What if the manosphere weren’t an online network of iron-pumping social media personalities and product peddlers but, instead, an actual place? Maybe we could think of it as somewhere that men were free to define their identities as they wish.
That is the premise behind two contemporary art exhibitions in the Netherlands. Both imagine the manosphere as a terrain to be redefined or expanded through a little creative ingenuity. And they both propose that this alternative manosphere would include space for gentler, kinder men.
“Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today,” running at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s leading contemporary art institution, through Aug. 2, coincides with “Am I Masculine?” at the Noordbrabants Museum in den Bosch, which runs until June 14.
Both shows arrive as the subject of masculinity is being reappraised with increased urgency. The idea of “toxic masculinity” has gained traction over the past decade, and the discussion has also broadened to include a “masculinity crisis,” in which some men feel unmoored from the attributes that were considered traditionally male.
The manosphere, which emerged as an online subculture and has become a multimillion-dollar industry, was part of a larger call to action to revert to classical masculine values like physical strength and economic self-reliance. Somehow, this translated into a summons to bulk up, start brawls and put women in their place.
This online community received a new wave of buzz recently, with the release of the popular Netflix documentary “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,” which featured key manosphere influencers like HSTikkyTokky, Sneako and Myron Gaines.
The curators of the two Dutch art shows see their work as pushing out the boundaries of the manosphere’s high-testosterone zone to create new realms in which men are have more space to breathe.
Melanie Bühler, the curator of the Stedelijk exhibition, said she understood that an art show’s impact was limited compared with a social media phenomenon with millions of followers.
“Maybe a manosphere influencer wouldn’t come to this exhibition,” she said. “But the art audience and social media aren’t always completely separate,” she added. “I just hope to inject a sense of nuance, to give an impression how artists think about this theme in a very different sense.”
Bühler’s show features film, sculpture, installation and performance works by 35 artists — including Tetsumi Kudo, Sophie Calle, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley — from the 1960s to the present.
The exhibition “doesn’t shy away from all the problems that masculinity comes with,” Bühler said, but it “also points to tenderness, and points to the fact that we all live with masculinity in one form or another.”
A series in the show by the American-Dutch artist Sands Murray-Wassink called “Horse Suite” consists of three 2018 paintings of horses on vibrantly printed curtain fabric. In an interview, the artist explained that, at age 3, his Freudian psychoanalyst grandfather forced him to undergo “conversion therapy,” because he had expressed interest in toys that were considered feminine.
“In the therapy, learning how to be a boy, I was told that horses and unicorns were symbols for little girls,” he said, adding, that when he turned 40 he started painting horses as a form of liberation. “They’re about freedom and wildness,” he said.
The Bulgarian cross-disciplinary artist Zhana Ivanova has choreographed a live performance piece that will be presented five times during the exhibition run. In it, six male performers interact with one another in ways that are intended to create tension, like getting too close, or making confronting gestures.
“I’m interested in power structures,” Ivanova said. “Often, when you take women out of the equation, things quite quickly become about power: who has it, who doesn’t, who wants more, who hides it.”
The Noordbrabant Museum’s show, “Am I Masculine?” curated by Roberto Luis Martins, largely focuses on male fashion and popular culture, with some contemporary art works. Luis Martins usually works at the Amsterdam Museum, a history museum, where he said he likes to “deconstruct themes of identity.”
In the first room, there’s an emphasis on competition and power, with a kickboxing ring containing classical Greek and Roman sculpture replicas of Apollo and Hercules, videos of boxing and weight lifting competitions and clips of influencers such as Andrew Tate and the fitness guru Brian Pruett.
As visitors move through the show, they see visual options for masculinity that become increasingly more gender fluid, and eventually entirely free of constraints. The last room features mannequins dressed in a range of androgynous outfits — skirts and boxer shorts, high heels and blousy shirts — with images like a Dana Lixenberg portrait of the musician Prince and a photo of the Dutch gymnast Yuri van Gelder covered in glitter.
Luis Martins said that until the late 18th century, European men wore ornamentation that would now be considered feminine, such as wigs, frilly blouses, heels, face powder and lipstick. But after the French Revolution, an Enlightenment movement known as “the Great Male Renunciation” led men to abandon their claim to aesthetics, and to instead favor functional, darker and simpler clothing.
“The ideas that were introduced or reinforced after the French Revolution are still dominant in today’s society,” Luis Martins said. “We still think men should be sober and rational, opposed to fashion, and not too embellished.”
He added that when conceiving of the show, he also wanted to explore his own masculinity. Because he was often told as a child that “boys don’t cry,” he commissioned a two-part installation called “Ocean Full of Tears,” with sound by the artist Otion and video by Luthfi Darwis, which he imagined as “all the tears that men across the world cannot shed.”
Whether these art exhibitions present a meaningful counteroffensive to the onslaught of social media hypermasculinity, they aim to remind the public that sensitivity, gentleness and emotional vulnerability are also manly values.
“We have to highlight the importance, in the bigger sense, of these fashion designers, stylists, painters and photographers who dare to seek the spaces that can also be masculine,” Luis Martins said. If it can’t defeat the manosphere, he said, “at least it’s a disruption.”
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