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NEW CITY, May 24, 1990.
Art Break
by Joyce Hanson
Joe Ziolkowski (Joe Z.) was celebrating the male nude long before Senator
Jesse Helms got his hands on it. Ziolkowski has simply continued a tradition
begun back in the early 1900s by George Platt-Lynes, the first photographer
to undertake a serious study of the masculine form.
According to Catherine Edelman, who is exhibiting a one-man show of Ziolkowski's
most recent work at her 300 W. Superior gallery through May 25, Bruce Weber,
Herb Ritts, and yes, Robert Mapplethorpe also have claimed Platt-Lynes as
a source of inspiration.
"Joe's not interested in the brutal side of the gay male experience,"
Edelman says. "That was Robert Mapplethorpe's reality. It's not Joe's.
Joe is more relaxed, more playful maybe. He's now more into male sexuality
and sensuality than he was in '86 and '87 when so many of his friends were
dying of AIDS. He's happier now. The work is more formal and not so politicized."
Considering this country's current climate of homophobia, however, it
is a virtual impossibility to be apolitical if one is openly gay. Ziolkowski's
work, you may remember, was a subject of controversy a couple of years ago
at a School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni show in a street-level
exhibit at 200 N. LaSalle.
When the building management started to receive complaints from passersby
about Ziolkowski's photograph of a nude male couple suspended upside down
and embracing, the artist chose to cover the work with construction paper
accompanied by a disclaimer.
Ziolkowski's new work remains true to the old. Clearly, the artist is
still exploring men's emotional and physicla bond. This time, though, the
photographs have a more classically sculptural look, as though Ziolkowski
were referring to a time when the Greek athletes of antiquity competed against
one another in all their glorious nakedness.
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