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Eden's Apple - Interpretation and ire in the works of Stuart Hahn
Medulla Art Gallery featured a talk with the Artist Stuart Hahn on Wednesday eight August twenty twenty-three. It started tentatively and ended boisterously with interviewer Natasha Ramnauth steering the conversation into territory raised by a guest about the carnivalesque. That was provoking enough, but there was a much more niggling issue that caught my attention as Mr Hahn spoke about his work.
As an avid admirer of his prolific collections over the decades I was alerted when yet again I heard him mention that he could not show nudity in public. At prior shows he had said those exact words to the audience.
Stuart Hahn - The Fall of Man
In Jamaica,the Laura Facey bronze sculpture Redemption Song is met with all the respect it deserves in a declared homophonic island. No one is deeming the public work indecent or homocentric. I found myself wondering why and how Mr Hahn has been dealing with this no man’s land quite literally for so many decades?
What does Mr Hahn have to be apologizing and hiding for? Is Stuart Hahn a maverick where nudity and male at that is concerned?
The short answer is no.
Stuart Hahn - The Fall of Man
He is preceded by the likes of Boscoe Holder and Hugh Stollmeyer. It is curious, but not fully necessary to know that those names represent men who were homosexual or bisexual. This is to be included only because of the fact that sexual history has been hard fought particularly in ultra religious spaces like Trinidad and Tobago.
Is Mr Hahn exploiting the form by showing explicit sexual acts? No.
In fact Mr Hahn only uses naked imagery in contexts where they are called for.
But instead of being caught up with his exceptional skills as a draftsman of the anatomy it is easy for the media to continue to hound his use of drawing what I can only call the subversive penis. Vaginas and breasts hold neutral ground.
Meanwhile it seems that the erect, semi-erect and inert penis causes great consternation.
We all reel daily as we read and hear of barbarically cruel murders. Yet, the penis in art is being ‘held’ as too unpalatable for sensitive constitutions.
Is there a connection between crime and the male body?
This may be an absurd question, but Mr Hahn’s work and legacy might hinge on the fact that a sense of being out of touch with the body is an important marker for all of us. An automatic fear or distaste to observe classical art in a caribbeanesque context narrows the lens.
Mr Hahn was born in Nevis of a St. Kittitian mother and Trinbagonian father. Of Caucasian heritage in a mostly brown land, a child of colonialism in San Fernando and a gay man in the Caribbean space during Black Power and Oil Money is dizzying enough. It makes one want to tear off one’s skin.
Nudity and the drawing of skin titillates. It is peeling back layers and finding oneself in private territory. Art has lauded nakedness for centuries, so, to now grapple on an island with what it means - is curious to me particularly when a few years ago Trinidad and Tobago was given the dubious honor of being in the top ten of users of porn sites in the world.
Stuart Hahn - The Murder of Abel
Mr Hahn’s Biblical, Classical Literature, Indian Mythology and local Folkloric pieces do far more than occasionally dabble in nudity. By focusing on the trite, everything that his work demonstrates gets shunted to the side. Mr Hahn’s work connects the complex past with the continuously confusing present. He shows great discipline when drawing and rendering the form with prisma color pencils and pen and ink when paint is so much faster - his almost religious penitence in lauding his characters with wings, togas and ropes of hair - yes there is homo eroticism in the work.
However, homo simply means man. I will not go down the prickly path of Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. I also will not convince anyone of changing their sensitivities or sensibilities. I write to place Mr Hahn’s work where it needs to be. He is neither a pornographer nor a sensationalist.
That is so clear in societies great love of Derek Walcott's TiJean and his Brothers the children’s book and his innovative approach to the Black Madonna and Child way before it was fashionable to do so. As a white, Caribbean gay man making Art in Trinidad and Tobago and causing debate makes Stuart Hahn’s career an important marker in Art history - one that we all take for granted. We speak fluidly about Impressionism or Abstraction. But what of Stuart Hahn’s drawings? I suggest that as we look at Art in Trinidad and Tobago, we begin to observe what is before our very own eyes:that we respect and honor ours in the same way that we have finally given Pan the attention deserved.
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