/no love: remnants of a modern unconsoled/
Beauty is an excess: not to be confused with perfection, which is only an average.julien torma
Slava Mogutin is an artist whose work has emerged from a confluence of cultures and histories. He works across different media – including photography, video, poetry and performance – conjuring volatile erotic phenomena from these clashing orders of representation. A comprehensive contextualization of his practice would require a reading of the relations between Mogutin\'s visual works and other narratives in recent photographic history, and an engagement with his Russian-language journalism and poetry. By age twenty, Mogutin had achieved notoriety in post-Soviet Russia, breaching its Criminal Code on several counts in the course of his radical investment in writing and publishing queer literature. This early literary ingenuity established his reputation as a sexual dissident, culminating in his well-publicized exile, and the subsequent granting of political asylum in the United States in 1995. Mogutin\'s work begs comparison with the ambivalent genre known varyingly as insider documentary or subcultural photography, a domain whose \'official\' cultural authority was first established by the five artists referred to as the Boston School. Of these, it is the figure of neither Nan Goldin nor Jack Pierson that offers the most useful critical foil to Mogutin\'s practice but, rather, the lesser-acknowledged work of Mark Morrisroe. Morrisroe developed a unique collage-oriented style, by printing layered negatives and adding pen decoration to his photographs. He took pictures of friends and lovers, visually mapping his own multiple identities and the painful physical deterioration of his body. While Goldin accounts for her own practice as paying homage to elusive social and cultural truths, or as the visual authentication of genuine (if unusual) identities, David Joselit characterizes Morrisroe\'s as an aesthetic of falsehood. Mogutin works explore photography\'s posture as a compelling index of an unmediated real, while further questioning its persuasiveness through the foreign bodies and queer practices that he captures. Like Morrisroe\'s aesthetic, Mogutin\'s visual terrain of lost boys refuses easy assimilation, either as representations of maintainable identities - sexual or otherwise - or as the products of institutional culture.
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