In the Male

Chloe Piene filmed a little boy in his underwear. The stripling stomped around in a pair of tightie-whities while Piene recorded his puerile actions with a digital camera. She is also pen pals with a convict serving time for a double murder. It’s a hobby. Oh, and she draws pictures of women masturbating.

These drawings recently appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. And her short film about the boy in his undies, Little David, is projected onto a wall at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston for “Perspectives 142: Boys Behaving Badly.”

The boy tromps around in the grass, flailing about in an imaginary fight with an invisible adversary. He flexes and walks around with bowed legs. He speaks — or rather, grunts — a monologue, part of which is taken from letters written to the artist by her incarcerated pal. “I’ll squish ’em, I’ll squish ’em, I’ll squish ’em,” he says. “I’m a barbarian.” Piene has slowed down the video, changing the boy’s movements and words into grimaces and growls. Yes, it would have been pretty damn creepy anyway, but now it’s creepy as hell.

The point seems simple enough: Evil lurks in the hearts of young men. The murderer was once a young boy, full of hope, promise and aggression. By slowing down the video and putting the murderer’s words in her subject’s mouth, Piene has shown us how all little boys can be demonic. The work is unique in the way it flip-flops a cliché: Rather than showing us how all murderers were once little boys, Piene has shown us how all little boys could become murderers. Little David‘s growling can be heard throughout the exhibition.

The work should be commended for the way it deals with testosterone-laden clichés. After all, the CAM’s literature states that the exhibition “features work that explores the clichés, isms and myths surrounding adolescent male behavior.” Too bad many of the other pieces just wind up being cliché.

Through candid videos, Jen DeNike shows us that adolescents like to wrestle in the grass, dunk each other and have weight-lifting contests. Big surprise there. Through stop-action photography, Tobin Yelland shows us that boys like to take unnecessary risks, like jumping off a building onto a pile of mattresses or hurtling over a rail line. Wow. And through video and sound installations, Pia Schachter shows us that death-metal guys have a sensitive side. Who woulda thunk it? Just because a work reinforces something you already know doesn’t mean it explores “clichés, isms and myths.” It can just as well be cliché as hell.

Olaf Bruening’s work does offer an interesting take on the clichés surrounding male adolescence. In Skaters, four dudes pose side by side in a room with hardwood floors. They stand shirtless, wearing golden shorts with drawstrings dangling in front. Golden chains with small medallions encircle their necks. With long blond wigs and blank stares, they look like barbarians. And, of course, each has got a skateboard by his side.

These attributes might sound cliché, and they are, but the point here is that the photographs are obviously staged. The outfits are over-the-top, and the models’ blank stares have been altered to make for pupil-less, freaky blue eyes. Bruening has taken a cliché and amplified it to the level of parody.

This Swiss photographer does similar things in his other works on view: Knights, Vikings and Bullies. All of the images are anything but candid. They recall the photographs of early cultural anthropologists, who infamously invited their “exotic” subjects to dress up as flamboyantly as possible before being photographed. These images were then taken as being accurate representations of foreign peoples.

Los Angeles-based Greg Fiering and Matt Luem have tackled the world of backyard wrestling in their photographs. In Mr. Fantastic, the eponymous wrestler stares at the camera, his gaze marred by blood trickling down his face. Xsanity is an action shot, with one guy in the air barreling toward another, who lies supine on a board between two metal chairs. Ouch. And in Andre Hardcore, we stare right at a competitor who wields a baseball bat covered in barbed wire.

What makes these photographs so damn intriguing is that they’re vignettes of boys behaving really badly. Most boys dunk each other in the water, but there aren’t too many kids in this world who let their friends jump off Dumpsters and land smack-dab in the middle of their chests. And you don’t even want to know what happens with that barbed wire on a stick.

Last but certainly not least are the photos of Anthony Goicolea. This Brooklyn-based photographer is in his mid-thirties, but the man is a regular Dorian Gray. In the photographs on display here, all of which feature clones of the artist engaged in boyish high jinks, he looks like a mere adolescent. Ponce de Leon would have been so jealous of this guy.

Porn features four clones of Goicolea hanging out in a tackily rustic room. The title of the work comes from the stack of videos on the left — Tight End, Big Tit Bonanza, Sweet Cherry Pie — and the kinky lesbo love scene on the television. The boys — remember, they’re all Goicolea — sit around, eating Oreos and drinking beer. One of them signs a cast on the leg of another, writing things like “fart-head,” “penis wrinkle,” “fuck you” and, of course, “get well soon.”

Goicolea’s photographs have done an exceptional job exaggerating, and thus unmasking, typical clichés of male adolescence. His use of himself as a model adds another layer of irony to the mix. And that’s why his works work: His images handle clichés in an intriguing manner. Some of the works by the other artists — you know who I’m talking about by this point — are just images of “Boys Behaving Badly.”