In the Cut

by Richard Meyer

"Sexuality has played a decisive role in the history of art ab initio. Until the 1970s, however, it was the male gaze at the female body which informed the politics of these images. In the first feminist examinations of the erotic which followed, women artists focused their explorations on their own body. The (hetero) erotic female gaze, on the other hand--directed at the male body--continues to be an exception in art. When feminist artists take a desirous look at the male body they break more than one taboo and reverse the power relations inherent to the traditional canon of images. With...