Pigs are beautiful

SHEREEN ALI interviews artist Ryan Huggins, whose exhibition explored xenophobia, beauty and queer stereotypes

Pigs may be beautiful, and may even have souls, but we eat them up anyway at Christmas time. (Many of us find them sinfully delicious, especially when basted with cloves and pineapple juice.) So do we devour each other in a similar, metaphorical fashion? Once you’re a bit different, does that make you fair game in Trinidad?

The title of Ryan Huggins’ recent art show provokes many questions. His two-day exhibition Pigs Are Beautiful opened at Y Art Gallery in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, on January 26, and closed the following afternoon.

There were no actual pigs, on or off the canvas. The show consisted of oil paintings of young men (and one woman), most in very short, form-fitting shorts, in arrangements of companionship, camaraderie, or intimacy. There were also some painted ostrich eggs. The art portrayed some aspects of youthful gay life not as a crazy aberration, but as a fact of life, albeit in a subculture not as open in TT as in some other countries. The one male nude, shown in the painting Gorilla in my Bed, was posed almost demurely (no genitalia on display), a focus of quiet, dominating power and cryptic observation by two anonymous, somewhat masked figures behind him, in an ambiguous, almost surreal triad of display and gazing. This painting, Huggins said, was inspired by a dream he had.

Huggins is a 27-year-old painter and a University of the West Indies (UWI) arts graduate who is now doing postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts (Kunstakademie) in Düsseldorf, Germany. The show was a fundraising venture to help pay for his tuition.

Huggins has been openly gay since his youth, and has found some supportive communities within Port of Spain to be tolerant spaces where different orientations are accepted. He remembers that as a teenager, his parents were very understanding of his sexual orientation when he talked to them about it: “Compared to some of my friends, I had it easy.

“Others did not have that experience. I grew up in a family who were around LGBT people. The artistic community became a shelter for many LGBT people...and I felt at home there.”

The exhibition Pigs Are Beautiful explored some aspects of gay life, including flirting, stereotypes within the gay community, and his own dreamscapes. Most of the art consisted of tall, smooth-skinned young male figures in various (almost wooden) still poses, some flirting, some holding hands, some just liming, each figure its own statue-like monolith, with paint applied flatly with just a gentle suggestion of volume and texture in an artistic style that is clearly still evolving. It was not photorealistic, but suggested a vaguely expressionistic feel, as if each figure were carved from a sturdy, vigorous coconut trunk. In this quality there’s perhaps some influence from German artist Louise Kimme (1939-2013), whose wooden sculptures Huggins admires. Among other artists Huggins admires are Afro-American, Chicago-based painter Kerry James Marshall, and the Jamaican-born, Trinidad-based artist Roberta Stoddart.

The art show press release states that Pigs Are Beautiful “analyses and decodes aspects of xenophobia, beauty and queer stereotypes within alternative subcultures.” Xenophobia – a fear, prejudice or dislike of people who are different – may be a quality more evident in TT society than in these artistic subjects; but if gay art makes you uncomfortable, then maybe that’s the point: to check your own attitudes. Throughout history, artists have long painted half-naked and totally nude women as ideals of beauty or as feasts for the usually heterosexual male libido or fantasy; shifting the gaze to half-naked men is not so different.

Huggins portrayed some gay stereotypes – such as the painting Twinks (a term used for slim, young, hairless and often attractive gay men, in their late teens to early 20s) and Gorilla in my Bed – a reference to “silverbacks,” the term used for an older, well-established gay man who likes younger gay men. There’s a whole range of expressions that some gay men use to categorise other gay men, and the artworks touch on a few of them.

Why the unusual title? In an interview with Newsday last Friday, Huggins, who grew up in Diego Martin, said: “I came across the phrase ‘pigs are beautiful’ when I was in Dusseldorf and it was part of a painting by a friend of mine. The subject was a queer-looking guy who seemed to be a performer, with a bunch of people in front of him, looking at him and analysing him in an interested way – but not in a good way, right?

“So it gave me ideas about myself as well, being a queer individual growing up in Trinidad and then moving over to a place like Germany, where sexuality is such an open thing, a norm. But at the same time it’s not exactly a norm for a coloured person in a predominantly white society...So I felt I had lots of other things, like my ethnicity, my class upbringing, my small island background. All of these things merged to create what some people in society would call a ‘pig’...I became more aware of the climate of thinking in that environment...while at the same time, referencing how that would fit into a Trinidad subculture. It’s almost a taboo.”

Perhaps Huggins, through his art, is chipping away at those taboos.