The Male GaYze1990

Jack Water's film, The Male GaYze was shown in the January-February 1994 media program at the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition, Black Male:Representations of Masculinity In Contemporary Art. The 1989 video short (11 minutes) presents an individual's observation of sexuality and power relations between men, a young African American dancer's reminiscence of his encounter with a famous Dutch choreographer. Approached from a personal perspective, the story is told in a casually direct voice-over that is read by the author/director. Issues of authority clash in a pedagogical combat zone. The depiction of seemingly random home movie-esque visuals cause the structures of text (masculine) and image (feminine) to form a contrapuntal relationship of identities. Waters constructs a theater where Black/White, European/American, Younger/Older; Experience and Beauty interact. Platonic in the original sense, the movie invites the viewer to engage in the process of experience itself, where one must make one's own reactive decisions. Like gender role playing itself, some viewers determine the postulation of form and content in The Male GaYze as competitive. Others sense the image/text relationship as complementary whereby the descriptive narrative can be absorbed unimpeded by undue intellectualization.