FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Masculinities | Barbican
Through the medium of film and photography, this major exhibition considered how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.
Went to see this this morning (it just opened today and I was in the first time slot - don't say you don't get the latest arts news on Urban!)
The examination of masculinity in a social context is something I'm very interested in but I was a little wary as I previously went to "Kiss My Genders" at the Hayward and didn't think it was very good. This is a much broader (and better) exhibition though, with all sorts of different projects in it, from deliberately polemical/subversive to more observational. It's more of a collection on a theme rather than having a specific overall thesis - it is divided into sections concentrating on particular aspects of the masculine role, and each series within that has a slightly different focus.
It's a big exhibition. It took me an hour to go round and I didn't even watch the videos. I ended up buying the catalogue, which I rarely do, because there was such a variety that I wanted to follow up on, and probably some which I didn't pay enough attention to at the time because I was tired. It gets a bit less focussed at the end IMO as you go up to the top floor.
In general I thought it was well worth going to, and very accessible. I particularly liked the "family" section with series on relationships between men of different generations and their role within the family structure.
