Touko Valio Laaksonen (May 8, 1920 - November 7, 1991), best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland , is a Finnish artist known for his highly masculinized style of homoerotic amulet , and for its influence on the late 20th century gay culture. He has been called "the most influential gay image creator" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. For four decades, it produced about 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with excessive primary and secondary features, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
Video Tom of Finland
Kehidupan awal
Laaksonen was born and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a town in southwestern Finland, near the town of Turku. Both parents are schoolteachers in a grammar school serving Kaarina. The family lives in a residential school building.
He went to school in Turku and in 1939, at the age of 19, he moved to Helsinki to study advertising. In his spare time he also began to draw erotic pictures for his own pleasure, based on the image of the male worker he had seen from an early age. At first he kept these pictures, but then destroyed them "at least when I went to serve the army." The country was involved in the Winter War with the Soviet Union, and was later officially involved in World War II, and he was obliged in February 1940 to the Finnish Army. He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of second lieutenant. He then attributed his fetishistic interest to uniformed men to meet men in army uniforms, especially the German Wehrmacht troops stationed in Finland at the time. "In my picture I have no political statements, no ideology, I just think of the picture itself, the whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is my hatred, but of course I still attract them - they have the sexiest uniform!" war, in 1945, he returned to study.
Laaksonen's artworks in this period compared to later works are considered more romantic and gentle with the "shape and form of soft features." The people featured are middle-class, compared to sailors, motorcyclists, tree fellers, construction workers, and other members of the working-class group of hypermasculine stereotypes featured in his later work. The other major differences are the lack of dramatic compositions, self-centered poses, muscular bodies and "exotic exit" that he then manifests.
Maps Tom of Finland
Careers
In 1956 Laaksonen sent a picture to an influential American magazine Physique Pictorial , which aired an image in the 1957 Spring edition under the pseudonym Tom , because it was similar to the name it gave Touko . In the Winter edition at the end of that year, editor Bob Mizer created the credit of Tom of Finland. One of his works was featured on the cover of Spring 1957 magazine, describing two wooden drivers working with the third person who was watching them. Drawn from Finnish mythology of tree-cutter representing strong masculinity, Laaksonen emphasizes and special "homoerotic potential [...] relocation in a gay context", a strategy that is repeated throughout his career.
The post World War II era witnessed the rise of biker culture as rejecting the "organization and normalization of life after the war, with a conformist and settled lifestyle." The Biker subculture is marginal and opposition and provides postwar gay men with stylish masculinity that includes rebellion and danger. This is in contrast to today's gay male stereotypes as sissy, as seen in vaudeville and films returning to the first years of industry. Laaksonen was influenced by the images of bikers as well as the artworks of George Quaintance and Etienne, among others, which he referred to as his predecessor, "distributed to gay readers through homoerotic physical magazines" beginning in 1950. Laaksonen's image of bikers and leathermen utilizes the clothing of leather and denim that distinguishes the men are from mainstream culture and suggest they are not wild, physical, and powerful. This is in contrast to the sensitive, sensitive, sensitive, sensitive, sensitive, sensitive, gay, sensual gays. The current Laaksonic drawings "can be seen as consolidating the various factors, styles and discourses that already exist in the 1950s gay subculture," this may have caused them to be widely distributed and popularized in these cultures.
US. sensor code (1950s-1960s)
The styles and contents of Laaksonen in the late 1950s and early 1960s were partially influenced by the US censorship code that limited the portrayal of "blatant homosexual acts". His work was published in the beefcake genre that began in the 1930s and his main photos featured an attractive and muscular young man in the athletic poses that often showed the exercises that showed. Their main market is gay men, but because of the conservative and homophobic social culture of the era, gay pornography is illegal and publications are usually presented as dedicated to physical fitness and health. They are often the only connection men have for their sexuality. At this time, however, Laaksonen is making a private commission, so more explicit work is produced but remains unpublished.
In the case of 1962 MANUAL Enterprises v. Day , the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that nude men photos are basically obscene. Pornographic magazines and gay pornographic films featuring naked models, some of them tumescent, are rapidly emerging and pretenses about exercise and fitness are dropped because control of pornography is reduced. In the late 1960s the market for beefcake magazines collapsed. Laaksonen was able to publish his more homoerotic work and change the context with "new possibilities and conventions to show men's naked front in magazines and movies." Laaksonen reacts by publishing more explicit images and reflects fantastically fantastical aspects with excessive physical aspects, especially their genitals and muscles. In the late 1960s he developed Kake, a character that appeared in an ongoing comic series, which debuted in 1968.
Gay mainstream appeal (1970s - 1991)
By decriminalizing men's nudity, gay pornography becomes more common in gay culture, and the work of Laaksonen along with it. In 1973, he published erotic comic books and made inroads into the world of mainstream art with exhibitions. In 1973 he submitted his full-time job at the Helsinki office of McCann-Erickson, an international advertising company. "Since then I've lived in jeans and lived in my drawings," is how he describes the lifestyle transitions that took place during this period.
In the mid-1970s he also emphasized photorealistic style, making the image aspect look more photographic. Many of the images are based on photos, but none of them reproduce exactly. The photographic inspiration is used, on the one hand, to create vivid and almost moving images, with convincing and active postures and gestures while Laaksonen exaggerates the physical features and presents the ideal of his masculine beauty and sexual attraction, combining realism with fantasy. In Daddy and the Muscle Academy - The Art, Life, and Times of Tom of Finland examples of photos and images based on them are shown side by side. Although he considers the photographs to be just a reference tool for his drawings, contemporary art students have seen them as complete stand-alone artworks.
In 1979, Laaksonen, together with businessman and friend Durk Dehner, founded the Tom of Finland Company to preserve the copyright of his art, which has been heavily hijacked. In 1984 the Tom of Finland Foundation was established to collect, preserve, and exhibit homoerotic artwork. Although Laaksonen was quite successful at this point, with his biography on the best-seller list, and Benedikt Taschen, the world's largest art publisher reprinting and expanding his monographs, he was very proud of the Foundation. The scope of the organization expanded to erotic works of all types, sponsored contests, exhibitions, and starting the basis for an erotic art museum.
Laaksonen was diagnosed with emphysema in 1988. Eventually the disease and drugs caused his hands to tremble, leading him to change the media from pencil to pastel. He died in 1991 because of a stroke triggered emphysema.
Reception
During his lifetime and beyond, the work of Laaksonen has drawn admiration and hatred from various circles of the artistic community. Laaksonen developed a friendship with gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work depicts sado-masokisme and iconography of the talisman also subject to controversy.
The controversial theme in the picture is the erotic treatment of men in Nazi uniforms. They form a small part of their work as a whole, but the visual treatment that usually flattering these characters has made some viewers take sympathy or affinity for Nazism, and they have been removed from the recent anthology of his work. Later in his career Laaksonen denied this work and took pains to separate himself and his work from a fascist or racist ideology. He also described a large number of black men in his image, without a clear racial or political message in the context in which they appeared; although they have in common with the racist caricature of black men "hypersexual", these features are also owned by the white character Laaksonen.
The art critics have divergent views on the work of Laaksonen. His detailed drawing technique has made him described as a "master with a pencil", while on the contrary, the observer for Dutch newspaper Het Parool describes his work as "illustrative but expressionless".
There is considerable argument as to whether his portrayal of "super man" (male character with large sexual organs and muscles) is fluent and unpleasant, or whether there is a deeper complexity in the work that plays with and undermines the stereotype. For example, some critics have noted examples of clear tenderness between hard traditional characters, masculine, or a playful smile in a sado-masochistic scene.
In both cases, there is still a large constituency that admires the work on a purely utilitarian basis; as explained by Rob Meijer, owner of a leathershop and art gallery in Amsterdam, "These works are not pieces of conversation, they are pieces of masturbation."
Writing for Artforum , Kevin Killian says seeing the original Finnish Tom "produces a strong respect for his lively and intelligent creations." Kate Wolf writes that "Tom from Finland helped pave the way to gay liberation".
Cultural and inheritance impact
In the late 1980s, artist G. B. Jones started a series of pictures called "Tom Girls" that took pictures of Tom of Finland. The pictures were performed in Tom of Finland style and based on the drawings, but featured punk girls or other identified subcultural women. However, unlike Tom's picture, in Jones's work, authority figures exist only to be underestimated, not obeyed. Both artists showcased their work together in New York City in the early 1990s.
In 1995, Tom of Finland Clothing Company introduced a line of clothing based on his works, which included a variety of appearances in addition to the cutoff-jeans-and-jacket style of the drawing. The fashion line balances the original homoeroticism of images with mainstream fashion culture, and their runway performances take place in many places during the same time as other fashion companies.
Exhibition
The New York Museum of Modern Art has obtained several examples of Laaksonen's artwork for its permanent collection. In 2006, MoMA in New York received five pictures of Tom of Finland as part of a much bigger prize than The Judith Rothschild Foundation. Trustee of Judith Rothschild Foundation, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, said, "Tom of Finland is one of the five most influential artists of the 20th century.As an artist, he is extraordinary, as a transcendent influence." Hudson, of Feature Inc., New York, puts Finnish works in the collection of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is also in the Public Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, USA; WÃÆ'¤inÃÆ'¶ Aaltonen Museum of Art; Turku, Finland; University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (California), USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA; and Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles, USA.
In 1999, an exhibition took place at the Finnish Cultural Center in Paris.
In 2011 there was a large retrospective exhibit of Laaksonen's artwork in Turku, Finland. This exhibition is one of the official events in the Turku Cultural Europe Tourism program.
In 2012, Kulturhuset presented a retrospective, Tom of Finland , in Stockholm, Sweden; and Tom from Finland working at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation We the People in New York City, USA.
In 2013, MOCA presented Bob Mizer & amp; Tom of Finland in Los Angeles, USA. The artist's work is also seen at HAPPY BIRTHDAY Galerie Perrotin - 25 years in Lille, France; Leslie Lohman Museum's Rare and Raw in New York City, USA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art's Keep Your Timber Limber in London, England.
In 2015, Artists Space presented the exhibition "Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play" in New York City, USA. The exhibition was also presented at Kunsthalle Helsinki in 2016, supplemented with additional material such as photos from family albums.
Movies
In 1991, Filmitakomo and Yleisradio produced the documentary, Daddy and the Muscle Academy: The Life and Art of Tom of Finland, directed by Ilppo Pohjola. In the late 1980s, Laaksonen was famous in the gay world, but the "lame and meticulous lethal masculinity icons" gained major attention when the film - which included hundreds of drawings together with the interviews - was released theatrically in Finland, won the Jussi Award Finland in its category in 1992, and featured in film festivals and movie art houses worldwide. While praising the quality of artworks, a critic noted that Laaksonen was an icon of gay pride and dismissed his work "similar to S & amp; M pornography and Fascist art" which he relates to Laaksonen's early sexual experience with the German army during World War II..
Filmmaker Wes Hurley praised Tom of Finland as an influence in his work, including the shortness of Peter and the Wolf and his comedy music waxie Moon in Fallen Jewel .
Variety was announced in 2013 that Finnish director Dome Karukoski is set to make a biography of Laaksonen, entitled Tom of Finland . Helsinki-filmi produce it and get exclusive rights. The film, released in February 2017 in Finland, is the artist's first biography.
Postage
In September 2014, the Finnish postal service, Itella Posti, issued a set of three first-class stamps featuring Laaksonen's drawings and associated with the release of stamps exhibited by some of its correspondence at the Postal Museum of Finland. Two of the stamps included portions of illustrations of a naked man sitting between the legs of another man dressed as a police officer; others describe the bare buttocks with a man's face, including between his thighs. The postage set exceeds the expectations of Posti, with pre-orders from 178 countries, making it the best-selling stamp set in service history.
Videography
- Ilppo Pohjola (author): Kari Paljakka and Alvaro Pardo (producer): Daddy and the Muscle Academy: Tom from Finland. Filmitakomo & amp; YLE, Finland 1991. (Duration Feature: 58 Minutes also features Laaksonen graphic frame.)
See also
- Bara (genre)
- Beefcake Magazine
- One National Gay & amp; Lesbian Archives
Note
References
- Arell, Berndt; Mustola, Kati (2006), Tom of Finland: EnnennÃÆ'¤kemÃÆ'¤tÃÆ'¶ntÃÆ'¤ - Unexpected , Like, ISBN 952-471-843-X
- Hooven, F. Valentine. Tom of Finland: Life and Its Age. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. ISBNÃ, 0-312-09325-X
- Kalin, K (1990). Tom of Finland, Interview with Touko Laaksonen, Images , 3, 104-119.
- LÃÆ'¶fstrÃÆ'¶m, Jan (1998), "Scandinavian homosexuality: essay on gay and lesbian studies", Journal of homosexuality , Routledge, 35 (3-4), pp.Ã, 189-206, ISBNÃ, 0-7890-0508-5
- Ramakers, Mischa. Gross Image: Tom Finnish, Masculinity and Homosexuality. New York: St. Martin Press, 2001. ISBNÃ, 0-312-20526-0
- Suarez, J. A., (1996): Bike Boys, Drag Queens, Superstars: Avant Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identity in the 1960s Underground Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
- Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure. Mischa Ramakers, ed. London: Taschen, 1998, ISBNÃ, 3-8228-8598-3
- Tom of Finland: The Comic Collection. Vol. 1-5 Dian Hanson, ed. London: Taschen, 2005. ISBNÃ, 978-3-8228-3849-5
- Hooven, F.Valentine III: Tom of Finland: The Life and Work of the Gay Hero . Bruno GmÃÆ'¼nder Verlag, Berlin, 2012. ISBNÃ, 978-3-86787-166-2
- Needham, Alex (2017-08-01). "The world of skin: how Tom of Finland created the legendary gay aesthetic". The Guardian . Retrieved 2017/08/01 Ã,
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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