Jon Campbell, Adam Cullen, Noel McKenna, Glenn Morgan, Dani Marti, David Wadelton, Ben Morieson, Charles Robb, Gareth Sansom, Gordon Bennett, John Beard, Euan MacLeod, James Mellon, Andrew Curtis
Curator: Frank McBride
I like watching people looking at art and imagining what they might be thinking. While I was viewing this show, a 70-something gent shuffled past in his slippers and high waisted shorts. What did this, an exhibition about contemporary masculinity, mean to him? Did he relate? Might he have questioned his own wrinkled sense of self? It’d be interesting to know, particularly about someone of his generation, which has lived through the whole gamut of male/female roles.
I came to this exhibition with my own expectations. Titled ‘A Man’s World’, and featuring fourteen contemporary male artists, I had for some reason expected a more prescriptive statement about a current male condition, whatever that might be. ‘Whatever that might be’ was clearly the point. It explored just how grey the area that defines contemporary masculinity is. Poor blokes. After centuries of pointy architecture, football and guns, they’ve ‘lost’ themselves…. Facetiousness aside, this was the interesting part of the exhibition’s thesis. However it focussed less on identity lost and more on opening up the extreme complexity surrounding ‘maleness’, not to mention ‘humanness’. Problematic identities are not a new crisis or revelation, but it was interesting that the exhibition should focus on ‘men’—seemingly as a collective grouping—given that contemporary identity politics has blown apart such majority groups. This is not to say that curator Frank McBride reinstated them but the title of the exhibition was a kind of foil, implying that it might conclude something about men.
Instead, the show presented very few definites, or rather it pointed out that there are, of course, no definites where subjectivity is concerned. Rather than an exhibition explicitly ‘about’ males, it was an exhibition where all