Review: Just So Horny

Artist(s): Michael Kirwan.

If Tom of Finland can be considered as the father of art showing manly, muscly men enjoying each other, the creator of Kake and other chiseled characters could also be seen as being partly responsible for the body fascism rampant in the modern gay community: only perfectly built men seem to have the “right” to have sex in gay porn. Or at least, in mainstream gay porn. But there are porn artists who don’t follow that path and put on paper far more varied body types. Michael Kirwan is clearly a proponent of average-looking men getting each other off, all drawn in lovingly depicted details.

Just So Horny collects more than a hundred drawings and paintings, covering two decades of an impressive career. Publisher Bruno Gmünder has done a beautiful job with this large, 128-page hardcover, complete with a dust jacket and introductions that put Kirwan’s work in historical and artistic context1.

Like Oliver Frey, another talented artist I greatly admire, Michael Kirwan rises above the numerous gay artists drawing porn, and not only because of the degree of craftsmanship in evidence here, but because his art has an aesthetics and a moral point of view, that which of the common (gay) man (and like Frey, Kirwan waited a long time before getting a book dedicated to his work). While Frey’s illustrations and stories come from fantasies which the artist shares, Kirwan’s art is a kind of documentary of modern gay life (or more exactly, the uninhibited sexual side of it). It also seems to illustrate the ideas around the disruptive nature of homosexuality, ideas which are at odds with current assimilationist activism (i.e., the artist is not very concerned with gay marriage) and which sees gay sex (probably even more than gay men themselves) as inherently questioning the fundaments of our patriarchal societies. Nowhere is that clearer than in the pairings Kirwan depict: “Young/old, fit/flabby participants coming from different ethnic, social and economic backgrounds”, as he himself states. Pairings which break down the barriers and categories mainstream society is  built around. As for gay society, Kirwan isn’t very taken with the thirty-something, white, affluent, (more or less) married gay couples that we always see in fiction. Look at these few examples, taken from Kirwan’s website (the reproductions of the book are also very good, by the way):

Why I bought the van

The Package came COD

Post Game

There’s something tender in the round line and warm colors these men are drawn with. They are horny, but more than that, they’re alive, they’re from anywhere and everywhere, they’re right around the corner. It seems to me that if one wanted to link Michael Kirwan to a contemporary, mainstream artist, it would be to Lucian Freud. Maybe I’m going too far, but there’s something in the best drawings/paintings by Kirwan where the skins and bodies of the characters are right between sensuality and morbidity. As if they were trying to prove to others and to themselves that they were alive. Post Game above is a good example of that. In fact, that particular drawing also reminds me of another artist’s work, this time a gay one: Paul Cadmus may not have drawn porn, but his art was strongly sensual and sometimes erotic. See for example his Playground or his YMCA Locker Room (I recommend this book if you want to read about this fascinating artist), which are both documentary and sensual—he also had a darker side, with paintings directly descending from George Grosz‘s caricatures. I don’t think Michael Kirwan can be called a satirist, but aesthetically speaking, the slightly grotesque deformations he often use on his men’s bodies bring an interesting distancing effect that for me is a form of wit, of insider humor.

Just So Horny is another welcome addition to the growing body of long hoped-for artbooks from the German publisher. The Internet might be a nice place for an artist to show his work, but nothing replaces paper for high-quality reading. Or maybe I’m just showing my age writing that.


Notes:
  1. This book is available at Amazon.

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