The Personal and The Romantic - XX book introduction

One of the earliest photographic works of Stuart Sandford, a series titled Cumfaces (2007), stands out as a highlight in his body of work. At first glance, the expressive faces of young men in closeups—are they in anguish or ecstasy? Are they gasping for their last breath, experiencing La petit Mort? A brief loss or weakening of consciousness, more specifically a post-orgasm sensation likened to death. The premise of Sandford’s orgasmic photo exercise: a call to interested participants, to capture the striking moment young men cum; their apparatus, the camera; a hazy moment of ecstasy. Initially commissioned by GAY TIMES Magazine in 2007, it secured one of the many points of direction and notoriety for the young artist and marked the first iteration of the idea of the selfie in Sandford’s practice which he would return to in sculptures and appropriated works in the following decade.

Born in 1978 in Sheffield, England, with dreams of a life treading the boards, Sandford became more interested in the behind-the-scenes world, and began penning scripts to direct them. An ex-love encouraged him to study fine art, to give him a thorough understanding of art history, current art-making practices, and time to experiment with different media. Focusing on photography and moving images was always the paramount idea, and that is what continues to dictate his inspiration and forms.

Following artistic bohemian impulses, Sandford tried a stint in Berlin in 2007 for six months, struggling to carve out a living and subsequently moving to London for a few years. Then, New York City in 2010, where he met like-minded queer art folks like Billy Miller, Bruce LaBruce, Gio Black Peter, and Slava Mogutin — to date these people have become part of his extended queer family, which has become a well of inspiration, encouragement and true friendships. His time in New York inspired seminal works that were a springboard propelling his body of work forward with clearer vision.

Sandford’s art-making is firmly fixed in the classicism of Ancient Greece and Rome, creating a contemporary of the eternal story of the male figure. Echos of the ever-lasting story of Hadrian’s love for Antinous in 130 AD. Emperor Hadrian had a hard-on for supposedly the most beautiful man that ever lived, bagged him, and fell madly in love. As any good Greek tragedy goes, some highs and lows, tumult, and death. Antinous drowned in the river Nile at age twenty. Devastated, Hadrian built statues of his image and was determined to build his legacy as a God. This mythology inspired Sandford’s first sculptural works and continues to inspire him on a feature film which he has worked on for a decade.

Sandford is in-the-life, present in a whirling post-AIDS, most QUEER era delivering a sound reminder to hold beauty to the light, images of love encounters, languid bodies, and a time of place. It is a far cry from images of ill and ravaged youth from the late 80s and 90s, captured in TV flashes of skeletal bodies in the news; a shattering of the progress that was afoot from the Late ‘60s and ‘70s changed the course of the mono-centric proposal of “Gay Liberation.” His work is not solely voyeuristic but loving and soulful, resulting from his imposed requirement of certain intimacies with his subjects, whether through blossoming friendship or carnal knowledge. A hurried image or closeup and studied, is a celebration of life and an acknowledgment of the vibrancy of queer life, queer bodies now in real-time.

He was introduced to Durk Dehner in 2014 and invited to live at the artist commune TOM House, where he was instrumental in starting the artists’ residency program at the historic former home of the man himself, Touko Valio Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland. He found a community that relishes the erotic, BDSM, Leather Culture; a queer cultural hub in the intersectionality, and diversity of queer folk. While there, Sandford bonded with a strong Latinx Community in Los Angeles, forging friendships that encouraged him and helped create a bridge for his next adventures in Mexico City. Now Sandford is back in the UK for an extended period and taking the time to explore what his hometown can offer, always with plans for the next big move.

Heady days in LA, Mexico, the UK, and beyond have informed his latest work, creating photographic tableaus that are familiar yet far away. His power lies in depicting his subject with the greatest of ease as if the camera is not there or he has become the camera, a camera with loving eyes, again blurring the line between art and life. The negative spaces in his photographic work are just as beautiful—these corners leave us to fill them with meaning, partake in libidinal longing, or place us in the instance of living life. His travels have expanded the eye on bodies beyond the Eurocentric norms, bodies with a myriad of shapes and colouring. Meeting boys via hook-up apps or the many parties and cultural events, he hardly misses, feeding his appetite for that perfect picture, face, body, the magic of time captured. He collapses time to create ample room for intimacies reflected clearly in all his work. He has created a dreamy pause from outside forces that insist on knocking down queer folks at any turn.

Sandford has forged perfect symmetry in his work. The through line is an uncompromising dedication to particular sensibilities, a relaxed formality with blurs of the now, but always with a fixed eye on beauty and truth.

© 2024 Rubén Esparza/SSE

Slipping through life, effortlessly - introduction to Polaroid Collages (2020) book

Over the past three years Stuart Sandford has been taking Polaroids, which he has then cut and re-assembled in new compositions. The resulting body of work, unequivocally titled Polaroid Collages, document the artist’s social circle – his “friends, lovers & others”, in his own words – in several locations between Los Angeles and Mexico.  Stuart started working with an instant camera in 2007 and revisited the medium seven years later, when he first arrived in L.A. to do a residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation, a life-changing experience. 

Taking a Polaroid finds a perfect equivalent in writing down a note: both actions share the same immediacy and respond to the same urgency of fixing an idea before it disappears. It’s something that has to do with capturing a thought or an instant, clinging to a moment, in the awareness that we’ll be able to go back to it, in the form of memories. Promises of a pleasure yet to come. 

Indeed, the Polaroid Collages originate from the pleasure that comes from satisfying small desires: the desire to photograph, which is also, almost inevitably, the desire to look, to smell, to touch, to taste, to possess.

Stuart describes his works in poetical terms, calling them “instant sculptures that, held in your hand, come alive and sing”. The physical nature of these images – a fact that we hardly associate to photography, these days – is enhanced by the cuts and the junction lines left visible on the surface of each photograph, reminding us that these are pictures made of fragments.

We are attracted by what is fragmentary because we are invited to fill in the gaps with our own sensibilities. Most ancient Greek sculptures, which established a powerful and enduring ideal of male beauty, came to us in pieces. Our very essence, our memory, is fragmentary by nature.

Because of their private character, Polaroids have a strong relationship with eroticism. 

Stuart’s images play on a ground shared by amateur homoerotic photography and more canonical imagery depicting the male figure. They also respond to a specific model of masculinity that thrived in L.A. after World War II, and whose heritage still lingers nowadays. Long gone are the beefy models and the tanned, blonde, California boys celebrated by Bob Mizer and Bruce of Los Angeles. 

Instead, the men in the Polaroid Collages strike for their most delicate vulnerability. They inhabit a place of intimacy and tenderness, slipping through life, effortlessly. It’s here that one revisits those captured thoughts: in the towering palm trees of Laveta Terrace, in the melancholic gaze of a young man whose name we’ll never know, in the low rays of sun that turn everything they reach into gold, at dusk.

Stuart has kept his promises.

© 2020 Francesco Dama

STUART SANDFORD ENCAPSULATES 1421 LAVETA TERRACE

IN MANY WAYS, MY TIME LIVING AT TOM HOUSE WAS DEFINED BY STUART SANDFORD. NOT ONLY WERE HIS WORKS PROMINENTLY FEATURED IN THE HOUSE DURING MY RESIDENCY, BUT HE SHEPHERDED ME AROUND THE QUEER ART SCENE IN LA. I WON’T GO INTO TOO MUCH DETAIL ABOUT OUR FRIENDSHIP, BUT LET IT SUFFICE TO SAY, HE’S A REAL PAL AND A TRUE LOVER OF THE ARTS. STUART’S WORK SPANS THE EROTIC GAMUT: PHOTO, SCULPTURE, FILM, WRITING, AND CURATION. HIS WORK HAS BEEN FEATURED IN SOLO AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS AROUND THE WORLD, AS WELL AS IN NUMEROUS PUBLICATIONS— MY FAVORITE, “THE HOUSE OF STUART” IN LALA MAGAZINE. ALTHOUGH STUART IS BACK IN HIS HOMELAND (MERRY ENGLAND), HE IS PARTICIPATING IN AN ONLINE EXHIBITION VIA CULTUREEDIT / TOM OF FINLAND STORE IN CONJUNCTION WITH TOM’S 100TH BIRTHDAY. THE WORK IS A CELEBRATION OF THE SAME IDEALS TOM BELIEVED IN— GAY JOY AND LIBERATED SEXUALITY. CHECK OUT THE SHOW ONLINE, AND PURSUE AVAILABLE WORKS. WE LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR PRODIGAL RETURN TO LA, STUART!!!

JAMISON KARON: WHAT WERE YOU DOING CREATIVELY THAT ORIGINALLY LED YOU TO TOM HOUSE?

STUART SANDFORD: I’D RECENTLY BEGUN WORKING ON A NEW SCULPTURAL PROJECT (MY ONGOING SEBASTIAN PROJECT) AND HAD SPOKEN ABOUT IT WITH GARY EVERETT, THE THEN DIRECTOR OF HOMOTOPIA (THE UK’S BIGGEST QUEER ARTS FESTIVAL). HE’D WORKED WITH DURK DEHNER AND TOM OF FINLAND FOUNDATION FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS AND SET UP A MEETING AT TATE BRITAIN WHILST I WAS STILL IN LONDON.

WHAT WAS LIVING AT THE HOUSE LIKE IN THE BEGINNING?

IT WAS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO ADJUST INITIALLY AS THE SPACE OPERATES ESSENTIALLY AS BOTH COMMUNAL LIVING SPACE AND ALSO GALLERY/MUSEUM OPEN TO THE PUBLIC SO THERE’S VERY LITTLE ROOM FOR PRIVACY AND ALONE TIME, WHICH IS SOMETHING I THRIVE WITH. IT WAS ALL ABOUT GETTING INTO THE RHYTHM OF THE SPACE.

HOW DID YOU INITIALLY DECIDE TO DO A SERIES OF POLAROIDS (1421 LAVETA TERRACE)?

I’D BEEN WORKING WITH PHOTOGRAPHY IN MY PRACTICE SINCE ART SCHOOL BUT HAD NEVER REALLY WORKED WITH POLAROIDS. I WANTED TO CHALLENGE MYSELF WITH SOMETHING DIFFERENT WHILST ALSO PAYING HOMAGE TO A VERY SPECIFIC TIME AND PLACE AND POLAROID ABSOLUTELY LENDS ITSELF TO THOSE MOMENTS, THOSE NEVER TO BE REPEATED MOMENTS, MOMENTS OF SPONTANEITY, OF EROTICISM, OF STILLNESS, AND BEAUTY. I CONTACTED POLAROID AND THEY SPONSORED THE PROJECT, PROVIDING ME WITH A CAMERA AND AS MUCH FILM AS I COULD SHOOT.

THOSE POLAROIDS ARE VERY SENTIMENTAL TO ME, BECAUSE I DID MY RESIDENCY NOT LONG AFTER YOURS, AND IN MANY WAYS THEY REFLECT MY OWN EXPERIENCE. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR ABILITY TO CAPTURE INSTANTANEOUS MOMENTS, AND WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT?

THE GREAT THING ABOUT A POLAROID CAMERA IS HOW SMALL IT IS, WHICH MAKES POINTING IN PEOPLES FACES AND OTHER PLACES QUITE EASY AND MUCH LESS INTIMIDATING THAN, SAY, A FULL SIZE SLR WITH LENSES AND FLASHES. IT’S THE REASON I’VE ALWAYS USED 35MM POINT AND SHOOT CAMERAS TOO, THEY LEND THEMSELVES TO THESE INSTANTANEOUS MOMENTS.

YOUR WORK, PARTICULARLY YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY, BRINGS MEMORIES OF OUR ESCAPADES IN LA. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE PERSONAL NATURE OF YOUR WORK?

I HAVE AN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH 99% OF THE PEOPLE THAT I PHOTOGRAPH, EITHER AS FRIEND OR LOVER AND WHEN I STARTED TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS I WAS FOLLOWING A SNAPSHOT AESTHETIC POPULARIZED BY MANY ARTIST-PHOTOGRAPHERS BEGINNING WITH WOLFGANG TILLMANS AND NAN GOLDIN. I WANTED THEM TO FEEL RAW AND VULNERABLE AND INTIMATE AND EVEN IF THEY ARE STAGED/RESTAGED THEY STILL DOCUMENT A MOMENT IN MY LIFE AND THOSE IN MY ORBIT.

DID YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS CHANGE WHILE LIVING AT TOM HOUSE? 

I DON’T THINK LIVING THERE CHANGED MY ART PRACTICE PER SE BUT I DID BECOME INVOLVED IN A NUMBER OF LARGER MORE COMMUNITY FOCUSED PROJECTS, LIKE THE QUEER BIENNIAL FOR EXAMPLE, AND I’M GRATEFUL TO HAVE BEEN A PART OF SHAPING THAT AS THE FILM CURATOR SINCE ITS INCEPTION.

YOUR WORK SPANS MANY MEDIUMS, FROM PHOTOGRAPHY, TO SCULPTURE, TO FILM. ALL FORMS WHICH ARE REPRESENTED IN THE NEW EXHIBITION. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW THESE FORMS INTERACT?

ALL MY WORK SHARES THE SAME CORE THEMES AND IDEAS THAT I WANT TO PRESENT AND EXPLORE, AND FOR ME IT REALLY IS ABOUT THE IDEA THAT DICTATES THE MOST APPROPRIATE MEDIUM TO EXPRESS THAT IDEA.

AS YOU KNOW, I’M QUITE FOND OF THE IMAGES OF BRENT CORRIGAN IN THE GARDEN. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO PHOTOGRAPH SUCH AN INFAMOUS PORN STAR? AND WHY IN THE GARDEN? HOW DID IT COME ABOUT?

WELL BRENT WAS MY NUMBER ONE ALL TIME PORN STAR CRUSH SO IT WAS A DREAM COME TRUE TO MEET HIM AND SHOOT HIM. I THINK HE HAD CONTACTED TOFF ABOUT POTENTIALLY HOSTING HIS BIRTHDAY PARTY AT THE HOUSE AND I ASKED HIM TO POSE FOR ME AND HE WAS VERY KEEN TO DO SO. I’D NEVER MET OR SHOT A PORN STAR BEFORE SO I WASN'T SURE HOW IT WOULD GO, BUT AFTER A COUPLE OF BEERS AND SOME TIME JUST CHATTING IT WAS A BREEZE. HE SURPRISED ME WITH HIS INTELLIGENCE AND SENSE OF HUMOUR. OH AND THE GARDEN WAS THE PERFECT LOCATION FOR THE SHOOT, SOMEWHERE CALM, PEACEFUL, BEAUTIFUL, AND SERENE AS I WANTED TO CAPTURE SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT THAN THE NORM, AND I THINK I DID.

AS YOUR WORK CONTINUES TO EVOLVE, THEMES OF ADOLESCENT NARCISSISM REMAIN… BRENT CORRIGAN, SEBASTIAN, SEAN FORD… HOW DO THESE FIGURES CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR MESSAGE? AND HOW HAS THAT MESSAGE EVOLVED OVER TIME?

GOOD QUESTION. HAS IT EVOLVED? I’M NOT SURE. IT’S DEFINITELY BECOME MORE MATURE AND MUCH MORE TECHNICALLY PROFICIENT BUT I THINK ALL TRUE ARTISTS ARE OBSESSED WITH SOME IDEA, SOME THEME, AND REALLY WE JUST MAKE THE SAME WORK OVER AND OVER AGAIN TRYING TO EXPLORE/PRESENT THAT IDEA OR THEME AND I THINK THAT’S OKAY.

THE SEBASTIAN RELIC SERIES HAS BEEN EVOLVING SINCE I MET YOU. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA TO HAVE FRIENDS AND PATRONS PEE ON THE BRONZE HEAD?

I’D LOVE TO SAY THAT WAS MY IDEA BUT IT WAS ACTUALLY A GALLERIST I WORK WITH THAT GAVE ME THE INITIAL IDEA. AS I WAS STAYING AT TOM HOUSE AT THE TIME, IT MADE SENSE TO MAKE USE OF THE SPACE AND THE PEOPLE THERE AND MAKE IT A COMMUNAL ART PROJECT FOR MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY THAT ORBIT AROUND TOM HOUSE.

WHO IS PEEING IN THE VIDEO? AND WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS FILM ADDS TO THE SCULPTURE?

THAT’S ACTUALLY A FRIEND OF OURS BRYCE, DON’T YOU RECOGNIZE HIS CUTE BUM? I TOOK SOME DOCUMENTATION PHOTOS WITH HIM AS WELL. I ALWAYS SAW THAT VIDEO IN MY MIND WHEN I STARTED THE PIECE, SLOW MOTION WITH PEE SPRAYING EVERYWHERE AND GLISTENING IN THE GOLDEN LIGHT OF THE GARDEN, A GOLDEN SHOWER FOR THE SEBASTIAN HEAD, IF YOU WILL.

YOUR WORK POST TOM HOUSE CONTINUES TO HAVE A DIALOGUE WITH THE SPACE. HOW HAS TOFF CREATED A PLATFORM FOR YOUR BRAND OF SEXUALITY?

THE WHOLE ETHOS OF TOM’S WORK, FOR ME, IS A CELEBRATION OF QUEER LOVE, SEX, AND DESIRE, AND I HOPE MY WORK RESONATES WITH THAT. I FEEL PART OF THE TOM HOUSE AND TOM OF FINLAND FAMILY AND CAN’T IMAGINE NOT COMING BACK TO THAT AMAZING SPACE AND CONTINUING A DIALOGUE.

WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW? AND WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME TO LA??

I HAVE TWO NEW STATUES I’M WORKING ON THAT I HOPED TO HAVE FINISHED FOR THE SUMMER BUT BECAUSE OF THE CURRENT COVID-19 STATE OF AFFAIRS WE ALL FIND OURSELVES IN, THEY WILL BE READY LATER IN THE YEAR. I’M ALSO FINALIZING MY FIRST BOOK SINCE 2017, WHICH IS OF MY POLAROID COLLAGES. I BEGAN THOSE AT THE END OF 2018 AND I’VE REALLY ENJOYED THE PROCESS OF MAKING THEM. THAT SHOULD BE OUT AROUND JUNE. OH AND I HOPE TO BE BACK IN LA END OF SUMMER IF ALL GOES WELL, IT FEELS LIKE HOME AND I MISS IT TERRIBLY.

© 2020 CULTUREEDIT / Tom Of Finland Store

Interview with The Guest Magazine - LA/CDMX

Dano Santana
Stuart Sandford 

D: I am a huge fan of your work.

S: Thank you so much.

D: I was introduced to your art and you as an artist because of the sculpture you did with Sebastian Sauvé. I feel like that is something you might hear a lot because you worked with him during those years when Sebastian was this kind of top model. He was getting a lot of recognition from the fashion industry and then all of a sudden, he is doing something with fine art, which was new and very cool.

S: It was great actually because when I had the idea to do the statue, which was always intended to be the selfie statue, I didn’t know at the time who the statue would be of. But, actually, Sebastian was great. When I had the idea of Sebastian Sauvé, and in my mind he was perfect, I just emailed him. He told me he had seen one of my series, called Cumfaces, which coincidentally was actually the first time that worked with the selfie. The Cumfaces series was in 2007, followed by another series in 2010, which was also done with the selfie. The Sebastian statue is the sort of the third iteration of the selfie. So I had this continually evolving idea, and I just needed to find the right person.

D: And Sebastian and the selfie?

S: Sebastian was perfect. He has this fantastic classical profile. His nose, his lips, and his chin.

D: Like a Greek God.

S: Exactly, Greco-Roman sculptures and statues were one of the inspirations behind the work. Especially because one of the biggest inspirations was this real-life guy called Antinous. Antinous was Emperor Hadrian’s boy lover back in 120 AD, and he was supposed to be the most beautiful boy that ever lived. When Antinous died, Emperor Hadrian commissioned more statues, paintings and likenesses of him than any other figure in Greco-Roman History. Through that process, he became worshipped, and he became an idol, and people turned that into a religion. There are lots of statues of Antinous, but there is one significant statue, there is no real title or name, but some call it Standing. Anyways, he is in a position where he is looking slightly downwards, and his left arm is extended as though he could be looking at his hand, and so that was the pose that I had Sebastian stand in. He is looking into the camera and taking the selfie.

D: Which is cool.

S: Thank you, thank you.

D: It’s also really cool for you to be in Mexico right now, and I don’t know if it was a coincidence because I do know that your friend Hector is here, but all of these interviews and all of these photoshoots going on are related to Pride because it is the month of June.

S: Yeah, Pride month, yeah.

D: Yes, Pride month and the big celebration will take place on the last Saturday of the month here in Mexico.

S: Oh, I won’t be here then.

D: Aw, well that’s our Pride. I always try to do something related to Pride, but I also want to do something interesting with people who are inside of the LGBTQI+ community; people that are trying to do more with the community, or trying to put out something like a statement. I know a little something about your art and you within the community, but can you tell us about your work in your own words?

S: Sure, so I work with photography, and I work with sculpture, painting, installation. I graduated from art school in 2006, so I have been making work ever since then. For me, what the work is about is when we’re teenagers, and when we’re an adolescent, we are trying to figure out who we are, our identity, our sexuality. When we form these ideas and these opinions, we are gathering from our friends, from our parents, from media, from many different sources and many different influences, and it’s about trying to figure out who we are. That desire to understand is kind of where the basis for all my work is. Not only is it about discovering, but about building the person you are. And so sex and sexuality is imperative within that. When I first started taking photographs, and when the photographs slid into the sculptural work that I’ve been doing mostly more lately, I wasn’t really seeing a lot of celebration and a lot of celebratory depictions of LGBTQI+ people, and I wanted to do that, I wanted to show that. I want my work to always be fun, but not funny. I am very serious about my work but definitely fun and definitely celebratory, and definitely, it is necessary to be visible as LGBTQI+ people.

D: Do your pieces have statements, or do you protest any sentiments through your work?

S: That’s a good question. I feel it is not necessarily a statement because I don’t believe that artists should be telling you, and I don’t think they should be instructing you. I think they should be asking questions. I think they should be prompting you, and I believe that good art should make you think, and it should make you question, and again within visibility and depictions within gay men or lifestyles, I think that is the statement. It’s funny because I was talking with a fellow artist saying, ‘Oh maybe I should write a diary about my trip to Mexico, but also generally, I should write a diary.’ He is a painter, and what he was said to me is ‘Well, I don’t do that because my work is my diary, and it’s my statement.’ I think that should be true. So, I don’t have a specific statement, but my work very much speaks for me, or I want my work to speak for me. Also, I am very conscious that I am a gay man, that I am producing imagery that is gay or queer, and I actually like the word queer a lot. I really like that word. I think it is the visibility that is the most important and that is the statement that I want people to see, for people to feel, and the celebratory fact that yes we have oppression, and repression, and suppression in many, many countries. We face the death penalty for being LGBTQI+ in several countries, and so the visibility and the fact that we are here and we are queer is important.

D: Yes!

S: What is that from? It’s the we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it. It’s the big old statement from, is it ACT UP? I think it is an ACT UP thing?

D: Yes it is a Queer Nation and ACT UP thing. Now, the next question is about your creative process. Can you tell us about how you have developed a piece or a series?

S: It really depends. For example, the new sculpture, Ouroboros. Ouroboros is an ancient Egyptian symbol of the snake or serpent eating its own tail. It is a symbol of fertility, eternal youth, and the changing of the seasons. I have a collector from Switzerland who just came to me and said, ‘Oh, I would love to have a sculpture of a guy sucking his own dick,’ and I thought to myself, that’s kind of boring, I’m not into interested in that depiction. Although there is sex in my work, I don’t consider my work to be erotic. I am not interested in turning you on, I am interested in making you think, but not necessarily in giving you a hard-on. If that happens, then that is perfectly fine, but that is not my intention. So, when he came to me, I was a little unsettled, but then when I thought about it and was researching the idea of the Ouroboros, it made sense to create this figure, this very classical idea, and merge the two together. I had been working a lot with traditional concepts. Again, with the Sebastian, and with these historic materials again, the bronze and the marble. That’s the way that I was thinking, in a classical sense. Because I don’t just want to have a painting of a dick or a photograph of a dick and have no narrative to it. For me, the narrative is critical, and I want you to look at a piece of mine and assume that there is a narrative behind it. For example, with my photographic work, I always want you to think there is a narrative there, even if you’re just looking at one image, there is certainly a narrative behind it. I also like the idea that you look at my work as a whole. So you look at my photography, then into the sculptures, then into the paintings, and that you can see the narrative and this story that’s happening within the work becomes evident. I always want to make sure that there is a story you can connect to.

D: For me, it is exciting to see that your work has a sense of fashion or edginess. Is that something you do intentionally, or does it just happen? For example, the Sebastian seems obviously connected to fashion because he is a well-known model, but with Cumfaces, there was something nuanced in the images that made it feel substantially fashionable, but also very clearly fine art.

S: I definitely see that. When I first started taking photographs, I was very much influenced by photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, who comes from the sort of snapshot culture. Although he never did any fashion photography. And Nan Goldin, who also didn’t do fashion photography, but instead had the snapshot aesthetic. So I think what you are seeing came from that. Actually though, back in the day, I did a couple of fashion shoots, but I didn’t really enjoy it at all because I wasn’t in control. I had to tell a narrative that I suppose I wasn’t interested in telling. Someone else’s story. I definitely see it though, specifically within the photography and with the Sebastian statue. Because of who I chose, that choice does have that fashion edge, and that’s something I’m delighted to have. I mean, I very much consumed magazines when I was younger; The Face, ID, Dazed and Confused, which I think filters in too. Just like watching TV, it’s not a TV, but were watching billboards and advertisements just like we watch TV, it definitely filters into our psyche and into our consciousness.

D: So was Sebastian a conscious or unconscious decision? Or a bit of both?

S: The thing with Sebastian and being a fashion model was really interesting because I did want someone who was known, if you were in that world, you knew who he was. And if you weren’t in that world, then you didn’t kind of know or care. I definitely thought about the fact that he has an identity, and I knew I wanted to slightly remove him from the fashion world and take him into a fine art context. That was part of the process and the project itself. Now, the underwear he is wearing in the statue is Zara. He told me one story about when he went to a Zara casting for kids. Well, Sebastian is like 6’ 4, I mean, he’s huge. He turned up, and at first, they were like, ‘what the hell, he’s too big,’ and they were turning him away. But somehow, he did it, he got the job because they decided he had the perfect look for it in the end. Those are the underwear he had on. I don’t think they were Zara Kids, but they were his, the ones he is wearing as the statue.

D: How has it been working in CDMX? Did you come to CDMX to work?

S: Originally I came here to do an exhibition. I planned this exhibition with a gallery, and I was going to do the work here. We would have been exhibiting around now, actually, around June. But it didn’t happen, because the gallerist, and I’m not sure what happened, but he just stopped returning my calls, messages, emails, and I just..

D: You got ghosted.

S: Yeah! He ghosted me. I didn’t come here for that show only, but that was potentially the main reason, was to make the work here, and to have this exhibition.

D: Wow, I’m really sorry.

S: It’s totally fine. It turns out I am kind of glad that I didn’t do it because I already feel as though the work that I was going to make was very much focused on a romantic situation, an ex-boyfriend. I was going to recontextualize the relationship and make a whole body of work around it. Later I realized I already did that with a previous project, so why do that again and why was I revisiting it? Even though it didn’t happen, and that’s a shame, it’s better because it made me move further on with my work and with other projects. I’ve been working on other projects here. I have an exhibition which I curated here and is in Los Angeles. I did most of the curation work here, and I’ve been working on two new commissions as well. So, I have been working plenty, but of course, I have been trying to explore the city, meet people, and I’ve been trying to learn Spanish. It’s funny, a couple of people back in Los Angeles, where I am based, were saying, ‘ Oh I would love to go to Mexico for four months, six months.’ I have to remind people, I’m not here for a vacation, I’m here to work. I wish I were on holiday for four or six months, that would be something special, but no, I am happy here, happy to be working. The new commission, it’s a new selfie statue with a guy called Sean Ford. He is an adult entertainer, and this commission came from a big collector of mine in London. We did the 3D scanning for the sculpture here. He was in Mexico City for a party, and so I brought my 3D scanning guy and got it done here.


D: The next question was going to be why Mexico City, but that kind of answered it.

S: It was the exhibition, but also, living in Los Angeles, it’s very, you know, it’s the only major American city that isn’t white Anglo-Saxon influenced. It is Latin American, it is South American. It has a very different energy and a very different vibe. When I started meeting people in LA, I started making friends with a lot of Mexican-Americans and some from South America, or other parts of Latin America. It piqued my interest in coming to Mexico and exploring. So that was another reason to come here. Growing up in England, I never had any exposure to Latin American culture or Mexican culture, so for me, to come and explore that, to think about it and to educate myself, was another reason for coming.

D: So far, what’s been the most inspirational part of your stay?

S: I think it’s just the people. The people that I’m meeting and the energy in this city is something special. The art, like the fine art scene and the art scene here, seems to be really, really, really, something special right now. The energy here for that is an inspiration. You know when you’re in a space, and you have to create in a vacuum? When you’re surrounded by lots of other creative energies, it can be tough because you’re battling against your own desire to create. You are fighting this vacuum of known creativity. But here, it doesn’t seem to feel that way. It feels as though there is *snapping* something happening. I mean that’s what you have when you have a city of what, 21 million people? It is constantly *snaps* like this *snaps*

D: As a foreigner, how do you see the LGBTQI+ community in Mexico?

S: Thriving and vibrant. Before I came here, I knew this group of guys who did this party, Traición. I met them in LA, so I knew that that was happening here. It’s extremely vibrant. And then my roommate, he takes part in the Vogue Balls, and I went to a couple, they were great. It has this underground energy. Obviously you can go to Zona Rosa and see the same old stuff that you can find in any place, but still, it has this underground spirit, like the Traición party, and like Pervert.

D: Is there something else that you want to add?

S: I mean, this was a pleasure, and thank you very much, I have had a wonderful time here.

D: Well, thank you for this opportunity and for giving me a little bit of your time. I never thought I would interview you.

S: That is actually really flattering.

D: I think I saw your first stuff on Facebook or something like that. I thought it was so cool because I used to love Sebastian, as you know he was on all the covers, and then he posted some of your work. At first, I thought he was selling his own series until I checked further and discovered you.

S: Actually, one thing that we might be doing is because he said to me, ‘oh we need to make the big one.’ Because the whole plan was to do an 8-foot version, that was the plan from the start. He wrote to me a month or so ago, and he was saying well, we need to finally do it. He said, ‘Let’s try to raise some money through crowdfunding or Kickstarter so that we have the money to do it.’ He told me that if we reach a certain goal, ‘I’ll do a nude version of it,’ and I thought to myself, that would be pretty great. So maybe that will happen at some point. For me, it’s not important that I do a nude version because the reason I had him wearing the briefs was to make the image about a very specific point in time. I wanted this statue to show that we are way less open to nudity, male nudity, than the Greeks or the Romans, were. But we will see, maybe it will happen, perhaps it won’t.

© 2019 Dano Santana/The Guest Magazine

House of Stuart

STUART SANDFORD STANDS IN THE kitchen of the Tom of Finland Foundation house in Echo Park, a tall bespectacled ginger wearing an LA Dodgers tank top, the vision of a perfect Angeleno. And like many Angelenos, the artist is a transplant, via Berlin and New York from the U.K., where he was born. He has been living in the over-century-old Craftsman style former home of the erotic art icon for nearly three years now. Initially as an artist-in-residence and now as a resident artist “I work with a couple of fabrication studios, and there’s a foundry I work with in San Fernando; he did the bronze head,” Sanford says. “Depending on what I’m doing, I’ll find myself on the third floor here if I’m just working on my laptop, or if I’m painting, I’ll be outside in the garden.”

The bronze head, which lays diagonally on a plinth in a sitting room in the house, is, to Sandford, much more a photograph than the classical sculpture it resembles. “If you think of analog photography as photography 1.0, and then digital photography as 2.0, 3-D scanning would be 3.0, but instead of having a two-dimensional image you can blow up to any size, you have a three-dimensional image you can print and blow up to any size,” he says. “That’s what I do. I make a 3-D print, and then cast from the 3-D print. It is part of the photographic process.” This particular series comes from his sculpture Sebastian—based on a 3-D scan of German-American model Sebastian Sauvé in his underwear, holding a camera to take a selfie. From this full-body statue, he isolates several body pieces, which are then subtitled (relic). The head in question is the first of the series, Sebastian (relic) no.1.

Sandford explains that the classical form is a reference to Antinous, Emperor Hadrian’s young lover from the early part of the 2nd century, whom Hadrian deified after his death. “More sculptures and likenesses were commissioned of him than any other figure in Greco-Roman history,” says Sandford. “And a religion grew up around him that lasted for 400 years before Christianity came through and swept everything away. There’s actually a bust of Antinous where’s he’s looking downwards, and his left shoulder is slightly elevated as though he’s holding something, so that was one of the references for this sculpture, where he’s actually looking down at a camera and taking a selfie. I wanted to play with these ideas: ‘How does one create an idol? How does one create a contemporary—not worship-able form, but some kind of icon?’”

References to classical imagery, eroticism and the selfie are a few of the dominant leitmotifs in Sandford’s work. An early series, Cumfaces, where he asked friends and acquaintances to photograph themselves at the point of climax, remains an important notch in his career. These selfies reveal the most important theme in Sandford’s work: intimacy.

His artist residency projects at the Tom of Finland Foundation consist of publications that contain Polaroid photographs of friends, acquaintances, lovers and others in his orbit. Many of those photographs are in Sandford’s most recent exhibition, “Pictures,” on view at Queer/Bar in Seattle through October 31st. They are beautiful gauzy photographs and not quite documentary. Sandford sets up the shoots beforehand yet the intimacy bubbles through, like a kind of Robert Mapplethorpe-meets-Nan Goldin sensuality.“I already have an intimate relationship with most of my subjects,” says Sandford. “I’m either dating them, or they’re a friend of mine. I’m trying to depict intimacy between myself and the subject. Yes, there are moments of eroticism, but my goal isn’t to arouse you, per se. If that happens, that’s fine, but that’s not necessarily my goal.”

Odd, considering the final piece Sandford shows me is a small 3-D printed sculpture of a young man giving himself autofellatio. He laughs when he shows it to me because it’s without question an extremely erotic image. Then he explains that the sculpture is called Ouroboros after the symbol of the snake eating its own tail, popular in Greek mythology. It all comes full circle.

© 2018 Maxwell Williams/LALA Magazine

Stuart Sandford’s ‘Polaroids’ Is a Gauzy Snapshot of Longing and Self-Discovery

Ten years after his sexy and provocative Cumfaces series captured guys around the world mid-climax, LA-based visual artist Stuart Sandford has released a more personal project: a book of Polaroids documenting his experience finding—and losing—love. Equal parts cathexis and catharsis, Polaroids reaches beyond that ill-fated relationship to include intimate snaps of friends and lovers taken in Los Angeles in 2017, and comes in two editions—one standard and the other an artist’s edition containing an original signed and dated Polaroid, naturally. For those unfamiliar with Sandford’s work, his CV speaks for itself—he’s shot for legendary queer quarterly Butt, been an artist in residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in LA, and more recently held solo exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. In a recent email conversation, Sandford shared the inspiration behind the project, the message he hopes to convey, and his plans for the future. Check it out, along with selections from Polaroids, below.

Tell us a bit more about who you are and where you come from.
My name is Stuart Sandford and I’m a visual artist from merry old England, but I’ve been based in Los Angeles, via Berlin and New York, for about 3 years now.

How did the book came about?
I wasn’t initially sure what the book was or why I was even taking Polaroids, but, as can often happen with art, one takes an action without fully realizing what it will become. For a long time I’d wanted to make a book about a single person, a lover, documenting the obsession one can have with a lover, and at the beginning of the year I fell head over heels in love with a guy, a fellow artist. I thought, “yes, this is the subject I’ve been waiting for.” I took some beautiful Polaroids of him but he ended up cheating on me and breaking my heart; we’re no longer together.

I wasn’t able to make any work for months afterwards and I’m still not over him, I don’t think I ever will be, as I truly believed he was the one, but then I started meeting other guys, some from before I met him, some from after, and picked up my Polaroid camera and just started shooting. So in a sense this is a book about breaking up but also finding oneself again.

How did you cast the subjects?
I didn’t cast them per se—they’re all friends or lovers—but I did make selections of who/what to include or not include. The ones that made the cut were those that were, or at least felt, the most authentic.

What do you want to make people feel with your work?
I always wanted my work to be celebratory, both about the body and about being gay or queer. I’m not interested in turning the viewer on, although if that’s what happens that’s fine. I’m more interested in just making them look and feel.

Who inspires you as a photographer?
I studied fine art so I not only looked at photographers (Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley) but also sculptors, painters, performance artists, and filmmakers. Film and TV have always been my driving force. A lot of my earlier work references the films and TV shows I watched as a kid/teenager, and I do have some future projects that will explore those things again.

What are you working on now?
I’m putting down my Polaroid camera for a while and have two sculptural commissions I’m working on as well as developing a feature film about Antinous and Hadrian, the world’s first gay power couple.

© 2017 Alex Black/Into More

Introduction to 1421 Laveta Terrace

When Stuart came to reside at TOM House and enter into our informal artist in residence program, he had fairly defined ideas on what he wanted to achieve whilst in residence yet, not unlike many artists coming to terms with their own bailiwick of issues they have to contend with in being artistic, as days passed and as financial resources went down and not up Stuart started to display nervousness and uncertainty. We had several informal chats revolving around trusting the process and that there were larger forces at work here and the wise action was to get out of ones way. It was not long before it was evident that Stuart was in the flow of it, as opportunities started coming his way and his creative flow of ideas were springing up on a regular basis.

TOM House operates in a communal living style and for those who are not used to such there can be a definite attitude adjustment required to bring one in harmony with the house. I doubt if he would ever choose such living situations over more singular private scenarios. He at least can now say he knows what it’s all about!

Much like a symphony, he relaxed into living at TOM House and taking advantage of the vast archives both in books, art, and video and film. He had the brilliant idea to document his time here with assistance from the Impossible Project (the company who bought the last Polaroid film factory and who now manufactures Polaroid film under the Impossible Project brand and reconditioned Polaroid cameras) and with a steady beat he captured the house itself (a 104 year old Craftsman style house, considered to be the jewel in the crown of Laveta Terrace when it was built) alongside both the eclectic mix of humans visiting and residing within it and the cat and dog menagerie both resident and visiting, with the regular almost daily offering of tours, events, and visitors, using the amazing light offered up at the sunset of a winters day.

TOM House is more or less a cultural site, of which there are few such locations in the world that offer an ever growing collection of visual works that depict the expressions of the male homosexual (with a dash of everyone else for public opinion). I need to let you all know that homosexuals do not have many sites in the world that they can call theirs, this is one such place that has a wealth of visual creations that speak to the magic and power of such and as Stuart began going out and meeting new friends he would bring them for tours that he himself conducted through the House and gardens. I felt he owned this responsibility and thus It did not occur to me to stop him for I knew that he would communicate the essence of this place, no matter if he didn’t always know the name of the artist whose work was on the wall or not.

I was notably impressed upon standing back and observing Stuart’s involvements here, indulging in the varying environments of TOM House and the Tom of Finland Foundation, taking advantage of the abundant archive resources, and the actual physicality of the property. I started to view what was coming forth from him much like a small symphony that was being written through his actions and creations. There is an amazing harmony in the movements as separate entities were brought together by forces that, for descriptive purposes, can be described as the actual presence of TOM House. In- deed an individual gallerist, Edward Cella, and a fellow companion came to view Tom’s work and, in the process, met Stuart. This would lead to another movement, later in the symphony, which would see Edward purchase the series of Polaroids taken by Stuart thus leading to the book you currently hold in your hands and to another movement in the symphony.

Well as is the case with the amazing garden of artistic expressions the foundation house and grounds produce and grow, Stuart was a beam of sunshine to have on a daily basis at the TOM House. Full of rather individualized characteristics he had concerns of getting too involved in the house and being sidetracked in his work, to having a rather interesting relationship with spirits, no, not ghosts but the alcohol variety. No insult intended but you have to know a few Brits to understand! Well let’s put it this way if you are going to have a party make sure you invite some Brits then you and everyone else will have a good time, as was the case on New Year’s Eve when Stuart brought to TOM House his own caravan of attractive gypsy troop of young men who became completely at home and expanded out into the far reaches of the garden within minutes to bring in the new year and spread their good spirits into the ethos of the house.

Upon reading the above depiction you will, I hope, make your own journey over to TOM House
in Echo Park and when you do make sure you turn your eyes upward in the breakfast room where lies on the ceiling one more artistic presence of Mr. Sandford’s mark. He is a man that designs his life much alike a Johnny Appleseed spreading his insights and observations as he trots down that cobblestone pathway of his life. Please see his “end of term” discussion that is available on YouTube at TomOfFinlandsMen channel ...and, of course, enjoy this book. Although filled with photographs capturing both real and created/curated moments, Stuart prefers not to be type cast as a photogra- pher, and indeed nor a sculptor, but an artist free to use any medium to express his love of life.

Durk Dehner
Co-Founder and President, Tom of Finland Foundation Los Angeles
June 4th 2015

© 2015 Durk Dehner/Tom of Finland Foundation

Mixing Classical and Gay Male Teen Desire

In the Natural History, Pliny the Elder discusses the origins of sculpture by telling the story of Butades of Corinth, the first Greek modeler of clay. According to the story, Butades’s daughter, deeply in love with a young man about to leave, drew upon the wall the outline of his shadow. The father then used the outline to model a statue of the youth, creating a substitute of the loved one and inventing sculpture.

Classical Latin literature may not be the first topic to come to your mind when visiting Teen Dreams, Stuart Sandford’s homoerotic show at the Invisible Line Gallery. Sandford’s work has been exhibited widely and his images published in gay cult magazine BUTT (which in the pages featured photographs by a then young and unknown Wolfgang Tillmans), but this is his first solo show in the UK.

London has been experiencing a new batch of explicitly homosexual content. Last year’s show Keep Your Timber Limber at the Institute of Contemporary Art featured daring works on paper addressing the topic. Among those were some drawings by Tom of Finland, one of the most influential creators of gay erotic images. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Sandford is currently artist-in-residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Echo Park, LA.

Teen Dreams, produced in conjunction with Fringe! Film and Arts Festival, features a collection of recent works the artist developed during his residency there. Sandford often uses found images, from YouTube videos to selfies of young men available on the internet. In particular, he seems to have a soft spot for 1980s teen fan magazines. The C-type print series Noah (2014) and Teen Dreams (2009–14) — the former based on portraits of American actor Noah Hathaway — show decontextualized images of ’80s teen idols put in sequence to acknowledge hidden homoerotic inclinations. The strategy of appropriation has been used extensively by gay artists for diverse reasons, often as a means of connecting with the established art system. These artists may seek social acceptance, they may want to conceal homoerotic contents — or they may use appropriation as a way of mining and subverting the heteronormative art world from within.

Initially it seems that Sandford keeps his work within the context of homosexual desire, mirroring the dynamics of a certain gay scene. But as David (diptych) (2014), a Polaroid diptych depicting the butt and genitals of a young man, makes clear, there’s more going on. The longer you look at the images, the more you realize that many of the features now often associated with homosexual desire — vanity, eternal youth, sculpted bodies — are also at the roots of the Western artistic tradition. After all, when he tells his story, Pliny feels the need to emphasize that Butades’s daughter was deeply in love with her young man and trying to eternalize him in art. The Greek myth of Pygmalion — the sculptor who fell in love with one of his works — further illustrates the connection between art and desire. So, the celebration of male youth that’s featured in Sandford’s works gradually moves from the vague category of “gay art” to a wider context.

Looking at Sebastian (2012–TBA), I couldn’t stop thinking about the classical representation of masculine beauty. To realize this small sculpture, Sandford contacted Sebastian Sauvé, one of the world’s leading male models, to pose for him. The artist used advanced high-resolution 3D-scanning technology to map Sauvé’s body, immortalized while taking a selfie. The individual 3D scans were then combined into a digital model for 3D printing. The result, cast in bronze, mashes up the classical canon of beauty with the cult of selfies and representations of homosexual desire.

The artist told me he’s currently working on another sculpture using the same technique. The commission came from a New York gallerist who sent his young, handsome lover to Sandford’s studio in LA to get a 3D scan of his body, which will be translated into an intimate sculpture. If Butades were alive today, he would probably do something similar.

© 2014 Francesco Dama/Hyperallergic

HUNG

One might say a darkroom resembles the second circle of Dante’s Inferno. In there casted are those overcome by lust. Alighieri condemns these “carnal malefactors” for letting their appetites sway their reason. They are the first ones to be truly punished. These souls are blown about to and fro by the terrible winds of a violent storm, without hope of rest. This symbolizes the power of lust to blow one about needlessly and aimlessly. But there’s nothing wrong with “the power of lust to blow”. In fact the darkroom is a space of freedom for sexual degenerates, an area of classless race for pleasure. A safe haven where kinky desires flourish. He might be fat and he might be less than handsome. What difference does it make? It’s pitch black anyway. All you need to do is use your cerebral cortex and make him be the way you want him to be. Men are nothing more than blurry visions obscured by cultural norms.

The artists of HUNG are lifting this oppressive curtain and allow us to gaze with their eyes at the normative product of the modern society – The Man. Their point of view appears to be rather ironic and iconoclastic. The images of HUNG men are utterly personal statements of its authors and as such become self-portraits. Because today the male gaze in no longer a penetrating look of patriarchal violence. Today it is a gaze of The Narcissist.

Narcissism is the personality quality that consists in attending overwhelmingly to one’s own needs and desires. The narcissists loom up the other side of the huge inflated self, as facilitators or inhibitors of the self’s projects. It is usually convenient for the narcissist to project onto these half-real others motives and desires that suit the self, rather than to inquire about the real other’s actual needs. For the narcissist, other people exist, in a shadowy way, but they are not fully real. Just as not fully real are the men of HUNG. Remember Immanuel Kant? The old koenigsbergian thought that all human beings become narcissists when having sexual relations. And what the hell is wrong with that? So remove your clothes and blink your narcissist eye, it’s good to be a carnal malefactor.

© 2010 Lukasz M. Maciejewski

Creamy Goodness

When I was 14 my Mum found gay porn under my mattress. I knew she changed my sheets, but I guess I got complacent – my bedroom was the only space I had to be alone, think, jerk off. It was where I came to terms with my desires and myself.

The bedroom is a safe space – or, as close to a safe space as most teenagers are going to get. It’s a place that comes to define who you are. The walls become your canvas: plastered with images of heart-throbs, they become an extension – and reflection – of yourself. The bedroom is a private projection and affirmation of sexuality: it doesn’t extend into the world, but only reflects back on the bedroom’s inhabitant and possessor. The objects you take into your bedroom become the materials with which is it created and defined. Cut-off from their original context, they become pieces of yourself. Heart-throb images marketed to teenage girls become your own property to gaze at, admire, wank over.

In Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, the eponymous protagonist’s bedroom is the stuff of teen dreams – a veritable shrine to those icons of 60s masculinity, James Dean and Marlon Brando. Scorpio smokes his Luckies, strokes his puss, reads his funnies. The joke is that, while neither the protagonist’s actions or bedroom’s adornments are queer in themselves, his sanctum reveals more about him than he would probably like. While the images of leather- clad Brando and Dean are not intentionally homoerotic, a previously-muted fetishistic tendency within them is revealed through Anger’s lens.

Similarly, Stuart Sandford takes seemingly innocuous images of 80s teen heartthrobs (Chad Allen, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Matthew Broderick are particular favourites) and decontexualises them to reveal a certain homoeroticism that has hitherto gone unnoticed. Indeed, the subjects are posited not as teenagers, but as twinks – a term with unavoidable sexual connotations. The twink is the embodiment of flowering sexuality and untouched male beauty. Like the non-nutritional Twinkie from his name derives, the twink is sweet to the taste and brim-filled with cream. Yet he also has an expiry date – the twink’s status as such is dependant on age, and in years to come, he will exist only in pictures that captured his fleeting youth. In this way the twink is untouchable and ephemeral; the closet we can get to the twink of our fantasies is to kiss his immobile image, cum on his glossy picture.

In Sandford’s work, desire in all its manifest forms is embraced and celebrated. In his bedroom, we are caught in a circle of looks – the looks of the twinks of the images, the imagined looks of the bedroom’s owner, and the looks of our fellow spectators. We are doing nothing if not being voyeuristic, but we are resigned to looking but not touching, our desire never reaching fulfilment.

In Twink, Stuart Sandford takes the bedroom – usually the most private of domains – and opens it up to public scrutiny. The desire which is normally enclosed is unleashed onto the viewer and the wider world. To whom does this bedroom belong? And do we have the right to be here? We eavesdrop on the (imagined) owner’s privacy and desires, and the effect is at once disquieting and exhilarating. Ever heard the old homophobic line ‘I don’t care what they get up to in their own bedroom, but...’? Well, in Twink the private is made public, sexual desire is outwardly projected – and, effectively, we get spunked on.

© 2010 Owen Myers

Charver with Art; or The Body Is Gone

I had a serious wanking-in-public phase some ten years ago. Now, bringing this back-to- mind I have to ask myself, why on earth did I, a shy blue-eyed angel-boy, risk my ‘good kid’ opinion just to get a shot of adrenaline in my head supplemented by a shot of spunk from my cock? No, it wasn’t for Art. I wish it was. It was because sex in public is, and always will be (until the very end of this prudish, straightlaced and sad world), a human being’s natural need. From natural need develops social phenomenon. And from social phenomenon develops a desire to symbolically represent this reality – in other words, a twisted mind’s creative urge some call art.

First an elucidation on why Stuart Sandford’s recent work, documenting gay cruising grounds in Europe, and his image for the Bloc Billboard are particularly significant. His photos often border on the public-private debate; he edges the subject, crosses the line, makes the spectator confused. It is a matter of his art’s base and super-structure. Such is the case with the ‘Venice’ billboard. Its significance reaches out beyond his previous works, which have explored the male body, or rather a cultural projection of it. This time the body is gone. The usual object of mapping is no longer there. Background becomes Object. It’s a shift from portrait to landscape. But all the same, there is Stuart’s trademark double meaning. This Venice cruising area, looking like any place, anywhere, receives its base and super-structure. The base is very plain. Just bushes one may say, mere sand, no big deal. But the super-structure is what really smacks you. The bushes and the sand become something close to institution after comprehending all of the following:

There should be men there doing their nasty pleasures, seeking a trade, becoming a trade, performing either the act of devoted desperation or simple fellatio. But we’re not going to get that. Neither in this billboard nor in Stuart’s series of landscape photos and videos probing the same subject. This is the moment when the story becomes unreservedly sad. It is close to the moment we get from the snapshot images of Dean Sameshima who made a series of photographs of sex places in Los Angeles[i] . Dowdy buildings on dowdy streets. Padlocked doors. Cabin 2768 closed in 1995. The sun pouring down like it’s five minutes to Armageddon on Hollywood Boulevard. Nostalgia is a common element of both Sameshima and Sandford’s art. Nostalgia is the feeling penetrating the mind, fingering the brain, rimming that hole in a continuum of time whilst looking at those photos. For these are the places where men hunted for love. Not just for trolling[ii]; neither a casual blow-job nor coital intercourse with a married cab driver. Bungee-jumpers without the bungee. Cruising areas were always sovereign space for the queer. Also, a state of mind so sensitively described in one of Justin Chin’s poems:

Lick my butt, I will lick yours then.
We will take care of the world’s shit later[iii].

But are we actually considering a real social phenomenon or rather an overconfident or even cock-sure judgment? I believe the proof lies somewhere there in Berlin’s Tiergarten, where in the 30’s SA thugs bunked-up before having to send the rest of the cruisers to Dachau just a few years later; they are now scattered on the streets of Eastern Europe where forbidden pleasures used to be cultivated in war-time-ghettos, in a true anus mundi. Or perhaps today, in Queens New York, where lucky hipsters may blow to their sheer
disbelief a closeted Hassid. Cruising areas were the setting of classless and raceless activities of bum bandits, the unconscious revolutionaries of arse.

Imagine it’s 1952, you’re a well off WASP, living with your unaware wife and children in an Edwardian house, you pretend to enjoy your life and believe you really like the new Queen, but at heart you just crave for fucking men. What do you do? You cruise. You cottage. You gag for it with any stranger who just wants to get his knees dirty. Never underestimate the capacity of sex for social-change. Remember Pasolini’s Teorema[iv] ? If that’s not a phenomenon then what is it?

Stuart’s Venice beach, a place where one could once get a blow-job, suntan and sunstroke at the same time is now abandoned. There’s no one left there. And I don’t mean the actual absence of men on the billboard. The institution of public sex-place is withering. The queer of today have joyfully deserted spots like this, instead choosing dating websites, naively trusting they are now civilized. Not quite. In this particular sense Stuart’s frequently voyeuristic art becomes more in the manner of an archivist.

Most gay men now prefer to select and to be selected. They publicise themselves and their cocks like in some sort of advert. Many queers are now logged on dating websites harshly demolishing the frolicking pleasure of getting fucked in a local park. Now it’s just teens and twinks. Oldies and daddies. Muscle and leather. Categories. Sorts. Classes. Men voluntarily put themselves into groups of membership users like they have become products in the local ASDA.

This billboard however possesses a culture jamming factor. But I’m not going to write about the Billboard Liberation Front[v] because Stuart’s piece is not really about that. There is a certain reference though within his Bloc project heading in that direction. Culture jamming has been characterized as a form of public activism, generally in opposition to commercialism and the vectors of corporate image. This is one of the crucial shifts in the “shag me in the bushes movement” and of what has happened to it in recent years. It has become part of a corporate image. Today there is always someone getting his share from a human being willing to fuck. And I don’t mean a threesome. One pays. One may log in. One may browse.

I’m sure Stuart is utterly happy showing you a billboard that sells nothing. Just nostalgia. At least that’s what comes for free. His work is just like looking back in time. Like re- visiting the house you were born in all those years ago. It looks the same but there’s something different. Something is lost.

NOTES

[i]Dean Sameshima, Wonderland, 1996/97
[ii] There are a number of Polari used in this text. Polari was a form of cant slang used in the gay subculture in Britain where it was used to disguise homosexual activity from potentially hostile outsiders. There is some debate about how it originated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari
[iii] Justin Chin, Bite Hard (Manic D Press), 1997
[iv]Pier Paolo Pasolini, Theorem (Teorema), 1968. Terence Stamp plays a mysterious figure who appears in the lives of a typical bourgeois Italian family. He engages in sexual affairs with all members of the household: the devoutly religious maid, the sensitive son, the sexually repressed mother, the timid daughter and, finally, the tormented father. The stranger gives unstintingly of himself, asking nothing in return. Then one day he leaves, as suddenly and mysteriously as he came. Unable to endure the void in their lives, the mother becomes a nymphomaniac, the son an artist, the daughter a catatonic and the father a sexual prowler. The servant, on the other hand, appears in the last scene casually performing a miracle. On its release, the religious right and the Vatican criticized the film’s sexual content. The Left considered it “ambiguous” and “visionary”.
[v]The Billboard Liberation Front is a group of “culture jammers” devoted to ‘improving’ billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti- corporate message.

© 2008 Lukasz M. Maciejewski

JOSH LA Trunk Show

With the HOLLYWOOD sign as a scenic backdrop, Arts & Sciences PROJECTS and the JOSH magazine are pleased to announce a one-day outdoor installation of Stuart Sandford’s Cumfaces series and Blow Job video in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Home to Hollywood’s iconic visual marker, Griffith Park has a storied history as a fertile cruising area where men go to have sex with other men. Art Trunk Show Los Angeles will temporarily reclaim the park as a venue for artistic expression and personal liberty as we combine art, zines, a picnic, and (optional) cruising.

Working primarily in photography and video, UK Visual artist Stuart Sandford is currently based in New York City. Invoking keen directorial and editorial skill, his work calls to mind the tenderness and innocence of Hollywood teen heartthrobs of the 1980s, while re- appropriating and re-contextualizing these familiar icons (including Chad Allen, Corey Haim, and a young, fresh-faced Matthew Broderick) with a provocative, sexy, neo-punk aesthetic. His process challenges the notions of authorship and image-maker (Sandford draws inspiration from eighties teen fan-mags and accepts photographic contributions from others for his own projects). In his Cumface series, Sandford uses an open call process to direct his subjects to submit self-portraits of themselves on the brink of orgasm. Like a skilled director, Sandford sets the constraints for the scene and culls the best performance from his subjects, resulting in a sublimely complex series of images of youth lost in a moment of ecstasy. In Sandford’s more recent Blow Job (2009), he expands his director’s hand to video. Blow Job features a reengineered digital clip (rendered in a silent, ever-so- brief-you-might-miss-it sequence) ostensibly depicting teen heartthrob Zack Morris (Mark- Paul Gosselaar’s character on Saved by the Bell) on the receiving end of some sort of off- camera pleasuring.

Sandford’s work has been exhibited in New York, Basel, Berlin, Rome, Krakow, Brasilia, Vienna and Rotterdam. His images have appeared in numerous publications including Basso, Try State, BUTT, GT and Kaiserin magazines.

© 2009 Philip Tomaru & Martin Masetto

Cumfaces

What are we left with after orgasm? Not much. Sweat running along the spine. Salivary glands dry like a desert. Semen curdling in bed-sheets. In fact it's no pleasure at all. Every orgasm is as backbreaking as it is ironic. 400 calories lost. 75 if you pulled off solo and that's the most frequent case anyway so don't believe what they say about sex and keeping fit. It's a frustrating and exhausting job. Bed exertion. Struggle in a toilet at your favourite club. Salty taste in your mouth and splashes on your trainers. The knowing gaze of those standing in the queue whilst you exit. A nightmare that sucks, literally. You just want to get back home, brush your teeth, gargle, wash your hands and forget it as soon as possible.

And at this moment of natural reset, of desperate and hopeless torment of a foreskin - if you have one - when you forget how your face swells and your eyes bulge, when it all dries out and crumbles out of your bellybutton, exactly then the voyeur Stuart Sandford puts his camera down.

Have you been excited? - Yes. Have you been embarrassed? - No. - says Bubi Canal when asked about Stuart's shoot originally commissioned by Gay Times magazine in 2007. Most of the guys answered like that. Most of them were happy doing it. For most of them it was an experiment with their own body. Today "victims" of voyeurism are no longer victims, they're willing participants. Today we are asked to be voyeurs. Today it's easier to be one more than ever before.

One can write Stuart's art is post-Warholian but that's the same awkwardness as shooting into a guy's eye. What art isn't? One can write he's inspired by Terry Richardson, which is a colloquialism that needs adding up because, like Wolfgang Tillmans, he's more objective. One can write he appreciates the work of Nan Goldin too, but he has a much better sense of humour than she does.

"Sperm mugs" was a right-wing website's translation of the exhibition title when the series was shown in Krakow, Poland in 2008. Catho-Nazis again, as bright as Slava Mogutin's dream skinheads. Wrong direction gentlemen. Nothing is so obvious here, it's far more elusive. It's blow job time here. So let's enjoy it.

© 2008 Lukasz M. Maciejewski