Word: elton
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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QUITE A SUIT, ELTON...
Stumper of the week: how do you say "She Bangs" in Spanish? We're enter into the end-of-year silly season, where all the albums by major artists are greatest-hits compilations (Blur), live albums (Neil Young, Elton John, Alice in Chains), cover albums (Rage Against the Machine) or, worse yet, Christmas albums (hello, Ms Aguilera!). Although, of course, there are exceptions. Next Tuesday Backstreet's back. Alright...
...without the whips and chains, which means the Mapplethorpe of laser-cut male torsos and tulips that loom before you like stage-lit pachyderms. These pictures were not collected by the inebriated stage floozy we used to know and love. They bear the mark of the studious Sir Elton John, a man buying things in the cold light of the morning after. Even the sex here is stately. Don't look for anything hairy or louche. It's mostly neatly muscled male torsos by Horst, Mapplethorpe or Herb Ritts. The models have abs more tightly organized than Elton...
What's unbuckled, in places, is the melancholy, which may be the emotional default mode of a man who has buried good friends--Gianni Versace, Princess Diana--and lost others to AIDS. The Elton John who wrote Daniel, with its baffled yearning, is the one who loves the blue-tinted male nudes of John Dugdale, with their Victorian grief. The somber undercurrent is plain even in Andres Serrano's vivid crimson circle in a rectangle of bright yellow, which on closer inspection turns out to be a pool of blood...
...find it again in the flagrant comedies of Tracey Moffatt's Something More series, scenes staged for the camera, where bored babes get very fed up with Nowheresville, Australia. At the High's satellite galleries at the Georgia-Pacific Center, where there's a separate show devoted to Elton's celebrity portraits, you see it once more in the shot Andy Warhol took of himself in drag, a Halloween-in-Greenwich Village version of Joan Crawford. Actually, he looks pretty good...