Work-Of-Art Porn Star Francois Sagat Offers Master Class At NYC Museum

First Terry Richardson chose Francois Sagat to be the subject of “activist art” by putting him in a American-flag-striped unitard and inking “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” on the gay-porn god’s shapely butt cheeks. Now that Sagat singlehandedly secured the repeal of the homophobic military measure, it’s time for the charismatic Frenchman with the surprisingly untrashy scalp tattoo to take on the world of high art.

That’s right, the 32-year-old is heading up “Another Man: A Master Class with François Sagat,” at the Museum of Arts and Design  November 19, part of a three-day retrospective that includes the U.S. premiere of a French television documentary on him. (Check out the bilingual trailer below.)


While it’s true Sagat has ventured into art territory before—with films like Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie and Christophe Honore’s Homme au bain, Man at Bath (both of which will screen at the museum)—it doesn’t seem like he’s quite ready to ascend to the pedestal of being a living, pornographic work of art: He tells Out, “I’m still overwhelmed that I’ve been invited.”

Best of all, perhaps, is that Sagat will be instructing attendees on… the art of being Sagat.

“I’m basically supposed to speak about my career and about porn, generally speaking, and porn through my life,” he says. “I’ll speak, maybe, about my childhood and all of my inspirations.”

If we don’t understand the subject matter, can we sign up for a private tutoring session?

NY Republicans Want To Block The Jesus AIDS Video From Public Display… Again

Last December, a bunch of Republican U.S. legislators joined forces with the Catholic League’s blowhard president William Donohue to get the Smithsonian Museum to censor part of their Hide/Seek queer art exhibition, all because of David Wojnarowicz’s video Fire In My Belly which showed ants crawling over a Jesus figurine for a whole 11 seconds.

Now that the show has moved to The Brooklyn Museum, New York state Republicans have started threatening to pull all the museum’s public funding calling Wojnarowicz’s work “sacrilegious,” “Christian bashing,” “a hate crime,” and “blatantly disrespectful and offensive to Christians during the holiday season.”
Even Bill Donohue has jumped into this deja vu scenario by saying that Wojnarowicz died by “self-inflicted” AIDS, something Donohue implies wouldn’t have happened if he had simply lived life according to Catholic doctrine. This is the same man who called Catholic child rape victims “gold diggers” and blamed gays for the Church’s molestation problem adding that the church has been unfairly singled out and scrutinized over the alleged rapes.

Maybe we can divert New York’s public art funds and pay Bill Donohue to deliver more of his anti-LGBT theatrics in the Brooklyn Museum. Viewers won’t be able to tell whether it’s real or just very passionate performance art. Either way, they’ll understand why the public needs queer art exhibitions in the face of Donohue and his elephantine friends

Artist Spotlight: Wes Hemphill: Last Part

Adam #1

Joe Mostly Recovered From the Accident, 2011 (study)

 

 Tell us more on this one.
The model, Joe M., was a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where Jack and I spend winters. He’d recently been in an accident, the nature of which I should leave to him to disclose. I thought this image conveyed something of his climbing out of that circumstance and of his natural beauty, which, as the viewer can see, remains intact

Hardly Boys: Still Waters (#511), 2010, a collaboration between Wes Hempel and Jack Balas

 

How About Now? (study)

Camping on Vermeer. Tell us more on this.
I was initially drawn to the Vermeer interior because of the extraordinary quality of light. But I’m also playing around with the contemporary painter George Deem’s campy idea of How to Paint a Vermeer (title of a book of his paintings). So the piece may be humorous on various levels. And yet I think there’s a poignancy lurking underneath that has to do with the portrait on the wall (the same person as a boy?) and the way the young man presents himself now.

Decision, 2011

So what is the decision here, and can you talk about the pre-Raphealite influences?
The female figures are taken from Maxfield Parrish’s 1912 illustration for the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. In the original story, the prince kisses Sleeping Beauty and awakens her from her trance. But this particular “prince” (our model Sye), having arrived late on the scene, seems to have trouble making up his mind what to do next. A decision seems to be in order, but it’s left to the viewer to imagine what is going through the young man’s mind as he squints into the distance, clenching his hands.

 

Artist Spotlight: Wes Hemphill: Part 3

Return (2007)

Sleepy Time, 2011

Song of Birds, 2005, a collaboration between Wes Hempel and Jack Balas

 

Spell, 2003

 Hempel: Another take on a Maxfield Parrish fairy tale, this time the 1912 Hearst Magazine cover illustration of the Snow White story. I’ve replaced the sleeping maiden with our model Toby.

 

Artist Spotlight: Wes Hemphill: Part 2

Magnolias, 2011

Hempel: A take on a painting by the same name by Venezuelan painter Pedro Centeno Vallenilla (born: Barcelona 1904, died: Caracas 1988). As part of my ongoing project of reenvisioning art history from a gay perspective, I’ve replaced the nude female in the original (lying on the branch to the left) with a nude male.

 

Farewell #5

Birthday, 2005, a collaboration between Wes Hempel and Jack Balas

 

 Can you tell us a little about working in collaboration with your partner, Jack Balas?
I usually work out my ideas fairly comprehensively before committing paint to canvas, but occasionally I run into problems. Living with another artist means I have someone to consult with, and Jack is often more inventive visually than I am and more adventurous when it comes to imagery. He can think spontaneously in spatial terms, which means he has a fuller visual vocabulary than I do. Sometimes his ideas are so good, it makes more sense for him to just take over the painting. The canvas then goes from my studio to his (we never work on a piece together in the same space), and I relinquish control to him, which I admit is scary. Almost always, though, I’m delighted with the end result.

Artist Spotlight: Wes Hemphill: Part 1

Playing around with paint and brushes given to him by his partner, artist Jack Balas, launched his career. This writer-turned-artist's first gallery show sold out. Understandably so.

By Christopher Harrity

Farmboy Idyll

For decades, Wes Hempel has been committed to reenvisioning the depiction of masculinity in contemporary art. By setting psychologically acute portraits of modern-day men against backdrops appropriated from such disparate sources as neoclassical history painting and Dutch golden age landscapes, the artist’s works forge provocative dialogues between the exigencies of the present and its endowments from the past.

Joining the mythic allusions and technical fluency of classical art together with the ideas of personal narrative and social content of postmodern art, Hempel’s paintings explore the divide between the ancient and modern, reason and passion, august ideals and the profoundly individual. The artist recasts modern male figures in historical and culturally iconographic settings, provoking both a rethinking of assumed narratives and mythic themes and inviting a similar reconsideration of contemporary life, masculinity, and sexual norms. Hempel’s societal investigations are rendered in sensuously modeled flesh tones, gleaming marble surfaces, and the immersive depth of Arcadian landscapes — proving as visually seductive as they are conceptually rigorous.

Hempel’s art has been the subject of more than 80 solo and group exhibitions and is included in a growing number of esteemed private and corporate collections, including the Denver Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Arnot Art Museum, Microsoft Corp., the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and the New Britain Museum of American Art.


The Advocate: Why are you an artist?
Wes Hempel: I always wanted to be a writer, but in graduate school, I began playing around with some old brushes and paints that my partner, Jack Balas, had given me. I was mesmerized. I completed my degree in creative writing and began teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but I had fallen in love with art. Jack showed some of my early pieces to his gallery in Denver, Robischon. They gave me a show, which sold out. I’ve been painting ever since.

What catches your eye?
There is something specific I’m always looking for, though it’s hard to put into words — the visual equivalent of a deftly turned phrase or the unexpected image in poetry. In painting an emotional quality can arise from the interplay of composition, color, and value, regardless of subject matter.

Tell us about your process or techniques.
It’s a very traditional technique. These days I do a full-color underpainting in oils — sometimes with the help of an assistant — on gessoed canvas, then apply one or more top coats, making adjustments to form and to heighten the richness of hue and quality of light. I also use glazes to add surface depth and to complicate the coloration. I have a few tricks I’ve developed along the way — I suppose most painters have these — that I hold close to my chest.

How do you choose your subjects?
One of my ongoing projects is a reenvisioning of what art history might have looked like had homosexuality not been vilified in the culture. The paintings one sees in museums are revered in part because they enshrine our collective experience. But it’s a selective past that gets validated. By presenting contemporary males as objects of desire in borrowed art historical settings, I’m able to imagine — and allow viewers to imagine — a history that includes rather than excludes gay experience — and thereby ride the coattails, as it were, of art history’s imprimatur.

What artists do you take inspiration from and why?
This changes all the time for me. When Jack and I first moved to Boulder, I took a year off from working and went systematically through the art library at CU, taking down each book and carefully going through it. It took me the entire year to work my way through the shelves. I used to joke that my faulty knowledge of art history is the result of the books that were checked out.
 

Hyperallergic--International Draw Jesus Day < this is a serious thing>

Mmmm, Jesus, have you been working out ? It's a good thing he's got perma-abs, because on Dec. 26, Jesus will be posing for countless contributions to International Draw Jesus Day. The team at Hyperallergic -- an art blogazine -- devised the event in response to the Smithsonian's much-publicized removal of David Wojnarowicz's video from its Hide/Seek exhibit earlier this month.
The video shows insects crawling over a crucifix, which the Republican party found offensive and pressured the institute to remove. But don't just stop at bugs for Jesus' big portrait. Hyperallergic says, "Bring it artists, we will show whatever you send us and NSFW is perfectly fine. Forget the people who want to censor our lives and art and long live freedom of expression!"in response to the GOP’s attack on David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire In My Belly” video, we want to celebrate freedom of expression in the face of the right-wing American political establishment that gets whipped up into an irrational frenzy any time LGBT people are treated as equals. To celebrate our freedoms and the beauty of America, we are announcing our first-ever (and perhaps only) “International Draw Jesus Day” event.
Hyperallergic readers and fans with artistic abilities can submit their very own drawing of Jesus for publication on this blogazine on December 26th, which is known in Canada and the United Kingdom as Boxing Day.
Bring it artists, we will show whatever you send us and NSFW is perfectly fine. Forget the people who want to censor our lives and art and long live freedom of expression!
Email all your submissions to DrawJesusDay@hyperallergic.com and trust me, we can take it.