Philip Steele
Unapologetic
Portrait of the artist: Philip Steele
Philip Steele’s work focuses on the deconstruction of the mechanisms of visual language, specifically as it pertains to gay representation. This contributes to an understanding of the systems of operation that construct and define gay identity. His work investigates the problematics of how codified symbols and metaphors represent same sex desire.
He attempts to arrest exoticization, exploitation, denial of certain bodies, and stereotyping. His process allows him to control at least some of the mechanisms of how he and his community are presented, perceived and exist. Steele sees this as his unapologetic position on the representation of acts of gay desire, lust, and love.
In this, his latest exhibition, Philip Steele presents 3 video/performance projections created in Argentina and South Africa. Each of the three works stands alone in their voice of protest, pain, intellectualism and experience. Together they present a complex personal view on the state of gay identity today and themes which are at the forefront of the LGBTQI+ debate globally.
Philip Steele, Sensual Resistance, 2018, stills from digital video
Sensual Resistance is intentionally shot in low quality and at first we see a fist, trapped in multiple layers of condoms, writhing in pain, like a snake shedding its own skin. The fist is an iconic image in many liberation struggles, representing dissent and resistance.
The way the work is exhibited is an essential part of the power relation that exists between being photographed and photographing, being observed and observing, returning the gaze. Ideas now common in our understanding of photography, which were introduced by John Berger and Susan Sontag. Steele stands naked in the exhibition space. The video projected on his body turning him into a living billboard, and you into voyeur.
Part of the conceptual research of the piece was to understand how the viewer responds emotionally when watching the projection without prior information or contextual background. Responses varied from feelings of tension and anticipation to dealing with issues of masculinity, sexuality and being constrained or confined.
Steele proposes that we remain bound by the problematics of western traditions of viewing. How the gay body is owned by society, decided upon without consent, and acted on without the person's voice being heard.
Philip Steele, Foucauldian Men, 2019, stills from digital video
Steele’s second video, Foucauldian Men, draws extensively from an interview with Michel Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life, which was published in the French magazine Gai Pied in 1981. The text is emotionally moving as it tackles difficult questions around gay representation and identity, and how social conditioning creates problems for many gay men.
The gay community is depicted as a walking embodiment of sexuality, as if "being gay" is the sum of who the people involved are. Ironically, however, they are not actually allowed to be sexual, in the sense that their desire cannot be shown. In a society which is often plagued with an overwhelming presence of sex, gay sexuality, desire and its representation is still forbidden, only whispered.
Generations of homosexuals have had to develop specific codified languages to communicate, meet, and to survive. This has often taken the form of dress codes, speech and body language. Tactics of survival such as these have found their way into the visual arts, theatre and film arenas as subliminal messages, recognisable by the homosexual eye, providing the ability to read or see what is not obvious to the heterosexual viewer. An informed gay audience can read the subtleties and clues of homoerotic imagery.
Philip Steele, Without giving way, 2019, stills from digital video
In this final endurance piece, Without Giving Way, Steele pushes the boundaries of pleasure and pain to a dangerous edge. Dressed in a floor-length, red dress, he fills a plastic bag with water and traps his head inside. One breath can mean drowning, not breathing can mean suffocation.
As we watch, the artist loses consciousness and any sentimental fiction in the work is destroyed. The cameraman is obligated to enter the frame and save the life of the performer.
This is not art imitating life, but art engaging life itself.
Pain and ecstasy are both conflating and cooperative forces in Steele’s work. Truisms such as “one man’s pain is another man’s pleasure” sometimes prove themselves. This work challenges representations of pain and ecstasy, being used as propaganda to control lived experience both in- and outside of the home. It challenges cultural norms and morals, and manipulates visual representation.
Art allows us to consider things beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding, and beyond our prejudice. It introduces and celebrates non-binary possibilities where concepts or experiences, which would normally be seen as opposing forces, can be joined together to allow a space where “more things exist between heaven and earth… than what was dreamt of in (our) philosophy”
Watch the full videos here