![]() ![]() By that time, the soft-core film over which Bidgood had labored so feverishly had taken on the aspect of a quaint curiosity, and one that didn’t even bear his name. Production of Pink Narcissus dragged on, and he did not see a completed version until 1971, the year of the first famous hard-core gay theatrical feature, Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand. That year, Jack Smith finished Flaming Creatures and shot Normal Love, Andy Warhol began making films, and Kenneth Anger directed Scorpio Rising the following year Sontag would publish “Notes on ‘Camp.’” As the ’60s were happening outside his door, Bidgood was shooting mainly inside, in his cramped Hell’s Kitchen apartment, constantly augmenting and revising his elaborate sets and compositions to approximate the baroque ideal he envisioned. He contributed lush color photographs to magazines such as Muscleboy and The Young Physique during their vogue in the early 1960s. Historical referents and views of exteriors hardly impinge at all on his visual world and yet Bidgood was very much a man of his era. He painstakingly arranged the appliquéd, molded, and shredded materials of the dress into a forced-perspective composition of vibrant greens, pinks, and blues.īidgood’s work is so self-contained that it appears to exist outside of time. The rest was recycled from a gown Bidgood created for a client attending a Junior League Mardi Gras ball. Amid the luxuriant vegetation, only the youngster’s body is what it seems to be. Beneath drooping branches, a nude male figure reclines on a bed of flowers and shields his eyes against a rosy sunrise in a landscape of hills and mesas. Willow Tree, from the mid-’60s, combines many distinctive elements of Bidgood’s photography. understood as a state of continual incandescence-a person being one, very intense thing.” Bidgood transformed himself from a female impersonator to an artist pursuing one very intense thing: his obsession with the young male figure, which he most often placed in highly stylized settings bathed in saturated colored lights. His persona is a perfect example of what Susan Sontag (some years later in her essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”) would call “instant character. As an androgynous and manic Carol Channing, he stands out with makeup that gives him a startled look and a toothy grin reminiscent of a Kabuki demon’s. ![]() One especially striking picture shows Bidgood in his drag persona Terry Howe at work “mixing” with spectators to encourage them to buy more drinks. Snapshots displayed in vitrines reveal how Bidgood, born in 1933, spent the ’50s: as a dressmaker, costumer, and performer, most notably at Club 82, a drag mecca and Mafia clip joint in the East Village. “Reveries,” curated by Lissa Rivera, presents new prints of choice examples of Bidgood’s photography, as well as vintage prints and publications from the 1960s, along with the work for which he is best known, the film Pink Narcissus (1971). James Bidgood as Terry Howe backstage at Club 82, New York, ca. Stranded outside any easily definable mainstream, he has been rescued for posterity on a number of occasions, the latest being the exhibition “James Bidgood: Reveries” at New York’s Museum of Sex. Although artists such as Pierre et Gilles, David LaChapelle, and Steven Arnold have ransacked Bidgood’s oeuvre for inspiration, his work is too idiosyncratic and homemade, and the artist himself too reclusive, to be called canonical. His small, hermetic body of work combines eroticism and a vivid, campy vulgarity. ![]() PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER James Bidgood might agree with a sentiment expressed in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband: To be natural “is such a very difficult pose to keep up.” From 1960 to 1970-the period between the US court decisions affirming the redeeming social value of male physique photographs and subsequent ones establishing a legal definition of pornography-Bidgood constructed an elaborate artificial world for himself. ![]()
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