Beyond Beefcake in the Work of a Gay
Pioneer
By KEN JOHNSON
THE NEW YORK TIMES, JAN. 9, 2014
“Devotion,” an exhibition at New York
University’s 80WSE, shows a surprising range in the work by Bob Mizer, known
for his erotic photographs of men. (Bob Mizer Foundation)
In 1951, Bob Mizer began Physique
Pictorial, a magazine loaded with photographs of muscular young men wearing
little more than posing straps — G-strings for men. Its imagery ostensibly
illustrated health and fitness, but was really aimed at what was then an
underground gay market. Mizer (1922-92) was a pioneer in making explicit the
genre’s erotic appeal, enough so to attract attention from legal authorities.
In 1947, he was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor by
taking nude pictures of a 17-year-old, and he spent a year in prison. In 1954,
he was convicted of distributing obscene material through the mail. (That
conviction was reversed on appeal a couple of years later.) Those speed bumps
didn’t stop Mizer’s enterprise as a commercial photographer and publisher from
growing to the point at which it occupied four lots near downtown Los Angeles,
like a Hollywood movie studio, earning him the nickname “the Hugh Hefner
of gay publishing.”Mizer, evidently, was blessedly free of high-art pretension,
but Physique Pictorial was nevertheless an inspiration for artists like David
Hockney and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Considering his renown, it’s surprising to
learn that “Devotion: Excavating Bob Mizer,” an exhibition at New
York University’s 80 Washington Square East Gallery, known as 80WSE, is,
according to a gallery news release, “the first major institutional solo
presentation of Bob Mizer’s work to be shown anywhere in the world.”
Along with the Siamese cat in the first
room is a wall-filling shelving unit containing costumes and props from the
collection of the Bob Mizer Foundation. N.Y.U. students are sorting and
documenting the materials.
(Photo: Jeffrey Sturges)
The show isn’t what Mizer fans might
expect. Organized by Jonathan Berger, director of 80WSE, and Billy Miller,
publisher of the gay magazine Straight to Hell, in collaboration with Dennis
Bell, president of the Bob Mizer Foundation, the exhibition of 45 photographs
works rather as a corrective to the idea of Mizer as only a beefcakemonger. It
makes a good case for him as an artist with interests and imagination
considerably more expansive than what his popular reputation suggests. Notably,
the show’s first picture is not of a naked man but of a Siamese cat on a sofa,
a large print from a negative made around 1945. There are men further on,
including a number of vivid head-and-shoulder portraits. But there’s not much
that you’d call conventionally pornographic.
Some pieces could be mistaken for
photographs by Diane Arbus, including one of a grinning little girl in a dance
costume, holding a giant trophy, and a portrait of a woman with dark bouffant
hair and a fur collar, whose grimacing smile and asymmetrical eyes give her a
scary, masklike mien. If you didn’t know better, you might guess that the image
of a nude man on all fours, with antlers rising from the top of his head, was a
Mapplethorpe.
Pictures shot in the studio include a man
fully dressed in the fringed buckskin and feathered headdress of a Hollywood
Indian; a woman in a striped dress, playing with a monkey; and, sweetly
hilarious, a smiling boy sitting for his portrait with a large live chicken.
Some images border on slapstick, like one
of two naked men entirely covered by silver paint, one on his hands and knees,
straddled by the other, who has his arm raised, evidently about to smack his
submissive partner.
There are pictures from which Norman
Rockwell could have made paintings, like one of four pretty young blond women,
looking beseechingly at a policeman, who smiles as he writes a parking ticket
for their car in the background. In a similarly wholesome image, a group of
eight handsome youths works on a partly dismantled sports car.
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A still from a 1955 film “Witch Boy.” (Bob
Mizer Foundation)
Most intriguing are two stills from a 1955
film, “Witch Boy.” In one, a man wearing only a conical sorcerer’s hat sits in
an armchair, perusing a thick tome in a room with drapery-covered walls, where
objects suggest some sort of magical practice.
The diversity of these and other pictures
in the show defies generalization, except for one thing: They all share an
optimistic spirit. You see this in his beefcake images, too. There’s almost
always a sunny, playful and happy feeling about them. Mizer was the opposite of
misanthropic, and unlike Mapplethorpe, for example, he seems not to have been
attracted to the more darkly disturbing dimensions of sex. But there is much
yet to be known about him.
At his death in 1992, Mizer left a huge
body of work, including about two million photographs and negatives; 3,000
films and videos; and untold quantities of costumes and props. His friend and
lawyer, Wayne Stanley, inherited it all and struggled to manage it. In the
ensuing years, it was parceled out to trash bins, storage and Mr. Stanley’s
garage, among other places.
In 2004, Mr. Stanley sold what he had to
Mr. Bell, who eventually consolidated materials and in 2010 established the Bob
Mizer Foundation in El Cerrito, Calif. Only a small fraction of what’s in the
foundation’s possession has been properly documented, a fact that Mr. Berger
has ingeniously taken advantage of. He asked the foundation to send, with the
framed pictures, boxes of archival material for inclusion in the show.
Student archivists have been going through
boxes of negatives for digital copying and annotation.
(Photo: Jeffrey
Sturges)
Along with the Siamese cat in the first
room is a wall-filling shelving unit, each of its cubbyholes containing
costumes and props from the foundation’s collection. N.Y.U. students are
sorting and documenting these materials. In other rooms are work tables with
computers and printers, where student archivists have been going through boxes
of negatives for digital copying and annotation.
The students are also making inexpensive
printouts of images they find interesting and clipping them up on gallery walls
to produce a rotating, ad hoc show within the greater show. Thus you get to
witness a buried history being uncovered right in front of your eyes, as the
show’s subtitle, “Excavating Bob Mizer,” promises.
The title might be misleading, insofar as
it anticipates the emergence of a coherent picture of Mizer and his oeuvre.
Considering the vastness and variety of his output, that may never happen. But
it’s a fascinating work in progress.
Link: Beefcake, Bob Mizer's Athletic Model
Guild [10:37]
