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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE January 19, 2007

eveningsout

The good, the bad, and no ugly

A quality coffee-table book should have more than pretty faces

by Anthony Glassman

A big, hardcover book of photographs is always a joy to open.

What types of models will there be, assuming it's that sort of monograph? Will there be a variety of men, or will they all sort of fit into one category? Is there a theme?

Flipping through the pages to discover the answers is where the fun of such tomes lies.

Unfortunately, though, not all art books are created equal. Some show a brilliance born of repression and rebellion, while oth-

ers

wallow in the shallowness of commerciality and safety.

Slava Mogutin's Lost Boys (powerHouse, $39.95) and Bryan Ockert's ChaosMen (ChaosInAustin.com, $49.95) illustrate that dichotomy perfectly. One is a travelogue through Northeastern Europe's queer/punk subculture, the other an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog with a lot of dicks.

It's fairly easy to guess which one is which.

With a foreward by University of London drama professor Dominic Johnson and a critical essay by Octavio Zaya, an art writer and curator, backing up the photos that, in part, got him exiled from the Soviet Union, Slava Mogutin's work runs the gamut from innocent to filthy, naïve to lurid.

He and Robert Mapplethorpe would probably have been great collaborators. Mapplethorpe might be best known for photographing himself with a whip in his ass, but his floral images are incredible.

Similarly, Mogutin's S/M photos of young punks in their natural environment are magnificently raunchy, but his trio of

boys sitting by a wall, one playing a guitar, is achingly innocent.

When he ventures into the world of beefcake shots, the squalor of the settings separate them from the typical, the mundane, the ordinary. Mogutin can construct an image incredibly well without stylizing it into soullessness.

In the other direction lies ChaosMen. One shouldn't think that Ockert cannot photograph well. He is very skilled, and his water shots (under a waterfall, in the rain) are beautiful, but almost invariably clichéd.

Frighteningly, there almost seems to be more diversity among the models in Lost Boys, virtually all of whom are white and Eastern European, than there are in ChaosMen. Ockert has a few Latinos and exactly one black man, but with the exception of the African American, they're almost interchangeable.

All of them are obviously models, and the focus on their genitalia is not organic as in Lost Boys ("we are guys, we like our dicks, therefore the photographs will show our dicks") but forced, as in the photograph of a man in the bathtub. The viewer can see his upper torso rising above the rim of the tub, and what else is there? Yes, his penis.

Again, let it be said that Ockert is a good photographer, but either through his own failings or his own design, he is not a great or inspired photographer. He has commodified the male form into worthlessness, and that is the great disappointment of ChaosMen.

One would think that something with the word "chaos" in its name would not be quite so formulaic, so pat, so slick and shiny and smooth that it loses all its features.

Saturday January 20th

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Saturday January 27: UN-BOY-LIEVABLE! Dragshow at the Nickel!

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