Themes on sexuality lose focus

Michael Armitage’s first exhibition in Australia tackles rich subject matter but lacks an overall sense of clarity.

Michael Armitage’s Mangroves dip (2015), left; Kampala suburb (2014).

Michael Armitage’s work, some of it reflecting the difficulties faced by gays in South Africa, reminds us that homosexuality is often illegal, socially condemned and more or less actively suppressed in places where it is also common. In southern Africa, both heterosexual and homosexual activities have had a role in spreading AIDS, while governments either denied homosexuality existed or that AIDS was indeed a real disease.

But the true reason for the confusion about homosexuality is much more interesting and deep-rooted than benighted or superstitious governments. It arises from several related questions, including what is meant by homosexuality and what sexual transactions, as well as what sort of roles within those transactions, are counted as serious or reprehensible.

Homosexuality was characterised as a medical condition in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, and was gradually de-medicalised to become a sexual orientation in the last couple of generations. Heterosexuality, in turn, emerged as a corresponding and antithetical category in a polarised system, leading to typical modern anxieties about which category individuals belonged to, on the assumption that it could only be one or the other.

All of this would have been unimaginable in the early modern period, before the invention of the concept of “sexuality” as an inherent and essential quality. People simply had a variety of sexual experiences, in some cases including both sexes, in others largely or wholly confined to either the same or the opposite sex. Someone like Caravaggio, for example, from what we can infer from documents and from his works, was universal if not indiscriminate in his tastes; even if his pictures suggest a predominant liking for young boys.

The second important point is that most times and places seem to have followed the Clinton principle that only penetration counts as sex. Other forms of sexual activity, while they may have been frowned on by religious authorities and moral guardians, do not seem to have been sanctioned by the law.

Although sodomy was formally criminalised in the middle ages — and in England by Henry VIII in 1533 — other homosexual acts did not fall under the sanction of the law and so, although considered immoral, were not actually illegal. This changed with the Labouchere Amendment of 1885, when they were prohibited as “gross indecency”. Ten years later, it was under this new law that the unfortunate Oscar Wilde was condemned in 1895.

The laws against sodomy were harsh, usually involving capital punishment, and the charge was hard to prove with eyewitnesses. Moralists in renaissance Florence were anxious about the prevalence of the practice, but the death penalty was only applied for the third conviction and few got to that point. Leonardo da Vinci, arrested for sodomy as a young man, was subsequently released because of the lack of evidence or witnesses. The severity of the penalty also came to be seen as disproportionate. In England, the last execution for sodomy was in 1835; two young men were hanged and a third, who had provided them with a room, was transported to Tasmania.

But even if we discount all other practices and reduce homosexuality in the legal sense to sodomy alone, this still does not correspond to the way most cultures have thought about the matter. Dover, Foucault and other theorists argue it is not so much the sex of the participants as the structural distinction between active and passive roles. Essentially, the argument goes that the one who takes the active role is structurally male, while the one who takes the passive role is female.

Michael Armitage, Leopard Print Seducer, 2016. Picture: Anna Kucera

All of this enormously complicates the moral and legal situation of homosexuals in many countries, effectively allowing the openly homosexual or those in permanent relationships to be persecuted while ignoring casual, discreet or hidden encounters. This is a particularly serious problem in Africa, where homosexual acts are illegal in most countries, and where there have been renewed campaigns of legal and popular persecution in recent years.

Armitage’s most vivid image in this vein is Kampala suburb (2014), which shows two young men kissing in a street at night. In the background an open door suggests they are being spied on, and above a frieze of images of executions recalls the draconian punishment they could face if denounced, caught and brought to trial.

Another painting, Mangroves dip (2015), has two naked women, one of whom is black and holds in her arms the figure of a white woman, head thrown in back in a pose of abandon, in a stylised and decorative background that recalls Gustav Klimt. But the most confronting picture in the exhibition is Leopard print seducer (2016), a grotesque and sexually ambiguous figure with a large phallus, a leopard-skin bikini and an apelike torso and face.

It seems hard to imagine that a white artist would venture to devise such a monstrous symbol of lust employing so many caricatural black African features. And indeed if it is possible for Armitage to produce such an image, it is because he has a British father and an African mother. He was born in Kenya and now lives in London, so he is also well placed to comment safely on the country from outside, although such an arrangement also raises other problems to which we shall return.

Armitage has tried to make his work more African by painting on a traditional bark cloth from Uganda called lugobo. This may seem like a gimmick, but in any case the lugobo cloth is more fragile than canvas, seems to tear easily and appears to be made in irregular pieces; it is sewed together with visible seams, and is pitted with holes. It is not suitable for heavy oil painting, so Armitage uses pigments heavily diluted with medium, producing a matt effect like that which Toulouse-Lautrec obtained by painting with diluted oil paint on cardboard.

More general sexual themes appear in the pictures as well, like the figure of a naked woman squatting on the floor with her legs apart, or the bizarre image of an apparently middle-aged woman sitting down after giving birth to a donkey, with umbilical cord and placenta on the ground before her.

And there are large compositions with political subjects, crowds and mobs surging in the streets, poised between absurdity and violence. Some of these figures seem inspired by Francis Bacon, in contrast to the sensual nudes that generally evoke Gauguin. There are harmonies of muted and pastel colours in the larger compositions that also recall Puvis de Chavannes or the Nabis.

But these colour harmonies, although quite pleasing in themselves, also point to a weakness in the work, for they seem to arise more from a decorative impulse than from any response to the subject of the pictures: in one case cool notes of green and mauve, in another a warmer combination of a sandy hue with pink and turquoise.

There is also something not entirely satisfactory about the figures and the human features. Perhaps the most successful examples have already been mentioned; the two figures of Kampala suburb are generalised and anonymous, but specific enough in the aspects that require specificity; the grotesque figure in the Leopard print seducer is similarly adequately articulated for its purposes.

Elsewhere, most of the figures are loosely sketched, especially in the crowd scenes, but when they are developed in greater detail, they tend to become photographically banal. This is the case with the features of the seated female nude already mentioned, as well as several other heads.

The literalness of this seated figure is not saved by the decorative use of turquoise and red against a general palette of earthy browns, nor by the title, Antigone, or the inscription on the border of the curtain — “All she wants is to get married”. The trouble is that neither the figure — in its posture, attitude or nudity — nor the inscription have any conceivable relation to the mythical character.

The daughter of Oedipus is the loyal guide of her father in his blind wanderings, and after his death she stands up to Creon and insists on carrying out the ritual burial of her dead brother, condemned to lie unburied as a traitor to the city. She is not, like the woman in the painting, sitting in her house waiting for something to happen.

Nor does she want to get married; her passion is directed to her father and brother, not to a husband.

Immensely resonant sources cannot be cited ineptly or without following through. The same could be said of a picture not included in this exhibition but reproduced in the catalogue, #mydressmychoice, which has a figure based on Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647-51) — itself inspired by the view from behind of the Hellenistic statue of a hermaphrodite — with a frieze of men’s legs in the background.

The picture’s title refers to an incident in Africa when a woman was harassed at a bus stop for wearing a short skirt, but the image, with its powerful associations, has no relation to the implied issues.

The Rokeby Venus, among other things, is an image that tantalises the viewer while remaining ambiguous and elusive, and that suggests the model can see us in the mirror, while not allowing us to recognise her features.

This lack of clarity runs through the work in general. What is the point of these pictures of demonstrations, turned into more or less decorative friezes?

Painting does not have to make a political or ideological argument, of course, but it has to have some sort of human perspective. The risk here is that Africa is just a source of exotic and outlandish subject matter, an alternative to the dull reality of the English world, which one suspects is more intimately that of the artist.

Most profoundly, perhaps, and as so often in contemporary art, one has to wonder whether these pictures have any connection with or incidence on the consciousness of the African people who are their subject.

It appears to conform to the usual pattern, in which contemporary artists, even those from Asia and Africa, mine these locations for fresh and colourful material, like a new form of orientalism; the work they produce is filtered through the main triage centres of London, New York, or Berlin before being distributed in the West through a retail network of international exhibitions and biennials.

Michael Armitage: The Promised Land

Museum of Contemporary Art, until September 22