Paul Donald

Endymion Project Performance

January 9, 2016

Paul Donald: Endymion Project, on view from January 9 through February 20, 2016 included a performance. Terrified of exposing himself in public, Donald is anxious about the power that accrues to his body as a source of white male privilege. The art world wants to avoid addressing this privilege—acting as if its disproportionate celebration of white male artists is not a problem. He wants to make work that unsettles this veiling of privilege and its connection to masculinity.

To this end, in Endymion Project the artist is driven to offer himself in an acutely vulnerable state to the audience. Revealing the male body of the artist, which has been consistently veiled in the history of Western art, other than for brief moments.

Donald found himself drawn to the figure of Endymion from Classical mythology, taken up with fervor by European painters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and rendered as a sexualized object of desire. (In the myth, Endymion is an object of female desire; and yet in the plethora of paintings of a sexy, naked Endymion from this period, his languid figure is clearly offered up for the delectation of the male spectators who dominated the European viewing public at the time.)

The performance was accompanied by painted objects that both celebrate and obscure the naked white male body, using the tropes of Romantic painting from the height of Endymion’s early nineteenth-century popularity. The billowing, Turner-esque swathes of paint covering the flat surfaces of these geode-like objects reveal figures of Endymion taken from the earlier paintings, scratched into the surface as if scrimshawed into whalebone. The backs of the objects are rough hewn from blocks of wood. But they are also beautiful things, which draw in the eye to look as well as the hand to touch. The nude male body becomes encapsulated as well as enhanced by these sensual objects, which put into parallel the desire for the body of the (male) artist with the desire for the work of art. Both are laid bare in the objects as well as through the performance.