Give Me Danger
“What happens if the performer gets hard?”
It’s New Year’s Day and as part of my annual tradition I’m at the Royal Academy, this time seeing the Marina Abramović retrospective. The main attraction — whether people have the guts to admit it or not — is walking through the threshold created by two naked performers, standing in such close proximity that there’s no way through without some contact. Writer Norman Night is posing the real questions before we cross over. “Is he excused for five minutes?”
I remember a conversation from months ago Norman and I had. “I’d eat Matthew Barney’s ass for as long as The Cremaster Cycle lasted,” I said, although the context escapes me. Does it matter? Intent, to me, is everything — and in this statement the intent couldn’t be clearer. I love Barney’s work so much that the only conclusion I can come to is to have sex with him (the only conclusion, really, is to have sex with artists whose work you admire, that art and sex are entangled).
The last time I watched The Cremaster Cycle was at Hackney Picturehouse in August 2021. I’ve since found a new reason to obsess over him: his football-inspired video installation, titled Secondary. A former quarterback, Barney makes the sort of art that’s defined by critics as masculine, which is art speak for focusing on men.
Why am I writing about this? Much has been written about men – their cultural decline or disappearance, their perceived fragility, their perceived power. Somewhere in this conversation, however, we forgot that men, well… we’re fun. In my last missive, December 2022, I quoted Barry Pierce on the state of publishing: “We need more fun and frivolous books from young men,” he wrote. A year later, I can’t think of a single book published in this time that fills this gap (but please enlighten me, I famously forgot to book tickets to Barney’s show at the Southbank, so I presume there’s a book out there I am in the dark about.)
Save me fun and frivolous book written by a young male novelist, save me.
If men appear to have lost favour in publishing, they — or more accurately their bodies — have captured the public imagination. Instagram and X alone are overloaded with images and videos of young men in various states of undress that in a different era would be confined to porn or fashion shoots looking to stir controversy (then again, they’re hyper-personalised, so maybe they’re just showing me what I want to see). And there’s an air of the homosocial to it all. Caked or not caked, a trend I can’t wait to try out myself, sees groups of men at the gym testing how big their asses are — by lying on the floor face down and having one of their friends roll barbells over them; if it stops in its track at your butt, you’re caked, if it passes over your frame unencumbered, you’re not caked. Is it a coincidence the New York Post called 2024 the year of the big butt for men?
Footballers have been stripping down to their underwear as fans ask to have their t-shirts and shorts straight off the pitch. Where will they stop? And what does it say about spectators effectively snatching the sweat-soaked gear off athletes’ backs? Are we fan-crazed or is our culture shifting in the direction of expecting — or rather demanding more male nudity?
Sadler’s Wells’ Romeo + Juliet by Matthew Bourne had a similar impact. Men in the audience, dragged there by their girlfriends, couldn’t stop commenting on the strength of the performers — that is, the male performers; describing their physiques during intermission with almost lyrical admiration.
The BFI has also joined in on the action, programming a season of films shown at Scala — the legendary smut cinema at Kings Cross back when the neighbourhood smelled of sex — featuring an impressive amount of on-screen male nudity from the 70s. Meanwhile, romps like Rotting in the Sun and small screen slutfests like Euphoria continue the work of auteurs long gone and are taking male nudity mainstream.
“Men are hot,” a friend said recently when we discussed these loosely-connected thoughts, “straight men have finally realised and they now play along for the attention.” What does this mean? Extra short shorts, running shirtless in the park, progressively undressing during group sports and something I’ve been spotting all over the city: men changing in the streets (literally undressing and putting on a new outfit in public).
If men are happy to change in public post-workout, if footballers strip down to their briefs after a match, if Marina can convince a conservative institution to platform the irl version of posting pole, while men now post slutty selfies all night long, then why can’t we have more fun and frivolous books by men?
If we’re returning to a more public male sexuality, maybe we’re ready for an element of danger in literature, too.
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