Arts, Faculty of
Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Willis V, John (Johnny)
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
“Radically Art Historical” presents a critical overview of the first decade of the Canadian painter Attila Richard Lukacs’s infamous career as Canada’s “bad boy artist” in the 1980s and 1990s. Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the thesis underscores the degree to which Lukacs’s appropriation of art history, and Caravaggio in particular, enabled his monumental scenes of queer male sexuality to enter into the spaces and collections of major international museums at the height of the AIDS crisis. I demonstrate that, passed through the art historical sieve of respectability, Lukacs’s work enabled gay sex to finally have a place on the wall of museums. Lukacs’s objectives, however, were much too deconstructive to be summarized as mere identity politics. Throughout the thesis, I demonstrate that Lukacs was engaged in a Derridean campaign of deconstruction, simultaneously citing and undercutting binary oppositions such as East and West, gay and straight, and past and present. Through careful examinations of his massive tableaux featuring hyper-eroticized skinheads as historical actants, I clarify Lukacs’s thematization of German division, reunification, and historical memory in relationship to both deconstruction and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I illustrate the degree to which Lukacs’s antibinaristic epistemology forms a distinctly queer ethos that harks back to a long lineage of transgressive queer thought from Genet to Foucault, and further, how it evinces a “criminal” strategy that corresponds with the history of art and homosexuality. The thesis also interrogates Lukacs’s deconstructive treatment of masculinity, revealing a parallel between the imitative nature of masculinity and Lukacs’s imitative yet parodic approach to art history. Lastly, the thesis investigates the relationship of Lukacs’s work to the transformations and devastations of the queer body politic during the 1980s and 1990s, elucidating the artist’s antibinaristic, horizontal ontology through his use of paint as a metaphor for flesh. At its core, “Radically Art Historical” works to recuperate Lukacs’s defining work that has since receded from public attention as one of Canada’s most significant living artists, underscoring the degree to which the work unravels the often neglected relationship between sex, art history, and politics.
RADICALLY ART HISTORICAL: ATTILA RICHARD LUKACS AND THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY by John (Johnny) Willis V B. A. (Hons), University of Pennsylvania, 2021 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art History and Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2023 © John (Johnny) Willis V, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Radically Art Historical: Attila Richard Lukacs and the Weight of History submitted by John (Johnny) Willis V in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History and Theory Examining Committee: Dr. Erin Silver, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisor Dr. Joseph Monteyne, Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract “Radically Art Historical” presents a critical overview of the first decade of the Canadian painter Attila Richard Lukacs’s infamous career as Canada’s “bad boy artist” in the 1980s and 1990s. Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the thesis underscores the degree to which Lukacs’s appropriation of art history, and Caravaggio in particular, enabled his monumental scenes of queer male sexuality to enter into the spaces and collections of major international museums at the height of the AIDS crisis. I demonstrate that, passed through the art historical sieve of respectability, Lukacs’s work enabled gay sex to finally have a place on the wall of museums. Lukacs’s objectives, however, were much too deconstructive to be summarized as mere identity politics. Throughout the thesis, I demonstrate that Lukacs was engaged in a Derridean campaign of deconstruction, simultaneously citing and undercutting binary oppositions such as East and West, gay and straight, and past and present. Through careful examinations of his massive tableaux featuring hyper-eroticized skinheads as historical actants, I clarify Lukacs’s thematization of German division, reunification, and historical memory in relationship to both deconstruction and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I illustrate the degree to which Lukacs’s antibinaristic epistemology forms a distinctly queer ethos that harks back to a long lineage of transgressive queer thought from Genet to Foucault, and further, how it evinces a “criminal” strategy that corresponds with the history of art and homosexuality. The thesis also interrogates Lukacs’s deconstructive treatment of masculinity, revealing a parallel between the imitative nature of masculinity and Lukacs’s imitative yet parodic approach to art history. Lastly, the thesis investigates the relationship of Lukacs’s work to the transformations and devastations of the queer body politic during the 1980s and 1990s, elucidating the artist’s antibinaristic, horizontal ontology through his use of paint as a metaphor for flesh. At its core, “Radically Art iv Historical” works to recuperate Lukacs’s defining work that has since receded from public attention as one of Canada’s most significant living artists, underscoring the degree to which the work unravels the often neglected relationship between sex, art history, and politics. v Lay Summary This thesis presents a critical overview of the first ten years of the Canadian artist Attila Richard Lukacs’s career (1983–1993). As a response to the lack of art historical literature available on Lukacs’s work, the thesis offers a theoretical foundation to more firmly establish Lukacs’s place in Canadian art history. Utilizing the theory of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the thesis illustrates how Lukacs adopted a deconstructive practice, which is to say, a practice that evaded binary oppositions and challenged a black-and-white vision of the world. The thesis also interrogates Lukacs’s complex relationship to art history, evolutions in the politics of the body, and the AIDS crisis. vi Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Johnny Willis. vii Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...iii Lay Summary……………………………………………………………………………………...v Preface……………………………………………………………………………………………vi Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………...vii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………...viii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..x Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...xi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: History and Opposition………………………………………………………………..8 Chapter 2: History and Imitation………………………………………………………………...31 Chapter 3: History and Flesh…………………………………………………………………….45 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….60 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..63 Appendix A: Interview with the Artist…………………………………………………………..66 viii List of Figures Figure 1 Attila Richard Lukacs, Love in Union, Amorous Meeting, 1991………………….8 Figure 2 Attila Richard Lukacs, East/West, 1991…………………………………………10 Figure 3 Attila Richard Lukacs, Love in Waiting, Stretching the Body, 1991…………….15 Figure 4 Attila Richard Lukacs, Ustad Sahibdin, Painting, c. 1690……………………….15 Figure 5 Attila Richard Lukacs, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1991……….16 Figure 6 Attila Richard Lukacs, This Town, 1990………………………………………...18 Figure 7 Attila Richard Lukacs, Wild Kingdom, 1992-1993………………………………19 Figure 8 Attila Richard Lukacs, Glamour Crew, 1993……………………………………22 Figure 9 Attila Richard Lukacs, Everybody Wants the Same Thing, 1993………………..22 Figure 10 Attila Richard Lukacs, In My Father’s House, 1989…………………………….23 Figure 11 Attila Richard Lukacs, Junge Spartaner Fordern Knaben zum Kampf Heraus, 1988………………………………………………………………………………25 Figure 12 Attila Richard Lukacs, Junge Spartaner Fordern Knaben zum Kampf Heraus [Detail], 1988…………………………………………………………………….26 Figure 13 Attila Richard Lukacs, That’s It, 2000…………………………………………...31 Figure 14 Attila Richard Lukacs, One and many stretched bei Tyler, 1992………………..34 Figure 15 Attila Richard Lukacs, Licky, 1990………………………………………………37 Figure 16 Attila Richard Lukacs, Die Erfindung der Malerei, nach Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1996-1998………………………………………………………………………..38 Figure 17 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Erfindung der Zeichenkunst, 1830…………………….39 Figure 18 Attila Richard Lukacs, He Liked America, 1989………………………………...40 Figure 19 Attila Richard Lukacs, Alex, Berlin, 1990……………………………………….41 Figure 20 Paul B. Preciado, “Straight Somatic Fictions,” 2008…………………………….43 Figure 21 Izhar Patkin, Unveiling of a Modern Chastity, 1981…………………………….46 ix Figure 22 Lukacs posing with his Prime Cuts at Unit Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, 1983……..47 Figure 23 Attila Richard Lukacs, Meat Cuts, 1983…………………………………………48 Figure 24 Attila Richard Lukacs, Meat Atlas, 1983………………………………………...49 Figure 25 Lukacs and the Young Romantics outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1985…51 Figure 26 Attila Richard Lukacs, Il y a quinze ans que je n’ai pas sait ça, 1985…………..51 Figure 27 Attila Richard Lukacs, Easter, 1985……………………………………………..52 Figure 28 Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse, 1992…………………………………55 Figure 29 Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse [interior panel]……………………….55 Figure 30 Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse [interior panel]……………………….55 Figure 31 Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse [interior panel]……………………….57 Figure 32 Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse [interior panel]……………………….57 Figure 33 Attila Richard Lukacs, Love in Separation, Rejection, 1992…………………….58 x Acknowledgements The production of this thesis has been endlessly rewarding, not only for its intellectual challenges, but for the relationship I was able to build to the art and its maker. Attila Richard Lukacs is not only a brilliant artist, but a warm, kind, and gentle soul. It is my honor to present this thesis in acknowledgement of the 40th anniversary of his artistic career. Thank you Attila, from the bottom of my heart, for welcoming me into your studio, for sharing the more intimate details of your life, and for your unwavering support of this project. The University of British Columbia and its community also provided key support for this project. Professor Erin Silver served as its encouraging advisor, and has offered generous guidance since its inception. Thank you, Erin, for your caring and compassionate approach to teaching, one that we should all strive to emulate. Professor Joseph Monteyne provided useful art historical advising, offering his unique perspective as a scholar of the Baroque, Lukacs’s preferred art historical period to quote and parody. Teresa Sudeyko, too, provided kind assistance in accessing the collections and resources of the Belkin Art Gallery. I also wish to thank the donors Hugo E. Meilicke and Tina and Morris Wagner who established the research fellowships at UBC that have funded this study. I would be amiss if I neglected to acknowledge the support of my parents throughout my studies, especially given the queer focus of my work. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for your steadfast support of my queer art historical practice, and my sisters, for your unconditional love. Lastly, I must acknowledge the degree to which my training in queer art historical methods with Professor Jonathan Katz at the University of Pennsylvania informs this thesis, and indeed my capacities as an art historian in general. Thank you, Jonathan, not only for your invaluable consultations on this thesis, but for giving me a foundation that I will have for life. xi Dedication For Attila. 1 Introduction Being a good artist is like committing the perfect crime—you don’t get caught. —Robert Rauschenberg (1961)1 Being an artist and a criminal is pretty well the same thing. Because you have to have the same genius. —Attila Richard Lukacs (2023)2 “Lukacs is Canada’s most controversial painter, and one of its best,” Canadian Governor General Adrienne Clarkson stated of Attila Richard Lukacs in 1991.3 Newspaper headlines in the late 1980s and early 1990s referred to Lukacs as Canada’s “bad-boy artist,” whose “shocking images of sadomasochistic rituals, skinheads and pit bulls” unsettled bourgeois British Columbian audiences.4 At the age of twenty-three, Lukacs—who was born in 1962 to Hungarian immigrants who fled to Alberta as refugees in 1956—was selected for participation in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s landmark exhibition Young Romantics (1985), propelling the young painter into the international spotlight. No matter how “controversial” or “shocking” his subject matter, Lukacs’s distinctly homoerotic paintings by and large escaped censorship and prosecution, foregrounding gay sex on the walls of international museums at the very peak of the AIDS crisis. The artist’s deeply enmeshed relationship with art history was his salvation, as his canvases foregrounded his “conservative” skillset in the lineage of monumental history painting and made repeated reference to art history’s canonical masters such as Caravaggio. This thesis thus aims to establish 1 Robert Rauschenberg, in an unpublished transcript of the symposium on assemblage organized by William Seitz following the Art of Assemblage exhibition at MoMA, 1961, MoMA Archives, 22: quoted in Jonathan D. Katz, “‘Committing the Perfect Crime’: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008), 45. 2 Attila Richard Lukacs, interview with author, April 19, 2023. 3 Adrienne Clarkson, “Adrienne Clarkson Presents,” filmed in 1991 by CBC News, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deloukJkQjY&t=3s. 4 “Bad-boy Artist to Show in Toronto,” The Vancouver Sun, June 9, 1989. 2 the art historical and theoretical foundations of Lukacs’s “criminal” design through an extensive excavation of the first ten years of the artist’s career (1983–1993). Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the thesis works to make clear that Lukacs was not merely a provocateur for the sake of provocation. Chapter One, “History and Opposition,” illustrates the degree to which Lukacs was engaged in a campaign of Derridean deconstruction in the period, simultaneously citing and undercutting binary oppositions such as East and West, butch and queen, and gay and straight. The chapter focuses on Lukacs’s Berlin paintings that were produced during the artist’s ten-year sojourn in the German capital following his move from Vancouver in 1986. Through a thorough analysis of his canvases that thematized German division, reunification, and historical memory, I demonstrate how Lukacs’s deconstructive undertaking paralleled the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how the paintings worked to unveil the foreboding presence of the Nazi past in the painter’s present moment—unsettling the ostensible opposition of past and present. The chapter thus takes Lukacs’s relationship to fascism as its central motif, illustrating how the threads “fascism is sexy” and “fascism is terrible” operate in tandem to deconstruct the (often uncomfortable) erotic allure of fascism that Susan Sontag outlined in “Fascinating Fascism” (1974). Following a discussion of Lukacs’s appropriation of art history to political ends, I argue that Lukacs’s antibinaristic mode encapsulates a distinctly queer ethos that harks back to a long lineage of transgressive queer thought from Genet to Foucault. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that Lukacs’s continuous evasion of positionality, leading to the collapse of binary oppositions and the fundamental destabilization of oppositionality itself, encapsulates the artist’s “perfect crime.” I continue the analysis of binary oppositions into Chapter Two, “History and Imitation,” beginning with an examination of Lukacs’s treatment of masculinity (often as a metaphor for 3 fascism itself). The chapter elucidates the relationship of the masculine and art historical canons through the lens of imitation, which is to say, I draw a parallel between Lukacs’s emphasis on the performative and imitative nature of masculinity and his imitative relationship to art history. To this end, the chapter analyzes Lukacs’s characteristic tenebrist technique in relation to Caravaggio and BDSM theory, illustrating that chiaroscuro offered the perfect model to depict queer, fetishistic scenes of “sexual theater,” as Sontag put it. I demonstrate that Lukacs’s work deconstructs the relationship of the real and the representational as Caravaggio once did, and between the original and copy. Lastly, the chapter considers the recurring motif of the monkey in Lukacs’s work as the embodiment of Lukacs’s imitative vision of masculinity and of becoming-animal. Just as BDSM undoes the established dichotomies of pleasure and pain, and erotic and nonerotic, I argue that Lukacs’s manifestations of becoming-animal serve to subvert the human-animal binary opposition. The chapter hence concludes that Lukacs’s art historical imitations are more accurately understood as transformations. Chapter Three, “History and Flesh,” considers Lukacs’s relationship to the devastations and transformations of the queer body politic of the 1980s and early 1990s, paying particular attention to the social context of the AIDS crisis. This chapter examines the beginning of Lukacs’s artistic career in 1983 in juxtaposition with the formation of AIDS Vancouver and the onset of plague in Canada. I analyze Lukacs’s first solo exhibition Special Grade “A” Beef Prime Cuts Butchered for You: by Richard A. Lukacs (1983) at Unit Pitt Gallery in Vancouver in relationship to coetaneous developments in body politics, followed by a discussion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a “universal flesh” that animates Lukacs’s oeuvre. Identifying Lukacs’s early work as an inchoate address that would ultimately morph into a case history as the AIDS crisis reached its peak, I then transition into Scott Watson’s celebrated exhibition 4 Young Romantics (1985) at the Vancouver Art Gallery, analyzing two of Lukacs’s key paintings in the exhibition and their relationship to the theme of flesh. Finally, I conclude the thesis with Lukacs’s participation in documenta IX and his installation Eternal Teahouse (1992), underscoring the degree to which the piece works to subvert the relationship between artist, viewer, and exhibition space by creating a locale that privileges embodiment and interweaves the political, erotic, and historic domains. Throughout all three chapters, the thesis works to continually emphasize Lukacs’s unravelling of the often neglected relationship between sex, art history, and politics. At its core, “Radically Art Historical” works to recuperate Lukacs’s defining work of the 1980s and 90s that has since receded from public attention. Art history has yet to produce a body of literature that reflects the significance of Lukacs’s artistic contributions—indeed, there are no monographic studies on the artist’s work, and very few journal articles. This thesis responds to this gap in the art historical literature by attempting to offer a theoretical foundation to more firmly establish Lukacs’s position in Canadian art history. The remainder of the introduction offers a brief review of the slim body of literature available on Lukacs’s work; readers seeking theoretical analysis instead may advance to Chapter One. Scott Watson, who was a curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1985 but subsequently led the Helen and Morris Belkin Art Gallery, introduced Lukacs’s work to an international audience and is responsible for much of the early writing on the artist’s work. His writing is usually limited to a few pages or less, but it offers useful curatorial insight and context. His article “Attila Richard Lukacs: Ciphers of Cold War Twilight” in the exhibition catalog for Polaroids (2010)—which displayed Lukacs’s photographic studies for the first time—was the first to offer any substantive analysis of Lukacs’s complex relationship to German history and 5 politics. His exhibition catalog essay for Young Romantics (1985), too, was the first to underscore the degree to which Lukacs’s work investigates the body and flesh through monumental painting. Indeed, the vast majority of writing on Lukacs is found in exhibition catalogs. The most insightful essay on Lukacs’s work from the 1980s and 1990s is Paulette Gagnon’s text “A Desire for Disorder” (1994) that accompanied his solo exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Albeit brief, Gagnon’s essay offers the most comprehensive take on Lukacs’s relationship to art history through an analysis of his E-Werk series (1989–1993), neatly identifying many of the key art historical referents. In titling the piece “A Desire for Disorder,” Gagnon comes the closest to recognizing the deconstructive element that, as this thesis demonstrates, embodies the ethos of Lukacs’s work. Nonetheless, the essay remains firmly grounded in art historical analysis, and hesitates to venture further into the socio-political realm. The philanthropist and art collector Salah J. Bachir owns the most significant collection of Lukacs’s work, which was displayed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2011 and was accompanied by an exhibition catalog. The book compiles a selection of writings on Lukacs, including Louise Dompierre’s 1989 essay “Into the Politics of Art and Popular Culture,” which was written for Lukacs’s exhibition at The Power Plant in Toronto (1989), and offers an early analysis of Lukacs’s anti-chronological relationship to art history. Interviews, one of which is included in the Bachir book, are the other key sources in the body of literature on Lukacs, and they often provide useful snippets of information. Adrienne Clarkson interviewed Lukacs for her CBC program “Adrienne Clarkson Presents” (1991), in which she offered televised overviews of renowned and up-and-coming Canadian artists. 6 One dissertation has been written on Lukacs’s work, entitled “Figurations of Ethics, Configurations of Power: Michel Foucault, Attila Richard Lukacs, and the New Painting,” by Eugenio Filice in 2002. The dissertation interprets Lukacs’s work in the 1980s as “an attempt to order things to a political and ethical end” through Foucauldian analysis and focuses on two paintings, Where the Finest Young Men… (1987) and Authentic Decor (1988), which are not addressed in this thesis.5 The main flaw of the text is its reluctance to integrate theory, historical context, and visual analysis, as it rather approaches them as separate topics. The dissertation’s strength lies in its early acknowledgement of the relevance of Foucault’s writings on power and ethics to Lukacs’s body of work, but it neglects to acknowledge Lukacs’s perhaps more profound relationship to Derrida, which I elaborate in Chapter One. In addition to Adrienne Clarkson’s 1991 televised program, interested readers should consult David Vaisbord’s film Drawing Out the Demons (2004) which chronicles Lukacs’s battle with addiction while living in New York, where he moved after his decade-long stay in Berlin. The film offers an intensely intimate view into Lukacs’s “dark night of the soul,” investigates Lukacs’s childhood, and documents the artist’s recovery in Hawaii. The film helps explicate, in part, why the artist’s work temporarily receded from public attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In short, it is a remarkably unique film that provides an unparalleled perspective of an artist’s struggle to survive the perils of addiction. Readers seeking a theoretical foundation that helps to illuminate Lukacs’s early work should consult the body of work on deconstruction, beginning with Derrida. The 1972 book Positions that reproduces three interviews with Derrida, and especially the third interview with 5 Eugenio Filice, “Figurations of Ethics, Configurations of Power: Michel Foucault, Attila Richard Lukacs, and the New Painting,” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2002), ii. 7 Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, was particularly useful for this thesis. Readers may also consult the anthology Derrida and Queer Theory (2017) edited by Christian Hite that provides an intelligent introduction to deconstruction. In terms of Lukacs’s deconstructive treatment of masculinity, Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble (1990) and essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1991) are of central import. Lastly, for theoretical tools relating to Lukacs’s depictions of S/M and fetish culture, readers should consult Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s writings on becoming-animal in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and the Finnish philosopher Timo Airaksinen’s work on BDSM theory. Throughout the thesis, readers will encounter deconstruction as a sort of leitmotif that threads together Lukacs’s various artistic engagements throughout the 1980s and 90s. Fundamentally, Lukacs’s work rejects a binaristic, black-and-white vision of the world. Lukacs forces us to consider uncomfortable scenarios and power dynamics, and to examine the often convoluted relationship of politics, eros, and ethics. In doing so, Lukacs challenges us and our naturalized ethical foundations, undermining their supposed stability. In offering the artist a mode in which he never had to take a binary position, deconstruction became key to Lukacs’s “criminal” ploy—one that works to subvert the binaristic regime of thought under which divergent genders and sexualities are named and punished. 8 Chapter 1: History and Opposition Attila Richard Lukacs’s canvas Love in Union, Amorous Meeting of 1991 (Figure 1) leaves most viewers uneasy. The sight of an erect neo-Nazi skinhead saluting a swastika may be the culprit. While the swastika, embedded into the rays of Japan’s rising sun flag, elicits an erection and salute for the nude Nazi, his partner instead gives it the finger. Despite their obviously disparate relationship to the fascist horizon, the two steadfastly embrace one another. Indeed, their political discord seems not to disrupt their imminent fuck, as the antifascist skinhead’s exposed buttocks donning a jockstrap would indicate. In embodying two enmeshed oppositional forces, their relationship remains inherently unstable, such that the canvas itself could seemingly split at any Figure 1: Attila Richard Lukacs, Love in Union, Amorous Meeting, 1991, Oil on canvas, 302.3 x 246.4 cm. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Gift of Gunter Heinrich and Anthony Sam, 2020. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography © Attila Richard Lukacs 9 moment. The work remains whole, but only amidst the incessant interplay of unity and opposition, of love and hate. Produced just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Amorous Meeting represents a Canadian artist’s vision of fraught German reunification and historical memory (or the lack thereof). Lukacs, who moved to Berlin from Vancouver in 1986 and found himself living in a city divided into East and West, continuously thematized German division and remembrance in his work. Lukacs’s youthful couple stand before a field that has been ravaged by the wars of recent history, repopulated by hares and opium poppies. The symbol of the opiate figured alongside the rabbits and the nude pairing suggests that, as the artist himself has proposed, sex is an opiate, here overriding any political ideology or affiliation. For what does opium provide its user, other than a state of euphoria and forgetfulness? The primacy of the erotic over the political in the work underscores the figures’ own amnesia, and hence the tendency in German history to overwrite the horrors of the Third Reich.6 The painting divided Canadian art critics in the early 1990s as to whether or not the work glorified fascism, with some frustrated by its “ambivalent messages” and lack of “clarity of intent,”7 while others celebrated its challenge to interpretive singularity. It should be noted, however, that Lukacs attempted to make his intentions clear in a 1992 interview in which he stated that the only thing he would never paint is “something that 6 This tendency is exemplified by the Historikerstreit (history debate) that began in Germany in 1986 when conservative historian Ernst Nolte published an article entitled “The Past Won’t Go Away” in which he argued that Hitler was responding to a comprehensible fear of Bolshevism in exterminating Jews, and that Germans should not bear guilt for the Holocaust. Jürgen Habermas responded with an article that condemned Nolte’s “grossly apologetic tendencies” and defended the necessity of German accountability during the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (process of coming to terms with the past). Notably, Lukacs arrived in Berlin the same year as the Historikerstreit began. See Scott Watson’s article “Attila Lukacs’s Skinheads: Ciphers of Cold War Twilight” (2010) for an elongated discussion on Lukacs and the Historikerstreit. 7 Ann Rosenberg, “Artists Cook up Dishes of Eros,” The Vancouver Sun, October 10, 1992, 92. 10 would outright glorify fascism. I know my work deals with elements of fascism but I think if anyone with a two-bit mind looks at the work, he would see that it’s more of a comment against it.”8 According to Ferdinand de Saussure, “The entire mechanism of language,” and thus the very system that gives birth to thought, “is based on oppositions.”9 “When isolated, neither Nacht nor Nachte is anything,” because it is only in relation to day that night coheres, and “thus everything is opposition.”10 This deference of a sign’s meaning to its obverse, the dependence a word has on its opposite to retain significance, provides one means of interpreting Amorous Meeting. Lukacs seems to say, indeed as he does throughout his oeuvre, that opposition strangely demands its opponent in order to solidify, and that any opposition is thus doomed to 8 Attila Richard Lukacs, “Regendering the Garden: The Very Rich Painting of Attila Richard Lukacs,” interview by Robert Enright, Border Crossings (Summer 1992), 25. 9 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 121. 10 Ibid, 122. Figure 2: Attila Richard Lukacs, East/West, 1991, Oil and mixed media on canvas. 113.5 x 85.5 inches, Collection of Salah J. Bachir. © Attila Richard Lukacs 11 interdependence on its ostensible other. Take East/West of the same year (Figure 2), for example, in which two skinheads are interlocked in a tussle. Just as Amorous Union takes its stylistic inspiration from Indian miniature painting, albeit in a monumental format, East/West conjures the Indic genre in its landscape and in the unnaturalistic coloration of its figures, one painted red and one white, that reference the rival communist and neo-Nazi skinhead factions in Berlin. In a classic instance of Lukacs’s entangling of opposition, the artist depicts the red skinhead wearing white boots, while the white wears red, each essentially containing elements of his enemy. The title East/West thus at once refers to these opposing gangs, a city and nation divided, and further to the general division of global culture into ‘eastern’ and ‘western.’ The work, however, denies any absolute truth to these binaries and hierarchies, and rather works to undercut their naturalization. In Amorous Meeting, the swastika depicted in fact hails from Indic religions; its orientation notably distinct from the symbol of National Socialism. Here, Lukacs underscores how a symbol endowed with divine meaning was appropriated as an emblem of mechanized genocide. One of the central ambiguities of the piece can be located in the handprint directly to the right of the rising sun. Is it the imprint of the Nazi salute, made by the righthand figure? Or is it the index of the artist himself, who places himself into this convoluted scenography? Perhaps this ambiguity, coupled with the presence of a swastika at a moment of fragile reunification, is what led lead curator Jan Hoet to remove the work from documenta IX after it was selected by assisting curator Pier Luigi Tazzi.11 Dualities and contradictions form the very core of Lukacs’s body of work, which does not lend itself easily to clean-cut interpretation. In so doing, Lukacs 11 Scott Watson, “Attila Richard Lukacs’s Skinheads: Ciphers of Cold War Twilight,” in Polaroids: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris, ed. Catherine Crowston and Reid Shier (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), 148. 12 both denies viewers access to definitive authorial intention and, fundamentally, engages in the deconstruction of binary oppositions such as East and West, butch and queen, and gay and straight. Lukacs’s work should be understood in relation to Derridean deconstruction and therefore to the dominant theoretical language of his moment, which, along with Foucault’s writings, catalyzed the birth of queer studies and influenced such seminal figures as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick.12 Centrally, deconstruction values the impossibility of a tightly knit synthesis of two warring concepts, privileging the instability of oppositionality rather than promoting Hegelian resolution. Deconstruction is a mode of thought that is seemingly ceaseless, and must be, because “the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself.”13 A textbook example of deconstruction would concern the relationship between hetero- and homosexuality, a binary in which heterosexuality positions itself as the primary component of a “violent hierarchy.” Derrida informs us that first step “to deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.”14 One would then take homosexuality to be the primary element of the binary relationship, the term that “governs the other,” and could genealogically reveal that the term “homosexual” in fact predated the coining of the word “heterosexual.”15 This inversion would in 12 Although deconstruction had been delinated by Derrida much earlier, the deconstructive turn that birthed queer studies did not come until the 1980s and 1990s following Foucault’s multivolume The History of Sexuality. Books that define this Derridean turn include Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). All of the aforementioned books have a central discursive move, which is to explore the reification of homosexual difference as a product of the “invention” of heterosexuality in the 19th century. This liberatory reading of the subject in queer theory has an obverse echo in Germany with the Historkerstreit. 13 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 42. 14 Ibid, 41. 15 Jonathan Ned Katz, “‘Homosexual' and 'Heterosexual': Questioning the Terms,” in A Queer World, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: NYUP, 1997), 177. 13 turn underscore that heterosexuality relies upon its abject other to maintain its superiority and to cohere as an identity. Secondly, deconstruction calls for the creation of new concepts that exist outside of the original binaristic formation. The term queer is in this sense a deconstructive term, one that refutes the possibility of a binaristic sexuality. As Derrida himself once asked, What if we were to reach, what if we were to approach here (for one does not arrive at this as one would at a determined location) the area of a relationship to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating? The relationship would not be a-sexual, far from it, but would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond bisexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality which come to the same thing.16 This is not to say that the painter necessarily follows Derridean deconstruction systematically, but that his work should be understood as analogous to theoretics that undermine hierarchical binary oppositions and expose their innate instability. When Derrida says that homo- and heterosexuality “come to the same thing,” he is referencing their mutual position as poles of dichotomy, as binary oppositions within a “discriminating” code of sexuality. He implies that they are both ideological constructions that delimit a range of normative sexuality, only operational in contradistinction to what they are not. We may think of the dualism of East and West in a similar manner. In Hegel’s Aesthetics, he establishes the East as the realm of “the Symbol” and therefore as “the beginning of art”; it is only “after all sorts of transitions, metamorphoses, and intermediaries” does the Symbol of the East become the West’s “genuine actuality of the Ideal as the classical form of art.”17 As Zainab Bahrani notes, it was only through the other of the East that the West was able to construct a coherent vision of the self.18 The very 16 Jacques Derrida, “Choreographies,” trans. Christie V. McDonald, in Points… : Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 108. 17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 303. 18 Zainab Bahrani, “Regarding Art and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013): 516. 14 origin of the East/West binary in European aesthetic discourse reveals the interdependence of its polarities, unsettling its naturalism—a central objective of Lukacs’s works engaged with “eastern” and “western” themes. In 1989, Lukacs witnessed the literal collapse of the East/West binary upon the fall of the Berlin Wall. The artist reports that he was “intensely occupied with [reunification] in Berlin, on a daily basis. A country had increased its size, doubled its population, but more importantly a city had done so. And there was an opening that was quite magical. And there was a lot of fear that it could go terribly wrong.”19 Tellingly, upon the reunion of East and West Berlin, the artist began to meld ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ styles of painting in an erotic series entitled Varieties of Love, of which Love in Union—Amorous Meeting takes part. The title of the series and its subtitles, including “Love in Waiting,” “Love in Union,” and “Love in Loss,” were found in a book on Indian miniature painting, and so were the landscapes in which he placed his Berliner skinheads. While the ‘eastern’ element came in the form of what the artist calls “great plains of abstraction,”20 vibrant coloration, and a lack of linear perspective, the ‘western’ element remained through classical figuration, the anarchic figure of the skinhead, and the monumental scale of the canvases. Take Love in Waiting, Stretching the Body of 1991 (Figure 3) wherein three skinheads are intermingled in an Edenic environment, cohabitating with and mirroring the poses of kittens and rabbits. The image overturns the perception of skinheads as rugged and violent, drawing an analogy to the animals as symbols of innocence. Lukacs cites the scene from an Indian miniature painting of Krishna supporting Mount Govardhan by Ustad Sahibdin of circa 1690 (Figure 4). 19 Lukacs, interview with author. 20 Ibid. 15 The cloudlike form of orange and yellow hues in Stretching the Body was originally a depiction of Mount Govardhan, a sacred Hindu site in Uttar Pradesh, India. In Lukacs’s amalgamation of ‘East’ and ‘West’, Mount Govardhan and the garden of Eden intersect in an entirely homosexual universe—with no possibilities of heterosexuality. Here, Lukacs is engaged in the first phase of deconstruction, which is to replace heterosexuality with homosexuality as the default, dominant social position. Lukacs’s citation of formal elements and scenes in the South Asian canon, setting the scene for visions of queer futures and utopias, destabilizes the aesthetic antagonism of East and West—fundamentally, the paintings are neither ‘eastern’ nor ‘western.’ In this sense, the Figure 3: Attila Richard Lukacs, Love in Waiting, Stretching the Body, 1991, Oil and enamel on linen, 200 x 365 cm. Private Collection. © Attila Richard Lukacs Figure 4: Ustad Sahibdin, Painting, c. 1690, Gouache on paper, 29.7 x 38 cm. Collection of the British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum 16 series operates as cultural citation more than as cultural appropriation, for the artist explicitly acknowledges that the origins of the style are not his own, and employs it in an attempt to deconstruct our aleatory division of the world. Upon the fall of the Wall, eastern German hustlers suddenly flooded the streets of West Berlin, and Lukacs, in fascination, often hired them and utilized their figures for his art historical paintings. The intermingling of oppositions became quite literal for the artist, as east and west German and gay and straight hustlers performed the same acts and posed for the same nude photographs for the artist. The Varieties of Love works can be understood as testimonies to the artist’s lived experience in Berlin and as allegories of the historical events to which Lukacs was witness. Yet they are also metaphysical theses that negate the possibility of construing opposition in any singular term, as all terms necessitate their opponent. Lukacs seems to propose that we are always-already invested in both sides of a binary opposition, and thus opposition is necessarily killed at its birth. * * * Figure 5: Attila Richard Lukacs, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1991, Oil, enamel and tar on canvas, 389.8 x 608.8 cm, Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Gift of A. Bernard Coady, Donald R. Seaman, and Daryl K. Seaman, Calgary, 2000. © Attila Richard Lukacs D 17 Lukacs’s painterly theses resonate with Mieke Bal’s proposition in Quoting Caravaggio (1999) that contemporary works of art “can be construed as theoretical objects that ‘theorize’ cultural history.”21 Indeed, Caravaggio was the singularly most influential source on Lukacs’s work throughout his ten year tenure in Berlin from 1986 to 1996. Take, for instance, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow of 1991 (Figure 5) from Lukacs’s E-Werk series that chronicles heterotopic scenes of German reconstruction, performed by hyper-eroticized skinheads. The work’s monumentality and ubiquitous use of chiaroscuro to depict heat and smoke immediately foregrounds Lukacs’s quotation of the baroque, along with the translucent globe through which the painter cites Caravaggio’s fresco Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto (1597). The nudity of the figures working in an industrial forge strikes the viewer as counterintuitive, indeed dangerous. Yet Lukacs places a spotlight on the metal workers’ buttocks and musculatures, underscoring the homoerotic nature of sex-segregated spaces and manual labor. The scene is positively rife with art historical referents. The two frontal, fully-clothed figures invoke the captain and lieutenant of the guild portrayed in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, another all-male setting in which the actants each perform their various duties. The scene as a whole alludes to the art historical trope of Vulcan’s forge, which carries with it a sexual connotation, as Velázquez portrayed, in being the locale where Apollo informed the god that Mars was having an extramarital affair with his wife. The eroticized body of the rightmost metalworker, too, is borrowed from Pierre Subleyras’s painting Charon Ferrying the Shades in the Louvre, which depicts Hades’s ferryman transporting the dead to the underworld.22 These baroque and classical referents serve both to further sexualize the scene of labor and to place the 21 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. 22 Paulette Gagnon, “A Desire for Disorder,” in Attila Richard Lukacs, ed. Paulette Gagnon (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1994), 30. 18 figures into the realm of history painting. The series, E-Werk, refers literally to the infamous Berlin techno club of the same name with a distinctly queer flair that Lukacs frequented and, more indirectly, to working and the reconstruction of Germany. The series interrogates the rebuilding of the country, bizarrely performed by skinheads, the various factions of anti-bourgeois, neo-Nazis, communists and anarchists, becoming a kind of new history painting, the most “elite” form of painting enshrined by the French Academy. In This town (1990) (Figure 6) the theme of German reconstruction becomes more clearly evident as the skinhead workers are placed against a backdrop of the Altes Museum on the capital city’s Museumsinsel. In repairing the stone blocks of the museum’s plaza, piecing them back together just as the city itself had to be, the laborers attempt to restore Berlin to its pre-war state. The neoclassical architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 1830 museum further conjures the pre-WWII era and symbolizes the classical past of which Germany envisioned itself to be the inheritor. While the scaffolding and the scattered pavement in This Town are indexes of the destruction that took place during the Third Reich, the act of reconstruction seems to “cover up” Figure 6: Attila Richard Lukacs, This Town, 1990, Oil, enamel and tar on canvas, 389.8 x 608.8 cm, Collection Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Gift of Helen and Joseph Lukacs, Photo: Denis Farley © Attila Richard Lukacs D 19 that period of the past. As Lukacs simultaneously evokes various historical moments in the Berlin works, the haunting presence of Nazism lingers, seeping up from the darker depths of history. We can here identify another binary opposition which Lukacs works to undercut: that of past and present. The artist’s next massive tableau in E-Werk entitled Wild Kingdom of 1992–93 (Figure 7) epitomizes this temporal toppling. That Wild Kingdom is set upon the theatrical “stage” of history is announced by the royal blue curtain of the leftmost panel, drawn to reveal Zeus’s abduction of a mature Ganymede scaling the Brandenburg Gate. The abductee seems to resist the eagle’s grasp, as two nude figures stretching a cloth await to catch his body, while two others ignore the scene playing cards. Zeus appears again in the central panel hovering over a cadaverous Europa—the first appearance of a woman in Lukacs’s oeuvre—while Zeus himself is a mere skeletal bull. Europa holds a painter’s palette upon which ‘IMITAT’ is written in red, referencing Lukacs’s mimetic yet parodic approach to art history. From the opposing side of the canvas marches a herd of militarized donkey-men flaunting their enormous phalli—a sardonic Figure 7: Attila Richard Lukacs, Wild Kingdom, 1992-1993, Oil, enamel and tar on canvas, 389.8 x 1260 cm, Collection of Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary, Private Gift. © Attila Richard Lukacs 20 depiction of neo-Nazi skinheads—making their way to the exposed body of Europa and their bull leader. The red flags carried by all-white figures in the background recall the National Socialist banners which once hung from the iconic gate. Indeed, Lukacs seems to employ the figure of Zeus as Hitler’s doppelgänger, “stealing” the bodies of healthy young men and greedily eyeing the body of an already lifeless Europe. Although Lukacs’s carefully constructed mise-en-scène is flooded with figures of western art history and the classical past, they are patently placed within the painter’s present moment. The skinheads, here just asses and cocks, are figured as the continuation of a Nazi ideal. Their all-black accoutrements and aggressively erect phalli connote the problematic seductiveness of fascist aesthetics and their ubiquity in contemporary gay culture which Susan Sontag outlines in her essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): SS uniforms are the units of a particularly powerful and widespread sexual fantasy. Why the SS? Because the SS was the ideal incarnation of fascism’s overt assertion of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior. It was in the SS that this assertion seemed most complete… because they dramatized it by linking themselves to certain aesthetic standards… Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. ‘Fascism is theater,’ as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality.23 Lukacs, the artist and uniform fetishist, stated himself in a recent interview that “no one did a uniform better than the Germans.”24 And in 1992, speaking of skinheads, he seems to echo Sontag’s statements: You’d be pretty hard set to find a fag who wouldn’t drop to his knees for some skinhead. First of all, not all skinheads are fascist. But they’re the same people who would beat the living shit out of fags on the subway. It’s that fascination with violence and power and evil.25 23 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1980), 99-103. 24 Lukacs, interview with author. 25 Lukacs, interview by Robert Enright. 21 Noting the hypocrisy of the fascist-inspired gay aesthetics—“Why has Nazi Germany, which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic? How could a regime which persecuted homosexuals become a gay turn-on?”—Sontag explains that sex played a key role in Nazi tactics, as Hitler regarded leadership as “rape” of the masses. 26 In Wild Kingdom, it does not then appear coincidental that Lukacs presents Ganymede and Europa just before they are to be raped by Zeus. Ultimately, Wild Kingdom asserts Hitler’s haunting presence over Germany’s reconstructive period and evokes the real dangers of recursive history which, according to the artist, are not remnants of some far away past but urgent threats of the present. Lukacs’s history paintings present, rather than a dualism of past and present, the critical interplay of past, present, and future. In the subsequent canvas Glamour Crew of 1993 (Figure 8), Lukacs depicts his intimate friends, the E-Werk nightclub’s owners and operators. The bleak scene of butchered flesh unmistakably evokes the Holocaust and sites of extermination. The German word Achte is written in bold Nazi Fraktur-like font overlooking the slaughterhouse, which can be loosely translated to pay attention. The club goers are joined by various art historical remnants: the leftmost pairing is flanked by the Spanish Romani dancer of John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo (1882) and the piece of meat found in both Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655) and Chaïm Soutine’s Carcass of Beef (1926) (the latter artist a Jew who fled Nazi persecution in France). Here, Sargent’s dancer no longer passionately performs but rather points in horror to the events she witnesses in the slaughterhouse. The artist seems to appeal to various art historical citations to plead that his audience “pay attention” to the pressing dangers of overwriting the past. 26 Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, 102. 22 Figure 9: Attila Richard Lukacs, Everybody Wants the Same Thing, 1993, Oil, enamel and tar on canvas, 389.8 x 608.8 cm, Collection of Martha Sturdy. © Attila Richard Lukacs Figure 8: Attila Richard Lukacs, Glamour Crew, 1993, Oil, enamel and tar on canvas, 389.8 x 608.8 cm, Collection of the Artist. © Attila Richard Lukacs 23 The series ends in the streets of early 1990s Berlin with Everybody Wants the Same Thing (1993) (Figure 9). A lone figure sits in the windowsill of a dilapidated building gazing towards the viewer, while a blue-skinned young man lying on the ground injects himself intravenously, his teeth gripping a fastened arm band to better reveal his veins. The figures seem to serve as a form of self-portraiture, although they purportedly represent the artist’s lover and one of his friends. Lukacs was concurrently battling addiction, and he would continue to for another decade. Among the graffitied walls of the building, Zeus (Hitler) appears yet again, his name written onto the wall. It is a raw image of the post-war neoliberal landscape, and the end of the artist’s series that seems to ask, “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” The heterotopic spaces of E-Werk envision 1990s Berlin as a battlefield of historical memory—a city at pains to reverse the irreversible residue of the past, its citizens caught in the struggle. Figure 10: Attila Richard Lukacs, In My Father’s House (detail), 1989, Oil on canvas, 398.8 x 640 cm, Collection of Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Purchased with funds from The Canada Council for the Arts (Acquisition Assistance Programme), The Senator Richard Hatfield Memorial Fund and anonymous donors © Attila Richard Lukacs 24 Although Lukacs had already achieved international attention, E-Werk received particular critical acclaim: “The E-Werk series establishes painter Attila Richard Lukacs as one of the most important artists Canada has produced in the past 50 years,” one headline announced.27 Working at the radical edge of representational politics, art history and its enshrined basin of subject matter effectively bolstered Lukacs’s entry into the collections and exhibition halls of Canada’s elite artistic institutions. For the artist, art historical appropriation was an expressly political tactic. In his words, it made the material more digestible, allowing him to “[put] a lot of asses in peoples’ faces,” 28 and hence foreground queer men’s sexuality on the walls of national artistic institutions at the height of Reagan-Thatcherism and the AIDS crisis, another genocidal historical moment. The first work produced for E-Werk for example, In My Father’s House of 1989 (Figure 10), features life-sized construction workers front and center bending over to reveal their asses to the viewer, just two years after Leo Bersani first published “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Yet, next to their buttocks, Lukacs tellingly inserts a monochromatic white figure that recalls the body of Christ in the pietà. The figure reminds the viewer that the painting remains in the realm of art and not pornography, a boundary which Lukacs continuously blurs, while the artist succeeds in foregrounding the most repressed part of male anatomy and the most common site of HIV transmission for gay men, Bersani’s “grave,” at a time of international neglect of the AIDS crisis. Passed through the art historical sieve of respectability and upheld by the sacralization of history painting, it seems gay sex finally had a place on the wall of museums. 27 “Grace and Grit: The E-Werk Series Establishes Painter Attila Richard Lukacs as One of the Most Important Artists Canada Has Produced in the Past 50 Years,” The Vancouver Sun, June 8 1996. 28 Lukacs, interview with author. 25 According to the artist, the successful execution of his radically art historical strategy required a criminal mindset: “I always say, being an artist and a criminal is pretty well the same thing. Because you have to have the same genius.”29 Lukacs was widely known was Canada’s “bad boy artist” in the 80s and the 90s, a moniker printed throughout national media. One magazine printed a conversation with his mother when the painter was still in art school in which he boasted that he was “going to be a famous painter”: “Ricky,” she replied, “I don’t know if you’re going to be a famous painter or spend the rest of your life in jail.”30 The artist was in fact commonly arrested during his youth, and the same magazine ensures to draw a parallel to Caravaggio: Caravaggio was jailed several times for fighting, for immorality… He killed a man, stabbing him in the groin after a dispute on the tennis court, and was himself disfigured in a tavern brawl. He picked up street hustlers and used them as models for his devotional paintings. Like Caravaggio, Lukacs courted controversy, had run-ins with the law, and sometimes picked up his own models at the train station…31 29 Ibid. 30 Bruce Headlam, “Attila Up Against the Wall,” Saturday Night, December 1993, 56. 31 Ibid. Figure 11: Attila Richard Lukacs, Junge Spartaner Fordern Knaben zum Kampf Heraus, 1988, Oil, enamel and tar on canvas, 275 x 662.5 cm, Collection Museum London, Purchased with funds from the Volunteer Committee, 1989 © Attila Richard Lukacs 26 The evocation of Caravaggesque mythology was not merely sensational; the artist himself reports that, in mirroring Caravaggio’s work, he would envision his “soul as the reincarnation” of the Baroque painter, of “his lifestyle and his knack for getting into a fight.”32 Junge Spartaner Fordern Knaben zum Kampf Heraus (The Young Spartans Challenge the Boys to Fight) of 1988 (Figure 11), Lukacs’s most famous canvas of the 1980s, clearly demonstrates the artist’s explicit quotation of Caravaggio. While the rightmost group mimics the sitters of Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew of 1599–1600, the leftmost gang is taken directly from Degas’s Young Spartans Exercising of 1860, and the artist employs asphalt to achieve the tenebrist, back alley-like lighting he observed in The Calling. The original positionings of both groups are inverted in Lukacs’s version and, à la Lukacs, the female figures in Degas’s scene are removed in the construction of a homosocial imaginary. The young communist Spartan skinheads, raising their hammer and sickle against a stark red background rife with symbols of masculine authority, challenge their rivals to a fight, but they do not seem keen to engage. The group from The Calling, wearing jockstraps over their faces (on one ‘FAG’ is written; Figure 12), remains seated, echoing the word written on the wall behind them—‘PEACE.’ The painting is not only materially divided in the wall itself, but it further embodies a metaphysical division—the two competing souls of a nation. The scene, a confrontation between the authoritative and anti-authoritative 32 Lukacs, interview with author. Figure 12: Attila Richard Lukacs, Junge Spartaner Fordern Knaben zum Kampf Heraus [Detail], 1988 27 currents in German history at this moment, takes place just a year before the fall of the wall when communism was arguably seen to be failing in the East. The Degas group’s hammer and sickle have been taken apart, and Lukacs seems to ask, almost prophetically, which track will Germany take? In Lukacs’s art history, as has been widely noted, skinheads and thugs take the place of saints and angels. His romance with criminality indubitably evokes Genet, as the author opens The Thief’s Journal: Convicts’ garb is striped pink and white. Though it was at my heart’s bidding that I chose the universe wherein I delight, I at least have the power of finding therein the many meanings I wish to find: there is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.33 Genet here touches upon one of the central tenets of a queer ethos: the fundamental refusal to reify naturalized binary oppositions. Just as Saussure informs us of the interdependence of opposing terms, Genet suggests that this interdependence limns the “same nature”—thuggish brutality and floral fragility evoke an analogous affect. Thus, Lukacs’s skinheads are to saints as Genet’s felons are to flowers. Tellingly, Sartre called The Thief’s Journal the Dichtung und Wahrheit of homosexuality.34 Of course, homosexuality has long been associated with criminality, as even before the term ‘homosexual’ was coined in 1869, sodomy and buggery laws forced same-sex acts into hiding. If, as Lukacs suggests, artistry and criminality are twins, Genet demonstrates that homosexuality completes the triplet. Following Genet, Rauschenberg also drew a parallel of the artist and the criminal: Robert Rauschenberg: Also, being a good artist is like committing the perfect crime—you don't get caught. 33 Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 2018), 1. 34The “poetry and truth” of homosexuality. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Foreword,” The Thief’s Journal, xii. 28 William Seitz: I'm talking about crimes you get caught for. Rauschenberg: That's not art.35 As Jonathan D. Katz reminds us, Rauschenberg’s relationship with Jasper Johns was then a literal crime, and thus figuring it within his work required a sort of criminal stealth: My point is that assemblage is the perfect medium for committing the perfect crime, the one where you do not get caught—caught in authoriality, intentionality, or worse still, self-revelation, not least when the subject in question includes desires actively persecuted under conventional social codes.36 Rauschenberg’s assemblages evoked a plurality of meanings, Katz explains, yet the works were often interwoven with queer ciphers only accessible to a narrowly delimited audience. Thus while Rauschenberg’s method exemplifies the “coding” approach in queer art history, Lukacs’s can be said to take the obverse. Arriving at a much different socio-historical moment, Lukacs’s crime had a much different objective. Rather than encoding and insinuation, Lukacs pushed the very limits of explicit queer representation. To this end, Lukacs relied on the “conservative” technique of monumental figurative painting to evoke the “great masters” of the past, whose presence absolved the work of its homosexual sins. Yet, Lukacs’s scheme was not simply to invade national institutions with homosexual scenes. His strategy was much too deconstructive to be summarized as mere identity politics. At the very core of Lukacs’s practice is the breakdown of binaristic logic and the evasion of positionality—“fascism is sexy” and “fascism is terrible” operate in tandem. Lukacs’s antibinaristic epistemology must be understood in relation to a broader queer objective to undermine the regime of binaristic thinking under which divergent genders and sexualities are 35 This excerpt hails from an unpublished transcript of the symposium on assemblage following the Art of Assemblage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 curated by William Seitz. See Jonathan D. Katz, “‘Committing the Perfect Crime’: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 45. 36 Ibid. 29 named and punished. As Foucault famously argues in his chapter “The Perverse Implantation,” the late 19th century witnessed the creation of the homosexual as a separate “species” that was discursively constituted. As sexuality became essentially binaristic, subjects became totalized by their novel sexualities: “Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle.”37 The antibinaristic mode shared by Lukacs and Genet is hence always-already subversive insofar that it thwarts the very foundation of the regulatory regime that creates the abject homosexual through a polarized discourse of sexuality. It is in this sense that “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes,” as Judith Butler writes following Foucault, because they can serve to reinforce the normative matrix.38 Butler cautions us that “the mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes,” as heterosexuality, for instance, coheres only in contradistinction to the perversely implanted homosexual.39 Lukacs generally avoids describing his art as “homosexual” or the subject matter as “homoerotic”—he dismisses the words as a “Victorian invention” that we should “get away from” in a 1991 interview.40 Lukacs seems to recognize, as Butler did, that paradoxically, the very terms of our liberation reinscribe the terms of our oppression—that the ontological division of sexuality into two, mutually exclusive halves reinscribes the regulations 37 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 43. 38 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 308. 39 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), xxvi. 40 Lukacs, “Adrienne Clarkson Presents.” 30 that effectively repress and delimit sexuality into two separate spheres. Lukacs’s anti-positionality may be better summed up as anti-oppositionality—indeed, his work destabilizes the very notion of oppositionality. It seems hardly coincidental that Lukacs’s work was birthed at virtually the same moment as queer studies, in the wake of Derrida, Foucault, and deconstruction. After all, the continous evasion of a binaristic epistemology, the fundamental unsettling of binary oppositions, forms the very core of Lukacs’s “perfect crime.” 31 Chapter 2: History and Imitation Lukacs’s treatment of masculinity is paradigmatic of his defiance of oppositional modes of thought. Like the far-right ideologies he confronts, Lukacs’s work suggests that heterosexual masculinity possesses its own fascistic currents and a propensity for the totalitarian control of individuals. Masculinity often becomes a metaphor for fascism. In That’s it (2000) (Figure 13), for instance, a group of nude and nearly nude skinheads are in the act of beating a man to death. The leftmost figures seem to participate in the act almost blindly, as mere followers of those leading the carnage. The scene is disturbing and unsettling, especially at heroic scale. The focal point of the painting, however, is not the bloodied body of the victim but the rounded buttocks of a muscled skinhead holding a baseball bat above his head, arms flexed and ready to swing. The tenebrism of the scene illuminates his body such that it emanates an erotic glow, and there is a handprint on his bare derrière—perhaps an index of the artist’s own hand. The other tattooed Figure 13: Attila Richard Lukacs, That’s It, 2000, Oil and tar on canvas, 376 x 227 cm, Collection Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Anonymous gift. Photo: Denis Farley © Attila Richard Lukacs 32 skinheads in jockstraps join their violent protagonist with hammers and bats, seemingly in enjoyment. Lukacs underscores the manner in which masculinity conditions its subjects to achieve total dominance over another’s body, at times to the furthest extremes. The work is simultaneously sexy and terrible, intended to discomfort. My point is that Lukacs’s work often lies in the space between glorification and condemnation, between authenticity and dissimulation. It would be shortsighted to argue that the politics at work here is merely that of “unfettered masculinism— seductive, raw, and terrible; appropriative, dangerous, and antireproductive,” as Jack Halberstam put it.41 Halberstam seems to fall victim to the surface of the work, neglecting its gendered self-awareness, and the artist’s own conscious and fraught relationship to “unfettered masculinity,” certainly to its eroticism, but also to its problematic propensity for violence, groupthink, and war. By virtue of their performative nature, Lukacs’s masculinist scenes implicitly allude to what these men are not, or what they purport not to be. The disfigured body of the victim is as central to the construction of masculinity in the image as the nude brawny figure is. He is the object of the protagonists’ performance of dominance, the vanquished other who propels the murderers’ masculine status. “Gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed,” writes Butler in Gender Trouble.42 The subject does not preexist the deed because “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself,” Butler 41 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 167. 42 Butler, Gender Trouble, 33. 33 elaborates.43 Despite its undeniable eroticism, Lukacs’s work self-consciously and recognizably foregrounds the imitative nature of masculinity that is bound to “an endless repetition of itself.”44 That’s it also constitutes, of course, an imitation of Caravaggio’s characteristic technique of framing subjects as emerging from the darkness and foregrounding them in illumination, as Lukacs blotches patches of asphaltum to evoke light streaming onto the figures. Imitation is thus doubly operative in the work, as both the emulation of an art historical master and the underlying impetus of the skinheads’ behavior. Centrally, both forms of imitation reference a sort of canonical basin of acknowledged and celebrated formations. As Derrida poses, Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a ‘citation’?45 Derrida’s notion of the “iterable model” bolstered Butler’s theory of performativity and gender imitation, as it demonstrated that the performative is “not the function of an originating will,” but that it is “always derivative.”46 In a similar vein, the art historical canon serves as a type of iterable model which is readily identifiable, endowing works with art historical citations an elevated status. The masculine and the art historical canons do not differ in that they both are based upon an iconographic and performative set of conditions which offer a degree of sanction to their subjects. In One and many stretched bei Tyler (Figure 14) (1992) Lukacs similarly employs chiaroscuro, the technique of starkly contrasting light and dark that was a hallmark of 43 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 313. 44 Ibid. 45 Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in Limited, Inc., Gerald Graff, ed.; tr. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 18. 46 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 13. 34 Caravaggio’s work, to frame the subjects as emerging from darkness onto the “stage” of the canvas. For Lukacs, this tenebrist style presented an ideal manner to display fetishistic and sadomasochistic realms which classically take place in dark environments and involve a staging of sexuality—a form of “sexual theater,” as Sontag put it. Indeed, in One and many stretched bei Tyler, three nude skinheads involved in a fecal ritual are framed by the circular rim of a spotlight. The darkness from which they emerge appears to seep onto their bodies, in the form of shit. With none of the figures’ faces in view, they remain shrouded in anonymity, the leftmost participant even effaced by feces. For Lukacs, tenebrism offered the perfect model to evoke the ostensibly dark and “sinful” nature of gay fetishism and its theatricality. In utilizing paint as a metaphor for flesh, and thence shit, Lukacs undercuts the classical opposition of the real and the representational in painting. Paint no longer imitates flesh but becomes flesh; Lukacs uses paint “like a bodily substance,” Scott Watson noted in 1985.47 47 Scott Watson, Young Romantics (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1985), 4. Figure 14: Attila Richard Lukacs, One and many stretched bei Tyler, 1992, Oil on canvas, 211 x 211 cm, Private collection. © Attila Richard Lukacs 35 Caravaggio similarly unsettled the distinction between the pictorial and the real in theatricalizing the relationship between light and dark, between foreground and background, abandoning the more idealized perspectival spaces of the Renaissance. In the Berlin Victorious Cupid (1601–1602), for example, the dark-winged god is illuminated against a shroud of tenebra. The dirt visible underneath Cupid’s toenails is striking, suggesting Caravaggio’s abandonment of idealism through the elision of the represented and the real. The inherent eroticism in works like Cupid is what drew Lukacs to Caravaggio in the first place. Leo Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit categorized Cupid as one of those paintings “in which we read an intention to stimulate our desire, not only to contemplate the body but to approach it, to touch it, to enter into or to imagine some form of intimate physical contact with it...it seems plausible to say that Caravaggio has painted a series of sexual come-ons.”48 Whether or not Caravaggio was himself “homosexual” has been the object of fierce debate since the publishing of Donald Posner’s 1971 article “Caravaggio’s Homoerotic Early Works” in which he claimed, “The nature of Caravaggio’s sexual tastes can hardly be questioned… the pictures themselves, with their fleshy, full-lipped, languorous young boys, assure us that Caravaggio’s homosexual inclinations existed.”49 On the contrary, Creighton Gilbert dedicated several lengthy chapters in his book Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (1995) to vehemently defending the Baroque artist’s heterosexuality, arguing that “signs of Caravaggio’s heterosexuality” are better evidenced than signs of his homosexuality. Helen Langdon, too, begins her canonical biography Caravaggio: A Life (1998) by noting that “many powerful voices have been raised against” the artist’s possible homosexuality. She establishes 48 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 3. 49 Donald Posner, “Caravaggio’s Homoerotic Early Works,” Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 301-324. 36 her accord with Gilbert, with his “true forensic power,” that “the historical evidence for Caravaggio’s homosexuality is extremely flimsy.”50 Langdon is compelled to doubly highlight the dominance of the dissenting, heterosexual-championing voices of the debate. This “homo or hetero” debate is, of course, borderline ludicrous. By the mid 1990s, abundant scholarship had well documented the invention of hetero- and homosexuality in the late 19th century, centuries after Caravaggio’s lifetime: the concept of an essentializing, binaristic sexual identity was not discursively operative during the Italian Baroque. Lukacs was never interested in the so-called sexual identity of Caravaggio and merely took the pictures at face value, a technique Leo Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit championed through phenomenology and psychoanalysis in Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998). The book centers the gaze as the primary mode of analysis in a close dissection of “the act of looking,” an act that implicates the painter, his patrons, his subjects, and further, any given spectator. For the authors, the palpable eroticism of Cupid’s full frontal, spreadeagle pose, his groin compositionally the focal point of the work, provides sufficient evidence for the work’s sexual nature. The pose alone is indeed provocative, but his obtrusive stare and grin even more so. His expression renders him the active party in the subject-spectator relationship, placing us in the passive position of his gaze. “Like all painting, Caravaggio’s work is about forms of connectedness in space,” Bersani and Dutoit write. Relationality is posed as the psychic interlocutor within and how we interact with Caravaggio’s art: To adopt a Heideggerian inflection, we might say that being “shines” in art. In Caravaggio, this shining is literally rendered by that peculiar light that seems not to be projected on bodies from some locatable external source, but rather originates within the bodies themselves. The light emanating from Caravaggio’s figures is the sign of their transformation from merely historical persons to ontological cartographers: Caravaggio re-presents them—which means here that he presents them for the first time—as mapping 50 Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 6. 37 modes of being. Caravaggio’s paint is the metaphysical X ray that compels us to see particular histories and particular myths as instituting relationalities.51 In their object-subject chiasmus, Bersani and Dutoit argue that Caravaggio’s subjects constitute the centripetal points of the webs of relationality that emanate from the paintings, suggesting that the paintings themselves inaugurate an erotic intersection of bodies. The central figure in Lukacs’s Licky of 1990 (Figure 15) is a clear citation of Cupid’s pose. The artist was very much self-conscious of his imitative yet transformative relationship to art history, as he put it in a 1991 interview with former Governor General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson: 51 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets, 42. Figure 15: Attila Richard Lukacs, Licky, 1990, Oil on canvas, 86 x 70 in, Private collection. © Attila Richard Lukacs 38 Lukacs: The way I use [art history] is more like a fast food consumption art history. Actually, I can’t say it’s much different from the way Manet used art history, or Cézanne. They also went ripping through art history, and said well I need these figures for that background.” Clarkson: You not only consumed it, Attila, you digested it. Lukacs: “And spit it out.52 While the excerpt is a classic instance of Lukacs’s sarcasm in interviews, Clarkson rightly points out that Lukacs’s historical citations are often intentional and thought-provoking, even spat up. Licky is the embodiment of Lukacs’s art historical “regurgitation” and thus transformation, figuring a skinhead receiving bootlicking as Caravaggesque subject matter. Just as Lukacs mimics the pose of Caravaggio’s Cupid, Caravaggio derived the figure for Cupid from his namesake Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco—entering Lukacs into a mimetic lineage dating back to the 16th century. 52 Lukacs, “Adrienne Clarkson Presents.” Figure 16: Attila Richard Lukacs, Die Erfindung der Malerei, nach Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1996-1998, Private Collection. © Attila Richard Lukacs 39 In Die Erfindung der Malerei, nach Karl Friedrich Schinkel (The Invention of Painting, After Karl Friedrich Schinkel) (1996-98) (Figure 16), Lukacs depicts the ancient myth of the invention of painting as imitation. Pliny recounts the tale in his Natural History: Butades, a potter of Sicyon, was the first who invented, at Corinth, the art of modelling portraits in the earth which he used in his trade. It was through his daughter that he made the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, her father filled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of pottery.53 According to the myth, Butades’s daughter invented drawing by tracing the shadow of her lovers profile so that she could retain a momento of his presence; the story harks back to the Platonic view of art as fundamentally mimetic in nature, as the imitation of life. Schinkel’s version, Erfindung der Zeichenkunst (The Invention of Drawing) (Figure 17), is just one example of the myth portrayed at a time of its peak popularity. Lukacs evokes the composition of Schinkel’s image, but incorporates a more stylized landscape, and further, imbeds phallic and self- 53 The Elder Pliny, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume VI (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), 284, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62704/pg62704-images.html. Figure 17: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Erfindung der Zeichenkunst, 1830, Watercolor on paper, 26 x 29 cm. Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal, Photo: Medienzentrum Wuppertal 40 referential elements. For Lukacs is never obedient to imitation; he is invested far more in transformation than imitation, more in transgression than tribute. In Erfindung der Malerei, the monkeys are personified. While one displays equal interest in the discovery of painting as his human counterparts, the other’s collar and chains imply that he is a metaphorical depiction of an S/M slave. Lukacs was an avid practitioner of BDSM, and frequently took on submissive and slave roles. He came to rely on mammalian, and particularly simian, metaphors to denote the very undoing of the binary opposition of human and animal that occurs during S/M and, more generally, gay sex. Monkeys also gave form to his imitative vision of masculinity. They notoriously mimic human behaviors, yet remain unaware of their social significance. One primate in He Liked America (1989) (Figure 18), for example, holds out a coffee mug to collect the urine of the one who pisses into it, seemingly to then drink it. Lukacs’s Figure 18: Attila Richard Lukacs, He Liked America, 1989, Oil, tar, and mixed media on canvas, 320 x 160.5 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery. © Attila Richard Lukacs 41 monkeys are unfettered, humorous, indecent, and licentious. They became the artist’s preferred avatar, and the perfect metaphors for the breakdown of repressive restraints that encapsulates the ethos of S/M. In Erfindung der Malerei, the leftmost simian’s phallus is notably erect, in a reddish tint shared by his buttocks. Given his collar on which ‘SLAVE’ is written, we can take that his buttocks are reddened from impact rather than from their natural state. The rock formation on which the nude boy paints is in fact a mound of phalli—the penis figured as the original ‘canvas.’ Lukacs pictures the very nature of his artistic practice which is invested equally in eroticism and mimesis—in short, erotic mimesis. The artist maintains that if “[sexual] energy isn’t there the painting fails. It becomes academic.”54 Lukacs’s mimetic practice relied on his Polaroid studies which provided lasting, recyclable images of models in hundreds of poses and costumes. “Taking the Polaroids was always a very sexual experience,” he recalls. The artist maintains that the libidinal desire for his photographic subjects “has to carry through the 54 Lukacs, interview with author. Figure 19: Attila Richard Lukacs, Alex, Berlin,1990, Polaroids, Collection of the artist. © Attila Richard Lukacs 42 Polaroids into the painting” in order for a work to succeed. Cathexis “has to carry the painting.”55 Consider the Polaroids utilized for the figures In My Father’s House (Figure 19) featuring Lukacs’s favored, and reportedly straight, model, Alex. The images are pure flesh, the pure objectification of the masculine form; the photographer’s desire for the classicized subject is palpable. Lukacs’s canvases thus present weak sublimations of the erotic relationship between artist and model. The two submissive figures in Licky, one monkey and one skinhead, are depicted akin as bootlickers serving their dominant partner. In the work the marginal skinhead and BDSM subcultures intersect at the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of becoming-animal. As one Artforum critic remarked in 1989, “The dividing lines between human and animal are blurred; monkey and man become interchangeable.”56 Centrally, however, Deleuze and Guattari insist that becoming-animal is not the imitation of an animal—becomings-animal “are perfectly real…what is real is the becoming itself.”57 They specify that “sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human.”58 The submitting skinhead-monkeys must then involve both becoming-woman and becoming-animal. Take Paul B. Preciado’s diagram “Straight Somatic Fictions” (Figure 20) for example, which provides an illustration depicting the age-old heterosexual ideology of embodied male subjectivity. The graphic features a swirling tube representing the digestive track in which the mouth and anus are the co-equal, defining sites of somatic entry and exit; yet they exist in an antithetical sociality. While the mouth serves as an 55 Ibid. 56 Noemi Smolik, “Attila Richard Lukacs Galerie Dietmar Werle,” Artforum, February 1989, 145. 57 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238. 58 Ibid, 278-279. 43 orifice of public consumption and emission, the anus is the most privatized, most repressed of all the body’s features. What both orifices share, however, is a mandated impenetrability—that the male body must be essentially closed off to the world. In Licky, the submissive subjects thus transgress the hegemonic codes of heterosexual embodied domination through becoming-woman. Both the mouth and anus are evidenced to be sites of penetrability and submission to the dominating other. In their 1975 text on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari write: “To the inhumanness of the ‘diabolical powers’, there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, ‘head over heels and away’, rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge, or judged” (my emphasis).59 Rather than submit to the “diabolical powers” of heterocracy, these skinhead-monkeys elect to become-ape. The canvas One and many stretched bei Tyler (Figure 14) manifests the reality of becoming-pig as the participants roll around in their own feces. It is not coincidental that in gay parlance, “pig” is a commonly used term that denotes the reality of becoming-pig that can occur during gay sex. Deleuze and Guattari write in Mille plateaux that “becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity.”60 For gay men in the 59 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 12. 60 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 239. Figure 20: “Straight Somatic Fictions,” in Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, New York, Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013. © Paul B. Preciado 44 period, anally-liberated orgies catalyzing becomings-pig were just one established form of embodied liberation. As one Deleuzian scholar interprets it, “Becoming-animal is always a threat to society, because it challenges established rules and produces lines of flight.”61 It also, of course, subverts the human-animal binary opposition, just as BDSM undoes the established dichotomies of erotic and nonerotic, and of pleasure and pain.62 For Lukacs, art historical imitation was always a means of transgression and subversion, manifested in antibinaristic logic. His canvases work to de-binarize the relationship between the original and copy, and the relationship between the real and the representational. Perhaps Lukacs’s imitations are, ultimately, better off being understood as transformations. 61 Alexander Greiffenstern, “Baboons, Centipedes, and Lemurs: Becoming-Animal from Queer to Ghost of Chance,” Humanities 10 (2021): 52. 62 Timo Airaksinen, “The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of BDSM,” SAGE Open (April-June 2018): 2. 45 Chapter 3: History and Flesh The body belongs to the world of things as the world is universal flesh. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty63 On March 12, 1983, the nascent organization AIDS Vancouver launched their public outreach program with an open forum at the West End Community Center in downtown Vancouver, the first such event in British Columbia. Paul Popham, the founding president of New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, attended as a panelist to help answer questions from a jam-packed crowd that was, as one AIDS Vancouver founder put it, “desperate for information.”64 The questions from the crowd reflected their anxieties and frustrations with the lack of available information: “See last year poppers gave us AIDS, this year screwing around gives us AIDS, what’s going to give us AIDS next year?”65 Eventually, Gaëtan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was long misnomered as “patient zero,” or the first person to contract and spread HIV in North America, took to the microphone. Dugas, who was living in Vancouver at the time, wanted the panelists to tell the crowd that “you shouldn’t fear someone who has AIDS, or has symptoms of AIDS.” For Dugas was then facing those very fears and prejudices in his own life, as David Wojnarowicz once wrote, “WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN'T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I'D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.”66 63 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Visible and the Invisible: The Intertwining - The Chiasm,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2004), 254. 64 Gordon Price, “AIDS Vancouver: 1983—The Forum,” filmed 2014, video, 5:16 https://youtu.be/f5wJXYxNu88. 65 Ibid, 5:32. 66 David Wojnarowicz, “Post­cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” in Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (New York: Artists Space, 1989), 7. 46 The first artwork to address AIDS is attributed to the Israeli-American artist Izhar Patkin, who during a routine visit to his dermatologist, sat in the waiting room surrounded by three or four men covered by unfamiliar blue-black lesions known as Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS).67 Patkin had heard of the rumors of a “gay cancer” infecting his community in New York, and went home to paint Unveiling of a Modern Chastity (Figure 21) (1981), a six-foot tall canvas that translates his vision of the KS lesions. The canvas emits a human quality through its height and its skin-like latex barrier through which the strange lesions break through, canvas and flesh becoming one. As Jonathan D. Katz puts it, the presciently-titled painting “was a very early recognition of how this new affliction would change gay men’s social and erotic lives, which we then understood as, if not identical, certainly closely adjoining.”68 67 Jonathan D. Katz, “A Viral Theory of Art: AIDS and the Aesthetics of Protest,” Invited lecture, University of British Columbia, February 11, 2022. 68 Ibid. Figure 21: Izhar Patkin, Unveiling of a Modern Chastity, 1981, Rubber, latex and ink on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist. 47 On June 20, 1983, three months after the launch of AIDS Vancouver and their public forum, Lukacs (then just 21 years old) opened his first solo exhibition at Vancouver’s Unit Pitt Gallery entitled Prime Cuts. The gallery was filled with painterly slabs of raw meat layered with thick impasto to depict fatty cuts and venous blues (Figures 22 and 23), paired with supermarket advertisements featuring “$pecials” that slashed prices from $7.99 to $4.99 a pound. As one critic described, the show was “a mishmash of pop exuberance and painterly expressionism,” recalling Claes Oldenburg’s Store and Meats of the 1960s. While the direct inspiration of Lukacs’s meat works is cited as the artist’s visits to Granville Island Market, as well as his admiration for Keith Haring, it is difficult not to interpret the exhibition in relation to the transformations and anxieties of the queer body politic during the early 1980s. Whether intentional or not, the fleshy tones with blue and purple hues in Lukacs’s meat works seem to evoke, as Patkin did two years sooner, KS lesions (Figure 23). At the very least, they place the Figure 22: Lukacs posing with his Prime Cuts at Unit Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, 1983. Photo courtesy of the artist. 48 question of flesh and the body in relation to capitalism at the forefront of the artist’s considerations. One critic derided Prime Cuts as derivative and “obvious” with a bashing headline reading “Tasteless Meat Art, Anyway You Slice It.”69 The writer takes note of a peculiar aspect of the exhibition, however: Some meat is cooked to a red-golden greasy iridescence with borders cut to radiate visual heat. Then—and here we come—there are the roasted people. One is divided up into a chart of human chuck, foreflank, shortribs, sirloin and brisket. The other nude roasts to a turn in red heat.70 Lukacs’s depictions of human slaughter inevitably resonate with the fears of a city soon to be afflicted with plague. The work strikes a similar tone as David Wojnarowicz’s renowned photograph Untitled (Buffalo) (1988) later would. For the work, Wojnarowicz photographed a diorama in New York’s Natural History Museum depicting buffalo falling from a cliff, drawing a parallel between queers and the animals who were slaughtered by the millions by white settlers to starve Indigenous populations in the early days of western expansion. Lukacs’s Prime Cuts show, with its prescient undertones and early themes of flesh and embodiment, can thus be 69 Lloyd Dykk, “Tasteless Meat Art, Anyway You Slice It” The Vancouver Sun, June 25, 1983. 70 Ibid. Figure 23: Attila Richard Lukacs, Meat Cuts, 1983. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Attila Richard Lukacs 49 described as an inchoate address that would ultimately morph into a case history as the AIDS crisis reached its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Governor General Adrienne Clarkson would state in 1991: [Lukacs] forces us to think about ourselves and what our consumerized, democratic liberal society has become: that despite its promise of freedom and equality, it has created a disenfranchised culture—the punished and the punishers, a world full of outsiders living on the margins of life.71 In retrospect, Prime Cuts represents the debut of Lukacs’s lifelong inquiry into flesh and its social markers. From its inception, Lukacs’s work was inflected by a Merleau-Pontian notion of a “universal flesh” that runs through all things. Indeed, forty years later, the artist maintains that his work “is always about the flesh.”72 One of Lukacs’s meat paintings literalizes Merleau-Ponty’s defining question, “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?”73 The work (Figure 24) replaces continents for slabs of meat on a world map, flesh and the world made literally one—and, of course, for sale. Though sardonic in tone, the meat works reflect Deleuze and Guattari’s hypothesis that “A fiber stretches from a human to an 71 Clarkson, “Adrienne Clarkson Presents.” 72 Lukacs, interview with author. 73 Merleau-Ponty, “The Visible and the Invisible: The Intertwining - The Chiasm,” 255. Figure 24: Attila Richard Lukacs, Meat Atlas, 1983, Collection of the artist. © Attila Richard Lukacs 50 animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber.”74 Lukacs’s trajectory from an interest in meaty-flesh to an interest in manly-flesh reflects a philosophy of ontological horizontality and the polymorphism of flesh, which is, at its core, antibinaristic. For Lukacs, the privileging of paint as a substance lies in its capacity to depict universal flesh. The centrality of flesh in Lukacs’s work remained evident in his participation in Scott Watson’s explosive Young Romantics exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1985. He was one among eight artists, along with fellow Emily Carr students Angela Grossman, Derek Root and Graham Gillmore; they were the youngest of the group, and captured the most attention (Figure 25; Lukacs is identifiable by his white tank top and black necktie). The monumental canvas Il y a quinze ans que je n’ai pas sait ça [sic] of 1985 (Figure 26) is characteristic of the themes Lukacs’s work explored in the show: embodiment, mythology, anality, eroticism, masculinity, and humor. In it, a tattooed skinhead poses as Bacchus—the Greco-Roman god of wine, a symbol of desire, and a reference to Caravaggio—behind jail bars, enticing the viewer with glossy grapes and engulfed by the grotesque entrails of a roaring, monstrous minotaur rendered in thick, three-dimensional layers of oil paint, tar, and enamel. Fluttering yellow-skinned cherubs encircle the beast and sacrificial lambs, scattering the fatty bowels around Bacchus and the jail cell, while another petite angel separated from the pack has been gorily bludgeoned. The work, at first appearing enigmatic, has some aspects possible to delineate. As Watson points out, the disembowelment seems to serve as an allegory of anality,75 and particularly gay male anality. Tellingly, the bowels gather around Bacchus, the allegory of 74 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 249. 75 Scott Watson, Young Romantics (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1985), 5. 51 desire, who beckons us to the jail cell. Lukacs seems to suggest that desire is a trap, and a potentially dangerous one at that, just as the threat of HIV increased with the number of men infected. The lambs at the feet of the minotaur, too, recall Wojnarowicz’s Buffalo at the very moment the AIDS crisis overtook the city of Vancouver. Figure 26: Attila Richard Lukacs, Il y a quinze ans que je n’ai pas sait ça, 1985, Vancouver Art Gallery. Photos by the author. © Attila Richard Lukacs Figure 25: Lukacs and the Young Romantics outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1985. Photo courtesy of the artist. 52 Lukacs’s enigmatic scenes in Young Romantics can thus be said to reflect the rhythms of a fraught generation’s psychic undercurrents. In Easter (1985) (Figure 27), for example, a nude sickly-colored skinhead crawls up a stairway with a devil’s mask attached to his buttocks, bringing to mind Norman O. Brown’s insistence on the “persistently anal character of the Devil” and Martin Luther’s equation of the demonic and the anal in Life Against Death (1959).76 The intestines from Il y a quinze ans appear here, too, lining the stairwell and leading to an inverted image of a pedestrian man inserted into the scene. The relationship of the anal and the satanic in Easter seems to respond to the dominant message encapsulated by news articles such as The Globe and Mail’s “AIDS Victims Told They Deserve Fate” (1984), wherein an Okanagan doctor unapologetically proclaimed that AIDS victims “deserve what they get”—that homosexuality and sin are met with a righteous plague.77 Lukacs characteristically responds with a defiant and ironic tone, insistent upon the erotic despite its increasing association with fear and death. Soon after Young Romantics, Lukacs entered into the international spotlight and established a significant platform. In an interview from 2016 he states, 76 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (Hanover: Wesleyan, 1959), 207. 77 “Across Canada: AIDS Victims Told They Deserve Fate,” The Globe and Mail, August 21, 1984. Figure 27: Attila Richard Lukacs, Easter, 1985. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Attila Richard Lukacs 53 I think the idea of doing gay subject matter and skinheads [was] to make people deal with it. Remember, it was when Reagan was denying AIDS. This said, ‘We exist and you have to deal with us.’ And putting it in front of people’s faces in an art historical context was a way for them to swallow it. As a painter, as an artist, our vocabulary is with our brush and our images and how we bring it to the viewer. And that was my fight. The underlying anarchist current of my work was, like, gay sex exists.78 Lukacs was hesitant to describe his work as “political” in his youth, but he recognizes its inherently political nature in retrospect. Indeed, Lukacs never overtly addressed AIDS during the 80s and 90s, although its presence hovers like a specter over his work. Lukacs has noted that as a painter he could present explicit images that people would confront and acknowledge more easily than they would with cinema or photography: “Painting is an easily acceptable art form. I could present images in a painting that if they were presented photographically they would be deemed pornographic.”79 In this sense, painting as a medium thus retained a sort of political expediency as it largely bypassed pejorative perceptions of pornography through its sublimated quality. Lukacs’s unapologetic rejection of self-censorship should be evaluated in the context of The Perfect Moment, a traveling exhibition of 1988–1989 centered on the work of the queer American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS-related complications just months after the show’s opening. Its planned iteration and subsequent cancellation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. sparked national polemics over the censorship of so-called “obscene” arts and the difference between art and pornography, a binary which Lukacs works to undercut. Lukacs’s steadfast ethical position concerning censorship was a response to 78 Kelsey Klassen, “Queer Arts Festival explores art as activism,” Vancouver is Awesome, June 15, 2016, https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/courier-archive/general-archive/queer-arts-festival-explores-art-as-activism-3034320. 79 Clarkson, “Adrienne Clarkson Presents.” 54 the greater discourse of queer representation and erasure exemplified by The Perfect Moment and, more broadly, Reagan-Thatcherism.80 Lukacs’s confrontation of the remnants of the Nazi past upon his arrival in Berlin in 1986 is colored differently in light of the AIDS crisis, a moment of queer holocaust. Let us revisit the canvas Glamour Crew (Figure 8) (1993) from E-Werk, the scene of Lukacs’s friends surrounded by art historical referents in a slaughterhouse. The German word “Achte,” or “pay attention,” paired with slaughtered oxen seems equally relevant to the history of AIDS as to National Socialism. The fearful and downtrodden figures in Glamour Crew are faced with a world wherein the youthful and the innocent are at constant risk of butchery—raw meat next in line at the slaughterhouse. Yet the majority of Lukacs’s work from the period works against the notion that sex and fear, or sex and death, should be necessarily associated. When Lukacs was selected for documenta IX, he proposed an installation of a “tea house,” which in queer British slang, denotes a public toilet where homosexual encounters take place (Figure 28). In his plans for the installation, Lukacs titles the work “Eternal Tea House OR The documenta IX Glory Hole, Boy oh Boy.” Designed after a Berlin pissoir, the interior was decorated with painted panels depicting allegories of the four seasons (Figures 29 and 30). Lukacs described the work as such: It’s based on old pissoirs in Berlin which are really beautiful structures. It’s where everyone went cruising. Sex is probably the only thing they’re ever really used for… So my Documenta work is place where people can drag someone off for a quickie in a nice atmosphere.81 The interviewer then poses, “Do you actually think that will happen?” To which Lukacs replies, 80 For information on the history of queer censorship in Canada, see Brenda Cossman, “Censor, resist, repeat: a history of censorship of gay and lesbian sexual representation in Canada,” Duke Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 21, Issue 1 (Fall 2013): 45-66. 81 Lukacs, interview by Robert Enright. 55 Figure 28: Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse, 1992, Metal, concrete, glass, gold leaf and oil paint. Collection of Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary. © Attila Richard Lukacs Figures 29 and 30: Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse [interior panels]. Collection of Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary. Photos courtesy of the artist. © Attila Richard Lukacs 56 I’m going to do it. Why not? It’s a place for sex. That’s why I built it. It’s a place for your Documenta quickie. I’d be really happy if I came in one day and saw sperm on the gold leaf…. With Documenta you have a situation which is like a cathedral for art, right?82 Lukacs suggests that the work is a rejection of the putative reverence we are expected to have for art, and for the spaces in which it is shown. Perhaps more significantly, however, Eternal Tea House takes a stance for sex at a moment where its repression threatened to overtake the accomplishments of sexual liberation. An article in Kunstforum on Lukacs’s Teahouse contextualizes to the political ground of the public toilet in Berlin, a cruising territory central to modern homosexual history: In order to combat homosexuality in Berlin there were those who wanted to raze these toilets to the ground just as they had done to the vespasiennes in Paris. And so this passion is an answer to the planned demolition… For a long time pissoirs were the only place where it was ever tolerated for homosexuals to meet each other.83 The installation thus invites viewers into an eroticized, historicized, and politicized space. Sex, art history, and politics are, after all, Lukacs’s signature trifecta. Eternal Teahouse represents their conjunction in an environment that works to transform the relationship between the artist, viewer, and exhibition space through a call to embodiment: I’d like people to be able to go in there and piss without a guard coming up and saying they can’t do that, because they can do that. I was even trying to figure out how to get the smell of piss inside.84 Lukacs appeals to classical referents, such as the figure of Mercury in Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1480) (Figure 30), in his characteristic employment of art history to political ends. Here, however, Mercury is Adam, and instead of picking fruit he flirts with the devil in serpent form. Eternal Teahouse is also, of course, about the fundamental refusal to reify binary 82 Ibid. 83 “Die Documenta als Kunstwerk,” Kunstforum International 119 (Spring 1992): 466. 84 Lukacs, interview by Robert Enright. 57 oppositions. The homosexual toilet cruising ground becomes the locale of a gold-leaf embossed series of the four seasons—in the spirit of Genet, piss and gold are given equal ontological weight. In one panel Lukacs depicts a nude communist figure wrapped in a flimsy red ribbon who holds a hammer and sickle (Figure 31). He lifts one of his arms to block his vision, blinded by political ideology. Here, Lukacs seems to critique mindless conformity to any one ideological structure or political position. In a bordering panel, an eerie skeleton peers over the shoulder of another eroticized, nude skinhead (Figure 32). Death looms over the youthful figure, as it loomed Figures 31 and 32: Attila Richard Lukacs, Eternal Teahouse [interior panels]. Collection of Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary. Photos courtesy of the artist. © Attila Richard Lukacs 58 over so many of Lukacs’s lovers, such as Martin Burgoyne, Madonna’s best friend who died of AIDS several years earlier. The skeleton thus embodies the psychic schema that came to associate eros with death. Despite this memento mori, Eternal Teahouse embodies a rejection of sexual repression, an act of resistance through an emphatically present homoeroticism. The political and ontological nature of Lukacs’s work has often been discounted by its parodic nature, which is to say, by Lukacs’s queering of genres. Yet being tongue-in-cheek does not preclude a work from political engagement (indeed, just the opposite). In Love in Separation, Rejection of the same year (Figure 33) (1992), Lukacs portrays the cycle of eros and death that resonated within the Zeitgeist of the early 90s. The monumental, scroll-like canvas depicts a sequence of violent scenes of cruising, murder, and S/M in the gardens of an Indian miniature. The names “Adam + Steve” are carved within a heart onto a tree, but Eden has collapsed. In the leftmost scene, a tiger devours its prey while a skinhead murders his erect lover, stabbing him in the neck. The body of Abel seems to lay in the center of the painting, slain by his brother Cain, while the rightmost figure is being bound and spanked. The bloody handprint on the weapon yielded by the figure on the right, too, appears to quote ACT UP’s famous graphic that stated the government had blood on its hands. Despite all of the work’s violence, we recall that in Figure 33: Attila Richard Lukacs, Love in Separation, Rejection, 1992, Oil and enamel on canvas, 200 x 584 cm, Private collection. © Attila Richard Lukacs 59 Hinduism, that which destroys creates. The destruction of Lukacs’s historical moment was inarguably devastating. Lukacs’s work, however, resists any singular conclusion, acknowledging an incipient creation in the wake of destruction. From its inception, Lukacs’s practice foregrounded the body within its political context. As his privileged medium, paint came to figure flesh itself, interconnecting the Prime Cuts, the skinheads, and the monkeys—each invested with equal ontological weight. Centrally, at the very moment that AIDS began to herd sick bodies into a minoritizing and dehumanizing class, Lukacs began to create work that asserted the universalism of flesh. The antibinaristic conception of flesh in series like Prime Cuts asserted bodily commonality at a moment in which a false dichotomy was being produced between queers and heterosexuals vis-à-vis AIDS. Even before Lukacs firmly developed his deconstructive mode, his work was propelled by an antagonism towards binaristic regimes of thought, which, as history shows us, more often than not come to harm those marked other, not least queers. 60 Conclusion In a 2016 interview, Jonathan Katz offered up a poignant assessment of Lukacs’s positioning in the contemporary art world: To me he’s one of the three or four best painters in the world, and I think it’s fair to say that if his subject matter were different, his career would be different. I’ll just leave it at that. He’s still famous, but he’s not achieving the stratospheric prices that an idiot like Jeff Koons can achieve.85 One aspect of Lukacs’s work that critics have never disagreed upon is its technical quality. The artist’s brazen subject matter, on the other hand, has frequently been up for debate, and has likely prevented further recognition of his work. Indeed, Lukacs has never been one to shy away from a sensitive topic, explicit queer imagery, or a dark imaginary (and if it’s sensitive, queer, and dark, all the merrier). This thesis was inspired both by an admiration for the artist’s work and the recognition that the work has not been given its due. It is my hope that this thesis has helped suture the art historical gap on Lukacs’s singular body of work, and that it may prove useful to future scholars who can continue to generate new literature on Lukacs. This project has revealed layers of intricacy to Lukacs’s work that were yet unrecognized in criticism and scholarly literature. The more closely they are examined, Lukacs’s paintings come to reveal a Johnsian level of complexity, demanding serious theoretical consideration. The process of elucidating Lukacs’s relationship to deconstruction was more than strenuous, but it has unveiled a new manner of looking at Lukacs’s work, solidifying its core socio-political engagements. Today, Lukacs lives and works in Vancouver where he paints (and sculpts) nearly every day at his studio in East Vancouver. Curiously, around the same time I began this project, 85 Klassen, “Queer Arts Festival Explores Art as Activism.” 61 Lukacs also began to revisit his work of the 1980s and 1990s, and began a new series entitled Pony Boi that examines the history of his career. From the beginning, Lukacs has opened his studio with open arms, becoming a key participant and supporter of this study. The artist, perhaps unlike much of his subject matter, is warm, gentle, and inviting. To walk through his studio is to walk through history—through art history and the history of Lukacs’s life. An altar in his studio is dedicated to his lovers who have passed; a miniature library is dedicated to art historical texts; massive canvases evoke Michelangelo’s treatment of the male form; drawers overflow with decades worth of Polaroids. The hundreds of paintings surrounding you undoubtedly attest to the contemporary painter’s brilliance. Some of Lukacs’s work, such as Il y a quinze ans… (Figure 27), retains such a tactile quality that it destabilizes the boundary between painting and sculpture, evoking some of Frank Auerbach’s densely layered canvases. The work truly begins to morph into flesh, a sort of phenomenological experiment in paint. The artist’s technical capacity never ceases to amaze. He in fact makes his own asphaltum, curing it for years to achieve the desired effect—the perfect medium for his contemporary vision of tenebrism. Most of Lukacs’s work is kept in storage at institutions such as the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, or at the artist’s studio. It is my hope, however, that a well-deserved, major retrospective is forthcoming. Lukacs’s radically art historical practice has much to teach art historians, unsettling our all too comfortable boundaries of past and present, of antiquated and modern, of the representational and the real: Lukacs challenges us to re-examine our relationship to art history. As Mieke Bal suggests, we must truly begin to consider contemporary works of art as rightful “theoretical objects” that offer unique contributions to cultural history—we must consider what 62 they do, not merely what they are.86 Lukacs reveals a new way of looking, one not premised in past or present, this ideology or that one, but one that intersects at the elision of past and present, and one that melds ideologies to reveal their critical interplay. Lukacs shows us, almost like a postmodern theorist does, that we can no longer look at the world in terms of opposition. It would seem, then, that Lukacs’s work presciently predicted our current non-binary moment, one that refutes ontological comfort on any one side of a rigid, binary opposition. 86 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 5. 63 Bibliography “Across Canada: AIDS Victims Told They Deserve Fate.” The Globe and Mail, August 21, 1984. Airaksinen, Timo. “The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of BDSM.” SAGE Open (April-June 2018): 1-9. “Bad-boy Artist to Show in Toronto.” The Vancouver Sun, June 9, 1989. Bahrani, Zainab. “Regarding Art and Art History.” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013): 516-517. Bal, Mieke. Quoting Caravaggio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Caravaggio's Secrets. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death. Hanover: Wesleyan, 1959. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999 Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, 307-320. New York: Routledge, 1993. Clarkson, Adrienne and Attila Richard Lukacs. “Adrienne Clarkson Presents.” Filmed in 1991 by CBC News. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deloukJkQjY&t=3s. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. First published 1975. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. 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Katz, Jonathan David. “‘Committing the Perfect Crime’: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art.” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 38-53. Katz, Jonathan David. “A Viral Theory of Art: AIDS and the Aesthetics of Protest.” Invited lecture, University of British Columbia, February 11, 2022. Katz, Jonathan Ned. “‘Homosexual' and 'Heterosexual': Questioning the Terms.” In A Queer World, edited by Martin Duberman. New York: NYUP, 1997. 65 Klassen, Kelsey. “Queer Arts Festival explores art as activism.” Vancouver is Awesome, June 15, 2016. https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/courier-archive/general-archive/queer-arts- festival-explores-art-as-activism-3034320 Langdon, Helen. Caravaggio: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. Lukacs, Attila Richard. Interview by Johnny Willis. April 19, 2023. Lukacs, Attila Richard. “Regendering the Garden: The Very Rich Painting of Attila Richard Lukacs.” Interview by Robert Enright. Border Crossings, Summer 1992. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Visible and the Invisible: The Intertwining - The Chiasm.” In Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, edited by Thomas Baldwin, 247-257. London: Routledge, 2004. Posner, Donald. “Caravaggio’s Homoerotic Early Works,” Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 301-324. Price, Gordon. “AIDS Vancouver: 1983—The Forum,” Filmed 2014. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wJXYxNu88 Rosenberg, Ann. “Artists Cook up Dishes of Eros.” The Vancouver Sun, October 10, 1992. Smolik, Noemi. “Attila Richard Lukacs Galerie Dietmar Werle.” Artforum, February 1989. The Elder Pliny, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume VI. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62704/pg62704-images.html Watson, Scott, “Attila Lukacs’s Skinheads: Ciphers of Cold War Twilight.” In Polaroids: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris, edited by Catherine Crowston and Reid Shier, 146- 149. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010. Watson, Scott. Young Romantics. Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1985. Wojnarowicz, David. “Post­cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” in Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (New York: Artists Space, 1989. 66 Appendix A: Interview with the Artist Interview with Attila Richard Lukacs, April 19th, 2023 Conducted by Johnny Willis JW: What exactly do you think drew the young queer Attila to Caravaggio? ARL: Uhhh, the book. Because that’s where I discovered Caravaggio. [Attila is referring to the Caravaggio book he got from the Emily Carr library in the 80s and still uses today as a reference source for his paintings]. JW: So you discovered Caravaggio in the book, not on the wall of a museum? ARL: No. And this was after I had taken a trip to San Francisco to see a Max Beckmann show. Because before then I was confounded as to how to attend to the body and the figure in my work. I was in art school. So I went with three of my colleagues to see the Beckmann retrospective and that kind of put it all into place—how I deal with lights and darks, light and shadow. And then I hurried back and I started doing some figurative paintings. But they were very stained… JW: They’re very sculptural. ARL: I hadn’t figured out light and dark yet. It was looking at Caravaggio that brought it into perspective for me, because my Polaroids looked so much like his chiaroscuro, and the flesh tones he had. So, using the Polaroids with Caravaggio, his lights and darks, they were the same palette. So I was able to finally figure the figure out. JW: And do you feel you had a homoerotic identification with Caravaggio? Did you see that in the work too? ARL: Yeah of course. I was searching for homoeroticism and I found it there too. JW: Right on the cover [of the book] there is a twinky young boy, sexually available. ARL: Yeah, of course—the whole mythology that I loved and saw my spirit or soul as the reincarnation of that. JW: Of Caravaggio? ARL: Of Caravaggio. His lifestyle and his knack for getting in a fight. JW: As a “bad boy” artist. ARL: Yeah exactly. Picking up street urchins and feeding them, and having them as your models. You know, the eye that goes with it—the tension between the model and the painter. I felt all of that. I could almost travel time. 67 JW: It’s interesting that Caravaggio was said to only paint from what the eye saw—he could only paint from a live model or from a physical being. He couldn’t paint imaginative angels, they say, because he wanted to see that physical, real subject.87 And in a similar way you have worked from that street urchin. ARL: With the aid of the Polaroid. JW: Yes. But you still had that realist tendency. ARL: I had that connection with the subject being behind the camera. That was the tension, the hard-ons in the pants. I’m sure Caravaggio would have used a Polaroid too if he had one available to him. JW: Oh definitely. ARL: Taking the Polaroids was always a very sexual experience. I was pragmatic about it and used it for my work. It could have devolved into just sex. I had a ferocious sexual appetite. It was like one a day, or at least two to three a week. JW: Hustlers? ARL: Yeah, pretty well. Because I would go collect them at Bahnhof Zoo. And some of them like Stefan and Alex, I found in the clubs, and they became friends. JW: And Alex was straight? ARL: Yeah. JW: And how much would you pay the hustlers usually? ARL: About 100 marks. JW: Including photographs? ARL: If it was photographs it was probably 200. JW: But it was worth it because you could keep them [the Polaroids] and use them as figures? ARL: Right, and I could ask them back too. 200 was quite a bit of money then. JW: Did you have financial support from your father? ARL: I was doing very well with my shows in Vancouver. 87 This is anecdotal, not art historical fact. 68 JW: Selling lots of work through Diane Farris? ARL: Mostly. My father’s financial support came at those times when it wasn’t so easy. Especially when I needed to go to Maui to turn myself over [from addiction]. JW: Speaking of Caravaggio, did you get a chance to see his works when you were in Berlin? ARL: Well, what was there. I went right away to the Dahlem Museum (Gemäldegalerie). They had the Caravaggio in a room, just a dark green silk cloth with a run of windows, lighting each area. And the Caravaggio was there with a painting of a nude boy as an angel. JW: The Caravaggio was Victorious Cupid? ARL: Yes. It was later that I went to Sanssouci and saw Doubting Thomas. JW: What about Francis Bacon? He seems to me one of the other major influences. How did you get to know his work? ARL: I wasn’t focused on him. JW: It wasn’t a major source for you then? ARL: Well everybody loves Bacon. You can’t deny that. JW: But everyone loves Caravaggio too, no? ARL: I love Bacon as much as I love as Caravaggio. But it wasn’t Bacon I was looking at as much as Caravaggio. He had all the keys for me. That book did me very well. And still gives. JW: You’re literally still using it. …So, back in 1991, you were friendly with Adrienne Clarkson [then Governor General of Canada], and you told her, “The way I use [art history] is more like a fast food consumption art history. Actually, I can’t say it’s much different from the way Manet used art history, or Cézanne. They also went ripping through art history, and said well I need these figures for that background.” And she said, “You not only consumed it, Attila, you digested.” To which you replied, “And I spit it out.” Do you remember that conversation? ARL: Yeah, that was that flippant interview I gave with Adrienne [laughs]. I’m very full of myself. But it’s true. JW: Do you still feel that your relationship to art history is one of fast food consumption? 69 ARL: No, because at that point, when I was young, I was just going through it, tearing through it, and digesting it that fast. But as you get older, you pay more attention to it. It becomes more serious; you look into things more deeply than one did when you were just absorbing everything. JW: So do you feel like “fast food” is too much of a discount? ARL: Well it was like that then. It’s not like that now. Because art history is only so big. And there’s always new art history being made. It’s not just Caravaggio I look at. I’m a big fan of Bellini. And Michelangelo’s early paintings are really quite good. You can see the gay in them too. Except he would just put breasts on everybody. He kind of had to. JW: So it’s really the Renaissance and the Baroque for you that’s the key art historical source. ARL: Indian miniature painting too. JW: That too. ARL: I took two books with me to Berlin, Caravaggio and Indian miniature painting. And I gave them equal source. JW: And, of course, the Indian miniatures you were doing weren’t so miniature. ARL: Same scale [as the monumental works]. I was dealing with gay subject matter on the same scale as the Caravaggesque compositions. They’re the same scale—it’s just a different aspect of where they were. One was in a western vernacular, the other one was eastern, about color and flatness. There was more abstraction to that for me than in the western style. JW: More stylization and abstraction of forms and landscapes. ARL: Yes, also imagination. JW: That’s what I want to get at. Do you feel that your appropriation of Indian miniature style was “fast food”-like or do you think there could be more to it? In the sense that it presented this realm of imagination for you, an alternate reality for your subjects. ARL: It wasn’t fast food. I didn’t approach it that way as with other art history. I had a very limited source and I was just looking at it, dissecting each page and composition and selecting those very modern elements in it like the borders, pergolas, and the lack of three dimensionality and the colors. I paired that with western subject matter—like the American Athletic Model Guild, that kind of era of posing, sort of 60s, 70s subject matter. JW: Something that comes out for me in the Indian miniature style paintings it that they are a lot more peaceful than the other works. 70 ARL: They’re about the garden. They’re about the luxury of the garden. The sensuality, the humidity, the birds, the flowers and scents. The jasmine lingering in the air. A cock crowing, the rise of morning. JW: So there’s a realm of peaceful co-existence with homoeroticism and gay love. ARL: The western adaptations were much darker. I think that simply came from the darkness of the background. JW: It’s probably also what you were witnessing in your everyday life in the West, no? What you saw on the streets, or what you felt inside? ARL: Yeah of course. JW: Maybe let’s go back to the beginning, in 1983 when you had your first solo-exhibition at Unit Pitt Gallery. So you were a student at Emily Carr and your instructor told you to go to Granville Island. He wanted you to paint still lifes or find inspiration. Is that right? ARL: He wanted me to do anything but what I was doing. JW: Right, which was the cartoons fucking each other. ARL: And sort of Keith Haring figures. JW: He wanted you to find naturalistic subject matter. And you come back and you’ve done these slabs of meat, and Angela Grossman says it’s when she fell in love with you and your work. What do you think drew you to do meat at that point? ARL: I just went down to Granville Island with a pad of paper and a pen. I was still looking at Haring and the way he layered his images. I saw that in the meat racks. They still have that Haring aspect. But I was in the right place at the right time with the right thought. JW: It seems to me that there’s a direct relationship between these early meat works and the skinhead works that you would start soon thereafter, because they both in essence depict a different type of “meat.” Was that something you were conscious of at the time? ARL: Kind of. Also because everyone was saying it. So I couldn’t be not conscious of it. So, of course, that was an aspect. JW: But it also seems to me that there is this idea of a universal flesh, of a relationality of all things through flesh that runs through your work. Is something that resonates for you, that there’s a flesh that connects all beings, or is that a far-reaching idea? ARL: I don’t think that’s far-reaching at all. I think that’s very accurate. And I would say in retrospect that’s true. Even today there’s that very aspect about the flesh. My work is always 71 about the flesh. Even when I did my Arbor Vitaes, the trees, they ended up being about flesh, looking like giant vaginas [laughs]. JW: As Emily Carr did. ARL: So somehow, yes, I’ve been in tune with that. JW: You said before that taking the Polaroids was a very erotic experience. Do you feel that in your paintings you are manifesting that sexual energy? That there’s a sublimation of that erotic drive? ARL: That has to carry through the Polaroids into the painting. It has to carry the painting—that energy. JW: So in a way painting is an expression of sexual energy. ARL: Definitely. If that energy isn’t there the painting fails. It becomes academic. … Look at Sargent, his work is full of that sexual energy. I take the Sargent book with me when I travel because he’s got it all. He’s got the energy of the landscape, the society portraits that I may have to do in a foreign land. And he’s got the subject—they’re sexy. JW: Some of them are raunchy. … So you started painting skinheads in 1984 or 1985? ARL: No. JW: You had skinhead works in the Young Romantics show. That was 1985. ARL: Yeah, but that wasn’t the subject of the skinheads yet. That was Cam, he was someone I fell in love with. JW: But he wasn’t a skinhead? ARL: He was. But I didn’t adopt the skinheads as subject matter really until I was in Berlin. JW: OK, that makes sense. Because they weren’t as present in Vancouver I’m assuming, with factions. ARL: I happened to find the ones with shaved heads and boots but that was a bar hopping, sexualized experience, which informed my desire to find that type in Berlin as well. JW: Beyond their erotic pull, were there any reasons you were thinking of, then or now, that you decided to start painting them? 72 ARL: Their marginalization, and their symbols came with them. JW: What do you mean by that? ARL: Whatever they were. Some were left wing, some were leaning right. JW: So there were different factions? The communists (the reds), the neo-Nazis (the whites)? ARL: Look, in Vancouver, there wasn’t room for any of that. Everyone knew everyone and partied with everybody. It was only when you crossed over into Berlin that factions were large enough to be their own communities. JW: And there was a lot of division in Berlin? Not even among the skinheads, but the city itself was divided. ARL: Of course there were divisions between the factions. They were always fighting. JW: It seems like you were interested in this idea of division or oppositions often. The idea that oppositions depend on each other, on the opposing force, to cohere as a group. A lot of your paintings seem to look at the division between East and West, human and animal, butch and fag. What is it about oppositional forces that you find so pertinent? ARL: Well you just answered it [laughs]. Exactly those forces. Between butch and fag, between gay and straight, between someone who can beat you up or let you lick their boots. That sort of tension. JW: You’re interested in the power dynamics. ARL: It’s all about power dynamics. Gay sex, male sex, it’s always been about power dynamics. JW: Right. Something that’s really interesting in your work is the relationship between masculinity and fascism, and there’s a correlation between them. One, they both rely on a denigrated other in order to cohere as an identity and as a group, and they also both involve a sort of totalitarian control of individuals. And moreover they both have that sexiness and seductiveness that gives them their pull. Do you think you were conscious of that correlation between masculinity and fascism? ARL: Of course I was. No one did a uniform better than the Germans. JW: [laughs] ARL: You know they had the tailoring, they had the blacks. They did a great uniform. The British do a pretty fucking good uniform too. The uniform became a very powerful subject. 73 JW: You were hyper-eroticizing masculinity but you were also problematizing it, even critiquing it. What was your critique of masculinity? ARL: You have to have a sense of humor. JW: Right. But it wasn’t just humor, it was also, look how sexy this is but look how fucked up it is. ARL: You’re putting all the answers in my mouth, you’re a great interviewer. Yes! [Laughs] Exactly. JW: [Laughs] Perhaps I’m just trying to get confirmation of my thoughts. ARL: That would be confirmation. JW: I apologize if I’m answering for you. ARL: No, it’s hard for me to place it all. Sometimes it’s hard to go recall back 30 to 50 years what intent was about. Especially at that time. Because painting is a very tantric exercise. It goes about how you feel about something daily. About those colors and shapes you lay down on that day that become a painting. And so yeah even though sometimes I spend months on a piece it comes down to what I deal with it daily. JW: It’s interesting that you bring up tantric energy and you’re inspired by the Kama Sutra. Where did that inspiration of India come from for you? ARL: It was the same as Caravaggio, discovered it in a book. To me it was abstract. I saw abstraction in it. I didn’t see necessarily naïve painting. I saw great plains of abstraction. [Attila looks for a book on Indian miniature painting but he can’t find it] ARL: Oh, von Gloeden. He was a great source for the figure. JW: Well, that makes sense. You had a similar relationship to your models as he did. ARL: Yeah. [Attila finds the book. It’s in pieces.] ARL: Some of my compositions are taken right out of there. ARL: I had been through here many times through here… Something that’s always had me is the balance between east and west. There has to be a balance between east and west. Because now I’m longing for those garden compositions. It’s been a while. 74 JW: A balance between east and west but also maybe a challenge of their division? ARL: And also looking at something in a different way, not always looking at it the same. Laying down a composition in a different way, training your mind to think differently. … JW: So you’re still using the bitumen (asphalt). You started using it in the 80s. Was anyone else using that back then? ARL: I have no idea. JW: How did you decide to start using it? ARL: I think Graham or Derek brought it in a bucket to school, and we all ran with it. JW: So it was at Emily Carr, one of your peers brought in bitumen? ARL: It was the four of us, we were extremely tightly knit [Atilla, Angela Grossman, Graham Gilmore and Derek Root]. JW: And you ran the most with it? You used it the most extensively? ARL: In the end probably, yes. I ran with it the most. JW: And you still cultivate it yourself, you age it. What do you do with it exactly? ARL: I guess I would say I’m curing it. I’m mixing it with the roof coat asphalt. The commercial product. I’m mixing it with polyurethane. The commercial product comes with all sorts of impurities in order to make it cling onto a roof or something. So you have to get rid of those impurities, and give it a base to dry on. It takes months and months, and sometimes years and years. The longer you wait, the better it gets. I’m still using it… It’s asphaltum, not bitumen. I’m using the asphaltum that comes out of the bitumen. Bitumen is a dirty oil product. I’m using the asphaltum that comes out of the bitumen. The products I refine from are like roof coat, something called plastic cement. … JW: So, in 1985, how did you get to know Scott Watson? ARL: Scott was the new curator at the VAG [Vancouver Art Gallery]. And he was part of the circle. We’ve always been akin to each other. JW: How did he discover your work? 75 ARL: I did another show at Unit Pitt Gallery, and I suggested to Angela, Derek, and Graham that we do a show together. Scott saw that show. JW: And he decided to show you guys at the VAG. ARL: That’s right. JW: What was it like for a young art student to be shown at the most prestigious art gallery in the city? Was that a big deal for you? ARL: Of course it was. It was a great way to get out of the city, too. I think it gave us all the wings that we needed to depart. JW: After Young Romantics, pretty soon thereafter, you decide to leave Vancouver. You go to New York, you fly to Amsterdam, and you end up in Berlin because you knew Michael Morris was there. Is that right? ARL: I had a court case that had to clear up first. JW: In Vancouver? During or after Young Romantics? ARL: During the exhibition. JW: But you had a drive to go out into the world. ARL: My friends had already left… I was a bit pissed off. JW: What was the urge to leave Vancouver? ARL: Because I had been to New York. And I was in New York for one week and I was there with one of my fellow students. I went out to the Pyramid club where I met Martin, who was the bartender, and he started buying me drinks. And started telling me, “That’s Jean Michel Basquiat.” He had just bought that green floor-length Armani leather coat. “He’s Madonna’s boyfriend.” As it turned out, Martin lived in the same building as Madonna, and they were best friends. He was her manager at the time. And they had just put out her first album, Starlight. And so I was sleeping over at Martin’s, going to Madonna’s place and hanging out with her. Martin gave me a dozen albums of hers, saying “Take these she’s gonna be famous.” So I’m hanging out with Madonna and Martin, we’re going to parties, Andy Warhol was there. Madonna would be accompanied on the street with break dancer kids. It was all very fabulous. Then I returned to Vancouver on a dreary Sunday eve, and trying to get into Faces, the only bar to go to, and the dyke says “Sorry, we don’t want you. Not coming in.” JW: Why didn’t they want you? 76 ARL: I guess I had been under suspension for an earlier infraction. We were on the dance floor and “We are Family” started playing, and I threw open the doors onto Robson St. and went dancing in the street. She came out, dragged me in and kicked me out… I had just spent this fabulous week with Madonna and Martin. It was like, I gotta get out of this city [Vancouver]. JW: But you didn’t end up moving to New York? ARL: No, but I visited Martin again. But he was on the way through… I wanted to visit him, but he was sick. He had full blown AIDS. And Warhol had just done three portraits of him. He’s in the Warhol Diaries, the latest film. JW: What was his last name? ARL: Burgoyne. Martin Burgoyne. JW: So you saw Martin when he was very ill? ARL: I didn’t get to see him. He didn’t want me to come and see him. He was in the hospital. But I still had Madonna’s phone number [laughs]. Yeah, so, I had to get out. But I had to wait until everything was resolved with the charges. The charges were then vacated. JW: As soon as that happened, you got out of here? ARL: Well, I had to apply for a Canada Council grant. I had some time to get into some mischief. I spent a week in New York and realized it was way to expensive. So I flew to Brussels for $99. JW: And then you went to Amsterdam? ARL: From Brussels. And spent a night on one of those tourist boats. It was terrible. I had an open invitation in Berlin with Michael Morris. JW: At that point you were just intending to visit? ARL: I knew I was moving there. I told him that upon arrival. He was more than happy to help me out, he was really sweet. He became my Mom, my Dad. More Mom. JW: So were you both living in Schöneberg? ARL: He was living in Charlottenburg with Vincent Trasov. JW: And where were you living? ARL: Kreuzberg. 77 JW: So you were pretty close to the wall, then? ARL: First I did some couch surfing between various addresses that Michael had set up. Most of them ended up in some kind of disaster. He suggested that I apply to Kunstlerhaus Bethanien. He furthered my cause by talking to the director. He smoothed my way in there. A month before that, I was in an occupied building, a big chapel. There was no heat. I found someone who wanted to share his room. It was full of punks… JW: And at that point, could you cross over into the east ? ARL: Yes, but you had to get a visa. JW: And did you ever go? ARL: I did, yes, once or twice. JW: Out of curiosity? ARL: Yes. JW: What were some of the obvious differences to you from the west? ARL: All of the sudden you were in a dark, gray place, in Slovenia or something. The lights on the streets only lit main streets, nothing in the back streets. All the scars of the war, the bullet holes, the stucco falling, it was still all there. You couldn’t go anywhere—there was nowhere to go. We couldn’t figure anything out. We tried to get rid of what money we had by going into a supermarket, and there were rows and rows of empty shelves and six loaves of bread. I went with my friend and we found an underground place, an old style kneipe from the 20s that still did drag shows. JW: A queer eastern bar? What was the difference from the gay bars in the west? ARL: The ones in the west were like raunchy leather bars or discos. In the east you still had to be discreet. My friend introduced me to Elli’s Bierbar, which was the oldest gay bar in Berlin, a small corner room. [Founded in 1912.] During the war, it was a brothel for the SS officers. But before that it was a gay bar. And I did my first painting show there, in Berlin. A few scraps of canvas I had, and just put them up. JW: So, you’re living in this divided city, and your 1988 painting The Young Spartans Challenge the Boys to Fight, perhaps your most famous painting— To me it seems to be a prophecy to the fall of communism. Because the canvas is not only materially divided, but it has this metaphysical division within it – the competing souls of a nation, of east and west. In some way, were you anticipating the fall of the wall? 78 ARL: Throughout my painting history, and it still happens today, there are times I see in my work that I had a premonition. It’s not something that’s often there, but there are times where I say, wow, that’s something that actually came true. Chernobyl had just occurred. In hindsight, one had the sense that perhaps something was going to happen. I guess Chernobyl being a metaphor. JW: Unification must not have been a smooth process, because in some works you make that quite literal, like East/West (1991), where a white figure and a red figure are wrestling in a landscape. It seems like you’re wrestling yourself with what reunification looks like. ARL: Well East/West is exactly where Berlin was placed. It’s not only political but it’s geographic. Once again I’m using western figuration and an eastern landscape. JW: So it has multiple meanings. ARL: It goes from political to geographic to cultural. JW: In the same way, Love in Union, Amorous Meeting with the swastika is this fraught image of reunification after the wall has fallen. There’s always this fraught coming together of the two sides. ARL: I was intensely occupied with that. In Berlin, on a daily basis. A country had increased its size, doubled its population, but more importantly a city had done so. And there was an opening that was quite magical. And there was a lot of fear that it could go terribly wrong. But the Germans just solved everything, as the Germans do best—throwing money at it. Make the radicals into middle class, burgher people. JW: So around when you made these works, you get selected for documenta IX. ARL: I was too young for that. Let me say that. I was too young for that. I didn’t even know what it was about. It’s a shame that came so early in my career. I was pretty occupied with the club scene at the time as well, so it was like a flurry, a tornado of cocaine. [Both laugh]. It wasn’t the way I would do it today. JW: But you still had some great work. Even if you were young. For me the most interesting thing is that your work was selected by Pierre Luigi Tazzi and he selected Love in Union, Amorous Meeting— ARL: but they didn’t want to show those. JW: Well the work was ready to be hung, and the lead curator Jan Hoet said “No, we’re not showing it.” What was that like for you? 79 ARL: It might be why I got into my cocaine flurry [laughs]. All of the sudden I was just showing weak work. Work I wasn’t so happy with. It just turned into a big nightmare. I just did cocaine instead of going to the opening. JW: Oh, gosh. So was your only work shown the Tea House [an installation designed with glory holes and paintings in a Berlin-style pissoir] ? Or was there anything else? ARL: No, there was an unfortunate sculpture. I hope there isn’t even a record of it anymore. JW: So they didn’t show your paintings, but you had some painting in the Tea House? ARL: I did. And that’s a pretty magnificent piece. JW: I think the teahouse is a great piece. ARL: Yeah. Fine, I discredit its magnificence because that whole situation is cloaked in *verbally grunts*. JW: Well it sounds like it wasn’t a great time for you. And it’s coloring your memory of Documenta in a way. And you were censored. Your work was literally censored! Were you told that your work was “too male,” is that right? ARL: I think Jan Hoet’s concern was that they had another male artist… was it Bacon? Yeah, it was [Francis] Bacon, right. I had that painting of the guy puking from giving the blow job.. I pretty well styled it after Bacon. So there was this obvious thing going on. And now that I think of it it’s quite fascinating that it came down to me or Bacon. JW: So, essentially, it was like, “there’s too much maleness here,” and we have to take down these works? ARL: Yeah. But they left up a terrible sculpture. It was some plaster elements, a stuffed animal element. JW: Alright, well. If you don’t want to talk about it we don’t need to talk about it. ARL: It wasn’t good… it was terrible. JW: So overall you do not look back on Documenta fondly? ARL: Could’ve gone better. JW: And you proposed the Tea House (Documenta Glory Hole)— ARL: Jan Hoet liked that and he worked on that project with me, closely. 80 JW: On the Documenta Glory Hole? ARL: Yep. He arranged everything in Brussels—the manufacturing. JW: What was it made of? ARL: Metal. It was manufactured in Brussels. JW: And you supplied the paintings for it—to go in it? ARL: Yes, I had painted on the panels that were made for it. JW: The four seasons? ARL: Yeah. An amateur theme to select. Not the best suite of paintings to be honest. …. JW: It’s been proposed that the monkey that you use in your work is a sort of self-portrait— ARL: Sometimes. More of an avatar. JW: It seems to me that the figure of the monkey is the perfect vessel to communicate that transgression of normative human behavior that occurs in gay sex and in BDSM – that process of becoming-animal. Because the monkey is often in the BDSM scenes. ARL: Avatar. [laughs] JW: Like an analogy for the skinheads. And you. And it also has that fun aspect of being an art historical reference. ARL: And playful innocence, cheekiness, lots of mischief. JW: Was there a political significance to BDSM practice for the young, queer Attila from Alberta? ARL: Political? No. JW: Not in the sense of, “I’m an activist.” More in the sense of defying bodily norms. ARL: It was just where my sexuality took me. JW: It was natural to you? 81 ARL: Natural? Yes, as Lucifer’s child [laughs]. I was hardcore from the very get go. There was darkness there. JW: Where do you think that comes from? ARL: That comes from an unqualified energy in the soul… who knows where it comes from. That darkness can exist in all of us really, 50/50. It depends on which way we metabolize that energy or which way it goes. JW: Do you feel that you have battled darkness in your artistic career? That it’s been something you’ve had to face, dive into, and come back out of? ARL: It’s something that I didn’t mind talking about. Because there is that darkness. But sometimes that darkness is not always evil. Sometimes that darkness is just a place to go. JW: So in an interview in 2000, around a time when you had been facing darkness, you stated, “Attila Richard Lukacs, the entity I created and I carried with me, has gone.” ARL: [Laughs] my pony boi interview! Well I was gone at that time. I had abandoned what I thought I had stood for, and embraced a new persona, which was pony boi. In the end, twenty years later, it gurgles back to the surface, in a much less destructive way [Attila is referring to his current work in 2023 that figures pony boi]. JW: Right. Do you still feel that Attila Richard Lukacs has gone, or have you been able to reconnect to that entity? ARL: That was a reverberation… The loop’s around the center. Like a solar flare. A huge burst of energy, a hundred times hotter than the sun, and it went. In the end that energy was fantastic and I felt like a solar flare. But that energy quickly became consumed by darkness. I would even say that evil was present. Once I had opened the door to both, one came in with the other. The darkness came in with the energy. JW: Did you reconnect with Attila in Hawaii? ARL: It was before. It was in New York, I realized that the dream had failed and I was terribly depressed and had one or two suicide attempts. I knew I had to get myself out of there, but I didn’t know how. I had gone into homelessness in a couple of different periods. Living with an addiction, the only thing you’re really concerned with is feeding that addiction. One always dreams of the exit somehow. I wasn’t interested in rehab. JW: You were interested in the beach, and Maui? Sunshine and nature? ARL: Yeah. The wind, the ocean. 82 … JW: So, here you are in 2023, and you really are connecting back to Attila Richard Lukacs and your young self. ARL: Oh, that’s the vessel I’m choosing right now, Pony boi! Pony boi loves when I go back into different years. Let’s say, ’86, or 2015. The vessel allows me to skip back and forth within different styles that I have worked with. [Attila explains that the 20 painting series he is currently completing will reflect his 40 year artistic career. Each painting reflects a different moment from his career.] JW: So it’s like time traveling? ARL: Well, a pull between the two. One wants to time travel and one wants to sit right here in the present. … JW: Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this. I’m very happy with some of the footage. I think one of my favorite parts was when you said that you were embodying Caravaggio, a rebirth or renewal of him. ARL: Well, honestly sometimes I felt like a spirit that has gone through him and many artists and through me as well. JW: Definitely, like Derek Jarman. He’s like a father figure, really. ARL: To hooligans. To artist hooligans. I always say, being an artist and a criminal is pretty well the same thing. Because you have to have the same genius. JW: You know what’s funny, Robert Rauschenberg said the exact same thing. ARL: An ordinary criminal ain’t gonna make it. I could organize criminal escapes and plots… I had to get myself out of a few positions, a few criminal escapes… I guess Rauschenberg had it right. JW: Let me ask you this. So you say you use art historical references in part to make the material more digestible to a straight audience, a wider audience, they were looking at this queer material in an art historical context— ARL: Well I wanted to make it as big and bold like art historical painting—queer. I was putting a lot of asses in peoples’ faces at that time [laughs]. I love putting asses right front and center! For better or worse, now. JW: Was that kind of a crime, in a way? 83 ARL: I guess so, because you were certainly breaking barriers. JW: like the perfect crime. Because you’re breaching pornography— ARL: and it’s in a museum. It’s like the perfect crime. JW: See, this is why I’m doing the interview—because I’m getting these golden quotes. I just needed that line. ARL: I’m glad you got it, how about that, at the tail end! [Laughs] FIN
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Art History & Theory
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Silver, Erin
Radically art historical : Attila Richard Lukacs and the weight of history
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