Reheating the Cold War

Identities in transition at the Bernard Toale Gallery

Stephen Barker's current exhibition, "The Archivist's Wig", now showing at the Bernard Toale Gallery through March 29, offers an exceptionally strong historical narrative. Combining photography, sculpture and other media, Barker constructs a dual focus on gay male identity: simultaneously mining the rich Cold War era and proceeding up to the present day circumstance of the omnipresent eroticized gay male image.

To achieve this end, "The Archivist's Wig" concerns itself with the story of Guy Burgess, pulling us back to the beginning of the Cold War era - a time of intense rivalry between the two emerging superpowers and thus an era of intense paranoia. Burgess, whose early life was fictionalized in the play and film Another Country, was a British-born diplomat and double agent whose defection to the Soviet Union caused a scandal in 1951. Burgess was no stranger to scandal; his homosexual desires placed him squarely at odds with British society and ultimately his country as a whole. Burgess was not quiet about his desires or his politics. This led to his alienation, which in turn became a self-reinforcing dynamic, as his alcoholism would abet further sexual and political indiscretions. Burgess' eventual treachery solidified his position as the ultimate other.

Photography is the principal method of conveying the narrative; even the government documents included appear courtesy of the photographic process. Save for one piece of sculpture (more on that in a moment), Barker has even included vintage images inside of other sculptural elements of the exhibition. Barker has literally plastered the walls with references to the dual lives that the mid-twentieth century gay male was forced to lead. The various double-exposed faces that line the upper portions of the gallery walls direct the viewer with their multiple gazes - they pointedly look out at each other as well as the exhibition and its viewers.

Accentuating the more aggressive views of the larger photographs at the top of the gallery, smaller-sized multiple-exposure photographs hover around the lower half of the fleshscape that Barker has wrapped around the gallery. These works mimic vintage porn but are decidedly of the present moment, a product of how we view and review ourselves and those we desire through the unmediated realm of cyberspace.

The series "Nine Bachelors: Guy Burgess In America," underscores Barker's overarching narrative of dueling identities, while taking a more submissive tone. Text (either a press clipping on Burgess or an FBI document detailing their surveillance of his American exploits, blackened with official redactions) mounted against a void and juxtaposed with Barker's black and white photography of a naked male lying abed in an anonymous room, back turned towards the viewer. Each of these "bachelor's" backs is adorned with tattoos that range from the innocuous to works of heavy religious and sexual intensity. These bodies evoke a feeling of vulnerability, but also of anticipation; they are open for our inspection, like the life of Burgess.

Burgess preferred to pick up hitchhikers, driving around in his 1941 Lincoln Continental. Barker, with a clear nod to Dada phenom Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)," places the metal frame of a '41 Continental within the confines of this exhibition. Like Duchamp's bizarre meditation on the psychosexual dynamic, Barker's own "glass" sustains a crack, a rupture in time if you will, through which we can, like Burgess, stare at the man of our desires - another image of a naked man's back, sharing a frame with the negative space that holds the documentation of Burgess's infamy. Amusingly, even one of these documents references Duchamps's piece in the headline "Guy Burgess: stripped bare!" another example of the doubling inherent in Barker's socio-psychological construction.