Some artists believed that new media and practices like video and performance were especially suited for the purpose because they were not yet burdened by the rigid formal conventions governing established media like painting and sculpture. The 'old media' sometimes appeared too gendered, too rigid, to shape the multiple perspectives now gaining voice. That altered climate offers a context for this exhibition about representation. Difference is now cherished. The richness of a visual culture which thrives on multiplicity and diversity has proved its worth, regenerating discourses from film and video, to painting and sculpture, to mainstream popular culture pursuits such as advertising and design.
Art is more tolerant now, but more complex too.
The more we learn about gender and sexuality, the less likely we are to reach definitive conclusions. Some of the biological sciences are again positing theories of determinism about gender that risk establishing new canons in place of the old ones we have just left behind. Francis Bacon, for example, subverted representational traditions of men and maleness by cutting his subjects to the bone, presenting them within a theatre of paint and insisting they escape definition. John Coplans is one of a number of artists investigating the area of the male body from a lateral perspective, but for every such one, there are hundreds more images that encourage men to measure themselves by the musculature of their 'six-pack' alone. Camille Paglia has sung eloquently of the homoerotic aura of ancient Greek statuary which celebrated the male body as the ideal.