Crowned men. Marta Pujades

As part of the support programme for creators by Les Clíniques d’Es Baluard and during the time period revolving around Working Women’s Day (8th March), we are planning a series of actions to publicise the work in progress by Marta Pujades (Palma, 1990) initiated in 2014 under the title of Crowned men, thus linking up directly to the line of research Es Baluard is developing on gender and transgender issues.  

Marta Pujades is an artist who habitually has recourse to the image in its photographic form, with a portrait base, as a medium for exploring the identity and roles that human beings take on socially. For one of his articles Jean Baudrillard wrote a title that drew on a problem which still requires profound public debate today. Under the epigraph of “We are all transexuals”, he asserted that “When the body is fated to become a prosthesis, it is logical enough that our model of sexuality should have become transsexuality, and that transsexuality should have everywhere become the locus of seduction. We are all transexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transexuals symbolically”.  

With the presentation of this work by Marta Pujades and the parallel activities and documentation that accompany it, Es Baluard seeks to openly approach the issue of the new masculinities and their relationship with feminisms.  

In Hombres coronados, Marta intersects things relationally performative with a serialized process of amateur anthropology based on the classical structure of the portrait that is the heir to nineteenth-century painting and the classical representation model of Adonis. In 1843 Francesc Muntaner opened up Mallorca’s first photographic gallery – the rest were itinerant studios following the tradition of the pioneers; the modus operandi that Marta uses is very similar, improvising a studio outdoors using the ingredients of attrezzo and attitudes typical of cabinet portraits.   

In the first instance she considers the debate on sexed imagery recurring to the masculine archetype of poses established throughout the history of painting with curveless models, in line with classicist ideals. She therefore uses the traditional portrait as a direct communication resource and witness to double-dealing, which confronts the gaze of the protagonist with the naked torso, but with certain identitary attributes (tattoos, piercings, beard or beardless…) against the author who defies them in front of the camera on the one hand, and on the other hand that derived from the conscience of assuming a role that extends beyond the public, symbolic exhibition that society has attributed to them merely because they are men.  

If we analyse the function men adopted in ancient Sparta, or their role in Japanese Kabuki, assuming the very essence of women, or the exploited ambiguity of rock figures like David Bowie or Patti Smith, who draw their more immediate inspiration from the androgynous prototype of Winckelmann or the Roman Bacchus, we will understand that these images have existed alongside us throughout the history of mankind but only rarely superficially transcended the problem of the sexes.   

Androgyny, first mentioned by Plato in his work The Symposium, alludes to both masculine and feminine beings. Naturally there also remain references to the diverted iconographies and crises of representation which already imbued certain debates, from the contemporary practises along the lines of the AIDS crisis in the ‘eighties and the queer movement. Of them all, we should highlight, as precursors, the exhibition “What she wants” (1993) at Impressions Gallery, curated by Naomi Salaman, or the “Fémininmasculin. Le sexe de l´art” (1995) display in the Centre Georges Pompidou. Their derivation and propagation from advertising to video-clips cornered their moves towards aesthetic frivolity, expanding ad hoc imagery without seeking to delve further into the past and current dilemmas of masculinities.   

Thus, the heterosexist system as a symbolic and social maze means that standardized heterosexuality and its established paradigms (marriage, procreation, monogamy… etc.) continue even today with their standardized application to the different forms of expression, communications media and education, without a critical review of sexism.   

In contemporary times, in his Musclemen series of 2012, Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou, alongside the bodybuilders of Benin, tackles reflections that come close to these but from a different angle, which may well complement the one we present here. They both allude to the representation of sexuality, masculinities of gays, bisexuals and heterosexuals who have been marked by the standardized gender concepts and social roles.  Here, however, the a priori construction of the image reveals, not without irony, that the men portrayed do not identify with hegemonic masculinity or the symbols of heterosexual masculine power and patriarchal domination. Through the exercise Marta proposes for her participants – the series of men who agree to be photographed for the project – a dialectic movement is produced between the moment when the scene is constructed, the pose and the actual register, a space of relation and revelation. Performativity, taken with humour and irreverence towards the typical icon, leads to the desacralization of the myth and the review, through a highly specific generational sample of men, of other ways of approaching masculinity and by way of a mirror, their relationship to women and gender policies.  

This set of samples that the artist develops as a platform for speaking of identity and role play reveals some of her strategies for dissecting the ontological statute of the image and intervening from a stance of complicity between the sexes in the present.    

(Nekane Aramburu)