Visual Arts Review: “My Eyes Are Starving for Beauty”
A feast of fearless art with Anthony Sonnenberg
Reviewed by Cat McCarrey, Fri., Sept. 6, 2024
A ramp slopes toward a black hole, beckoning entrance to Anthony Sonnenberg’s “My Eyes Are Starving for Beauty” at Big Medium. It’s an anticipatory descent into a new world, a mystical portal toward the artist’s bold claim on beauty.
The exhibit’s title video fills the wall directly opposite from the doorway. It opens in extreme close-up on Sonnenberg’s face, accompanied by André Leon Talley’s title quote recitation. From there the audio morphs into Divine’s disco song “I’m So Beautiful,” stretched into a thumping rhythm with low, distorted vocals snaking into the bloodstream. Sonnenberg learned sound mixing specifically for this beat (which also features drag queen Jade Elektra and snippets from French filmmaker Jean Cocteau), and the trancelike quality is perfection.
Such mesmerizing videos form the meat of the exhibit. In them, Sonnenberg inserts himself into often-fickle interpretations of what’s attractive, tackling the amorphous concept of “beauty” head-on. These spaces typically denied people like Sonnenberg and his many muses, saying, “You’re too fat, too queer, too much.” But here, he boldly takes up territory, rejecting anything that would deny him, using his actual body as the subject. From Grecian statuary to Baroque melodrama to the gritty glamour of the 1970s, he’s there, staking out his historical right to beauty.
None of the videos cross the 10-minute mark. Sonnenberg doesn’t believe in overly long performance pieces. But these works are worth allowing the time and space to marinate. Soak in the projector glow, sink into the video stream. Sonnenberg’s works are full of references. He alludes to the artistic pantheon just as easily as he flaunts their conventions.
He openly reveals his creative process. The title video, once it shows Sonnenberg’s face, quick-cuts to construction of the clay-stained blanket set. Those found/thrifted blankets stretch into something comfortingly cavelike. It’s a place of safety for Sonnenberg’s filmed beauty routine, where white-smocked assistants smear mud and clay on his body. Framed against the blanket set, he is a solemnly beautiful figure, echoing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, an ethereally ornate oceanic gift. Sonnenberg holds a coquettish gravitas, performing beatific movements that draw the viewer into his enchanted world. Even still moments are regal as he gazes in a mirror at his muck-daubed form. Through it all, there’s arresting power in such quiet confidence.
The set-pieces from “My Eyes Are Starving for Beauty” fill the exhibition floor, giant clay-spattered blankets, wood beams, and whitened florals brightly lit in pinks and blues. Viewers have to weave between them toward the other video presentations. Here is his crown – a towering structure made from twigs, bent dental mirrors, and small teddy bears – resting on the throne. There are the mirrors, clay smeared around the edges, that reflect Sonnenberg’s primordial beauty in the video. They now offer viewers glimpses of their own inner goddess.
Tucked in a corner are the two video predecessors to “My Eyes Are Starving for Beauty,” proof that Sonnenberg’s themes have percolated for almost a decade. The seeds are there, flowering more cinematically as time marches onward.
Mighty Real, with title and soundtrack taken from disco pioneer Sylvester, came in 2019. Here’s more process as an assistant prepares Sonnenberg for performance. Like an Elizabethan lady, Sonnenberg enters a blanketed wooden form, part corset, part hoopskirt, and all theatrical. With a direct gaze at the audience, he poses and grooves to the sultry disco tune, restricted by the wooden apparatus and an elaborate headpiece (which itself looks astoundingly like Marie Antoinette’s wigs). He might be penned in by the trappings of fashion, but his soul? Utterly free.
Sonnenberg’s first video, 2016’s Decline: In Four Movements, features a stark proscenium set in the woods. Underneath the arch, his gray-colored body oh so slowly adopts positions of famous Greco-Roman statues. He captures these poses with absolute serenity, only occasionally interrupted by fluttering leaves in the background or the gentle rise of his breath. Finally, he walks through the archway into the woods beyond with grand movements, thunderous and strong even through the screen.
At the exhibit opening, Sonnenberg said, “In a system that doesn’t serve you, interrupt the rules.” Each video features him literally creating a niche for himself. He’s shown that beautiful things can be made out of nothing. Through that, we create our own power. Take back beauty. Take up space. After all, why should we starve?
“My Eyes Are Starving for Beauty”
Big Medium
Through Oct. 5
