Eingebildete Männlichkeit (2012)

Overview

In this video installation Philipp Gufler grapples with different images and ideas of masculinity that art has produced over centuries: from vomiting, well-endowed Greeks, to the vain Narcissus, towards Andy Warhol’s gun shooting Elvis Presley. The selected images are printed on Lucent fabrics and behind those the artist coquets with masculine and feminine poses: smoking, applying makeup, knotting a tie etc. The reference to the painting “Pygmalion and Galathea” by Jean-Léon Gérôme can be regarded as the ironic highpoint concerning the gender debate: The ancient legend of the gifted sculptor Pygmalion, who, in the spirit of the Male Gaze, carves his perfect woman out of stone, is a perfect metaphor for the creation of a completely artificial femininity, as it is alsoembodied by transvestites. The prefix trans- is thereby symptomatic for the whole staging of the film: the projections and the artist seem to permeate and superimpose each other constantly.