Attila Richard Lukacs > Military Series

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by Arthur Kroker

Attila Richard Lukacs is the contemporary successor to the artistic vision of Francis Bacon.

Just as Bacon painted the male body at that point where it exploded into schizophrenia so too Lukacs paints the male body in all its hysteria. Indeed, Lukacs is the painter par excellence of the hysterical male, of the male subject as an alternating scene of violence and discipline. In his artistic vision, we are brought directly and without censorship into the dark theatre of the postmodern male psyche: a brilliant, just because so deeply obsessive, portrait of the male subject as the focus of the theatrics of sadomasochism, with all its liturgical traces from uniforms to shaved heads. Francis Bacon may have compelled us to see the tortured male body turned inside out, like a medical specimen in a laboratory, but Lukacs has done him one better. He has actually painted the evolutionary history of the hysterical male from the twentieth century: a genealogy that begins with his early silkscreens of dead meat, continues with the famous (Bataillean) pissing primates, evolves into the spectacle of Berlin skinheads and culminates in the more menacing (because much less transgressionary) vision of American military cadets engaged in normalized rituals of sadomasochism.

Dead Meat Before the Fall: Meat, Monkeys, Skinheads, Military Cadets

In all of Lukacs' paintings, there is revealed a profound and deeply mythological vision of the male body as dead meat before the fall. A world obsessed with the fascinating rituals of sadomasochism in which male subjects only relate in terms of discipline and authority. As a painter of the postmodern male subject, Lukacs' artistic perspective can be so seductive because there lurks behind its spectacular mythological scenes (Authentic Decor, Junge Spartaner) a fatal inertia. This is art that can be fascinating and disturbing because in it Lukacs' obsession with the liturgy of sadomasochism (shaved heads as a reversible sign of defiant challenge and disciplined bodies), uniforms as a sign of "twentieth century warriors" (the skinhead series and war machines (military cadets) spills onto the canvas as a serial record of what is really at stake in the games of male seduction at the end of the twentieth century. Always there is the return to the male body as a kind of dead meat before the fall, from Lukacs' early student paintings at Emily Carr College of coded meat specimens and his playful, disciplined, monkeys (Order, Precision, Respect) to the Berlin skinheads and finally to the boys will be boys of the American military academies.

As an artist of Male seduction, Lukacs paints in the twilight time of male subjectivity before the fall, that twilight time when male seduction can be so intense and pleasurable because it is always about power and discipline. Here, the male body becomes a text for the erotic pleasures of discipline and the ecstasy of ritualized bondage - a pure sexuality of power in which the relations of master and slave are instantly reversible because they are always only simulated and imaginary. Lukacs paints the male body under the sign of semio-sex, that point where male seduction is always coded by its fetishistic and imaginary rituals of exchange, from fascination with shaved heads to uniforms. In each of his paintings, there is always a chilling and grisly, but also deeply fascinating, playing out of the will to power - with someone winning, someone losing, and everyone taking pleasure in the exchange of the rituals of discipline, bondage, and humiliation. Here, even transgression is purely imaginary, not a sign of the rupturing of the normal state of affairs, but of its strengthening under the ambivalent and reversible signs of shaved heads and paramilitary uniforms.

Lukacs' artistic vision is, therefore, of a world of cold seduction: disciplined, highly aestheticized bodies with no excess fleshiness, tribal poses of the male subject engaged in all the kitsch activities from sports, religion and broadcasting to frenzied orgiastic feasts of male sexual bonding, an almost autistic world where sexuality, authority and power form a single field of male desire. Indeed, if Lukacs can say that his monkeys are like Socrates' artists - parodists and truth-sayers of society - then they are also mirrors of the seductive pleasures of sadomasochism. Monkeys urinate on one another (Judgement and Sport); they take golden showers (Allegory of Water); their bodies are delivered up for vivisectioning into an infinite circulation of signs. Just like the Berlin skinheads who are also implicated in the same primitive rituals, Lukacs paints the psychological theatre of a primate war - a spectacular playground of primitive artists (monkeys, skinheads and military cadets) who are engaged in exactly the same rituals of cold seduction. Rituals of discipline and bondage, the pleasures of ornamentation, scenes of male tribal aggression, the voyeuristic gaze of hard, disciplined bodies upon one another (Like That). This is the painting, finally, of sex without secretions, of male sexuality as a purely imaginary theatre of desire - a voyeuristic theatre of seduction.

Repressed Skinheads

Lukacs' military cadets are ultimately portrayed as repressed skinheads. Not skinheads in the romantic tradition of Junge Spartaner or True North, but something much more menacing. Normalized skinheads who operate under the sign of disciplined violence, not defiant challenge, and who operate according to the code of official authority, not transgression. These scenes of military cadets, drawn variously from recruitment advertisements for West Point and Valley Forge, represent just that moment of instant reversal when the voyeuristic fascination of the theatre of sadomasochism leaves the margins of culture, becoming instead the central power field of postmodern society. All the dominant cultural icons of America are invaded by the authoritarian gestures of military cadets as repressed skinheads: sports, religion, science, media and even music. The mood is Bush-like realism, not romanticism, and the style a severe photorealism of collage effects, not the Delacroix painterly gestures of the monkey and skinheads series. It is as if Lukacs paints the essential point that in passing from romanticism to realism, from transgression to normalization, nothing has changed at all.

But, of course, if the paintings of the military cadets appear to adhere so faithfully to the code of representationality, that's just because they work to undermine their subject-matter. In Where are you now?, the bulldog's ass disappears into the cadet's leg as if to suggest a coincidence of official function. Father knows best is marked in its lower visual register by floating white boys' heads at genital level. In Murder that the background suddenly appears with a teddy bear in his hands as if to suggest that the background of camouflage is also disguising another, more hidden, game: Boy oh Boy. And finally if the shaving of heads in Your head is beautiful can evoke such a mood of humiliation and degradation, that's because this may just be the quintessential painting of Sacrificial America.

Anyway, the particular brilliance of Lukacs is that he paints what he actually is. When asked why he chose to paint the series on military cadets, he replied that "I always wanted to attend a military school, but my father wouldn't let me apply. The paintings are an act of exorcism of juvenile fantasy." Because his artistic imagination is apolitical and non-theoretical, Lukacs is that rarity: an artist whose imagination is uncensored, and whose work can be at the height of its time because it splays onto the canvas the key mythological themes, first Europe in ruins and now America in ruins. It is as if through sheer artistic instinct that Lukacs understands that parody, kitsch and the instant reversibility of signs into their opposite meaning are the essence of postmodern America. Thus, while Lukacs' portrayal of American cadets seemingly displays, with great technical virtuosity, a realistic portrait of America cut to the visual tone of recruitment posters, each painting is instantly reversed by its titling.

The title The Trial of Love reverses the meaning of a painting that is all about a loveless instruction in the media of persuasion. The performative scene of the cadet polishing brass is encoded by its titling of The good son. And not just the titling either. Even the materials for the different canvasses instantiate parody and imminent reversibility as the keynote of the world of repressed skinheads. Thus, the cadets climbing poles in Gemini play off a brilliantly golden background, resembling both in its subject-matter and style Lukacs' earlier 1-800-MIKE. In We were wrong, the cadets in a physics classroom have their heads transposed into empty globes fit for the quatum world of "leptons and quarks": sometimes the cadets in this group pose have their physical identities effaced, and sometimes their heads are resting spots for the circulation of the planet earth at the end of a golf club. Repressed skinheads in Sacrificial America, therefore, as mythological signs of a panic war machine; soldiers as all a bugle (Good Morning America), all a flag (Remarks made to the President at the White House), all a sport (Dance a manly dance), and all a scene of humiliation under the sign of "Who To Salute." Indeed, if Lukacs' cadets can focus so emphatically on the military principle of twinning (Gemini, The Trial of Love, Sic Semper Tyrannis), that is probably because he instinctively realizes that in America most of all transgressions only operate to confirm the impossibility of rupturing the limits of a culture founded on the excessive logic of imminent reversibility. America, then, as the world's first polity of seduction. Or, as Nietzsche said earlier: "Truth is dead. Everything is permitted."

Arthur Kroker

Military Series