Michael Petry’s Milky Ways @ Sundaran Tagore Gallery. – By Photios Giovanis

Beautifully presented at SoHo’s Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Michael Petry’s first New York solo show, entitled The Milky Way and other Fairy Tales, pivots around a careful grouping of paired glass balls suspended from the ceiling.

Michael Petry’s Milky Ways @ Sundaran Tagore Gallery.

By Photios Giovanis

 

 

 

 

 

Beautifully presented at SoHo’s Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Michael Petry’s first New York solo show, entitled The Milky Way and other Fairy Tales, pivots around a careful grouping of paired glass balls suspended from the ceiling. The exhibition plays with gay cultural codes, deploying them for the purpose of "high art," but could have benefited from being further politically sharpened. Made from a lustrous white colored glass, clear on the outside and delicately white on the inside, these pairs of balls, hand-blown by glass craftsman Anthony Harris at the Royal Collage in London, where Petry also teaches, hang from the gallery’s high ceiling from nearly invisible wires. They are dispersed around a central pair, hung at the anatomical height of Petry’s own testicles. The surrounding pairs rise from the floor at a 45 degree angle—the "angle of pleasure" which, if exceeded, qualifies as publicly displayed image of an erection deemed legally pornographic. Gallery visitors are encouraged to wander amongst the pairs of glass balls which make small tinkling sounds with the unavoidable encounter with the viewer or ambient air currents. When moving among them, I became aware of concurrent anatomical correlations, at eye level and at gonad level.

Titled The Milky Way, this artwork is less a galaxy and more a constellation of vitrified milky substances derived from the male body. More vulnerable than Achilles’ heel, the glass ovoids invoke the fragility of male reproductive organs. While there is tension in the delicacy of the work, especially in its equations with the male body, the mathematical precision with which the objects are arranged, combined with the preciousness of the glass, confer a sterile and pristine coolness to the room. The installation is immersive and enveloping, reflective of a desire for sensuousness, but its form eschews the direct imagery of pornography.

Each element of Petry’s artworks is a thinly veiled reference to a set of codes. The series of nine colorfully dyed cow hides that surround The Milky Way resemble color field paintings, but with titles including Sex for Sale, Butt Pluggers, Mansuck, and Foot Soldiers, they clearly reference gay sexual games. Fully splayed, each hide is stretched and riveted to the wall, evenly dyed green, fuchsia, blue, black, or yellow, correlating to the "hanky code." The color of a hanky worn in the back pocket advertises the gay male’s sexual wants while out cruising. The viewer can choose to contemplate the meditative aspects of the art or focus on the sexual connotations.

Constellations of small white irregular pearls are sewn onto the hides to resemble sparse topographies, outer space star clusters or yet-to-be-discovered archipelagoes. The Milky Way sculpture appears to be a magnification of the artworks that surround it. The patterns on the hides are actually outlines of ejaculate patterns from stills of "the money-shot" from gay pornographic films. The pearls are sewn in a stretched pattern to match the dimensions of an average 5’11" male body. The color of each hide matches the major theme of the porn film from which shot is taken. The hides/skins recontextualize pearls, highlighted in portraits of Queen Elizabeth as signifiers of virginity and purity.

The milky substance of ejaculate is an underlying motif in much homoerotic contemporary art. A few pieces include Vito Acconchi’s surreptitiously performative Seed Bed, David Wojnarowicz painted infections spermatozoa, Kehinde Wiley virile sperm decoratively swimming about his paintings of urban black males, Murakami’s lonesome cowboy, and Linda Benglis’s recent bronze blob titled Come. Petry makes a significant contribution to the history of the image of the petite mort in art. His is a gay post-AIDS art of renewed optimism and conspicuous sexual consumption. The disease persists but the culture adjusts to its etiological shifts.

Petry’s work milks the puns out of the materials he uses, relying on double entendres and literal readings. Sexuality creates bizarre displacements, not neat correlations. His artworks reify desire, translating the body’s messy functions into "high-art" preciousness with careful mappings that leave them sanitized and disinfected. The hides, punctured and stretched, try to be grotesque but the result is an idealized, fully functioning gay male body, unharmed and unthreatened by infection. Infection and dysfunction cannot be represented in this world because the works depend on the evidence of full male sexual functioning. Petry’s hides mirror so many of the problems of gay porn industry’s drive to maximize profit.

Petry’s art does not emphasize worker’s exploitation in mining pearls or making leather to serve luxury goods industries. Despite cunning abstractions that work as conceptual mappings, and a dependence on coding and metaphor, these works take for granted so many other contexts and points of reference on which they. These other areas might spoil the fun, but without them, the skin looses its tenderness. With reality checks, Petry’s de-pornographied fairy tales would shatter like glass.