Catalogue Ryan McGinley

09/10 exposition

ryan mc ginley portrait bestiality nude mystery

EDITO On his road trips across America, Ryan McGinley has been photographing his friends in a variety of stunning natural environments. The fragile nudes are a majestic reminder of what came before us and what will remain after we’re gone. In Moonmilk he took his tribe underground into huge caves, which in some cases had never been documented.

The shoot itself was an intense physical challenge for everyone involved and the result is an epic, eerie descent into darkness. Imagine Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth updated with a cast of gilded young Americans.

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SOMMAIRE 1 Biography. p.4 p.12

2 Portrait p.13 p.22

3 Bestiality p.23 p.35

4 Nude p.36 p.48

5 Mystery p.48 p.60

‘Pseudo-fiction, Myth, and Contingency’, Chris Kraus, 2012 Myth . . . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them a simplicity of essences . . . it organizes a world without contradictions . . . a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.

Frequently lauded for capturing the essence of a generation, Ryan McGinley’s extraordinary images in fact do something more subtle and deft. Seamless and irony-free, they have created the myth of a generation for whom freedom and possibility consistently trump disillusion and doubt. Flesh may be temporarily bruised, but psyches remain unscarred.

In McGinley’s world, the laws of gravity scarcely apply. Fantastic, ebullient, McGinley’s work enjoys an unusually widespread appeal among art world insiders and lay-fans alike.

Today McGinley is best known for dreamlike images of figures in natural landscapes, but his earliest work took place in the shabby apartments and dirty streets of downtown New York. His first major body of work, a series of photographs titled “The Kids Are Alright,” depicts moments from the lives of the artist and his friends on the Lower East Side. They come across as a diaristic chronicle of time spent spray painting graffiti, rolling joints, waking up in closet-sized rooms, having sex, swimming nude, and hanging out.

First exhibited in 2000, in a self-produced show at 420 West Broadway, in SoHo— once the home of the Leo Castelli and Mary Boone galleries, the space was temporarily abandoned before the construction of luxury lofts—the photographs attracted widespread attention, leading to a solo exhibition of much of the same work at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art three years later.

The images were hailed for their tantalizing similarity to the work of McGinley’s most obvious predecessors: Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, and Larry Clark. And yet, there were differences: As one critic wrote of the Whitney show, “The tone is relaxed and playful, as if the world were on recess. . . . The pictures have none of the after-hours decadence of Warhol’s snapshots, nor the grit of Mr. Clark’s work, nor the noirish narcissism of Ms. Goldin’s.” A narrative quickly emerged: Post-AIDS, post-9/11, the subjects of “Kids” were immersed in an underground lifestyle unclouded by imminent doom. While others lamented the corporate gentrification of the city’s once seedy locales, McGinley’s images seemed to prove that it might still be possible to be classless, artistic, and young and have fun in early twenty-first-century corporate New York—margins of freedom were still there to be found. McGinley’s swift move from DIY exhibition to major museum show formed a parallel story of promise: A young artist no longer had to wait a decade or more to receive mainstream recognition. With little formal photographic training and no more than a graphic design BFA, McGinley, at age twenty-five, became the youngest artist to be given a solo show at the Whitney and was anointed an avatar of his generation.

A decisive shift took place in McGinley’s work in the summer of 2003, when a collector loaned the artist a Vermont country house. McGinley installed a skate ramp and trampoline in the yard and began busing friends and acquaintances up from New York each week. Removing his subjects from their “natural” urban environment, he transported them to this bucolic setting, and then instigated large situations and setups that would trigger spontaneous actions and moments. The work became a matter of documenting “real life” as it occurred in highly constructed situations, and the resulting images are more deliberately cinematic.

In 2005, McGinley embarked on a series of annual summer road trips that would result in new bodies of work including “Sun and Health,” 2006; “I Know Where the Summer Goes,” 2008; and “Moonmilk,” 2009.

He began formally casting models—not professional models but kids recruited from art schools and cities all over the world—and crew and staff numbers grew larger. Still, traveling around the US for three months, living mostly outdoors and naked, boundaries between McGinley’s subjects, the natural world, and each other seem to dissolve, evoking the halcyon 1970s when, unburdened by debt or career, countless young people simply traveled, and an “artistic life” could be lived without being professionalized.

McGinley’s depiction of young and lithe nude subjects has been read as a celebration of youth, defined by rebellion, vitality, and positive energy. Yet youth—like the body’s unclothed, natural state—can also be read as an absence: a blank slate upon which psychic and physical qualities can be more clearly registered.

The exhaustion of Ann (Sand), 2007; the expectantly wistful expressions of Ann (Windy Truck), 2007, Hanna (Blonde Meadow), 2008, and Brennan (Blue), 2007; the black eyes and bruises of Tim (Black Eye), 2005 and Olivia (Sparrow), 2010, would not be as apparent or striking were their subjects encumbered by age or identifiable clothing. His subjects wear their bruises well, like tattoos. Aged bodies are marked by accretion, but Tim and Olivia are still young, and their bruised states are fleeting.

Portrait

13

bestiality

23

NuDe

36

Mystery

48