Mirrors that reflect shadows of dismembered existences: The ‘real’ self always seems to be elsewhere, beyond clouds of indolence and imaginative poetry. Representations entangled in their very bounds; raising questions of identity in a world wherein masquerade has become the rule is a dangerous task. Transcending the barriers of the skin and decoding the universal patterns of life in a linear teleological sequence: what is at stake here is providing a space for minorities – this shadowed ‘Other’– to share their story, to tell it loud and clear.
At first glance, we perceive Anthony Gayton’s vivid tableaux-vivant as naïve and playfully charming attempts to introduce the homoerotic pathos into the universal fairy tale of love, desire and growing up. But soon morbid indulgence gives place to reflection. Before our eyes images unfold, which in their syntactical complexity courageously thrive in the act of viewing the self as part of a sexual grammar whose main components, masculinity and femininity, intermingle within a hybrid sensuality. In this big play of humanity, deviants, outcasts and misfits emerge out of Plato’s cave. They all stoically carry on their shoulders their respective category labels. Tiny but inventively acute, these labels are nothing but societal denominations of a restrictive nature, essentially designated to them, the scapegoats of our culture…
For Anthony Gayton the camera and the spoken word go hand in hand. Articulated according to a clear visual diegesis and accompanied by short texts and poems, his narratives scrutinize the way in which axiomatic stories passed on from generation to generation advocate given attitudes towards homosexuality. Still, Gayton’s more recent body of work, consisting of portraits of well-built young men in archetypical postures with a pin-up quality, takes a step further. And it does so by exposing specific cases of iconographic misplacements that unveil hidden iconographies and secret relationships with an unforeseen sexual component: the homoerotic laps of religious symbolism in “Martyrs”, the current desire for the perfect male alongside the cult of the body in “The Harem” and the British uranian archetype of worshipping versus the platonic teacher-student relationship in “Ladslove”.
Entitled as “Beautiful Freaks”, the fourth of these series seems to take this premise to its extreme. The ongoing issue here is the subtle yet apparent association of homosexuality with physical and mental abnormalities, as it derives from a fictional casebook of “deviants” brought to the doctor’s lab. Accompanied by exhaustive reports in German which Gayton expressively commissioned for this purpose, the pictures seem to establish a factual and morally non-judgmental tone appropriate to a medical document. This may be the case on a linguistic level at least. Yet, in visual terms, much more seems to be beneath the surface. The mirror which we look and are looked at through is cracked. It is upon us, as viewers, to restore the unknown ‘Other’ in its deformed members to an integral whole that makes sense. Above all, it is upon us to accept and recognize the essential humanness of this ‘Other’; a humanness imbued by an animal-instinct-driven sensuality that exists outside any preconceived ideals of beauty. Fetishism, voyeurism and desire can have another colour, another taste and odour…
Anthony Gayton lists among his sources of inspiration for “Beautiful Freaks” case studies of deformities as encountered in the medical books of the 19th century Victorian world, in ethnographic and travel photography, vaudeville prodigies and slideshow cartes-de-visite. To all this, he adds his own distinctive touch. Although it would be easy to go after the mere shock-value of the grotesque, he does not do so. Gayton’s freakish creatures carry an ambiguity, both intriguing and compelling at the same time. They are all decayed Gods and Angels. Their abnormal bodies become the containers of an intrinsic play between attraction and repulsion, radiating an unprecedented sensuality.
Gayton has deliberately reinforced this switching from aberrance to beauty by asking models from a fashion agency to help him deconstruct these archetypical scenes of deformity. Gayton explains how in the before-session mood he discussed the concept behind the story with each of these men and the way he would alter them on the computer afterwards. Following a shooting of long exposures, so as to bring the most natural and naïve expression out of his sitters, he would proceed with digital manipulation, applying nevertheless considerably less than the usual retouching to the skin so as to maintain the aura of a believable deformity, more down-to-earth and less grotesque or idealized. In this sense, the images of “Beautiful Freaks” work as honest medical statements as much as they are the carriers of provocative hints for the eye and the soul. An incessant play between desire and repulsion is taking place here. During the photographic moment, both the imagined subjects and the actual sitters are unexpectedly asked to switch roles; the beasts unexpectedly become the subjects of longing, and apt men in terms of standard appearance become the beasts!
By grounding this ongoing dissonance between the body’s commonness and naturalness and the archetype of the freak as testified through medical cases, films and prodigious circus tales, Anthony Gayton’s photographic representations shift away from any given assumptions concerning beauty and physical attraction. Moreover, they show us that the coin has always had two sides, both on a human and a historical level. To the eyes of society freaks may have always been ‘freaks’, yet many of these tortured creatures have claimed their right to be the exception to the rule. And they have accomplished it. Gayton describes how his working experience with Paralympics medal winners and the paradigm of Frank Lentini – a three-legged man, who in the thirties ended up being from an entertainer to an educator, celebrity and family man – have offered him valuable feedback at the moment of conceptualizing “Beautiful Freaks”. Through the fascinating stories of these people, Gayton was lucky to discover that behind any well-rooted assumption there are the exceptional lives of those men who are both ‘deviants and Gods’. The bottom-line is that what ultimately hurts is the perturbing gaze, the one that labels and discriminates alimented by the scrutiny of the historical moment and its vocabulary; a vocabulary always reluctant and hostile towards any dichotomy or ambivalence.
Following on from this, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that “Beautiful Freaks” essentially is all about language and its sickest derivative: a schizoid gaze that tortures and becomes tortured. The meaning of deviance is relative and the synecdoche here is more than evident. Historically, homosexuals have always been considered ‘freaks’ and in many communities of the world are still confronted with social barriers and suspicion, among them the hypocrisy of the church and other tight cultural inhibitions. But the mirror has two faces, Anthony Gayton seems to point out, and the harm comes from the inside too. As much as the gay community has fought against aphorisms, it has been in need of them in order to conquer self-definition. From this point of view, the aesthetically and formally kinky pictures in “Beautiful Freaks” offer a very-well accomplished oxymoronic questioning of the homoerotic ethics today. The overt aestheticism of the body in these pictures alludes to a whole vocabulary of values as reinforced in the gay community today: the disclaim of any physical utterance, the quest for utter perfection, the cult of the gym-built sex icon... It is precisely this trivialization that can make gay men as much as discriminating, suggests Gayton. Deviants from the norm are rejected within and without a homosexual context. Hypocrisy is everywhere.
“Beautiful Freaks” invite us to look through both sides of the mirror, from the within and from the outside. This ongoing interplay of the image and of language in its atrocities culminates into a new, meta-semiotic context, in which the notion of the abnormal is reworked into a novel cultural whole of ‘alterity’ designed to be contemplated in and out of context. What is left upon us as viewers? We can either buy into the standard values, or we can willingly let ourselves be carried away by this new challenge of multiplicity. In the first case, it would be obvious to think of these beautiful freaks as nothing but regular pin ups; it is easy to see the model before the message, guided by the common denominators of body and sex. In the second case, in turn, a drastically novel set is created for the contemplation of the ‘Other’. The new angles of the mirror lead us to a context somewhere between the real and the imaginary, whereby masquerade falls and the narcissism of categories dissolves into allowance and tolerance.
Anthony Gayton’s work offers a very intuitive, self-reflecting gaze on gay masculinity and perception. His constructed images are medical statements insofar as they are aesthetic assertions. In their quality of pseudo-documentary, they ‘enact’ perception and photography with its pros and cons. But, before all, they expose the contrivances of language and the problematic of liberating the images from the constraint of words. For as Gayton concludes: “Terms as homosexual and heterosexual are by definition labels. They are not character definitions but artificial concepts –convenient, perhaps, but still artificial concepts that entrap people, precisely because they force them to choose sides…
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
©All pictures: Anthony Gayton
Galería MiTO, Barcelona
