PARIS.- After nearly thirty years in Sweden, last summer Martha Edelheit returned to Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue where she had begun her career in the early 1960s as a painter, and, more discreetly, as a filmmaker, by way of a few charming short films signed “Martie Marbles”. When I visited her last February, she was working on a large canvas: a nude portrait of a couple of friends languidly sprawling on a bed of spring flowers. Her assistant, a young painter with magnificent blonde curls, looked as though he had stepped straight out of the drawings she made in 1971 – works soaked in a raw, sunlit eroticism, that are exhibited here for the first time.

Less than a decade separates these nostalgic apparitions (a portrait of Susan Sontag and other ghosts of early 1970s America) from the photographs that Bruce Pavlow took in San Francisco in 1978, most of which depict gay and trans people who had found refuge in the same house to rest up and to make some new friends, before maybe hitting the road again together. The gentleness of the photographs and the peacefulness that emanates from them is almost enough to make one forget the content of the film Pavlow was shooting at the same time: as its title suggests, Survival House relates their harsh journeys and the hostility of American society that brought these people together, revealing the underbelly of a dream that his second mid-length film, M.A.S.S., deconstructs by reducing Hollywood to its barest expression: a world of mechanical clichés.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s entire body of work is infused with a similar but very different passion for cinema, whose mythological figures (young male leads and forgotten starlets) and raw erotic power he takes up in his 16mm films, his literary collages, and the nudes he sketches in his New York studio. Koestenbaum is also a musician. One only has to watch his ingenious films, whose soundtracks he composes and performs himself on piano: the way they are structured around a simple and deceptively random melody, enriched by multiple and subtle harmonics; their vigorous simplicity, the joyful sense of improvisation, and the unabashed thrill of experimentation that drives them.

It is not stars and starlets but rather small, chubby cherubs that populate the illustrations on tissue boxes that Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt has been creating over the past two years. They seem to travel through circuits of wires and manifest themselves in a lightbulb, or else appear in the reflection of a window or the background of a television screen. These small “chamber sculptures” (as in “chamber music,”) have the same fragility that characterizes many of his assemblages from the early 1970s. These cut-out portraits of sportsmen and beefcakes infused with a flamboyant masculinity have been suspended for the past fifty years in a mixture of glitter, tinsel, cardboard, plastic bags, and staples – a way of freezing a fantasy with the irresistible appeal of a pornographic B-movie, at once flashy, clichéd, and seemingly forever on the verge of deflating.

Their joyful, overflowing eroticism lights up the whole exhibition, calling forth an emotion that finds an echo in Martin Laborde’s collages: in their apparent simplicity, which serves as a deliberate caricature of a muddled and urgent desire; in their deliberate choice to strip the medium down to its bare essentials (packaging, magazines, printer paper); in their repetition and in their refusal to speak to anything other than what they are, namely a simple operation of selection, sampling, and synthesis. Through a strange reversal, these little agglomerations ultimately attain a materiality close to the clippings that make them up, becoming innuendos on glossy paper once again.

Amidst these composite, sometimes dissonant and anachronistic forms, Ben Taylor’s work stands out for the quality of his images – flat, ultra-defined, and instantaneous – whose subjects seem to surface from liquid prints. Nearly fifty years after Pavlow, he sketches out the portrait of a generation that remembers those who came before and, by representing themselves, strives to carry the memory of forgotten genealogies, both human and aesthetic. The carefully defined yet clumsy appearance of these apparitions and the welcome optimism that radiates from them enter into a seductive resonance with the works of each of the other artists present in the exhibition.
In a conversation a few days before the opening of the exhibition, Wayne Koestenbaum described it as “a piece for a chamber orchestra” or “a sextet for unusual instruments.” And indeed there are six rather unusual instruments here, both in terms of the sounds they produce and the ways in which they are used. The different bodies of work all seem to have developed in a field that was somehow unfavorable to them, finding their way in the shadow of other, more significant practices by embracing “minor” registers. Together, they create a singular melody – something a lonesome cowboy might sing to keep himself going as he crossed the desert, and a tune that others might pick up and whistle in turn.

Baptiste Pinteaux

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited-run publication featuring a series of
erotic texts by the artists in the exhibition (Martha Edelheit, Wayne Koestenbaum) and by other writers (Riley Mac, James Robert Baker).