Romain Mader's "The Following is a True Story" at Foam
Swiss artist Romain Mader’s exhibition The Following is a True Story at Foam museum for Photography in Amsterdam could have been a great curatorial opportunity to approach the subject of cultural privilege, masculinity, young, heterosexual men’s understanding of their own gender and sexuality, and the role women play in it. A more educational approach of this type would have been particularly relevant following the petition protesting Mader’s work at Foam before its opening for spreading “offensive stereotypes” about Eastern European women and promoting “sex tourism, sexism, and misogyny.”[1] Instead, the curatorial approach refuses critical engagement and the exhibition is framed as a “naïve” and “humorous” exploration of “loneliness, love, exploitation and the female body”[2]
The exhibition is composed of a few photographic projects stretched out over four exhibition spaces on the second floor, most of them feature young women as a visual focal point in stereotypically feminine roles, poses, jobs, and duties. Each of the photographic projects seems to have been extended beyond its limits, acting to fill up space. The photographed women in Mader’s projects represent objects of the artist’s desire yet inability to conquer, a typical male gaze which is forced upon the viewer. Often, the artist photographs himself alongside or together with the women. In one of his projects, the artist went to showroom displays and photographed himself with the women standing like ornaments alongside the cars being sold- a well-known status symbol in popular culture. In another project, he hired a pick-up artist or ‘seduction coach’, who taught him how to approach and pick up women in bars. Mader composed a slide show of the photographs telling the story of how he hired the pick-up artist who helped him eventually ‘get’ the girl he likes and, it is implied, have a threesome with her and her friend; the three are featured in bed together under the title “we had some good fun.” The artist’s new girlfriend in this project, just like women in his other projects, is referred to as merchandise which he was finally able to possess with his renewed masculinity; explicitly stated as the photograph is overlaid with the wording: “she is finally mine.”
While Mader was regarded as an artist of great “subtlety,” the artworks themselves come across as flat rather than layered and convey an emptiness in both the visual format and conceptual quality. According to the exhibition statement, however, the main strength of the work is in its blurring between reality and fiction. The same themes of the previously described works lead into the main artwork of the exhibition, the protested artwork for which the artist won the Paul Huf award, Ekaterina.
Ekaterina is a fictional narrative composed of a slide show of photographs following the artist as he sets out to find a wife in the Ukraine and comes upon the city of Ekaterina. The fictive city, Ekaterina, is a city made up of women only; they are all beautiful and they are all named Ekaterina. The women are all born and raised in the city and their only way of leaving is through marriage to a foreign visitor such as Mader. Before entering the city, visitors must obtain a ‘visa’ based on a checklist indicating the physical characteristics desired in a woman. Mader chooses tall and blond and his preferred breast size. Eventually, Mader finds an Ekaterina to be his wife. Rather than humorous or naïve, the simple narrative told by the friendly, calm voice of a slightly chubby, nerdy and polite looking and sounding Mader, contributes to a de-politicized look at the phenomena of trafficking, prostitution, sex tourism, and gender roles in general. In particular, however, it is de-politicized look on the specific situation discussed, of Western men arriving to the Ukraine for different forms of sex tourism. As the petition against this work implies, the work also obscures and exploits the political situation which Ukraine finds itself in at the moment as a country at war and as the European center for sex tourism and mail-order brides.
In the award jury’s response to the petition they defended Mader’s work, stating that the artist himself is in fact the main target of his own satire placed “in the role of the foolish and oblivious Western European.” According to the jury it is also in this way that Ekaterina was “misread” as a “stereotypical vision of sexist behavior.” In the end, the jury concludes that it is precisely the work’s invocation of disagreement which reveals its artistic quality, stating that: “while we accept that Mader’s work is not for everyone, we the members of the jury also respectfully suggest that not all art has to be subject to broad consensus. Most of the art all of us care about invites disagreement.”[3]
I would indeed agree that Mader is the main subject of this exhibition; exposing his desire for women’s bodies and feelings of rejection and sexual frustration, voyeurism, inferiority complex, and a privileged play with different methods of obtaining access to these bodies (pick-up artist, sex tourism). Socially committed, feminist, and simply good curatorial work would not dismiss claims of misogyny with apolitical, neoliberal statements about the subjectivity of art as art’s utmost value. When choosing to go forward with the selected candidate for the Paul Huf award and display such an exhibition despite a well-written petition claiming misogyny signed by art professionals from Eastern Europe, at the very least the institution, its jury and curatorial staff, are expected to engage in a deep analysis of gender through feminist scholarship and to frame the exhibition through this lens. This means viewing Mader’s work through the lens of cultural relevance rather than an aesthetic lens and using it for educational purposes. It means that Mader’s work should be accompanied by an analysis of how power dynamics factor into the social construction of heterosexual, gender relations, and of how masculinity is shaped through practices of domination which men desperately seek to embody.
Claiming that sexism is subjective and opinion based, is an example of the institution’s reaffirmation of its own power at every cost. If the jury, Foam and its curatorial team, were to take such claims seriously rather than occupy themselves with justifying their own authority, it might be possible to use Mader’s work in order to educate about what is quite a problematic unveiling of male sexuality. Beyond these conceptual considerations, it is also questionable whether Mader’s play with ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ is in any case a relevant, new, or unique contribution to the field of photography worth of display for these reasons.
[1] https://www.change.org/p/foam-huf-award-petition-to-reconsider-the-results-of-the-foam-huf-award-2017
[2] https://www.foam.org/talent/foam-paul-huf-award
[3] https://www.change.org/p/foam-huf-award-petition-to-reconsider-the-results-of-the-foam-huf-award-2017/u/19805780
