TITLE    : Sexual Ambiguity as Pantheism
STORYID  : sexual-ambiguity-as-pantheism
SUMMARY  : This as That in the Art of Christopher Leach.
AUTHOR   : Cal Y. Pygia@lit
DATE     : 2010-02-18
CATEGORY : reviews-and-essays
FLAGS    : 
TAGS     : |christopher leach|illustration|painting|art|erotica|transvestite|transgender|


Except for the nipples of the latter, buttocks and breasts bear more than a passing resemblance, a similarity that transgender artist Christopher Leach highlights in A Call in the Night. In this painting, a naked man kneels beside a bed, his head resting upon a pillow, facing the viewer-voyeur. His arm is folded so that his hand rests upon the mattress. All but his head and neck are off the bed, which is itself shown only in the vicinity of the pillow. The figure, obviously, a dreamer, wears women's stockings. His penis is erect, and drops of semen drip from its glans, past a fire bucket.



Behind him is a two-story house or, perhaps, part of a hotel, with ornate windows, brick chimneys, and terraces, one of the latter of which seems to be equipped with a red-and-white-striped beach umbrella.



Two gigantic female figures--the characters in his dream, who call upon him in the night, dwarf the scenery. One, facing away from the viewer, is African, and her wide, firm buttocks, dressed in a tight-stretched bandana-like bikini bottom, appears just to the upper left of a blonde in a tightly laced corset, the cleavage of whose breasts is juxtaposed to the other woman's round buttocks, suggesting more an affinity than a difference between the four fleshly globes.



This painting does not itself suggest an ambiguity between the categories of male and female, man and woman, masculine and feminine, but it does suggest the central motif of Leach's art, which is that one thing is so very much like another that the two may seem but variants of one another. This theme is again and again manipulated in the seemingly endless variety of metamorphoses of body parts that occur in the artist's illustrations and paintings.



In A Spring Orgasm 1996), a human proboscis becomes a penis (or a penis a human proboscis); in Berlin May Day, a naked woman is transformed into a gigantic sperm (or a gigantic sperm is transformed into a naked woman); in Chloe Factor (2002), a dome-capped tower becomes a naked woman's penis (or a naked woman's penis becomes a dome-capped tower); in Happy Valley, comparatively huge, disembodied women's buttocks and vaginas form rounded hills (or rounded hills form comparatively huge, disembodied women's buttocks and vaginas); in several of Leach's works, the resemblance of the testicles to breasts occasions the transformation of a woman's limbless torso, as seen from behind, into a shape that could be a disembodied penis (or a disembodied penis is transformed into a shape that could be a woman's limbless torso, as seen from behind).



The transformations and metamorphoses keep coming. In Night Nurse, clever shading and the presence upon one orb, and the absence upon its twin, of a nipple creates the illusion that a pair of breasts is a pair of buttocks (or that a pair of buttocks is a pair of breasts), an illusion which is reinforced by another image in the same work, which features another cleverly shaded orb, complete with jutting nipple, which appears, because of the shading, to be seen, at the same time, both in full, from the rear, and from the right side, in profile, with a leg wearing stockings and a high-heeled show attached below the ambiguous breast-buttock (or buttock-breast).



Disembodied heads, breasts, buttocks, eyes, lips, and other body parts, some of which function independently enough to assert individual life on their own, apart from the rest of the body (in Show Me What's Behind the Blue Door [1991]), which purports to show "the lengths some people will go to, to please Mr. Oscar Wilde," the decapitated head of a blonde woman, wearing a mask, performs what appears to be, at first glance, cunnilingus upon a slender figure dressed in fishnet stockings and gloves, but who is, a closer look reveals, a transvestite to whose penis the head is giving head. Likewise, in Piccadilly Gardens (2003), oversize heads, penises, breasts, torsos, and pudenda all go blithely about their business, separate from the rest of their bodies. The parts have no need of the whole in the fragmented world of the fetish artist.



In Spring Is Sprung, a nude male figure overlaps the nude female figure behind him. This overlap makes it appear that the single, elliptical drop of semen which the male figure ejaculates is the woman's navel. In the same illustration, a tangle of body parts reveals itself to be a clump, as it were, of testicles and breasts, and penises and breasts slither and crawl about the drawing of their own accord, monstrous creatures akin to the demons of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. As always, in the work of Leach, one thing can be another, just as any body part can separate from the rest of the body, enjoying a life (of sorts) of its own, as unfettered and untamed by reason as it is uncontrolled by the brain.



Although attractive, the faces of Leach's men and women are androgynous, with a unisex look which would allow any head to be transplanted onto any body of the opposite sex without need of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief." In a world, such as that of Christopher Leach, in which a breast may just as easily be a buttock, a woman's torso a penis, or a pair of testicles a pair of breasts, it seems just as likely that a man could be a woman or a woman a man, and, of course, his art is replete with both transvestites and transsexuals (that is, with men dressed and, indeed, equipped anatomically, to some degree, as women).



The detailed and repetitive insistence that this can be that and that that can be this prepares the viewer to accept that, more than a mere similarity between the sexes and genders, there is an equivalence, which may be expressed now as male-man-masculine and now as female-woman-feminine, so that it makes as much sense to say that, in Leach's anthropology, a female can likewise be a male, that a woman can likewise be a man, and that feminine can likewise be masculine as it does to say the reverse, that a male can likewise be a female, that a man can likewise be a woman, and that masculine can likewise be feminine.



If men are women (and women are men) sexually, they are so in terms of both their genitals and their secondary sexual characteristics. Thus, a woman may be bald, and a man may have both female breasts and male genitals--and, if he likes, a beard as well, as a figure in The Fundamentalist Masquerading as a Hair Stylist (2002) certainly does. Moreover, the transformation of body parts, one into another, may be frozen, as it were, in mid-metamorphosis, thereby symbolizing the essential oneness of all things sexual. In The Joys of Gardening (1994), breasts-as-testicles (or testicles-as-breasts), one of which, at least, is complete with a projecting nipple, sprout a mighty erection.



People are things, Leach's art insists. Therefore, they can be, at once, woman and building (as in The Joys of Gardening), just as parts of them--their breasts, for instance--can be landscape features--hills, in Happy Valley.



Indeed, body parts can be both partly themselves and partly human artifacts: a breast and a penis, a tower (Chloe Factor [2002] and Strange Gifts for the Birthday Boy); a pair of buttocks, a sack (Strange Gifts); a woman, a statue (The Artistic Way of Life); penises and testicles, dirigibles (The Discerning Traveller); female abdomens, the fronts of buildings or plowshares (The Joys of Gardening).



In Leach's fetish art, the ambiguity of sex and gender is projected onto the world at large, including both nature and technology. All things point to other things, but, at the same time, everything is potentially everything else, so that the parts and the whole are strangely confused, yet united, in a polymorphous and perverse totality of sex and existence (or of sexualized existence).



The world of the fetishist and the pervert, Leach's art suggests, results in (or may be caused by) an undifferentiated identification of the self and the universe wherein, one is all in all, so that both he or she (or, rather, he-and-she) reflects all things. The religious term for such a worldview is pantheism. Sexually, such a mindset creates a pansexual outlook in which, as The Beatles put it, " I am you and you are me and we are all together."



Note: Descriptions of Leach's art are based upon Internet images of his illustrations and paintings, the titles of which sometimes indicate the dates of their creation and sometimes do not; where dates are provided, I have included them.

