Lovett/Codagnone
OUT OF BOUNDS
By Octavio Zaya
Published in Flash Art , May 1998, issue 129.
http://www.flashartonline.com/

OCTAVIO ZAYA: AS I was viewing the pictures that you recently showed in Chelsea, I overheard somebody exclaiming that they owed a lot to Mapplethorpe's work.

In truth, many of the reviews concerning your work suggested Mapplethorpe as recurrent reference. It seems to me, however; that much has happened between Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (the 1979 Mapplethorpe photograph which features two men in leather and chains, posing in the middle of an unusually decorated living room), your series "I Didn't Do It," and the other photographs which you recently presented at XllXavier LaBoulbenne. On the one hand, S&M has been assimilated and has become commonplace in the "Society of the Spectacle," to the extent that it is hardly distinguishable from fashion.

On the other hand while Mapplethorpe operated using fixed categories and "types" that depended on the curious fascination of a pleasure bearing on the purity/perversity duality, and produced images that both "resembled" him and allowed him to recognize himself as "different," your work collapses such categories and also brings you into the picture. It is as if you are "perverting the dometic" and, simultaneously, "domesticating the perverse."

Alessandro Condagnone : If something is owed to Mapplethorpe, it is that he opened a "territory" that has subsequently become available as a visual and historical reference. S&M has become not only commonplace, but also very accessible, mainly through fashion and the media. In our photographs, these cir­cumstances allow us to displace the sexual act that gets constructed by the social environ­ment. Our clothing and apparel becomes the signifier of a specific kind of practice that does not need to be performed m order to be under­stood. Our presence in the pictures, and the irony that frequently occurs as a result of the settings into which we put ourselves, have the effect of "perverting the domestic" while "do­mesticating the perverse."

Our work is very much based on our life to­gether, which becomes our common ground. But it is important to remember that it is pro­duced through the collaboration of two indi­viduals who come from different back­grounds. My education has been very acade­mic and this has been reflected in my art prac­tice since I started ten years ago. My approach to the work has changed a lot since I have been working with John, but I still regard literature and theory as my main sources of analysis and inspiration.

John Lovett: On the other hand, I had been involved in fashion photography for ten years before starting to collaborate with Alessandro. As I was growing up, the media, and popular culture more generally, played a strong role in shaping my perception and critical stance. What I believe is important to explain is that, as Alessandro said, our life together is our common ground, on which we confront each other as we bring in different references and perspectives. So - when we decide to shoot, it is not that we simultaneously come up with the same idea and have the same vision... Rather, one of us comes up with a concept that, in the process of being realized, gets shaped by the other's presence and under­standing of it.

OZ: This "confrontation" which both of you refer to, this kind of negotiation in the process of realization, would then account for the performative quality of your photographs. This strategy indeed, the very nature of your collaboration - suggests that the exter­nal appearance of gender and sexual orien­tation, as transmitted through clothing and behavior; is always performed In this sense, a series such as "I Didn't Do It," which you published in Honcho, an erotic gay maga­zine, reveals as much as the portraits with your parents in suburban settings, walking your dogs or sitting on the beach on vacation. In particular; a picture that you recently made, in which both of you are standing by the window of Prada's Milan boutique as a nun passes by inadvertently, illustrates this point most convincingly. To what extent are your live-performances related to your pho­tographic work? Also, given the fluctuating character of sexual roles, what is it that you are looking for in your work?

JL : Our work be it photographs, performance, or video deals with the same issues and conceptual bases, and the medium is de­ployed so as to function appropriately in rela­tion to the purpose. In the performance, we in­troduce language in the form of "found" text and body language, in a way that is related to the ephemeral nature of performance; but there is also a different confrontation with the audience. In Moments in Love, for instance, a performance we presented last September at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, as I am sitting at a miniature table, wearing a man's suit and a ballgag mask, trying to build a house of cards, Alessandro is swinging with high heel shoes on, continuously disrupting my activity. Through the performance, this act builds up a feeling of unfulfillment and sexual tension, while Alessandro's clothing and the text that he is reading establish what you have called "the fluctuating character of sexual roles" as part of the human condition.

AC: In our work, we try to present the idea of gender and sexual orientation as a form of drag, which is performed, at times, through behavioral interaction with the environment. By proposing the idea of sexual roles as fluid, we try not only to confuse the expectations that are anticipated in regard to gender, but to question what is familiar, what is the norm, and what is ordinary.

OZ : Your work elicits questions of projection, identification, and objectification as they are evoked by photography's fixed point of view, as well as the non-reproductive charged present and invisibility which indicate the disappearance aftereffect of perfomance. Are you aware of the various audience reactions to these two distinctive voices of your work?

How would this 'found" text contribute to it? Could you elaborate how the text functions?

  AC : There is certainly a different reaction that an audience has when looking at a picture as opposed to when it is witnessing a perfor­mance. If there is a confrontation that is pro­posed by our presence in our pictures, it is still mediated by the object that becomes a record of the performative act while stating its ab­sence. However, the live performance is all about "presence," where the audience con­fronts us while we confront the audience.

JL : Regarding the text, it is a collection of dif­ferent excerpts. The sources range from self­-help books that tell you how to maintain a re­lationship or how to do your laundry, to the Marquis de Sade; from favorite family food recipes to the leatherman handbook (which ex­plains how to obtain the perfect S&M relation­ship) to the 60s classic Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, which includes a homophobic chapter about homosexuality. The representation of gender and sexual orien­tation vary from text to text in these sources, but, as the text is read, gender is defined by the agent, Alessandro. Additionally, the different moods of the text become equal in weight and importance as a result of the monotone deliv­ery. This irony is a form of confrontation with the audience since it involves a collapse of gen­der distinction, and thus, of sexual assump­tions.

OZ : In the most lost recent work that you shot in Italy right after your New York "solo" debut, you ventured beyond the domestic, familial, and suburban stereotypical domains of your previous work and entered the public space of the city, its architecture, its open plazas, and historical monuments, settings potentially more hostile to your presence. In the previous work, you had already established a relation between clothing and environment and chal­lenged the delineation between public and private space Could you talk about this new development?

JL : Different lifestyles -whatever they are - usually find space for expression in the anonymity of big cities. What we did, was to bring it back into de-sexualized suburbia in a very familial format so as to reclaim this terri­tory. Like in the movie Blue Velvet, by David Lynch, in which suddenly, in clean and quiet suburbia, where public and private are usually very well separated, an act of interference, of disturbance, occurs out in the open, in the public space, and comes to shake the dreams and values of middle-class America.

AC : Naturally, the next step, conceptually, was to reclaim the public space of the city, and specifically the European city, with its historic monuments and plazas. That sacred space where history is recalled and proved in its mag­nitude. That point of reference that, growing up, I had to confront and relate to constantly. Our presence in the "untouchable" space of history becomes like graffiti, which does not alter the architecture but questions it in relation to the present. That is why we tried to recreate the structure of Italian Renaissance painting in the way we positioned ourselves in relation to the architecture.

OZ : Speaking of positioning and space, re­minds me about the cubic photography hold­ers that you arranged throughout the floor to display your pictures at your recent exhibi­tions in New York and Berlin. I never owned one of those transparent cubes, but I suppose that they are still familiar decorative objects in many houses. In your case, they become sculptural objects of different sizes, but they still serve the same purpose of simultaneously holding many pictures. Their most obvious function scents to be, once again, the domes­ticating of your "scabrous" subject. Yet, the fact that you force awkward positions and corporeal negotiations within the space on the viewer in order to look at the pictures, makes these cubes somewhat annoying. Are you trying to make the viewer uncomfortable? When I visited the show the most raunchy pictures, those depicting full frontal nudity in apparently real S&M settings, seemed surreptitiously hidden under the cube, on the face and out of sight. Why?

AC : Using the cubes was the easiest way for us to engage the audience sculpturally with the familiar idea of the photo album. The reference to the domestic object and the use of the snap­shot format . reminiscent of family portraits, vacation and souvenir pictures becomes a form of access to the work for the viewer. The other reference we wanted to engage for the viewer is minimalism. The first impression when entering the gallery at least in "Greet­ings." the show in New York is of an empty room, except for four different size cubes scat­tered on the floor like dice. Like many minimal sculptures, the cubes require a negotiation of the body in relation to the space and with what at first looks like a lack of references other than formal ones. The second operation is the real­ization that in the "empty room" there are ac­tually twentyfour photographs, and that the viewer is requested to interact physically in order to see all of them, especially the ones placed on the bottom. Minimalism and its pol­itics only become a paradox when confronted with the images and the cubes as photo albums.

JL : About the hidden photos, it is true that two of them are the most "raunchy" ones, but it is also true that the other two are possibly the fun­niest ones: me as a Playboy bunny and Alessandro as a baby in a crib. We knew that the hidden photos would create the most ex­pectation in terms of what was revealed, so we decided to "reveal" the suspected while releas­ing the "expected" with laughter.

Octavio Zaya is a critic based in New York .
SUMMER 1998 Flash Art 129

"We're a couple and they're a couple and yet who's normal or abnormal?"

Art
Family Ties

THE NEW YORK BASED DUO OF John Lovett, 33, and Alessandro Coda­gnone, 28, are the latest entry in the growing list of art collaborationists Gilbert and George, Mc­Dermott and McGough, and Aziz + Cucher who also happen to be gay couples. Together for less than two years, LovetllCodagnone have begun constructing a record of their lives.

In a January show at New York's White Columns, a series of bright color photographs posed the happy couple with their in-laws: Lovett's parents are all about American sub­urbia, Codagnone's live in a respectable home outside Milan. Italy. The parents smile, the boys are smiling too and draped in leather and bondage gear. "We're a couple, just as they're a couple, and yet who is normal or abnormal?" says Codagnone. "When they were posing. .John's parents thought we were making fun of them, and that scared them. But to us, the photo is also about them making fun of us. And a total outsider might just think it's a shot of the circus." One encounters in Lovett/Codagnone's work the sometimes humorous, sometimes dangerous ntersections between sex and family, sex and culture, sex and, well, sex.

The Leo Castelli gallery in New York recently showed their work, which has also been in XXX Fruit magazine and will show in Berlin in September. The pair begin work on a commercial porno video in April. Their work, primarily photography, is at once familiar, domestic even, but also confrontational. almost punk.

The photographs all Robert Mapplethorpe's images of leathermen in their living rooms, but where Mapplethorpe tended toward the precious, Lovett/Codagnone strike a lighter tone. The pic­tures poke fun at both the domesticity of their parents' homes and the supposed frisson of fetish wear. They also capture a family moment of tender, almost shocking intimacy: Could you drape your arm across Mom and Dad's shoulders while wearing a ball gag?

Other Lovett/Codagnone projects challenge the limited spectrum of (erotic images that dominate gay male life. In a spread that appeared in the December issue of Honcho, Lovett wears a business suit topped by the head of a plush pink piggy, while Codagnone wears high heels, a leather shirt and a latex mask. An unnarrated video captures the artists receiving matching commitment tattoos The melody "Greensleeves" plays throughout. Codagnone now explains that their tattoos are a "sym­bolic and ironic gesture," and adds slyly, "the placement of John's tattoo" --high up on his inner thigh­-- is meant to remind him of whom he's committed to every time he's having sex with someone else.”

What's fresh in this work is the unaffected candor of two lovers who enjoy getting in front of the camera and acting out. The images are generous rather than stingy, inclusive rather than exclu­sive-and that's always an unexpected treat.

DALE PECK PECK

Dale Peck is the author of The Law of Enclosures (Farrar, Straus, And Giroux).