W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #erwinolaf, #wrestlngwithshadows, #peterpan

There is a bit of Peter Pan in Erwin Olaf. Make that a lot of Peter Pan. Peter is the classic J.M. Barrie character who is the eternal boy, prankish and puckish. In the play and novel, Peter returns from Never Never Land, where he lives with his Lost Boys, to the Darling household in London. He wants to retrieve his shadow, which got trapped there when Peter visited secretly to hear Mrs. Darling tell bedtime stories to her children. 

Why does he need his shadow?

You could argue that Peter wants to be mortal, to hear stories and to grow up and tell stories to his own children and to be . . . not immortal. 

This is one of those stories for children that seems pretty rough when you start to take it apart. Does Wendy really have to sew Peter’s shadow back on? Ouch. She seems intent on fixing his shadow. 

Is Erwin Olaf in pursuit of his shadow? 

There is something substantial in this shadow business. The shadow is a powerful phenomena in literature and psychology. Jacob wrestles with his shadow in the Bible. The shadow is also seen as an angel and as God himself. Wrestling with shadows is the stuff of nightmares—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc.). Theoretically, the Jungian shadow is a tangible entity, something real to wrestle. 

With Olaf, the shadow is not the neurotic underbelly or the dark side of depression and despair but, rather, the specter of age and mortality—that Beast.

The good news—the absolute ringing joy of this—is that Erwin Olaf embraces life with vigor and light. He works at it fiercely. A part of the shadow is his health. He has chronic pulmonary emphysema, and this compromises his activity, both work and pleasure. He balances them artfully. It’s not a secret, but it precedes and follows him.

This is all to say that Olaf is always wrestling to some degree with this, his shadow, the shadow of . . . you fill in the blank. He is extremely conscious of his mortality, or at least his vulnerability. He seems to have sorted himself out about this. The aging is inevitable; the dying comes with no regret. He doesn’t have any trouble with aging. Only with living. Good for him.

Whatever very healthy narcissism he might be accused of as a younger man, he continues to wear it well. He is a handsome man.

In all three panels of his triptych “What I wish, I am, I will be”, 2009, this is relative. He looks great in the first, younger, self-portrait, albeit with someone else’s chest, and less good in the looking-ahead third panel, with oxygen tubes attached to his nose. It is likely to be difficult for gay men who trade on their looks early in their careers to adjust to getting older. Olaf seems prepared. It may be coincidental but Oscar Wilde said of his ageless character Dorian Gray that three of the characters were reflections of himself: one “is what I think I am,” another “is what the world thinks of me,” and “Dorian is what I would like to be — in other ages, perhaps.”*1

Erwin Olaf’s early portrait of a well-built, half-naked young man clutching a bottle of champagne at the the moment the liquid explodes orgasmically onto his lower belly distills the abandon and heroism of the 1970s.  The image is from his Joy series and could easily be thought to be a self-portrait. It even looks like Olaf, a young man in orgasmic celebration of life, sexuality, and youth, narcissistically dancing on the edge of the volcano which is an image Olaf used later in his writing.*2

I have had a long creative relationship with the artist., and was conscious of Olaf’s earliest art well before we worked together as his New York dealer. The “Joy” image was reproduced on a postcard, and I had many of them salted away in drawers. I don’t think I ever actually sent one but rather kept them like some secret entry in a fairly closeted diary. For a very long time I did think it was a picture of the artist. 

And it is, in the same way, a picture of the author. I can transport myself into it and become free and sexual, shoulders arched back, mouth open, hair a bit crazy, a bad-boy tattoo of a dagger on my forearm.

And here is where you or I might want to live forever, to fix our shadows, with the life force pouring through our bodies and spilling out wantonly, endlessly.  “In Cum Shot”, 1985, it is the artist, on the receiving end, celebrating the elixir of life. 

There is an element of transgression, too.  Chronologically, this picture was made at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and everything represented in it would be politically incorrect today.

In 1979, Erwin Olaf would have been twenty.  “The Joy” model and Olaf could have switched places.  Over the years Olaf has created a number of works in which he is the model, memorably, as the young man with a sizable erection in full makeup and halter.  It isn’t always obvious like the fashion victim with the leather switch(!) but usually we can identify him. 

Olaf appears in another triptych — a female/drag version — and there are diptychs of him bound and gagged: “Tamed & Anger”, 2015, and even “Tar & Feathers”, 2012.  Using the self-portraits as sign posts along the trajectory of his career seems to reveal him trying on a range of identifies, metamorphoses, if you will. It is as if he emerges from the shadows to experiment with different identities or iterations of himself.  The many guises of Erwin Olaf.

Most striking of these is the dramatic “Berlin, Olympia Station, Westend”, 2012, a self-portrait of him struggling up steps with Sisyphean exertion and much difficulty for a seemingly still youthful-looking man.  He is walking away from the camera (with another held in his left hand) and seems to pass into the light.  Transcendence. 

You don’t need to know the specifics of his health.  He seems to be exploring the arc of his life without any acknowledgment of or emphasis placed on his illness. What is striking is not only the gravity of this but also the incredible grace.

Olaf loves life. There is no death wish here.

The photos fix his characters in time. They live there eternally. The models are striking; they are groomed and photo-shopped to perfection, but stilled in this spot, an act of lepidoptery. 

Photography is famously “the art of fixing the shadow.”

One of the creators of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot wrote, “‘The phenomenon which I have now briefly mentioned appears to me to partake of the character of the marvellous, almost as much as any fact which physical investigation has yet brought to our knowledge. The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our "natural magic,” and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy.*4

Olaf’s characters never age.  Even the oldest, the ladies of Mature and the crones of Berlin, won’t change.  Maybe photography should be called the art of fettering the shadow.

Curiously enough, there are very few actual shadows in the works of Erwin Olaf.*5 

There is almost always lots of light.  Olaf’s studio settings are sunny, and his characters don’t cast shadows.  This is also indicative of something—in the color work especially, where there are the fewest.  They are noticeably absent.  Perhaps they are hiding in Mrs. Darling’s nursery drawer. 

It could be argued that the “Separation” series, which shows the domestic life of a family dressed in rubber fetish gear, presents literal shadows.  The environments in his “Hotel” and “Berlin” series are unusual in this regard as well.  They are atmospheric and seem to be constructed in lower light situations.  But, most often, Olaf’s world materializes in a photo studio that is fully and evenly lit.

Working in color seems to have set him free.  You can see this in his portraits of developmentally challenged young people in “Mind of their Own”.  These are not photoshopped, however; that technical breakthrough, in addition to working in color, did indeed fuel his success in these projects, especially the commercial ones.  The early negatives for “Mind” were manipulated in the most primitive way, by baking them in an oven to set the image.  Modern tools of photography have given the artist the ability to fix the world he sees.

Looking at Olaf’s entire body of work you are struck by and remember the youth, the perfect bodies and impossible skin.  We tend to overlook age, and Olaf may at first seem committed to its younger iterations.  But time tells.  There is, in fact, a full range of ages in his oeuvre. 

The artist is like Jaques in “As You Like It”, with his “Ages of Man” speech, sad and cynical yet affectionate and poetic. *6 

To repeat, Olaf has always been a pretty man.  Being tall and blond with a good physique is gay currency.  When you think of the Olaf pictures, you think of that flawless skin and lean supple body, like the artist himself as a younger man.  You don’t think of age. 

Not everyone in his images is so perfect and pretty, though.  The artist actually and actively attacks beauty in “Royal Blood”.  He segued to these pictures from his Mature pin-up ladies, who are more than harbingers of age.  They have Macbeth-like “walking shadow” foreboding. The earlier and older Norman Rockwell-like models in “Hope” and “Rain” are characters, not fantasies; they are annoyingly real. Olaf once described one of these models as the “homeliest girl in The Netherlands.” *7

He returns to characters like these in Berlin with his clowns and “Judgement of Paris” ladies.  The cosmeticized, smooth-skinned models are confronted by the other, wizened characters, who are related to the sad-to-imagine, mature, and intubated Olaf in “I wish, I am, I will be”.

Considerations of age seem trumped by the beauty of youth, but that may be the product of reading the work too quickly and not recognizing the profound presence of age.  In his 2016 “Nuit Blanche” nighttime projection of “L’Éveil (The Awakening)”, slow-motion videos of faces are balanced with full-size naked bodies who are stretching and coming to life. It’s celebratory, not voyeuristic.  These figures and faces have been recycled from his earlier “disco in Hell” series Paradise, and they are affecting, but here they seem older, more real, and feature a range of ages and body types. 

Erwin Olaf is a big fairy.  He is a big fairy, as he has magical powers.  He is spritely and impish.  In the vein of Fox Talbot’s “marvellous,” he is marvellous. He has "natural magic.”

He is also happily gay, a man who embraces his sexuality and celebrates it in his photographs.  He is liberated.  Think of various images in the series Hotel as erotic fulfillment or the fantasy of anyone who ever wanted to spend the night away from home.  Or, imagine an evening in with any of the models in “Skin Deep”.

Coming of age as a gay man undoubtedly involved some shadow boxing for the artist.  Whatever personal difficulties around his coming out that there may have been with family, they are in the past.  Olaf effectively chronicled his active participation in the disco/punk scene while he was in his twenties in “Joy”, and shared his apparent exploration of fetishism in “Chess Men”. Always exploring, his recent self-portraits show a fully resolved and sensitive man, intent on seeing more of the world: journeying to Berlin, Shanghai, and soon Singapore.

Today he is married.  You do witness his personal evolution in the work, his process of investigation and discovery.  To return to the notion of the shadow, we may feel that when we see our shadow, it affirms our presence to ourself.  You get the sense that the artist has found his way into the light.

Olaf, the Shadow, knows. *9

To quote Carl Jung: “This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well”. *10

But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.

Notes:

1 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), first published in its entirety in Lippincottt’s Monthly Magazine, July 1890.

2 The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962), 352.

3 Erwin Olaf, in an artist’s statement for the exhibition Skin Deep, 2016.

4 William Henry Fox Talbot, “Some Account of The Art of Photogenic Drawing or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves with the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1800-1843)

5 Shirley den Hartog, in interview with the author, April 2018. Shirley den Hartog is Olaf’s longtime studio and life manager. She quipped that “there shouldn’t be any shadows because the studio had paid a fortune to have the photo retoucher remove them.”

6 Or, perhaps better, are these lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5: “Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

7 Olaf, in conversation with the artist, September 2005.

8 As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts. His acts being seven ages.”

9 “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts  of men? The Shadow knows.” From the introduction to the broadcast radio episodes of The Shadow, as quoted in Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, “Radio's Golden Age: The Programs and the Personalities” ([New York]: Easton Valley Press, 1995), 

10 Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, accessed July 17, 2018. 

This essay is the originally commissioned text for Erwin Olaf “I Am” (Aperture 2018).  The artist was upset and offended by my calling him “a big fairy” because he felt he had spent a great deal of energy escaping any sort of gay niche as an artists.  That was not the author’s intent. 

©2021

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