Made Men
Body, gesture, and habitus of masculine visual worlds
28/02/—17/05/26
Ines Arnemann, Edmund Bechtle, Norbert Bisky, Fritz Cremer, Jutta Damm-Fiedler, Helmut Diehl, Andreas Dress, Albert Ebert, Jochen Fiedler, Günther Friedrich, Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik, Erich Gerlach, Jost Giese, Gerhard Goßmann, René Graetz, Peter Graf, Otto Griebel, Erhard Großmann, Lea Grundig, Ulrich Hachulla, Manfred Hausmann, Christian Heinze, Bert Heller, Karl-Georg Hirsch, Werner Hofmann, Joseph W. Huber, Rolf Händler, Joachim Jansong, Jürgen Jentzsch, Susanne Kandt-Horn, Gerhard Kettner, Klaus Killisch, Rolf Kiy, Kollektiv Tröger-Lohse, Gregor-T. Kozik, Wilhelm Lachnit, Helge Leiberg, Annina Linggi, Harald Metzkes, Peter Muschter, Manfred Pietsch, Curt Querner, Günter Richter, Elke Riemer, Wilhelm Rudolph, Jürgen Schieferdecker, Harald K. Schulze, Willi Sitte, Volker Stelzmann, Werner Tübke, Max Uhlig, Andreas Wallat, Kurt Zimmermann, Manfred Zoller
In his work Masculine Domination (1998/2001), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu examined the cosmology of the mountain farmers in Kabylia. Cosmological thinking orders the world through metaphorical similarities and opposites—for example, high and low, inside and outside, fire and sun. This order of knowledge is particularly interesting to Bourdieu because, lacking a written tradition, it has not been reflexively reshaped and has therefore retained a particular everyday stereotyping. At the center of this cosmos is humankind, symbolically represented by man.
Against this backdrop, the exhibition Gemachte Männer (Made Men) can be read as a collection of open visual cosmoses. Masculinity in the works on display does not appear as a fixed allegory, but rather unfolds through relationships between individual pictorial elements, through metaphors, and through the action of bodies in space. Typical examples are the militant depictions of workers from the early GDR. For instance, an upright Ernst Thälmann, striding with a determined gaze and clenched fists, looks down from a poster over the heads of the viewers. The low perspective conveys the impression that he could simply trample over the viewer and all the obstacles of history. These depictions from the 1950s follow a symbolic order closely linked to Bourdieu’s observations of Kabylian peasant society: masculinity becomes associated with the militant, with production, and with expansive movement into the external world.
From the 1970s onward, this symbolic order shifts. The hitherto hegemonic significance of masculinity is now viewed from an increasingly ironic distance. Joseph W. Huber quotes Paul Peter Rubens‘ allegorical depiction of the Judgment of Paris, but places Paris in the role of a postmodern single man who must choose between dating ads in the newspaper. In Max Uhlig’s paintings, identities become literally fragile: the silhouettes of the portrayed figures remain recognizable as traces, but the lines become unstable, the body loses its closed form. Norbert Bisky’s visual worlds, on the other hand, are characterized by a colorful, hedonistic aesthetic. Beneath this surface, however, scenes unfold that are permeated by a raw libidinality, which both originates from and acts upon the male body. Masculinity thus appears not as a stable point of reference, but as a differentiated field between uncertainty, desire, violence, and vulnerability.
Together, the works reveal how masculinity is not simply depicted, but is constantly produced, shifted, and questioned—as body, gesture, and habitus.