Event Press Release

Transcription

Event Press Release

Bob Mizer Foundation
PO Box 511
El Cerrito CA 94530
BobMizerFoundation.org
[email protected]
BOB MIZER FOUNDATION
Devotion | Excavating Bob Mizer
November 23 2013-February 15 2014
NYU | 80 WSE Gallery
80 Washington Square East
New York, NY Bob Mizer
Siamese, Los Angeles, C. 1945
Vintage Large-Format Black And White Negative
Selenium-Toned Silver Gelatin Print
10 X 8 Inches
Edition Of 5, Printed In 2013
B o b M i z e r F o u n d a t i o n . o r g
p . !2
Bob Mizer
Wally Schillicutt And Friend [With Broken Finger], Los Angeles, C. 1950
10 X 8 Inches
p . !3
Bob Mizer
Bob Delmonteque, [Portrait], Los Angeles, C. 1950
8 X 10 Inches
p . !4
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Woman With White Fur Collar], Los Angeles, C. 1952
8 X 10 Inches
p . !5
Bob Mizer
Joe Leitel, Los Angeles, C. 1955
8 X 10 Inches
p . !6
Bob Mizer
Hope #1, Los Angeles, C. 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !7
Bob Mizer
Blackie Page, [Portrait], Los Angeles, C. 1950
8 X 10 Inches
p . !8
Bob Mizer
Nathan Powers, Los Angeles, C. 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !9
Bob Mizer
Hope #2, Los Angeles, C. 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 0
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Woman With Hands Clasped Behind Back], Los Angeles, C. 1951
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 1
Bob Mizer
Jack Levan [With Hands Clasped], Los Angeles, C. 1948
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 2
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Woman In Striped Dress With Monkey], Los Angeles, C. 1951
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 3
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Four Women With Police], Los Angeles, C. 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 4
Bob Mizer
Henry Lenz [Burro], Southern California, C. 1948
10 X 8 Inches
p . !1 5
Bob Mizer
Everett Lee Jackson With Two Horses, Los Angeles, C. 1959
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 6
Bob Mizer
Ron Henderson & Henry Nichols, Los Angeles, C. 1963
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 7
Bob Mizer
John Nordman [With Pistol], Los Angeles, C. 1961
8 X 10 Inches
p . !1 8
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Card No. 3], Los Angeles, C. 1948
10.5 X 8.4 Inches
p . !1 9
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Woman Balancing On Parallettes], Santa Monica, 1946
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 0
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Young Girl In Soft Shoes], Santa Monica, California, C. 1946
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 1
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Acrobats With Child], Santa Monica, California, C. 1946
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 2
Bob Mizer
Hot Rodders, Los Angeles, C. 1957
10 X 8 Inches
p . !2 3
Bob Mizer
Robert Martin [Folded], Los Angeles, C. 1949
10 X 8 Inches
p . !2 4
Bob Mizer
Bob Davis [Indian], Los Angeles, C. 1956
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 5
Bob Mizer
Bob Bucher [Photo Study For Weight Loss Product], Los Angeles, California, C. 1948
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 6
Bob Mizer
Bill Atkins [With Switchblade], Los Angeles, C. 1957
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 7
Bob Mizer
Tyrone Power, [Portrait As Zorro], Los Angeles, C. 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 8
Bob Mizer
Jim Carroll [With Antlers], Los Angeles, California, C. 1951
8 X 10 Inches
p . !2 9
Bob Mizer
Walter Mayfield [Aerial], Los Angeles, 1956
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 0
Bob Mizer
Teenage Bum {Joe Leitel], Los Angeles, 1956
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 1
Bob Mizer
Gypsy Boots [Grass Skirt], Los Angeles, C. 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 2
Bob Mizer
Charles Butler [Still From Film Witch Boy], Los Angeles, C. 1955
10 X 8 Inches
p . !3 3
Bob Mizer
Venus Ross [Monument Valley], Los Angeles, 1950
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 4
Bob Mizer
Untitled [Still From Gift For Demitrius], Los Angeles, 1959
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 5
Bob Mizer
Larry Thompson And Son, Los Angeles, 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 6
Bob Mizer
Bob Adams [Still From Witch Boy], Los Angeles, C. 1955
10.5 X 8.4 Inches
p . !3 7
Bob Mizer
Gustaf Holmes [With Trophy], Los Angeles, 1951
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 8
Bob Mizer
Leonard Chambers [In Flask], Los Angeles, 1950
8 X 10 Inches
p . !3 9
Bob Mizer
Ed Fury [Decapitated], Los Angeles, 1951
8 X 10 Inches
p . !4 0
Bob Mizer
Floating Lady [With Duck], Los Angeles, 1949
8 X 10 Inches
p . !4 1
Bob Mizer
Gustaf Holmes [With Monkey], Los Angeles, 1951
10.5 X 8.4 Inches
p . !4 2
Bob Mizer
Tony Farrell & Jim Lee [Still From Film Kissing Rocks], Los Angeles, C. 1971
Vintage Color Transparency
Cibachrome Print
40 X 40 Inches
p . !4 3
Bob Mizer
Rick Hayes And Ray Piel [Silver], Los Angeles, C. 1975
Cibachrome Print
8.4 X 10.5 Inches
p . !4 4
Bob Mizer
Rick Hayes And Ray Piel [Green/Black], Los Angeles, C. 1975
Cibachrome Print
8.4 X 10.5 Inches
p . !4 5
Bob Mizer
Rafaello Luigi, Venice, Italy, 1952
Cibachrome Print
10.5 X 8.4 Inches
p . !4 6
Bob Mizer
Kurt Koenig With Dog, Los Angeles, C. 1973
Cibachrome Print
40 X 40 Inches
p . !4 7
ARTWORK EDITION AND PRICING INFORMATION Artwork is represented through the Foundation’s galleries: Invisible-Exports in New York and
Exile in Berlin, Germany. All Artworks are accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity by the
Bob Mizer Foundation.
Please email “[email protected]” for more information on sales.
Editions from 4x5 vintage Black/White negative (Artwork size: 10 x 8 or 8 x 10
inches)
Editions from 35mm vintage color transparency (Artwork size: 26.6 x 17.7 or 17.7 x 26.6 cm / 10.5 x 7 or 7 x 10.5 inches)
Edition 1/5 $1500 Edition 2/5 $1700 Edition 3/5 $2050 Edition 4/5 $2410 Edition 5/5 $2725
Editions from medium-format vintage color transparency (Artwork size: 26.6 x 26.6
cm / 10.5 x 10.5 inches)
Edition 1/5 $1430 Edition 2/5 $1910 Edition 3/5 $2250 Edition 4/5 $2410 Edition 5/5 $3225 B o b M i z e r F o u n d a t i o n . o r g
p . 4
! 8
Selected Press
p . !4 9
November 4, 2013
Fantasy Camp: Photographs by Underground Legend Bob
Mizer Come Up for Air
By CARL SWANSON
80WSE Gallery
New York University
New York
Over five decades, from the forties until his death in 1992, photographer Bob Mizer built his own libidinal
archipelago on West 11th Street in downtown Los Angeles. This compound, surrounding a boardinghouse
his mother owned where he lived his whole life, served as headquarters for what he called the Athletic
Model Guild, and as home to a churn of young, often troubled men he photographed for AMG’s magazine
Physique Pictorial.
This was a risky operation at first—Mizer even went to jail for distributing his photos through the mail.
But he was, in his way, both a visionary and a relentless entrepreneur, serving, and to some extent stoking
and shaping, what was then an outsider market for idealized depictions of male beauty. Painter David
Hockney credited Physique Pictorial with inspiring his move to L.A., and Mizer took pictures of notable
hotties like Alan Ladd, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joe Dallesandro, and Jack Pierson, along with 10,000 less
famous men he captured in 3,000 sometimes peculiar films and over a million photos, many of them still
undeveloped. Some were documentary, others more or less conventionally athletic or heroic, but over
time the compound became like a studio lot, churning out odder, often jarringly dreamy compositions of
young men in various stages of undress and costume (in antlers, or as Nazis or cowboys), in images that
seemed to combine totally discordant eras and places.
Two exhibitions opening next month argue for Mizer’s significance: “Excavating Bob Mizer,” at NYU’s
80WSE gallery, and one at MOCA in Los Angeles (both arrive on the heels of an archival exhibition at the
Invisible-Exports gallery this past winter). “Back in the seventies, I followed Physique Pictorial,” says
Jeffrey Deitch, the former MOCA director who set the Mizer show in motion before he left this summer.
“I’ve always been a student of vanguard culture, and I understood that Mizer was doing much more than
just showing seductive images of men. He was part of the process of creating this new masculine identity,
which coincides with the invention of the teenager and biker movies and surf culture.” Mizer cooked up
“this private world but also this public world,” explains MOCA curator Bennett Simpson. “He knew the
archetypes of masculinity. This was at the same time as James Dean and Marlon Brando. He was good at
plucking these things out of the air.”
“Bob is like three or four artists,” says Billy Miller, who works with the Mizer estate and is co-curating the
NYU show. “So much of it has been branded as kitsch and camp, but people don’t realize that it was once a
subversive underground language.” Miller does admit that “he’s sort of called a pornographer,” a
reputation reinforced by the plethora of penises in a 2009 Taschen coffee-table book (Bob’s World). But
Miller is more interested in the photographer’s obsessive, idiosyncratic documentation of postwar L.A.’s
subculture petri dish. “His work could never have happened here or Chicago or even San Francisco,”
Miller says. “It was the environment of L.A. after the war which made it possible.” B o b M i z e r F o u n d a t i o n . o r g
p . !5 0
September 24, 2013
Bob Mizer's Revolutionary Homoerotic Photography
Heads To MOCA
By PRISCILLA FRANK
LA Museum of Contemporary Art
Pacific Design Center
Los Angeles
Through January
This fall art season we're excited to see an onslaught of exhibitions honoring the shapers of
homoerotic imagery, paying overdue tribute to artists that were all too often silenced in their day
or erased from the popular trajectory of art history. A key exhibition in this vain revisits
photographer Bob Mizer, a pioneer of male erotica and post-war gay culture. His NSFW photos,
which led to Mizer's arrest in the 1950s, are slated to show at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles this November.
Mizer began his photographic career in 1942, mastering a signature sensual, flashy and campy
style all his own. Though sexed up kitsch was used on photographs of women, Mizer was one of
the first to place men as the figures of desire. Even the few available male-centric photographs of
the era cohered to a muscular and macho aesthetic. Mizer, however, gave equal attention to the
fresh-faced boy next door, opening up new avenues of desire and a new male erotic ideal.
Mizer opened up his own film studio, the Athletic Model Guild, where he worked for almost 50
years, capturing over 10,000 young men along the way. He also established "Physique Pictorial,"
the house publication for the studio. Whether snapping a scantily clad policeman, cowboy or
leather enthusiast, Mizer was sure to capture the softer side of the male physique. Thanks to the
Guild, Mizer was not only a subversive and kitschy force in the art world but also one of the first
to instill an open, gay community before the concept even existed. Yet despite being an artistic
and social revolutionary, Mizer always maintained an easy, breezy sense of playfulness in his
work, making it truly addictive.
The transgressive friskiness of Mizer's oeuvre inspired a multitude of artists, from provocateurs
like Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe to rule breakers like Mike Kelley and John Waters.
A rare selection of Mizer's "catalogue boards," along with his AMG films, and a complete set of
Physique Pictorial magazine will go on view at MOCA in Los Angeles alongside the leathercentric works of fellow gay gamechanger Tom of Finland. B o b M i z e r F o u n d a t i o n . o r g
p . !5 1
January 17, 2013
ART IN REVIEW
Bob Mizer: ‘Artifacts’
By HOLLAND COTTER
Invisible-Exports
14A Orchard Street,
Lower East Side
Through Jan. 27
Bob Mizer (1922-1992) was a photographer and filmmaker whose entrepreneurial talents led
him to form a one-man empire in the field of homoerotica, beginning in the 1940s. Working out
of his home in Los Angeles, he was photographing at a time when bodybuilder magazines were
as close as gay pornography got to being legal, and he pursued both genres when he established
his Athletic Model Guild in 1945.
Mizer soon ran into trouble with the law. In 1947 he was convicted of sending obscene material
through the mail and put in jail for nine months. Once out, he picked up where he left off and,
with the help of his mother, Delia, kept his studio going for decades. He occasionally used
female models; the young Susan Hayward posed for him. But a majority by far were male. A few
— Alan Ladd, Victor Mature, Arnold Schwarzenegger — became Hollywood stars; others became
luminaries of the gay underground.
The Mizer show at Invisible-Exports, organized by Billy Miller in cooperation with the Bob Mizer
Foundation, is an archival display, engrossing on several levels. First, it’s a record of extreme creative
industriousness. Mizer was apparently a nonstop worker and cottage industry micromanager. Over the
decades he produced countless promotional catalogs from paste-up boards, then photographed the boards
to use as handouts. Examples of all these formats are here.
Mizer worked with thousands of models, on whom he kept meticulous files, not just on their physical
appearance, but also on their character, habits, backgrounds and sexual repertory, with all the
information both written out and distilled into pictographic codes for quick reference.
Although he did plenty of single-figure shots, much of his output was based on multicharacter narrative
vignettes. In conceiving them he both created and helped preserve a compendious essay in midcentury
American concepts of masculinity — straight, gay, whatever.
And while certain images give pause (a hunk in Nazi uniform), others are delightfully funny — innocent,
even, with campy horsing around and everyone having fun under the California sun. No wonder David
Hockney, in chilly old England, took one look at Mizer beefcake and decided Los Angeles was the place to
be.
As a record of changing times, fashions and mores, the show is well worth a visit. It’s also a moving tribute
to a pre-Stonewall pioneer and artist-visionary, which Mizer was. Finally, it’s a gold mine of sheer
information, and there’s tons more where it came from. So come on, all you students in cultural and queer
studies. There are dissertations to be done. B o b M i z e r F o u n d a t i o n . o r g
p . !5 2
May 12, 2012
Bob Mizer: Private Works
By CHRISTOPHER TROUT
“I feel more strength now than ever before, but this strength, this driving energy, shall be
carefully bridled and directed with wisdom ... My ambition is everything‚ pleasure, physical
sensations mean nothing compared to great accomplishments.” — Bob Mizer in a letter to his
mother, Delia Mizer, from a work farm in Saugus, California, May 28, 1947.
The above quote comes from a series of letters written by American photographer Bob Mizer,
following his arrest and subsequent imprisonment in the spring of 1947. He spent one year at a
work camp in Saugus, California (now part of Santa Clarita) for the unlawful distribution of
obscene material through the US mail. The material in question was a series of black and white
photographs, taken by Mizer, of young bodybuilders wearing what were known as posing
straps‚ a precursor to the G-string. At the time, the mere suggestion of male nudity was not only
frowned upon, but also illegal. In spite of societal expectations and pressure from law
enforcement, Mizer would go on to build a veritable empire on his beefcake photographs and
films, with the establishment of his influential studio, the Athletic Model Guild.
Mizer’s letters from prison, along with a handful of correspondences from a trip to Europe in the
early 1950s, and his diaries, kept from the age of fourteen, make up the most comprehensive
firsthand account of the long and complicated life of one of America’s most unique and eccentric
photographic voices. Perhaps the most informative portion of what remains of the Mizer estate,
however, is a collection of personal photographs that have rarely been seen, even by those
closest to the photographer. A special selection of these images appeared at Exile Gallery in
Berlin in 2011, in a first-of-its-kind exhibition entitled “Bob Mizer: Selected Private Works
1942– 1992!, curated by Billy Miller. Since that initial showing, his work has since appeared in
shows internationally, and a one-person exhibit of newly uncovered work is slated for Fall 2012,
or early 2013.
The State of the Mizer Estate
At the time of his death, Bob Mizer was probably best known for his groundbreaking magazine
Physique Pictorial, a publication that mixed photographs and illustrations with Mizer’s vitriolic
political rants. In the span of his near 50-year career, he created a body of work that both
reflected and skewed American ideals of masculinity. His portfolio included everything from
dramatically lit black and white beefcake to colorfully extreme close-ups of male genitalia. From
his home in Los Angeles, he photographed thousands of men, including actors, bodybuilders,
soldiers, and hustlers. His collection, estimated at nearly one million different images and
thousands of films and videotapes, features unique cultural figures, including actor and
politician Arnold Schwarzenegger, Andy Warhol muse Joe Dallesandro, and contemporary artist
Jack Pierson. The Bob Mizer Foundation now houses the majority of the collection, however,
following his death, a series of events unfolded that threatened to keep Mizer’s work out of the
public arena forever.
He died at 8:15 p.m. on May 12, 1992. His older brother Joe, heir to Mizer’s Los Angeles estate,
died just one month later on June 16, leaving everything to his second beneficiary: his live-in
p . !5 3
lawyer, Wayne Stanley. The Mizer estate consisted of four city lots, containing the Mizer family
home, the photographer’s studio and archives, and a recently constructed dorm for his models.
Over the years, the compound played host to his family, the occasional boarder, a virtual zoo of
barnyard animals, dogs, and even monkeys, and a slew of models. In the days immediately
following his death, a few
remaining models disposed of much of Mizer’s possessions at Stanley’s request. Stanley often
recounted the occasion, saying that they filled anywhere between 16 and 33 dumpsters full of
junk. That “junk” included crucial elements of the photographer’s process — his elaborate sets,
costumes, equipment, and props — and almost all of his personal belongings. Mizer’s friend, the
American painter John Sonsini, salvaged some of these artifacts while other pieces of the estate
were handed off to various friends and contemporaries.
Stanley attempted to keep the operation afloat, even taking photographs of popular AMG
models himself, but the most important part of the business was missing — Bob Mizer. In 1994,
Stanley put the compound up for sale, sectioning it off into three parts. Eighteen months later,
he sold the final property and relocated to Alameda, California. Stanley kept Mizer’s black and
white prints and negatives in his garage, and stacked his 35mm color slides floor-to-ceiling in a
nearby public storage unit. His films and videos remained in Los Angeles until documentary
filmmaker Marvin Jones sent the films to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
keeping the videotapes on his back porch. Back issues of Physique Pictorial changed hands a few
times before landing in a storage unit, also in Los Angeles.
Living in Alameda, Stanley eventually exhausted the profits he collected from the sale of the
compound, and began selling original prints on eBay. In 2004, he made his final sale to Dennis
Bell: creator of the Bob Mizer Foundation. The transfer included all of the remaining
photographs, including 35mm color slides, 4×5 black and white negatives, 2 1/4 color
transparencies, and a card catalog that mapped out the collection in its entirety. Over time, Bell
pieced the collection back together — he relocated and acquired all of Mizer’s remaining films
and videotapes, and most of the props, equipment, and backdrops that John Sonsini rescued
more than 10 years earlier.
The Private Bob Mizer
There is no way of knowing what all was lost in the days following Mizer’s death, but what
remains of his estate paints a picture of a complicated and meticulous artist. He was a
workhorse. He shot obsessively, nearly everyday, often multiple models, even continuing to
work as his body deteriorated from renal failure; his last known session took place just two
months before he died. He kept and scrutinized every frame, some marked with the words “do
not print,” others accompanied by notes about lighting or exposure.
Early on, Mizer made a habit of photographing outdoors, occasionally on location, but often on
the rooftop or by the pool at the compound. When he worked in the studio, he is rumored to
have shot with a series of cameras, constantly shifting between 35mm, medium format, and
large format, in both color and black and white, producing an array of formats of each and every
pose. Videos of his sessions, kept almost religiously from the early 1980s on, reveal an entirely
different approach. As Mizer’s health waned, he stopped shooting outdoors, and rarely moved
from his post directly next to a constantly recording camcorder‚ Mizer can be heard coaching his
models, the flash from his Contaflex SLR popping in the background.
He was an extremely successful commercial photographer, no small feat, considering his subject
matter, and he knew exactly what his customers wanted. Nonetheless, he steadily produced
images that stand out from the standard beefcake that made him famous. In the cardboard
boxes that housed his slides and negatives, right alongside the posing and preening, are images
p . !5 4
that Mizer himself never presented to the public, perhaps out of fear that they would be
misunderstood. Even the many posthumous gallery exhibits and coffee table books overlook
these, the most bizarre, and perhaps the most intriguing of his photographs.
Mizer had a keen understanding of composition and lighting from the beginning, and was early
to adopt advances in photography; his earliest color work dates as far back as the mid-1940s
(decades before color photography was accepted as a fine art form). The
images, referred to here as his personal works, show a truly unique vision of masculine identity.
From the time he started documenting bodybuilding competitions on Santa Monica’s Muscle
Beach, Mizer trained his lens on portrayals of masculinity, and as the years progressed, his work
turned from standard representations — bodybuilder, cop, sailor — to multi-layered
constructions. A black lumberjack set against a dessert sunset, sports a Gucci t-shirt and skintight jeans. A disheveled Jesus-figure, arms open wide against a fabric-draped cross, stands,
pelvis thrust forward, fully erect. Then there are the more traditional images: the unusual
fashion photographs and colorful portraits that have yet to make much of an appearance.
These images present a new man. He is neither restrained as in his early photographs, nor
explicit as in his later work. Here he exhibits the strength he once spoke of: the “driving
energy ... carefully bridled and directed with wisdom.” Bob Mizer has never been considered a
great artist. Despite his obvious impact on visual culture, and proclamations of his influence
from renowned figures like David Hockney, Bruce Weber, Francis Bacon, Jack Smith, Robert
Mapplethorpe and others, he has, until now, filled the role of outsider or, at best, commercial
photographer. He may not have received the acclaim he is due, but then Bob Mizer the artist is
only now beginning to make his debut.
p . !5 5

Event Press Release

Transcription

Similar documents

After Party Flyer

Bob Mizer: ARTIFACTS | Art Blart

pelligrosa press page 8

Be Strong Brochure - Youth Over Violence

Friday, May 6, 2016 At Luminarias Restaurant

The DFW-VJMC held a vintage Japanese bike show on June 11 at

this PDF - UNLV Libraries Digital Collections

What is Budokan?

City Year #InstaGallery

Gratts Primary Center and Early Education Center, Los Angeles