Fishing for Herring

by Anthony Glassman

Cleveland-From the earliest days of formalized art, sexual orientation has always factored into it.

Michelangelo's statue of David has been seen for centuries as a study in desire and the beauty of the human body. Many artists used their younger lovers, or their patrons' paramours, as the models for paintings and sculpture.

"The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian," for instance, almost always has some very attractive young man tied to a post, arrows piercing his flesh in some sort of sadomasochistic tableau combining sex and religion in a potent mix. Why? The model for St. Sebastian was almost invariably the lover of the artist or his patron.

Art has since moved on from its roots, and sexual orientation is now more central to art, or beside it altogether, instead of creeping into it in the choice of models and the poses of the people in it.

The Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art has two exhibits running through late November that illustrate the interplay between sexual orientation and art at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Oliver Herring, born in Germany and trained as a painter, moved off from the more established art form when shaken by the death from AIDS of an East Village performance artist he admired. They had never met, but the man's work and life had a profound effect on Herring. Some of Herring's work is on display in an exhibit entitled "Sleepless Nights."

Herring started to sculpt instead of paint, and his sculptures were as far from regular sculpture as sculpture is from painting. He started knitting, first using Scotch tape, then moving to Mylar, the pretty stuff they use to make those silver balloons.

His first works were flowers and jackets, funereal and empty, signifying loss. He has since moved into more abstract constructions, like large silver globes or circles lying on the floor.

Herring also makes video art, strange montages of stop-motion images. He invites people to his studio to be in the videos as a way of expanding his social circle, being a shy and quiet man. He also scores the videos himself, sitting at his computer watching the

Fishing, by Nicole Eisenman

video frame by frame, adding the soundtrack.

Starkly different from Herring is New York artist Nicole Eisenman, whose work is on display in the larger exhibit "Threads of Vision: Toward a New Feminine Poetics," dealing with women in art from around the world.

Eisenman is the only open lesbian in the exhibit, but her works run the gamut from playful and cartoonish to more serious and descended from social realists like Diego Rivera.

The pieces in "Threads of Vision" represent her social realist work, paintings filled with meaning into which the viewer can delve and make his or her own judgements.

"A lot of people look at her paintings and immediately dismiss her as a man-hating lesbian," said Kristin Chambers, the curator of the two shows.

"There's so much more to the paintings than that, though," she said, urging the crowd at an October 25 program on queer influences in contemporary art to look at the faces of the women in Eisenman's paintings.

For instance, she noted, in the piece Hunting, which has two men sitting in the foreground while a group of Amazonian women approach them with spears, only one of the

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women looks angry. The others are apathetic at worst, confused or curious at best. These women, who recur in many of the artist's paintings, have their own society in some arctic clime, and these men are not their enemies; the men are simply completely foreign to them, outside of their experience.

"This is the world that Nicole has created, and these men are outsiders," Chambers noted.

In addition to Chambers' talk, held in conjunction with the Cleveland Lesbian-Gay Center, a number of other events, including an artist talk by Herring on October 4 and a Sept. 11 benefit on October 26 accent the exhibits, as well as the constant efforts of the CCCA to bring contemporary art out of the realm of aesthetes and into people's everyday lives, demystifying current art movements and making them more accessible to the public.

"Threads of Vision: Toward a New Feminine Poetics" and "Oliver Herring: Sleepless Nights" will both be on display at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. 8501 Carnegie Ave, until Nov. 25. CCCA can be reached at 216-421-8671 or online at http:// www.contemporaryart.org.

ANTHONY GLASSMAN

Oliver Herring sits next to one of his knitted Mylar sculptures during a gallery talk at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.