We are sometimes told that great art cherishes ambiguities and enigmas. Mike Kuchar, Play Stations, 2015. Ink and felt pen on paper, 34 × 24 inches. Image courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery, and Ghebaly Gallery. A blue spiderweb in the background recalls a similar ropy device used to trap the protagonist of The Secret of Wendel Samson, while the swears and cocks scrawled on the wall reference the degree-zero pornography of bathroom graffiti. Play Stations (2015) shows two men engaging in bondage, within a grimy chamber. Even the more contemporary situations partake of stock fantasies: a daddy inspecting a male stripper’s G-string, for instance, in Party Time (2016–17), or college frat boys indulging in a modern-day Bacchanalia for Spring Break Costume Party (2015). A naked Odysseus runs from a similarly unclothed Cyclops in Mythology (2015) here, the monocular monster’s red eye is rhymed by the ruddy tip of its penis as it peeps out from its foreskin-Pegasus, flying in the background, wields his own hefty schlong. In Pagan’s Picnic (2017), a beefcake Cupid shoots an arrow into the muscular chest of a nude shepherd, causing him to stare longingly at a well-hung, blue-eyed Dionysius lounging in the foreground. Many of the pieces here use scenarios reminiscent of movies and books that might have provided safe objects for a teen Kuchar’s horny gaze, updated with an adults-only spin: Roman history and Greek mythology, Adam in the Garden of Eden, loin-clothed cavemen and Tarzan types, hirsute barbarians and lusty pirates. Mike Kuchar, Mythology, 2015. Felt tip pen and ink on paper, 30 × 22 inches. Image courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery, and Ghebaly Gallery. Though their work continued to bear many similarities-a wholehearted embrace of non-acting, a comic-strip palette, soaring soundtracks lifted from dime-store record albums-one of the most noticeable distinctions between the two was their attitude toward sex.
The brothers collaborated until the mid-1960s, after which they produced films independently for the subsequent decades. Filled with camp and kitsch, and edited to the overblown rhythms of Hollywood melodrama, the Kuchars’ movies provided prime inspiration for John Waters’s early micro-budget comedies. The Kuchar twins began their careers in the 1950s by making whacked-out 8mm shoestring epics while still teenagers in the Bronx, and then quickly found themselves at the center of the New York underground film boom of the sixties, rubbing shoulders with fellow cinematic visionaries like Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, and many others. The eponymous Mike! is Mike Kuchar, best known as a pioneering experimental filmmaker and the surviving half of the fraternal directorial team of George and Mike Kuchar. Their expressive dicks are thick and veiny: some half-tumescent flesh-tubes flop lazily downward others stab at the air, yearning toward some object of desire, dribbling semen like a salivating predator. Their sparkling eyes appear glazed over, staring into daydreams even as the men lick and paw at one another’s brawny bodies. Their bare asses are, without exception, spheric and shiny, like the juiciest apple you’d ever hope to bite. Here, in a show simply titled Drawings by Mike!, are twenty-two neatly framed ink-and-felt-tip-pen cartoons of tousle-haired Caucasian bohunks engaged in a variety of joyously, nakedly homoerotic situations: skinny dipping, crotch grabbing, pec rubbing, tit sucking.
Mike Kuchar, Drawings by Mike!, installation view.