Ideas around masculinity are undergoing a global crisis and concepts such as “toxic” and “fragile” masculinity are shaping social discourse. „Masculinities“, currently being shown at Gropius Bau in Berlin, taps into this debate and touches on themes of patriarchy, power, queer identity, race, class, sexuality, hypermasculine stereotypes as well as female perceptions of men and presents masculinity as an unfixed, performative identity.

Curator ALONA PARDO talked to Béton Bleu Magazine during the European Month of Photography about the political aspect of photography and how the pandemic has changed the way we experience art.

Béton Bleu: With the Me Too movement and figures like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, the term masculinity currently comes with many complicated associations. What perception of masculinity guided you when you put together this show?  

Alona Pardo: It was a very loose one. The idea we were looking to dismantle in certain places of the show was this white cis heterosexual, this traditional patriarchal male that sits atop the gender hierarchy. Because of course men are many things. There is a dissonance between reality and representation. I wanted to examine how artists had disrupted and destabilized these traditional representations, this idea that you have to be a certain way in order to be accepted into society. Looking at the unequal power relations between genders, the politics that surround the hegemonic masculinity was what was really interesting to me.

BB: Do you have an example?

AP: The photographer Karen Knorr for example looks at how power almost seamlessly passes from one generation to another to another because they all look the same and they go to the right schools. It's this old idea of patronage from the renaissance period that we are still holding up.I wanted to take a very specific look at what masculinity meant and how we can break it down so it becomes a more complex image.

BB: Was there anything particularly surprising to you while looking through this body of work?

AP: One of the most surprising things was how masculinity is never challenged. We're in a moment of fourth wave feminism and we are constantly looking at the position of women and the power dynamics within women, around intersectionalities, yet somehow the notion of masculinity is never questioned, because it's seen as normative, it's seen as the normal. The more I thought about it the more surprising somehow this was, that we've taken it as a given, that it remained quite static. So the most obvious thing was almost the most surprising.

BB: You titled the show „Masculinities: Liberation through Photography“. What role can photography play in liberation, and why does masculinity need liberation in the first place?

AP: The title is about offering new ways of being and living as a male in the 21st century. This idea of unshackling ourselves from this idea of manning up and ‚boys will be boys‘ or ‚boys don't cry‘, these very reductive concepts of masculinity that are often held up as role models to children. So there is this idea of liberating ourselves from these very restrictive social norms.

BB: Why is photography the right medium to do this?

AP: Photography can be an incredible agent of change, it has a unique capacity to reflect on the external world and it is used as a medium of resistance, particularly from the 60s onwards, but even before. If we look at these images of resistance, they are often imaged through the lens, through the camera. For me it has something to do with the resistance of the camera. I'm aware of all the pitfalls of photography in that it's not truthful and it's not authentic. But there is that idea that for example Sunil Gupta, who is part of the show, can go out to India but can also photograph in America, and we can begin to see how these identities are performed out on the street. There is a certain amount of agency that happens through the medium.

BB: What role does art in general play in the political discourse, and how does that reflect on the role curators like yourself play?

AP: It's incumbent on artists more than ever to look at the world critically, to challenge it. Artists do have a big responsibility to reflect the complexity of the world in their work. I think the responsibility of the institutions, the curator and the museums, is to ensure that we are giving a platform to those artists who are challenging and critiquing the status quo, whether it's Black Lives Matter or Feminism, or racial politics. I think public organisations do have a civic duty to address difficult ideas, to address the narrative, not to shy away from it. So I think we need to continue taking risks and be brave and be courageous and support artists making difficult work.

BB: In certain countries here in Europe, masculinity has almost been used as a weapon against minorities. What role does an exhibition like this and does art in general play in that context?

AP: Art calls out those received wisdoms, these received ideas that were somehow indoctrinated in society that power belongs to a certain class, to a man that looks a certain way. What I really hope is that we call that out and say, actually it is a social construct and that we are exposing it, whether it's Richard Avedon’s multipart series "The Family", which looks at the kind of people in power in the 1976 American election, or Andrew Moisey’s work which looks at Fraternities. All of these works, and in fact the totality of the show I hope, call out those ideas and dismantle them.

BB: In London you had to close „Masculinities“ early because of Covid. Now the same happened in Berlin. Is the platform you mentioned earlier weakened when people can't come together in a physical space in the same way? How can you still reach people? 

AP: Accessing spaces physically has become more difficult, the spontaneity of life is gone in a way. But for instance, for this exhibition, we did a very in-depth recorded virtual tour of the show for those who can't come and visit it, so they can still understand what the show looks like, the ideas, the themes, there are a lot of in-depth looks at specific work. I think we do have a responsibility to take our exhibitions outside of the walls of the institutions and make sure that they can be accessed by as many people as possible. Obviously it's not the same as encountering work in the flesh, but in these very difficult times I don't think we have a choice.

BB: What have you learned working on this show about how masculinity is perceived in different countries?

AP: In a way the idea of masculinity as kind of strong and hard and aggressive and hyper-competitive, this idea remains the same whether you are in the US or in India, it's the same almost everywhere even though there are cultural specificities of course. I found it much more universal as a subject. It’s interesting how different places go through changes in different times where certain lifestyles are accepted, but ultimately they all share the same history of discrimination.

BB: There is a lot of polarization in society, even this exhibition is probably going to reach only a certain subset of society. How can you reach out to people beyond that and start a dialog?

AP: It's true, the exhibition only talks to the people that come inside these walls or seek it out through digital forms. But this is why I think it's incumbent on artists to be making work, to be talking about their work to curators. We each preach to our own choir, it's an echo-chamber, I don't know how to get out of it. But I do hope that exhibitions and artistic practice does go some way to bridging those gaps. It just takes one conversation with somebody else where we listen to each other. And I hope this show is a kind space, the idea isn't that you go in and you hate being a man. There is no self-loathing, it's full of comic moments, it's humorous, it's playful, it's intimate, full of tenderness.

ALONA PARDO is curator at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. She has co-authored numerous books including Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers and Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age.

“Masculinities: Liberation through Photography” is temporarily closed until the beginning of December. The show is scheduled at Gropius Bau through January 10, 2021

You can join the collaborative reading group “Bodies that matter” here.

Find the curatorial text here.

Interview: Thorsten Schröder

(C) 10/11/2020

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