Vienna museum bows to outcry, covers man parts on ad posters

[Syt]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2219005/Naked-men-exhibition-causes-controversy-Vienna.html

Giant posters of naked men cause outcry in Vienna as new exhibition prepares to launch

An Austrian museum has been forced to cover up several large images of nude men after posters used to promote a forthcoming exhibition caused an outcry.

The Leopold Museum – a major institution of modern art in Vienna – is due to stage the 'Nackte Manner' ('Naked Men') showcase from Friday (October 19). But the decision to advertise the show with giant versions of some of the works that will go on display has proved controversial.

'We got many, many complaints,' Klaus Pokorny, a spokesman for the museum says.

'We didn't realise that many, many people would be really upset or really angry in a way that we are also afraid about security, about protection of the visitors of the museum.'

One of the exhibits that will feature in the show is 'Vive La France' – a trio of photographs by the French artists Pierre & Gilles.

This striking creation shows three men of different racial backgrounds naked but for blue, red or white socks, and football boots.

Another work – 'Mr Big', by the Austrian photographer Ilse Haider – shows a nude man reclining on one elbow. Placed outside the Leopold Museum, it has been drawing crowds.

The museum has now decided to cover the 'intimate parts' of the images – and the exhibition will go ahead as planned later this week.

Some 300 images will be included in the show, which will run until January 28.

'Many people told us that they wanted to, or had to, protect their children,' Mr Pokorny continued. 'Some had warned that "if we won't cover it, they would go there with a brush and they would cover it with colour." Already somebody did that.'

Despite the provocative nature of the images, the museum has been surprised by the reaction to the posters.

'We are not really happy about the situation,' Mr Pokorny added. 'You always hope that we have made progress, that we are now in the 20th century.'

A statement on the museum website explains that the exhibition offers revolutionary perspective on the human body.

'Previous exhibitions on the theme of nudity have mostly been limited to female nudes,' it reads. 'Thanks to loans from all over Europe, the exhibition "Naked Men" will offer an unprecedented overview of the depiction of male nudes.'

It also describes the show as 'a long overdue exhibition on the diverse and changing depictions of naked men.'

Exhibits will also include what might be deemed more 'acceptable' versions of male nudity, such as paintings on Greek vases and works from the Renaissance.

Located in the famous Museumsquartier (Museum Quarter) of the Austrian capital, the Leopold Museum also features works by some of the country's major modern artists – including 20th century icons Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt.

Mr. Big - it's inside the Museum's Quarter. It will not be censored (hard to find SFW pics of this):




And the problematic poster (top half only):



The original image (NSFW - Full Frontal Male Nudity):

http://images.derstandard.at/2012/10/12/1348364094197.jpg

I'd say from a marketing point of view: mission accomplished.

[Camerus]

Entartete Kunst.   

[Martinus]

'We are not really happy about the situation,' Mr Pokorny added. 'You always hope that we have made progress, that we are now in the 20th century.'

[Martinus]

Also, I think I now need to visit Vienna. 

[Syt]

You might want to visit the annual Life Ball, Mart.

[Sheilbh]

Vienna airport's lovely.  Though I had to go through security three times when changing flights

And large swathes of the new, sleek looking black marble corridors were entirely empty which was kind of terrifying.

[Syt]

Vienna airport's lovely.  Though I had to go through security three times when changing flights

And large swathes of the new, sleek looking black marble corridors were entirely empty which was kind of terrifying.

Yeah, the new wing is a bit of a mess. They also forgot to make it handicapped accessible. The NY Times had a bit about the guy who designed the new signs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/arts/22iht-design22.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

VIENNA — Walking through Vienna Airport recently, I noticed something odd about the signs. It wasn't that they were misleading, on the contrary, they seemed to relay the right information in the right places, but that they looked slightly blurred. The characters and symbols on most airport signage are crisply defined, but some of these signs appeared to have been drawn by hand.

The oddness is intentional. The designer of the signs, Ruedi Baur, devised the blurred effect as part of his efforts to make Vienna Airport seem different from other airports at a time when most of them look pretty much the same. A fierce critic of the identikit school of airport design, he was determined to ensure that his signage reflected the spirit of Vienna. "The sociologist Marc Augé has described airports as 'nonplaces,' not destinations, but somewhere in between," he said. "My job was to create a system of signs that makes this airport a place, not a nonplace."

Why not, you might think, especially as the project seemed so promising when Mr. Baur started work on it eight years ago. Based in Paris, he had recently completed an innovative, widely praised signage scheme for Cologne-Bonn Airport and was commissioned to do the same in Vienna where the airport was to double in size by constructing a new building and renovating an old one. The senior management there was sympathetic to his goals, as were the architects, Itten Brechbühl and Baumschlager Eberle.

The first phase of expansion was completed this summer when the new building opened, replete with Mr. Baur's signs. But the project has not gone as smoothly as he had hoped. New personnel joined the airport's management during construction and decided to change aspects of the original architectural scheme, which affected the signage, and to drop two important elements of his planned system. He has also had to modify some of the signs following complaints from people with impaired vision amid an online rumpus that his artfully blurred signs are not legible.

Whatever else an airport signage system succeeds in being, it must be clear. If the signs do not communicate the relevant information quickly and easily to everyone who needs it, they will have failed, but pulling this off is tougher than it sounds.

Airports are often large, labyrinthine spaces in which thousands of people need to be guided to particular places at specific times. Some of them will be familiar with the airport, but others will be there for the first time. They may well speak different languages, and range from veteran flyers to nervous ingénues and terrified flight-phobia sufferers. Somehow, the signs need to guide each of them through the building so efficiently that they never worry about getting lost, as well as conforming to a minefield of safety regulations and competing against a blizzard of advertising imagery.

No wonder that the first wave of modern airport signage systems, in the 1960s and 1970s, were characterized by discipline and uniformity. Often, they were the work of gifted design "despots" like Benno Wissing, the Dutch designer whose 1967 signage for Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam was renowned for its lucid typography and rigorous color coding. To avoid confusion, he banned any other signage in his chosen shades of yellow and green from Schiphol, including Hertz's car rental signs.

Clarity was also the goal of the Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger at the turn of the 1970s, when he developed a signage system for Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris. He designed a special typeface in which each letter could be read from different angles by distracted passengers while racing through crowded terminals.

Like Wissing's signs at Schiphol, Mr. Frutiger's scheme at Charles de Gaulle was a wonderful example of design that fulfilled its function sensitively and elegantly. Sadly, it has since been neglected, but Wissing's work has been lovingly maintained and updated by the Dutch designer Paul Mijksenaar. Other airports have tried to achieve the same lucidity, but have generally settled for less sophisticated designs, which have produced indistinguishably bland signs that make it hard to tell one airport from another.

There are rare exceptions, like the elegant signs devised by the Swiss designer Ruedi Rüegg for Zurich Airport until his death last year, but experiments, like Mr. Baur's work at Cologne-Bonn Airport, are unusual. The signs there feature pictograms seemingly drawn by hand in a deliberately naïve style, which seems distinctive in the context of an airport, and so familiar that you feel as though you have been there before.

Mr. Baur sought to achieve a similar effect at Vienna with the blurred signage that looks as if someone has scribbled on it in thick pencil, specially created pictograms with light shadows and a series of delicately translucent glass paneled signs.

He believes that these "subtle, playful effects" give the airport a distinctive character, together with the choice of typeface, Fedra Sans, which he commissioned from the Slovakian designer Peter Bil'ak for a previous project and contains all of the Central European accents, making it very apt for use in the Austrian capital.

Some of the glass panels have proved too subtle for people with impaired vision, who have complained that they are not clear enough. Mr. Baur says the problem was caused by the late changes to the architectural program, which left some of the panels inadequately lit. He and his team are now trying to rectify that.

But he is less optimistic about the chances of persuading the airport to reinstate two lost components of his original scheme: a panel by the baggage carousels welcoming passengers to Vienna with Austrian-German greetings and his pièce de résistance, a giant LED screen that would have traced the progress of flights as they approached the airport.

Does his grand plan work without them? I can't pretend to have spotted explicit references to Vienna on the airport signs, but they were discernibly different to the "identikit" variety: definitely odd, but agreeably so.

[DontSayBanana]

I love how the guy with the biggest smile on the poster has the biggest woody.

[Syt]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20218094

The shock of the (male) nude

By Bethany Bell BBC News, Vienna

An exhibition in Vienna probes our attitude towards nudity - people in the West have become accustomed to the naked female form, but male nudes can still shock. Before the show opened, the museum even covered up parts of its own posters, saying they had caused public outrage.

Five naked male statues on a pedestal confront you as you enter the new exhibition at the Leopold Museum.

The earliest is Ancient Egyptian, and the most recent a figure based on a shopping mannequin.

Tobias Natter, the director of the Leopold Museum, says the opening display is a "walk through 500 years of history".

"You have an old Egyptian nude, which is very unusual for Egyptian art, you have Roman art, you have Rodin from the 19th and 20th Century, to a postmodern statue. It tells the visitor the male nude in art has a very long tradition," he says.

The exhibition features a diverse range of styles, from paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Paul Cezanne, Edvard Munch and the expressionist artist Egon Schiele, to more modern and sexually explicit works by the US photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the London-based artists Gilbert and George.

There are images of erect penises, and of anuses.

Natter says the museum is breaking new ground.

"It's quite unusual for an exhibition to focus on the depiction of the male nude. Surprisingly we had many exhibitions dealing with the female nude body, but so far never an exhibition which features the male nude. Somehow it is a taboo.

"On the other hand, we see that the male nude is getting a new presence in modern contemporary society. He is now on posters, he is on stages, he is getting more and more normal."

An image of naked woman is still regarded in a very different light from that of a naked man, Natter says.

"We saw with the advertising for our exhibition, there is still a difference between a female nude body on the poster or a male nude body. This makes a cultural difference that is still on-going and needs to be discussed with an exhibition."

One of the posters advertising the exhibit featured a full-frontal photograph of three naked footballers, by the French artists Pierre et Gilles. Shortly before the opening last month, the Leopold Museum said that it had received so many complaints that it had been forced to take action.

It put a red band covering the intimate parts of the footballers, on some - but not all - of the posters.

But Vienna is full of posters of naked or semi-naked women and is also known for its relaxed approach to nudity at mixed saunas and sunbathing areas. So did the pictures really cause outrage?

Erich Kocina, from Die Presse newspaper, says the museum expected to provoke controversy with the posters - but it went beyond that, causing serious offence to some Viennese.

"It's a mixture - 30% was marketing and 70% was genuine outrage," he says.

"I think we are just used to seeing naked women because they are used as objects of desire in advertisements and TV. Naked men are not that common - we are not used to seeing a penis. I think that is the main problem for people."

Art historian Eva Kernbauer, from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, says male nudes have been around for a long time, but the way nude men and women have been depicted has always differed.

"To put it very simply, male nudity was closely linked to strength, invulnerability and heroism, the female nude to beauty and erotics," she says.

"Also, the 'Venus pudica' [the shameful Venus] was already developed in ancient Greece, so the depictions of female chastity and female nudity are historically deeply interlinked. The female nude is not threatening at all - female nudity is vulnerable, because it acknowledges the gaze of the beholder."

This classical model is still powerful today, she says. Female nudity is not only omnipresent, it is also unthreatening. Male nudity is more challenging.

"Male nudity is very often linked to the exposure of sexual organs - the penis - and this is often done in a way that responds to the classical model of aggression and strength.

"While the sexual organ in itself does not necessarily have to appear as threatening or aggressive, the difference from the dominant model of soft female nudity is great."

Despite a long search throughout Vienna, I can't find anybody deeply outraged by the naked posters.

One man tells me guardedly that he is not "highly appreciative" of the image.

"It's provocative, it's true," says a woman named Eva. "On the other hand it is looking back to the old days when nakedness was quite common [in art], so I think we should get used to it."

And others, such as Cecile, a tourist visiting from France, like the nudes.

"They are very well-built, they are sportsmen, it's not like ugly old men with a big belly, so they are pretty. It's nice to see."

The article raises some good points.

[garbon]

Like what?

[Syt]

That female and male nudity are still perceived differently by most(?) of society, and that male nudity is still more "risque".

[garbon]

I guess it appeared to me that the article was posing those as fairly novel points - when rather they seem rather evident, especially when looking at Europe. Here male frontal nudity is definitely taboo - though exposed female nipples also cause problems.

[Valmy]

That female and male nudity are still perceived differently by most(?) of society, and that male nudity is still more "risque".

It must be because I am living in puritanical yankee land but I do not really see that.  When a female nipple shows our society goes crazy. I am not sure if a full frontal vag shot would be percieved as less rique than a junk shot.

[garbon]

That female and male nudity are still perceived differently by most(?) of society, and that male nudity is still more "risque".

It must be because I am living in puritanical yankee land but I do not really see that.  When a female nipple shows our society goes crazy. I am not sure if a full frontal vag shot would be percieved as less rique than a junk shot.

However female nudity in movies is less risque than male nudity in things like films.

[Valmy]

However female nudity in movies is less risque than male nudity in things like films.

Well women have the nipples to show.  For us it is either our junk or nothing risque at all.  I cannot recall a really graphic vag shot, which would be the equivalent, in a film.

But you might be right.  I am not some huge film buff or anything.