Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

the aspirational aesthetics of ‘gentlemen’s pornography’ 51
communicating style, modernity, and elitism, that the same aesthetic
is used in aspirational branding today. 20 In an ironic twist, GQ now
makes use of the stylistics of Modernist photography to hide explicit
sexuality and convey a tone of sophistication.
The aesthetic experience of an artefact, posits Dilthey, 21 is
dependant on imaginatively unifying disparate sensory perceptions
through the interpretation of the general symbolic constructs within
the work (a process he terms Erlebnis). The link between aesthetic
experience and the imagination is a crucial one in understanding
gentlemen’s pornography. Within GQ, mythic social triggers (musthave
objects, do’s and don’ts of dress, interviews with corporate
celebrities) elicit this connection between commercialised aesthetic
experience and sexual desire. Through their participation (imaginary
and consumerist) in the visual tropes represented in glossy men’s
magazines, readers thus participate in the ritualistic aesthetic
masking of sexual difference. In this way, the magazines continue the
active/passive gender relations established in canonical erotic art
(particularly prior to the twentieth century).
GQ will never wholly imitate art, because then it would lose its
obscene connotations; its intention is not to mimic artworks, but
merely to hint at their mythologised tone or form and appropriate the
aesthetic experience thereof. Donald Kuspit describes this play
between a hidden signification and an understandable visual or
mythological trope as the ‘dialectic of decadence’. 22 Decadence,
comments Kuspit, is always with us, 23 a consistent inevitable in art
and life, and perhaps most insidiously, in the dialectic between them.
He explains: ‘Decadence is ... a deliberate short-sightedness, making
one's art seem more significant, original and ultimate than it is’. 24 GQ
hovers between limitation and decadence, between the acceptable
and the obscene. It discreetly appropriates the classical codes of art
and the ‘artful’ techniques of Modernist photography and
commodifies and sexualises these under an aestheticised veneer. The
GQ calendar is an example of this. 25 It is a pin-up style calendar not
unlike those of Pirelli or Sports Illustrated. For each month of the
year an auteur photographs a model with his own particular signature
style. The element that is most important in terms of communicating
20 Most notably the Purist or Straight photographic style has been employed in the
marketing campaigns of Calvin Klein, BMW and Gucci.
21
In P J McCormick Modernity, aesthetics, and the bounds of art (1990) 80.
22 D Kuspit The dialectic of decadence. Between advance and decline in art (2000).
23 Kuspit (n 22 above) 91.
24
As above, 92.
25 The sense of expressionism or overt stylisation that seems to be a common thread
throughout, is perhaps somewhat akin to the expressive gloss of early attempts at
photographic art, where photographers still seemed quite swayed by the idea
that the artistry of an image lay in its expressive style.