one of the newly designed T-shirts on sale featuring "a monochrome 1952 photographic portrait of a smiling Marilyn Monroe, with streams of urine spurting from red phalluses on the sleeves and pooling to form the words 'Piss Marilyn' across her face" [1].

 

One assumes that Warhol was amused by this punk tribute to his work by McLaren and Westwood, referencing as it did not only his famous images of the tragic Hollywood star, but also his most recent works which used urine as an artistic medium.

 

 

III. 

 

Warhol's works incorporating urine are divided into two separate categories in the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: (i) Oxidation Paintings and (ii) Piss Paintings, although both categories of work were produced in the same period (1977-1978) [2].  

 

Whilst the latter are simply primed canvases stained with urine, the former are canvases that have first been prepared with a metallic base, such as copper or gold-coloured paint, giving a far more beautiful (shimmering) effect after an assistant at the Factory has pissed on them at Warhol's direction, or once urine has been poured from a sample bottle by the artist himself.  

   

It's possible that Warhol was, on the one hand, giving a camp and gently mocking critique of Jackson Pollock [3] and the abstract expressionists who loved to splash and drip paint on to canvases with exaggerated machismo, whilst, on the other hand, producing work rooted in the gay club scene, where golden showering was almost de rigeur [4].

 

Either way, the piss and oxidation paintings represent a genuine break from his previous stuff which relyed on the transference of photographic images to canvas via silkscreening [5]. 

 

Art often involves far more hardwork - and far more suffering - than many people realise or wish to acknowledge, but it's nice to be reminded by Warhol that we can produce provocative works that rely upon bodily fluids other than blood, sweat and tears ...    

 

Notes

[1] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 427. 

      The shop at 430 King's Road was still operating as Seditionaries at this time. Warhol's visit to the store was noted in an entry dated 23 June 1979 in The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (Warner Books, 1989). One of the Piss Marilyn shirts (sans sleeves) is in the Met Museum's Costume Institute collection: click here.

[2] Searching for a new approach via which he might reaffirm his radical credentials as an artist and counter the accusation that he was now merely a society portraitist, Warhol began working not only on his piss and oxidation paintings, but also a series of Cum Paintings for which volunteers agreed to ejaculate on to canvases. As seminal as the latter works may be, here I will only discuss the canvases that have been pissed on.  

 

[3] I don't believe Warhol was a fan of Pollock's work, but he may have enjoyed some of the stories that circulated about the latter; including, for example, that he would sometimes urinate on a canvas before giving it to a client he didn't like and allegedly pissed in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace when she requested he reduce the size of a mural he was producing for her.

[4] Warhol's homosexuality - and, at times, abstract sexuality - certainly shaped his work and he would, of course have seen how a younger generation of artists, such as Robert Mapplethorpe, weren't shy in breaking boundaries and documenting what was happening in the gay bars, underground clubs, and bathhouses at that time.   

 

[5] Of course, in Warhol's 1982 portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, we get the best of both worlds. After taking some Polaroids of the much younger artist, Warhol then silkscreened an image of Basquiat's face on to a canvas coated with copper paint, before then pissed on it and allowing the uric acid to discolour the metal, creating pretty patterns of rust, black and green. It's the only known portrait exceuted by Warhol in the oxidation style and sold in 2021, at Christie's New York, for $40 million.   

 

 

To read the second post in this series - on Helen Chadwick's Piss Flowers (1992) - please click here. 

 

To read the third post in this series - on Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) - please click here.