An Artful Dodger's musing

First commissioned essay for New Zealand's gay newspaper express.

Do we look at the world – and art – differently because of our sexual orientation?
Imagine, if you will, wandering into an art gallery or museum, not knowing what to expect or see, perhaps enticed by a specially curated exhibition of art you are rather unfamiliar with. It’s something that may occur frequently, especially on travels when you want to see what the locals have made or collected. It happened to me last year when visiting the Auckland Art Gallery’s exhibition of work owned by the National Galleries of Scotland; the appealingly human-scaled Berlin art museums; and the renaissance treasure troves of the Low Countries.
I’m not a huge art connoisseur – I like to be surprised, appalled or seduced by each painting and sculpture that crosses my path through an exhibit, even to the point of ignoring who the artist is or what the work is called. I regard wandering through an art gallery akin to an adventure trail with no set path, signs or finish. A complete open-mindedness when approaching a piece of work has, in my experience, always stood me in good stead and allowed me to be able to enjoy the art – even the disappointments. Contemplating a painting that draws you in, screws your brain and leaves you pleasantly exhausted is almost as good as having mind-blowing sex.
I would like to think that the way art speaks to people is somehow related to their sexuality and sensibility. I love hearing a lesbian’s assessment of a Tom of Finland drawing or a straight man’s eulogy of the female nude in Western painting, then trying to relate those criticisms to my own. On a related but different level, I would hypothesize that many collections around the globe might have contained very different pieces if their investors/collectors had not been gay men or lesbians. And does this mean that my distinct lack of enjoyment of the aforementioned Scottish exhibition, despite its critical acclaim in the local media, is due to my gay sensibility second-rating many of the works? One often knows more about the artist’s inclinations than the critic’s.
For those lucky enough not to have studied for a fine arts degree, like me, there are some excellent art historians and critics around who have produced sterling guiding work for television. Sister Wendy’s roaringly funny and touching reflections on art, particularly religious art, and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation have both given me the confidence to look at art with all my senses and judging faculties, and being unafraid of going against the received wisdom of the art canon.
On BBC World News, Andrew Graham-Dixon is a leading light when it comes to letting you see art in an unexpected sociological and national historical setting. He did a series on Russian and German art and his take on art in the Low Countries is on the Arts Channel. His previous work included a riveting piece on Caravaggio’s relationship between the artist’s biography and his art, which was especially appealing to a gay guy like me after Derek Jarman’s earlier magisterial and idiosyncratic treatment of Caravaggio’s life. And nothing, of course, beats standing in front of “Christ Expulses the Money Changers Out of the Temple” or “Triumphant Eros” at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

Simon Schama has produced an intensely personal take on artists as varied as Rembrandt, David and Rothko in his Power of Art series on BBC Knowledge, which smacks you round the head with its erudition and often far-fetched theorising. He nevertheless remains enjoyable because the show allows you to talk back afterwards, if you’re keen enough to delve into the subject’s art yourself.
None of those television personalities, as far as I know, are gay. So I am again intrigued whether critics of a different sexual orientation would approach Bernini, Friedrich or Hirst differently.
Re-interpreting imagery, storylines, characters and quotations is what we are really good at. Whole pre-gay liberation movements have devoted their waking hours to appropriating actresses, films and operas, resulting in whole swags of cultural icons and artefacts now being recognised as ‘gay culture’ which every aspiring queen needs to master. The beauty is that this gay subcultural conquest is on-going, even though it is becoming less easy to find material since show business and other visual arts are now actively niche-marketed to us instead of invented by us.
We just like to dance to our own tune and dream the world as we want.

Headland 2013

 

The Headland Sculpture on the Gulf exhibition is a biennual event in which the artwork has a huge task competing with the scenery, and most times nature wins out. This year's effort was especially weak in content. I had trouble discerning any art amongst the trees and grass. There were plenty of pieces tacked on to trees and plonked next to the walkways. I imagine many an artist just went round the coastal walk trying to work out what they could do in a particular spot and most of the resulting works look rushed and improvised. 

Nothing moved me despite the number of mobiles (or things just flapping in the wind). Hanging a few red fabric balls in a pohutukawa tree does not an artwork make. 
It was especially hard on children for many pieces had a playground feel to them (strings, swings, playhouses) but a confusing "do not touch" policy for some of them, but not others, caused confusion, tantrums, and tears.

I hope the local board doesn't buy any of the entries because none of them are worth preserving much for posterity. I dread they'll inflict another tumbling down corrugated iron piece on us, and yes, seeing that there was one made my heart sink.

My award would go to "Not For Sale", the only piece that actually made you think what it meant.

Antwerpen, 2012

Of course it's always enjoyable to come back to my hometown, see all my old mates again and take the opportunity to make a few new ones. The physical look of the city has been changing over the past decades: a whole swathe of the inner city has been pedestrianised, cycle ways are everywhere and many areas and streets have been renovated. There are still large building and resurfacing projects underway and all that rebuilding gives me the impression the city's general colour scheme is now more light gray than its former darker hue. Trees are also noticeably fewer in number or still too young and recently planted to make an impact on the streetscape yet. A low-cost shared cycle scheme has made the city more bike-friendly but the trams look old and tired. The public transport system in in crisis due to lack of sufficient revenue to finance new rolling stock. Decades-long planned underground tracks have still not opened. Line and change information is insufficient, confusing or completely absent, especially in metro stations.

Park Spoor Noord: The north-eastern inner suburbs of Antwerpen has always been a poor and unhip part of town. Home for the working classes working in the international harbour and domestic shipping services there has always been little in the way of attractions, open spaces or leisure areas. Narrow streets, poor housing and a focus on industrial and transport actitivies (including a large railway yard) caused the area to be ignored by the City and most of its citizens. I lived in the southern leafy suburbs most of my life so I certainly had never been there before.

In a bid to attract a new wave of more affluent inhabitants who can't quite afford the southern area house prices, a large urban renewal programme was launched with Park Spoor Noord (a new park, sports fields and exhibition spaces in former railway sheds) very much the focal point for the local community. Many streets have had their workers' cottages renovated and sold. A new city library and city service centre were built in a troubled area formerly infamous for drugs dealing, illegal immigrants and, incidentally, one of Antwerpen's gay streets which had all but disappeared due to local criminality and lack of personal safety.

Further west a very hip part of town has been growing too: Het Eilandje (the Little Island, a former quayside area surrounded by Napoleonic docks) now has the new Museum aan de Stroom (Museum on the River), a multi-level purpose-built museum which now houses the collections of several smaller city museums. The top floor has a great city and river view and is such a tourist magnet that surrounding streets, formerly populated with Russian trading shops and prostitutes, now house new cafes and outdoor dining areas.

Other museums have been expanded and improved. The main open air sculpture park Middelheim is now three times the size and is still one of my favourites. I used to go cram for exams in Summer there inspired by classics from Henry Moore and Auguste Rodin. Now they have been joined by plenty of new work in a green setting. Other old favourites, such as the Plantin Moretus and Rockoxhuis Museums are still going strong. And Museum Mayer Vandenbergh was promoting itself with a splendid exhibition of its whole Pieter Bruegel print collection, including a newly discovered drawing.

Out of town, the Verbeke Foundation is a fascinating collection of contemporary sculpture, artists-in-residence, nature interacting with art and visitors able to stay to spend the night with the art works. In the middle of a polder landscape near the Flanders-Zeeland border it is a private foundation set up on a farm which has renovated its sheds and adapted its glasshouses as artists' pads, exhibition spaces, plus a large cafe/entertainment area. The sculptures are integrated in the boggy landscape or are conceived to contrast with the natural world. Chickens and waterfowl abound everywhere and wandering around is like exploring an adventure trail. Highly recommended and very much worth the trip to Kemzeke.

Art history for beginners

The recently completely refurbished and extended Auckland Art Gallery has now more space for larger temporary exhibitions and the first one is called "Degas to Dali".
It is a walk through 19th and 20th Century art movements at lightning speed with a series of very lovely (and to me) unknown single works - both paintings and and a smattering sculpture of most major artists one encounters in art history class. Several would be worth hanging on my wall and I wouldn't mind having to look at them every day. Others not so much, as you would expect - the Joan Miro and the Rene Magritte paintings, for example, were very disappointing choices.
All major art periods and schools are represented by their major artists, although not by their major work. The Auckland Art Gallery is being a bit naughty for only listing the artists on their site and not the individual work titles on show has the full list of works here.

Overall, "Degas to Dali" is less a curated/visionary exhibit than an educational effort. Since all works come from the National Gallery in Scotland some strange anomalies like the "Scottish Colourists" are included, the weakest section of the lot - although one of them, Sir William Nicholson "The Lustre Bowl" was one of my favourite pictures (so dark! so hard!):

 


Here are some of my other favourites:

Lucian Freud "Two Men Sleeping". An impressive rendering of the skin tones and textures.

Nicholas de Stael "Le Bateau". Lovely colouring and much darker than the photograph.

There were two Belgian surrealists in the collection, Rene Magritte with a dark, brooding war theme; and the ever hilariously funny Paul Delvaux (who usually forces any exhibit of his work to have an R18 rating) with - a particular obsession of mine (trams) - "La rue due Tramway".

My #2 top painting is Gustave Courbet "The Wave". Very Japanese-inspired but unmistakeably a north-west European scene.

My favourite is a tiny painting, done as a study, but it's full of atmosphere. The photograph doesn't do the piece any justice as the colours in the real picture are far warmer. Georges Seurat "Study for Une Baignade".

The exhibition runs until 10 June and a day pass costs $20.

Wellington sojourn

A well-deserved outing to the southern tip of the North Island to attend our niece's wedding in Martinborough saw us also for a few days in Wellington. Staying at a funky urban hotel studio apartment near the centre was a convenient base to explore from. Wellington succeeds in looking cool with its trolley buses, urban wastelands, funky shops in decades-old, slightly decaying street malls and a large dollop of cultural venues. Its waterfront is the envy of Auckland, mainly because all its harbour activities are well away from the city centre, which leaves a large chunk for pedestrians, skaters, cyclists, kayakers and assorted tourists. A lovely touch is having free wi-fi access to go with the fabulous view.

The Museum of Wellington City & The Sea is cute and compact, and it's just how I like my museums. Lots of historical artifacts and tit bits about Wellington and its harbour's past, including a harrowing display of things salvaged from the Wahine sinking in 1968.

Further down the waterfront is the rather malformed national monstrosity of Te Papa Museum of New Zealand. Supposed to represent the nation and its history, culture and art, it is a mishmash of fairground-type displays, serious social and natural history and a jumble of art from most eras, styles and origins. We had a look at the giant squid they fished up and dissected and is now displayed as a grayish corpse in formaldehyde, reminiscent of Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living".
We had seen the natural and social history sections during previous visits so we escaped to the top floor for a proper look at their art collection. A large gallery is devoted to "Collecting Contemporary", things acquired over the last six years but what a disappointment that was. There is certainly nothing there I would have spent cash on. A number of works are not what they are supposed to be or have been conceived as: Maddie Leach's ice rink installation had the ice rink missing and Jim Allen's "Small Worlds" could only be looked at from afar instead of walked through as was the artist's intention and the work's very raison d'être. Without it it has no meaning and no value for the viewer. For god's sake, they're only plastic strips hanging down, not something irreplaceable should a philistine touch the sacred art!
And then there was the truly gross collection of photographs we had been confronted with at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne last year in the New Zealand contemporary art exhibition.

But not all our tax dollars were spent on kitsch and flash art. In a small side room, an absolutely lovely collection of etchings and prints from the Bishop Monrad collection were on show. Most of them are landscapes and religiously themed, but there was one (pictured left) of a "Bacchanal with a wine vat" that caught my eye: a boys-only drinking party like they don't throw anymore these days! Wellington was worth the trip for that one alone.

Then it was time for some fresh air, and it only takes a short ride into the hills above Wellington to escape the city completely. Ewen's early ancestor, Job Wilton, bought a large piece of land to farm but had the foresight to reserve some of it and it is now Otari Wilton Bush, the only public botanic garden in New Zealand dedicated solely to New Zealand native plants.

Lastly, we legged it to Parliament to see the maiden speeches of the seven new Green MPs, including our Waiheke MP Denise Roche, and the first profoundly deaf member Mojo Mathers, who actually spoke excellent English (as in non-NuZuldish). Of course we applauded in sign language:

Auckland on its most stressful day

Today (or rather, tonight) New Zealand will be either officially in mourning, or prolong its anticipation of winning the rugby world cup it has been waiting for for 24 years. So it was time to go and have a look what all the fuss is about in rugby heartland, a.k.a. The Cloud, on the waterfront.
It looks like a temporary structure, canvas flimsily held aloft by meccano-like structures, but if it was up to Maestro Warterfront on the Council it should stay there for another 15 years. I think that's highly unlikely and if a swift nor'easterly storm or hurricane doesn't do the trick, surely a cartload of pigeon shit will make it look tatty and old before its time is up.
Inside it looks spacious and airy but since the actually rugby wasn't on, it's run as a showcase for NZ companies. It reminded me of being taken to engineering and building trade shows by my dad: rather boring and pointless.
The remaining old shed next door has been 'transformed' into a booze barn with all the alcy charm and chummy coziness that entails.

So, after that rather disappointing excursion it was time to check out that other new development my tax dollars have been spent on, apart from the rugby, the newly refurbished Auckland Art Gallery.
A rather fetching new annexe with a spectacular kauri wood canopy abuts the Victorian French chateau-style original gallery, expanding the exhibition space enormously.
But it's still a very intimate gallery of contemporary and historic New Zealand and international art, which makes a visit manageable and not overwhelming. There are some spectacular pieces on show by Picasso and Goldie. My favourite was a very small painting by Piet Mondrian.

In all, I am very pleased my tax dollars have been spent on this, and the return will be far longer lasting and substantial than any rugby match series can.
The gallery website is here.

Venice Biennale 2011

The New Zealand entry into the Venice Biennale this year is a rather spectacular set of works by sculptor Michael Parekowhai. Facebook pictures here.

He was one of the few artists whose work was actually worth looking at a recent exhibition of New Zealand art in Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria:

Melbourne: more art

Spending a week in Melbourne was probably not enough with digesting the terrible news from New Zealand putting a dampener on the planned proceedings. Visiting many attractions had to be postponed until next time, such as the Melbourne Museum and the Immigration Museum. But we tried to get in a lot of art and a sense of the city.

First up was the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, housed in a magnificent building - a former brewery - in a redeveloped former industrial part of South Melbourne.
It stages temporary exhibitions in one room each, with Joseph Kosuth's installation, inspired by the play "Waiting for Godot", an outstanding piece. In a darkened room, excerpts from the dialogue ran on the high walls in illuminated lettering but it was illegible head on, you had to stand in the corners to be able to read them at an acute angle. Quite disorientating in the dark but you could let the text be your guide.

More contemporary Australian art was on show in the National Gallery of Victoria Australian section on Federation Square, with the exhibition "Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography" my favourite. Some truly outstanding pictures of (Australian) landscapes expressing the ravages on the land by the country's weather and climate. Murray Fredericks "Salt" (pictured right) were just stunning and eerie, where the salt plains merged with the skies.

Further out of town in a suburb incongruously called Heidelberg, the Heide Museum of Modern Art sits in a parkland besides the Yarra River. It used to be a farm whose owners got into modern art, but has now been engulfed by suburbia. A new building conceived as a house and art gallery to live in was built down the hill. It has very few windows as many walls were needed to hang art on. It comes complete with a 1970s conversation pit. The pieces on show were all drawings, but they suffered from being on sandstone colour walls, which did nothing to set them off. It would have been better to hang them on darker backgrounds.
A third building housed the gallery shop and spaces for temporary exhibitions. The grounds were turned into a kitchen garden, park and outdoor sculpture exhibition space.

Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria International

One is starved of European art in New Zealand and you have to travel a long way to get a fill, but luckily Melbourne has a quite marvellous but not overwhelming collection of Western (and Asiatic and Pacific) art. It took 2 days to visit most of the National Gallery of Victoria International and Australian venues.
The permanent collections, mainly purchased as the result of a 1904 bequest by a local benefactor, Mr Albert Felton, are quite a nice introduction to all periods, countries and schools and art forms in the Western canon, with an especially lovely Flemish and Dutch painting collection (including Rembrandt). Not only paintings and sculpture but also beautiful glass work and modernist furniture (such as Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Gerrit Rietveld).

The temporary exhibitions included a small selection of drawings and paintings by Gustave Moreau, which was interesting if you are into highly decorative, symbolic and scantily-clad feminine figures from history and myth. My favourite was "Hercules and Omphale" (pictured left) because it's so wonderfully rude with him, while obviously sexually aroused, being forced by her to stare at her barely veiled private parts. The painting was not available in poster form in the Gallery shop, unfortunately.

A very different kettle of fish was on offer next door with a travelling exhibition from the Queensland Art Gallery on New Zealand art called "Unnerved". It's a ramshackle collection of mainly non-pakeha art by artists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, purportedly telling a nervous story about being in New Zealand, from black and white short films about growing up poor in a Pacific household to larger than life full colour photographs of Maori mythical figures. It's supposed to "unsettle" us but I was mainly offended instead of amused, especially by a series of photograph/collages showing state houses and their tenants (their heads replaced by photos of anonymous mental health patients cut out of a medical text book). If their portraits had been non-white there would have been an outcry.
There were two pieces that were brilliant: the seal balancing a piano on its nose, and a short film of two "brothers" sharing a piece of chewing gum.
Even the Gallery coffee shop staff (mostly New Zealanders) thought the exhibition was terrible.

Headland 2011

Only one week to go to catch this year's Headland: Sculpture on the Gulf. We went last week as the sun was going down over the city and the heat was bearable for the trek across.
It's not the first time we've been to this biennual event: check my (short) reviews of 2005 and 2009.

Again a very mixed bag of art, some funny and whimsical, some pretentious and baffling, with most horribly overpriced. The corrugated iron weed matting was especially a waste of effort (what a lot of man hours must have gone into that) and it looked messy. My favourite? "You Are Here" by Matt Akehurst (pictured): iconic yellow New Zealand road signs pointing to a number of iconic western art works and their distances away from where you are now. A perfect illustration of New Zealand's cultural cringe being so far removed from the art canon and probably never be able to contribute to it.
I heard the artist will change the distance indicators depending on where you will place it in your garden.

Underground detail

Here's a game (via Diamond Geezer's annual Tube Blog Fest) that will have you hooked for hours if you are a London Underground map design fanatic, like most of us are who have ever lived in London. Now you can create your own mug/t shirt/mouse pad design with bits and pieces from the iconic map. And if you like it enough you can even order it at exorbitant, but in happily devalued pound, prices.

Here's my collection:


And I could make one for Auckland too:

Pina Bausch (1940-2009)

Pina Bausch, dancer and choreographer at the Wuppertal Dance Theatre, died yesterday.
She was one of the most original choreographers, fusing humour, surrealism and physical theatre into her art.
Please, forget about moon-walking, Pina Bausch was the real thing.

Mondriaan Museum

The "Gemeentemuseum Den Haag" (the Municipal Museum in The Hague) wants to change its name to Mondriaan Museum because it has the largest collections of Mondriaan paintings in the world. This is surely a good marketing idea because its current name is rather pedestrian and non-descript.
The museum has far more art (modern, fashion, music etc) than just Mondriaan, but having this focus is great.
Mondriaan is just brilliant: from evocative impressionist and pointilliste landscapes, cubist portraits to the instantly recognisable and most famous abstracts.
Here are a few of my favourite examples (all from the museum website, there are 158 works on display):

Trouble at the museum

The museum is a bit of theme these days, it seems, on this blog.
Now another one is slated to be opened in Louvain-La-Neuve (south of Brussels, Belgium, of course) dedicated to cartoonist Hergé, probably mostly known to you as the creator of Tintin, but highlighting other aspects of his life such as his art collecting.

A press preview didn't go as smoothly as planned because all press photographers and cameramen were obliged to leave their gear at the door. No stills or film were allowed to be recorded inside the new museum, to "avoid creating imagery of exhibits", as museum officials clumsily stated. How the museum will create a buzz in the press seems a mystery when no-one can run any pictures or TV footage. The Tintin owners seem as hellbent on control as Walt Disney!

Magritte Museum

If Roman and Celtic history museums are not your cuppa, Belgium is now also opening on 2 June in Brussels a museum dedicated to one of its most famous avantgarde painters, Rene Magritte.

I always loved his cloud pantings, one of which, a sky landscape framed as a dove, called L'Oiseau de Ciel, was commissioned by the Belgian national airline Sabena for use in its advertising and corporate apparel in the 1970s. It was auctioned off in 2003 after the airline went out of business in 2001.
Empire of Lights is another of my favourites.

Now there really is no excuse not to visit Belgium on your next trip to Europe. I bet you never thought of it as a destination anyway.

The Yves Saint Laurent / Pierre Bergé art collection

Oh, to have taste and money. Because no happier match was made this year between them at the Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre Bergé art collection sale in Paris.
Such exquisite pieces, such high end refined tastes. You can instantly imagine just one of the pieces brightening your living room and elevate it to something worth receiving guests in.
The prices paid at the auction, of course, beggar belief and I'm not sure if I had a spare 21 million euros I would have bought the Eileen Gray Dragon chair and dared sitting in it. But it's easy to understand how fast you could fall in love with that piece of furniture. Or any of the paintings or sculptures - I particularly liked the Mondrian ones, even his landscapes.

Browsing through the online whole collection made me think that it is actually an enormous shame that the collection could not stay together, because it would make such a fabulous permanent art exhibition if it were housed in its own Paris venue. Much like the fantastic Museo Thyssen Boremisza in Madrid, which was created from a family's collection and takes you through a vault of world high art history, very much like the YSL/PB collection does.

Entropa

Europeans being able to laugh at themselves? Perish the thought!

A new art installation to celebrate the Czech presidency of the EU at the Commission building in Brussels is causing some controversy, apparently, because it dares to play with European stereotypes.

You can see all Entropa artworks here [PDF, 5.7MB]. The assembled work of all entries looks a bit different from the individual artists' notes.

I quite like some of them, especially the Dutch Mosque minarets set in a drowned polder, Polish monks erecting the gay flag Iwo-Jima-style and Sweden portrayed as a flat pack purchase from Ikea.
Belgium is inevitably a yummy box of chocolates.

Another reason to come to Waiheke Island

The bi-annual Sculpture on the Gulf exhibition is opening next month and will run from 23 January to 15 February.
It's always a mixed bag of delightful, baffling, silly, whimsical, but definitely expensive sculptural art. So it may not be to your liking but it's worth a visit for the walk along the cliffs on the southern side of Matiatia Bay. My advice is: choose a late afternoon when the sun sets over the city, bring a picnic and some expensive local wine.

The first sculpture you will meet on arrival is one that has been in place since mid-December. It's cleverly disguised as a gangway connecting the pier with the ferries. But you would be fooled as to think this is a useful, efficient and practical solution to the bottle neck that is ferry embarkation. Several ferries do not have the correct upper deck exit gates that line up with the sculpture, so often it's a structure that has to be admired from afar rather than tacitly enjoyed, a good example of expensive ($360,000!) public art.

The 100 gayest albums of all time

A fairly predictable list compiled by Out Magazine USA. The usual Anglosaxon, gay party boy bias. Notable absences: The Virgin Prunes, The Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk, Pete Shelley, Sinead O'Connor, Jane Birkin and Maria Callas. But I am surprised and pleased by the number of Smiths and David Bowie entries.
And the #1 and #2 are absolutely spot on.
Any entries in bold are albums I own(ed) or liked.
(List via Bjørn's Blog)

100 The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
99 Joni Mitchell - For The Roses
98 Ferron - Testimony
97 Janis Ian - Between The Lines
96 Nick Drake - Bryter Layter
95 Culture Club - Kissing To Be Clever
94 Hair Original Broadway Cast - Hair
93 Sade - Lovers Rock
92 Morrissey - Viva Hate
91 Grace Jones - Nightclubbing
90 Kate Bush - The Kick Inside
89 Fifth Column - To Sir With Hate
88 Hüsker Dü - Zen Arcade
87 Madonna - Confessions On A Dance Floor
86 Madonna - Madonna
85 Nina Simone - Anthology
84 Cyndi Lauper - True Colors
83 Bette Midler - The Divine Miss M
82 Cher - Believe
81 Scissor Sisters - Ta-Dah
80 Rufus Wainwright - Want One
79 T. Rex - Electric Warrior
78 Various - The Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack
77 New Order - Substance
76 Ani DiFranco - Imperfectly
75 Carole King - Tapestry
74 Michael Jackson - Off the Wall
73 Various - Fame Soundtrack
72 Donna Summer - Once Upon a Time
71 Elton John - Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
70 Rent Original Broadway Cast - Rent
69 Frances Faye - Caught In The Act
68 Nirvana - Nevermind
67 Hüsker Dü - Candy Apple Grey
66 Soft Cell - Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret
65 Le Tigre - Le Tigre
64 Patti Smith - Easter
63 Björk - Debut
62 Jeff Buckley - Grace
61 Sleater-Kinney - Dig Me Out
60 R.E.M. - Automatic For The People
59 Bronski Beat - The Age of Consent
58 Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
57 Prince - Dirty Mind
56 Team Dresch - Personal Best
55 David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
54 Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
53 Culture Club - Colour By Numbers
52 Kate Bush - Hounds of Love
51 Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Welcome to the Pleasuredome
50 Rufus Wainwright - Poses
49 Patti Smith - Horses
48 Cris Williamson - The Changer and the Changed
47 The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs
46 Madonna - Ray of Light
45 Bikini Kill - Pussy Whipped
44 Pet Shop Boys - Very
43 Prince - Purple Rain
42 ABBA - Gold
41 Melissa Etheridge - Yes I Am
40 Pet Shop Boys - Behavior
39 Laura Nyro And Labelle - Gonna Take A Miracle
38 Dusty Springfield - Dusty In Memphis
37 Blondie - Parallel Lines
36 Madonna - Erotica
35 Yaz - Upstairs At Eric's
34 Donna Summer - Bad Girls
33 The Smiths - Hatful Of Hollow
32 The Smiths - Meat Is Murder
31 Sarah McLachlan - Fumbling Towards Ecstacy
30 Diana Ross - Diana
29 Pet Shop Boys - Actually
28 Queen - The Game
27 Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
26 Scissor Sisters - Scissor Sisters
25 k.d. lang - Ingénue
24 Sylvester - Living Proof
23 Deee-Lite - World Clique
22 The Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control
21 David Bowie - Hunky Dory
20 Queen - A Day at the Races
19 The B-52s - The B-52's
18 George Michael - Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. I
17 Lou Reed - Transformer
16 Queen - A Night at the Opera
15 George Michael - Faith
14 Erasure - The Innocents
13 Ani DiFranco - Dilate
12 The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
11 Various - Hedwig And The Angry Inch Soundtrack
10 Antony And The Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
9 Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual
8 Madonna - The Immaculate Collection
7 Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
6 The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
5 Judy Garland - Judy at Carnegie Hall
4 Indigo Girls - Indigo Girls
3 Tracy Chapman - Tracy Chapman
2 The Smiths - The Smiths
1 David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars

Pantsdown for a good cause

Belgian TV station Een organised a competition for nude calendars, with entering groups able to donate the profits of their effort to the charity of their choice.
All sorts of professionals took part, from hair dressers to car enthusiasts to nurses to women rugby players. But it wasn't difficult to guess that the top prize went to the firemen from Hasselt (pictured).
The Fotomuseum in Antwerpen is staging an exhibition of all the entries.
A short video report of the proceedings here.

It's that time of year again, I hear you say correctly. So here's the 2009 New Zealand Firefighters calendar with proceeds going to the Child Cancer Foundation.

If you want to research a broader array of men's calendars from around the world, please proceed to here and here (don't let the fact that these sites are in Polish put you off, we can all speak the international language of lust). Links via Abiekt.