There is nothing to question as in a great painting. A Picasso portrait is perfect. Written in but never published until now , this is one of my earliest pieces of research and writing. While it is somewhat idealistic in many ways, hopefully this piece still has some relevance for the reader for there are important ideas contained within the text. It examines the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in images of the male body by 4 gay photographers: Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, F.
Photography has portrayed the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals of the body throughout its history, but has never fully explored the theoretical implications and consequences of this pairing. Our presentation of the body says precise things about the society in which we live, the degree of our integration within that society and the controls which society exerts over the innerman. We can clearly define the Apollonian beauty, perfection, obsession, narcissism, voyeurism, idols, fascism, frigid, constraint, oppression, the defined, the personalised, an aggression of the eye linked to greed and desire and Dionysian ecstasy, eroticism, hysteria, energy, anarchy, promiscuity, death, emotion, bodily substances and the universal.
In reality the boundaries between these ideals are more ambiguous. For example, in the work of the American photographer Fred Holland Day we see allegorical myths portrayed by beautiful youths, many of which to modern eyes have a powerful homoerotic quality. According to some critics,3 societies acceptance of photographs of Apollonian or Orphic Dionysian youths [see 2 different critical views]4 in that era the fin de siecle of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century , was based on what was seen as their chaste, idyllic nature.
For Day, physical beauty was the testimony of a transcendent spirit. But what was being revealed? Was it F. These works show Day as both director and collaborator, his idols equally unattainable and available, resilient and vulnerable. In portraying this beauty, was Day embracing a seductive utopia in which this Apollonian beauty leads away from the very Dionysian spirit he was trying to engage with?
At around the same time a Prussian named Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden was also taking photographs of scantily clad local peasant youths, based on Arcadian themes. While this may be true, the focus of the images is always on what Von Gloeden desired, his full frontal nudes drawing our eyes to the locus of sexual desire, the penis.
