Exhibition Review: Hung @ the Horse Hospital

It is an almost self-evident truth that gay men love nothing more than penises and double entendres, a fact that must have seemed too good for artist and curator Stuart Sandford to pass up when organising his latest exhibition, “Hung” (on until 30 October at The Horse Hospital).

On past experience, not all gay men seem to equally love good art, with many similar previous shows falling heavily into either the “borderline boner” homoerotic category or disappearing up their own witty rabbithole of visual puns; many do a bit of both. Most sell a fair amount of the work displayed; that alone is not enough to make them either interesting or memorable.

“Hung”, too, sometimes walks a fine line – but manages to end up on the right side of pointlessly titillating. The program that accompanies the show posits, simultaneously loftily and adolescently, that the artists on display (from the established names on the gay art scene, like Bruce LaBruce, Walter Pfeiffer and Slava Mogutin, to the more up-and-coming Jan Wandrang, Sandford himself and sometime-Mogutin-collaborators Gio Black Peter and Brian Kenny) rescue lustfulness from Dante’s Infernal damnation and, in an iconoclastic irony, produce hitherto-unseen images of Man. The muddled suggestion does a disservice both to the writer of the program notes and, less justifiably, to the artists: this ain’t no Rodinesque experiment, but nor is it trying to be.

What it is is an often surprisingly-touching body of work from artists that, each in his own way, tries to juxtapose the sexuality he feels or sees with the world around him. Mogutin does this with a series of photos of twinks, beautifully printed onto carefully selected financial pages of newspapers (background headlines screaming – that love of puns again – “Edging Up a Second Day”, “Most Active, Gainers and Losers”). Gio Black Peter draws  naif self-portraits proffering himself, semi-naked and erect, on semi-obscured copies of his “day job” (or “slave”) CVs. Sandford himself unveils a new piece that takes a different direction from the photographic body of work that he has amassed so far, hopefully enjoining “Remove Clothes” in yellow neon, aware that none will comply.

Other works are less successful, ringing with a hollow bravado (not least LaBruce’s laurel-resting “L.A. Zombie” portrait of the inexplicably omnipresent porn star François Sagat); however, these few do not significantly detract from what is ultimately a well-assembled body of work. It won’t change your view of Man or lust, but you’ll at least be glad you went.

- Peter Orlov