Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, February 21, 2016. © Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Elena Olivo.

Deller is an artist who consistently returns to themes of masculinity and its obstacles. In his 2014 installation in the UK pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he juxtaposed archival photographs from the 1972–73 miners’ strike with images of David Bowie on his final, concurrent Ziggy Stardust tour. The contrast between miners, whose rough skin and clothes bespeak a hardscrabble working-class existence long associated with masculine attributes, and Bowie at peak androgyny, is a dynamic that Deller replicates in Iggy Pop Life Class. A key difference between the projects is that the masculine and the feminine impulses of the earlier work are explored simultaneously through examination of the rock star’s singular body.

In Deller’s words from the Brooklyn Museum website, “Iggy Pop has one of the most recognizable bodies in popular culture. A body that is key to an understanding of rock music, and that has been paraded, celebrated, and scrutinized through the years in a way that is unusual for a man.” Two aspects of this statement warrant unpacking: First is the assumption that rock music has a body, and that body is male and white. The second is the assumption that scrutiny of Pop’s body tracks with the same kind of body-image policing that women and people of color experience daily.

Guno Park. Untitled (Seated Pose), from Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller, 2016; ballpoint pen on paper; 15 x 11¼ in. Brooklyn Museum Collection. Photo: Sarah DeSantis.

Looking at the drawings produced by Deller’s twenty-two collaborators provides some clues to deconstruct these assumptions. A life-drawing class requires an artist to take his or her model at face value. Considering the group of drawings as a whole, the most prevalent characteristics that emerge are signs of the rock icon’s age. If the younger Pop was cast as a contemporary David, walking a line between long-haired gender subversion and rippling, virile manhood, the older Pop looks tired, heavy, and saggy. His hair, jowls, and pronounced nose take on symbolic qualities, and slip accordingly, both describing and stripping away the pop star’s allure. Surprisingly, given its centrality to his mythos, Pop’s iconic penis is in short supply. Most of the artists choose not to represent the singer’s genitals at all, while one in particular seems to see only that part and to render it a cartoonish protrusion, like Pop’s nose. One drawing exaggerates Pop’s pectorals and narrows his waist so as to nearly render him anatomically female. Despite the effects of time on his body, perception of Pop’s sexuality remains rooted in an aggression that he no longer seems to possess. Its absence suggests that age might unsex men much as it does women. This would be misleading, given that Pop continues to be lauded as a sexual icon well into his 60s, while female contemporaries like Patti Smith or Wendy O Williams are allotted either sexuality or longevity.

Egon Schiele. Male Nude (Self-Portrait) (Männlicher Akt [Selbstbildnis I]), 1912; lithograph on paper; image: 16 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.; sheet: 17 5/8 x 15 11/16 in. Brooklyn Museum Collection.

Figures from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. L: Master of Ntem, Fang (Mvai subgroup) Artist. Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri), Gabon, Ntem River basin, mid-18th to mid-19th century; wood, iron. 23 x 5 7/8 x 5 in. R: Ascetic Sakyamuni. Japan, 16th century; wood with pigmented lacquer, inlaid crystal, metal. 8 1/2 x 6 1/16 x 7 1/8 in.

Sculptural objects from Gabon and Japan articulate the poles of representation of the male nude. A Fang Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri) made of wood and iron places a rounded head atop a rectangular body with short legs and arms and a fat, squat penis. Eschewing realism, the Master of Ntem who created this object highlighted the parts of the male body that carry the most importance—the mind, the sex, and the cycle of birth and death. Nearby, a rare 16th-century Ascetic Sakyamuni shows the Buddha in a state of near-starvation. Emaciated Buddhas serve two traditional functions: to attest to the triumph of Buddha’s mind over the matter of his body, and to represent and comfort the poor and afflicted, who see in the emaciated deity’s restoration the possibility of their own.

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller; installation view. Photo by Jonathan Dorado.

Like the Buddha Sakyamuni, the young Iggy Pop practiced a form of asceticism nearly indistinguishable from self-abuse. His unlikely survival and ascent to senior-citizen status represents a restoration as well, the image of which has been as important to poor white men of a certain generation as the Buddha was to 16th-century Japanese. Having graduated from deviant to bard, Pop maintained his signature theatricality throughout. Its absence—his stillness—is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Deller’s installation.

Charlotte Segall. Untitled (Lying Pose), from Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller, 2016; natural charcoal with white chalk on pink paper; 12¾ x 19 in. Brooklyn Museum Collection. Photo: Sarah DeSantis.

Both the Stooges’ name (rumored to be an homage to Larry, Curly, and Moe) and the title of their classic 1970 album Fun House position Pop’s ongoing performance of masculinity as a clown show. Clowns, of course, operate by exaggerating proportions. Today an extreme version of male arrogance, aggression, and insecurity is performed daily by the Clown-in-Chief in the White House, who unwittingly models Judith Butler’s dictum that “all gender is performance.” Our nation is trapped in a spiral of aggression, retaliation, and humiliation that Iggy Pop narrates all too well. We can only hope that, like Iggy, America will survive its current infatuation with self-annihilation.

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through March 26, 2017.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Jeremy Deller. A Good Day for Cyclists, 2013. British Pavilion. Photo by the author.

Jeremy Deller at the British Pavilion brings a political approach to history in a series of installations that deal with working-class revolt against the symbols of affluence. A series of large wall murals add polemical humor to the copious photographs, documents, and drawings that Deller has collected—each space centered on a different act of protest. Upon entering, the viewer first encounters a mural of a massive owl in flight with a red Range Rover dangling from one of its claws. On the opposite wall, the banking town of St. Helier in Jersey is depicted in flames. These are mythological scenes in which Deller imagines the twin oppressed collectives of nature and the working class taking their revenge on those who have exploited them for so long.

Farther in, one space is given over to images of working-class riots in Britain that coincided with dates on David Bowie’s 1972–73  Ziggy Stardust tour. As Bowie toured his native country with phenomenal success, coal miners, stevedores, and construction workers across the land were striking over fair wages and labor protections. Deller contrasts documentary photographs of the workers clashing with police and strikebreakers with images of Bowie’s onstage theatrics and his obsessive fans. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust mythology overtook British youth with its gender-bending, science fiction fantasy while maintaining an element of horror at the crowd’s potential to swiftly turn mob. “When the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band,” Bowie sings. A similar energy, characterized on one hand by dreams and aspirations and on the other by brutal mob justice, informed the concurrent labor strikes, though these were overwhelmingly gendered male and had little use for the speculative logic of art.

Jeremy Deller. We Sit Starving Amidst our Gold, 2013. British Pavilion. Photo by the author.

A subsequent space invokes the socialist values of William Morris. Morris, the nineteenth-century artisanal prophet whose theories underpin the contemporary craft revival as well as the emerging genre of social practice, rejected industrial manufacturing and instead sought to produce handmade decorative arts while maintaining a middle-class price point. He is widely recognized as a medievalist who idealized the pre-Renaissance folk culture of Britain. He mined the Arthurian legends and Gothic sources for examples of indigenous archetypes. At the same time, Morris drew heavily on the colonized East for his aesthetics, basing textiles on traditional Indian and Chinese patterns but transferring production from those countries’ indigenous artisans to British ones. The contradictions between Morris’s proletarian leanings and his participation in economic systems of colonization are unexplored in Deller’s work, which turns Morris into a socialist colossus avenging the uncourteousness of the mega-rich. Russian oligarch and art world player Roman Abramovich made headlines in 2011 for blocking access to the Giardini with his oversize yacht. In a mural, Morris lifts the offending boat right out of the water and prepares to plunge it to the depths of the Venice lagoon.

Additional galleries contain a meditation on currency and value; a video of cars being crushed in a junkyard that also features highlights of Deller’s earlier socially activated projects; and a series of drawings by veterans imprisoned for crimes at home. This last group is the most compelling, as the soldier-prisoners articulate the traumas of war and the self-satisfied callousness of politicians who perpetuate it through drawings that range from highly skilled to childlike. At the back of the pavilion is a tea room that is less a social practice project than a simple concession stand. Deller imagined this as a respite from the density of his own work and of the biennale as a whole.

Shary Boyle. The Cave Painter, 2013. Plaster, wood, foam, synthetic hair, sculpting epoxy, metal, paint, glitter, glass, three overhead projectors on custom-sculpted plinth, photo-collage projection acetates, timer sequencer. Canada Pavilion. Photo by the author.

Nearby at the Canada Pavilion, Shary Boyle’s installation approaches similar issues to Deller, though from a feminist perspective. Her sculptures evoke kitsch collectibles but carry an uncanny charge. The dark space of the Canada Pavilion has few objects within it. On the rotating platforms of record players, two porcelain figures spin while holding up globes. One is white, the other black; both are female and contorted and burdened by the weight of the spheres they carry. Above, a video of Boyle in pantomime makeup plays silently. A large installation, The Cave Painter (2013)  is the main event. In a serene grotto of white metal and Styrofoam, a plaster mermaid reclines. Her face is haggard, though her body is unlined. The tranquility of this ghostly space is interrupted periodically by a projection that fills the entire void with a montage of appropriated images. The grotto fills with figures culled from history, film, and current events. The effect is similar to a three-dimensional Hannah Höch collage in its combination of media and feminist themes. Teeming with visual information, the illuminated grotto is a surrealist tableau.

High above the Canada Pavilion, on the exterior, another of Boyle’s enigmatic figures is crouched. She is black and wears a veil, though no clothes. Her posture is that of an imp or fairy in an act of mischief. At the same time, she is a sentinel. She surveys all of the Giardini from her perch. She grasps colorful ribbons in her hand that wind around the pavilion’s exterior. Boyle’s sculptures do not easily resolve into meanings or messages. They are monsters of a troubled national psyche that is still wrestling with divisions of class, race, and gender. Nonetheless, the presence of this work—like that of Jeremy Deller—indicates that among the developed and privileged nations, the beginnings of a long-overdue dialogue are under way.