For each of the two semesters I've taught art appreciation at University of Tampa to a gaggle of students from non-art fields like business and nursing, the class session that we devote to the Baroque has represented a minor victory for me. When we focus on the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, a 17th-century Flemish master who served as an ambassador and court painter throughout Europe, yawns and sagging eyelids give way to wide eyes and vaguely scandalized guffaws.
This is because Rubens was, undoubtedly, a tit man. In his allegory "Minerva Protects Pax From Mars" — painted in hopes of encouraging peace between England and Spain — a voluptuous Mother Peace squirts a stream of nourishing milk from her breast into the mouth of a gentle babe, while the goddess of wisdom chases away stormy war. In a portrait painted nearer to the end of his life, Rubens depicts his second (and much younger) wife, Hélène Fourment, barely concealing her ample figure with the fur coat she clutches against her body. It's hard not to stare, especially if you're 19.
This week, I'll urge my students to see the work of Tampa-based artist Neil Bender, whose paintings, collages, drawings and prints have something of a neo-Baroque character, though I expect to take some flack for it. Bender's work isn't for the sexually meek or self-conscious. Instead of comfortably heterosexual territory, he explores contemporary practices (dare I say, performances?) of sex and gender in all their fluidity and polymorphous perversity. Forget traditional dichotomies like male/female and gay/straight: The works in this exhibit will only frustrate those categorizations. Viewers will find themselves dropped into a garden of earthly delights by way of R. Crumb and playfully assaulted by a parade of cartoon-y buttholes, unisex nipples and eager tongues. If this body of work has a patron saint, it's a gender-bending Marlon Brando armed with a stick of butter and a pair of fingernail clippers, per the artist himself.
A solo show of Bender's art opens Saturday at Bleu Acier, where he is one of a handful of younger Americans the gallery-cum-print-atelier works with in addition to a cadre of established European artists. Because the exhibit hadn't been staged yet last week, I called on Bender in his studio at the University of South Florida, where he teaches in the School of Visual and Performing Arts. Between plywood walls, the studio is coated in his signature shades of pink (one dominant shade particularly evocative of Pepto-Bismol) and littered with the detritus of his creative drive: tables piled high with drawing journals, magazine cutouts and crusted paint; dozens of collages and paintings stacked on the floor and hung from the walls; the walls painted as a quivering landscape of anuses, noses and other orifices. Visiting the studio is a bit like venturing inside a giant brain — or maybe a giant testicle.
The centerpiece of the show is a dramatic, large-scale painting inspired by 17th-century still-lifes; here, however, elements that could be construed as vanitas (symbols of death and decay) in other settings — a skull, a prime cut of meat — are suggested as playthings for penetration. Behind a table loaded with a cornucopia of sexual paraphernalia — a whip, a necktie, several colorful silicone dildos, a discharged can of instant whipped cream, a bottle of wine, a limbless torso — two headless figures stand, readying themselves for a sexual encounter that would presumably qualify as hair-raising in most circles. One, a female, wears a strap-on phallus; the other — a man, judging by his natural-looking genitalia — is otherwise nearly identical to her.
Smaller collages and works on paper take a subtler approach than the arresting masterwork, treating phallus, nipple and other orifice shapes as abstract elements or even as building blocks in wallpaper-like patterns. (Bender plans to cover one of Bleu Acier's walls with such a pattern for the show.) A third group of pieces — realistic paintings of T-shirts clinging to taut, masculine chests and breasts at attention — invites viewers to project themselves into a unabashedly trashy wet T-shirt contest.
Whatever you may think of Bender's subject (and it's easy to imagine many viewers taking offense), an overarching virtue of his work is that it avoids a pitfall common among artists who practice the integration of pornographic imagery into their work. Rather than re-inscribing the objectification of participants (most often women) found in mainstream porn, Bender's deployment of pansexual anuses, nipples, dildos, etc., is playful and exploratory in a way that reflects the current, lively discourse on gender and sexuality. Nobody's getting hurt in these constructions — unless, of course, the safety word is forgotten.
As a palliative to Bender's excesses, the gallery will offer paintings, drawings and prints by emerging German artist Judith Sturm in a smaller annex. Sturm also takes the figure as her subject, though her approach employs a much subtler eroticism. Some treatments depict the female body as a shell of apparel only, a paper doll's outfit or a sewing pattern of a chemise, cropped from neck to hip and rendered flatly in muted grays, pinks and black. When the body itself appears — the flat plane of a belly above a slender pair of crossed legs, slimly muscular thighs in a miniskirt — it evokes the tradition of fashion photography that bestows upon adolescent sylphs the status of queen or icon.
Still, over the course of more than two-dozen variations on the figure, despite their headless anonymity and the artist's cool palette, a warm intimacy accumulates between the viewer and the subject.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2008.