Balla Duchamp Behan

Duchamp in 1912, Balla in 1912, Behan in 2026: three artists, more than a century apart, working on the same question: how to show the figure in motion on a two-dimensional surface.

Behan, Leg Day (2026). The repeated legs fan out in arcs that echo the dog's feet in the Balla. Duchamp and Balla painted their motion studies in muted tones from an observed or imagined model. Leg Day builds its motion from a photograph in the feed, in full color, with the figure a man at the gym.

Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). A single figure broken into overlapping planes as it moves down the stairs. The painting caused a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic mocked it as an explosion in a shingle factory.

Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Painted the same year, it shows motion as repetition: the dog's feet, the tail, the leash, and the walker's skirt all multiply into blurred arcs. Both painters drew on the chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey.

Making Endurance Pay

Every morning begins with my feed, which brings me images and spaces to consider for collaging. This collage uses three of them.

One comes from an outdoor shower. One comes from a gym. The room comes from a news article with tips for decorating a small space.

An algorithm selects each one and sends it to me.

Each presents a version of the good, at least to the people who made it.

The collage places them in one composition. The flexed arm is the foreground, the showering figure the middle ground, the furnished room the background. Three flat images produce the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface.

Editing on the iPhone unifies them. Focus, sharpness, and softness are adjusted until the three sources read as one space.

At the bottom edge, a fragment of caption remains from the source: "Solid G…" I leave it in because it identifies the image as coming from social media, and because the word states what all three sources promise. "Solid" means firm, full, and complete: a solid body, a solid build, a solid home.

The source of inspiration is an artwork seen in the same article on best practices in home design: in a pink bathroom, a reclining figure in red on a desert highway, reflected in a mirror. Two things in that work hold my attention: the intensity of the color and the relation of the figure to the ground. As an artist, it is important for me to find other artists who are pushing the same boundaries, each in a distinct way.

For many artists, the payoff is found in the long road. It may come as a future audience, a better understanding of the purpose behind the work, or both. Endurance is critical to building a successful portfolio. Artists make endurance pay by defining a unique visual point of view and by finding the audience that connects with that view.

Swapping Spit (Diptych), 2026

Swapping spit is an act of intimacy and connection in gay culture. It is the sharing of body fluids between two men. This act is both poignant and celebratory after decades of HIV, when gay men were taught to fear and avoid the exchange of body fluids. Saliva has never transmitted HIV, but for years the fear extended to any fluid exchange between men.

Intimacy through Exchange

This diptych recreates that act of intimacy by swapping the images of two single shirtless men between their original settings. A young man in jeans stands barefoot in a motel pool at night. An older man in striped swim trunks stands on a terrace above the sea with his two poodles. Each man is placed into the other's scene. That exchange is the only action.

The action creates what painting has traditionally called pentimento: traces of the former figure remaining in the original setting, partly covered by the new figure. Behind the older man in the pool, the younger man's arms, jeans, and bare feet remain visible. Behind the younger man on the terrace, the poodles remain.

The viewer is left to consider the intimacy of entering another person's space: how each figure is changed by its new environment, and how it stays the same.

Swapping has a long and celebrated history in American culture.

From the 1960s onward, suburban heterosexual couples held key parties, where married couples swapped partners for an evening. This activity was treated as harmlessly as a Tupperware party.

One of the most popular films of the late 1960s was Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), in which a wealthy California couple decides to try swinging and wife swapping and brings their best friends into the idea. It was an enormous success and showed that swapping in heterosexual culture had moved into the mainstream.

Ironically, gay men in similar settings were often raided and harassed for the same behavior, which continues today. In April 2026, Dallas police served a search warrant on a warehouse hosting a party for gay men, detained 48 people, and arrested the two promoters.

The deeper contradiction is that while gay men were condemned for swapping body fluids, heterosexual couples were swapping themselves. What is apparent is a lack of understanding and empathy in the dominant culture, and an inability to see its own part in behavior it considered unnatural or unsavory.

The diptych Swapping Spit is about making a connection where there was none, whether through a body fluid, a partner, or a setting, creating intimacy through exchange, popular with gay and straight people alike.

— Behan

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"; KWTX/KLTV, "Dallas police raid 'sexual encounter center'" (April 20, 2026).

The Feed

On a daily basis, millions of people move through the images, advertisements, and stories contained in social media, the feeds themselves becoming self-portraits of the viewers. In my own case, from that encounter, I gather grounds and figures to create collages that express a specifically queer point of view. And in these collages, I see both myself and the larger culture, revealed through what other people choose to make and to post. This is communion.

— Behan

Behind the Process

These two collages start with images from 1899. Two men in straw boater hats stand on a racecourse lawn, with a woman between them. A grandstand full of spectators sits behind them. It follows the usual format: boy, girl; boy, girl.

Then the woman steps out while the two men stay to meet up with some new friends. In the space between them, men from 2026 appear. One pulls his shirt over his head to wear even less. Another takes a phone call, or is it a mirror selfie? The Blue moon and Jupiter 3 witness it all.

The new seating arrangement: boy, boy; boy, boy.

The result is the same image, queered. Like squared, but queered.

The clothing shows 127 years of change. In 1899, the men are fashionably dressed in high collars, waistcoats, jackets, ties and straw hats. In 2026, the men leisurely don tank tops, shorts and briefs, or nothing above the waist at all. In 1899 they carry canes and pipes. In 2026 they carry phones.

The original images had room for one story. Now they have room for another.

— Behan

Homage to Hartley and His German Lover

In 1914, the American painter Marsden Hartley was living in Berlin. There he loved Karl von Freyburg, a young Prussian lieutenant. In October of that year, in the first months of the First World War, von Freyburg was killed in battle. He was 24.

Hartley responded with Portrait of a German Officer. The painting contains no face and no body. It is built from flags, epaulets, military insignia, letters and numbers. For decades it was described as an abstraction about war.

The painting is a portrait, written in code. "KvF" is von Freyburg's initials. "24" is his age. "4" is his regiment. The Iron Cross is the medal he was awarded after his death. Hartley put the man he loved into the painting in the only form the time allowed: as coded information.

This collage brings the code out. Hartley's composition remains, and in front of it stands Dirk Yager, a German gay adult film star. His head is framed by the painting's central yellow triangle. He wears a black leather harness, shorts and gloves, and the straps over his shoulders follow the lines of a uniform. Beside him, the number 24 is still visible. The painting Hartley built to leave the body out now contains a living, breathing body.

Making this collage further revealed something in Hartley's painting. Beside Yager hangs a form from an officer's uniform: a tassel with a long shaft above a rounded base. The painting is composed as a torso, and this form sits where the groin would be. As a painter, I read it plainly as genitalia. This then is not only a portrait. It is a nude portrait, which makes sense, as Hartley was painting his lover.

I have not seen this formally discussed. That is not surprising. Art history has a long habit of looking away from queer sexual content. A coded language is also meant to be read by very few people: the artist, and those closest to him. Hartley coded his lover's name as initials and his age as a number. He also coded his body.

The two figures, von Freyburg and Yager, are two German men separated by more than a century. During his lifetime, von Freyburg could only be recorded as initials and numbers, while Yager is photographed openly as a gay man by his own choice. The collage places them in the same frame to honor both of their realities.

Layering onto an existing work is not new. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. I also work on a reproduction, in my case a digital one.

This is the method of all of my work: take the subtext, the code, and make it context, make it legible. Hartley named his lover in letters and numbers. This collage brings the idea of him into corporeal form, so that we can see him the way Hartley no doubt saw him when he looked back at this painting. Hartley did not see numbers and initials. He saw his beloved, Karl.

Sources: Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection; Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).

Roommates AKA Straight-Washing in Art History

Straight-washing is the practice of presenting historical figures as heterosexual by default, and removing or renaming evidence that complicates that picture. Close bonds between men become "friendship." Shared homes become "studios." Love letters become "admiration."

The practice is documented. When Michelangelo's poems were first published in 1623, his grandnephew changed the pronouns. Sonnets written to a young Roman nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, were printed as poems to a woman. The original texts were not restored until the nineteenth century, when scholars returned to the manuscripts.

In 1914, Marsden Hartley painted Portrait of a German Officer, a dense arrangement of flags, numbers and military insignia. For decades it was described as an abstraction about war. It is a memorial to Karl von Freyburg, a young officer Hartley loved, killed in the first months of the fighting. The initials and his age are in the painting.

In the autumn of 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh moved in together to share a studio and a home in Arles. Van Gogh lovingly decorated Gauguin's room with sunflowers. Their arguments, he told Theo, were "terribly electric." In the joint letter of November 1888, Van Gogh writes that Gauguin interests him "greatly as a man — greatly." Two months later, when Gauguin prepared to leave, Van Gogh collapsed.

The standard account reduces this to rivalry and mental illness. The brothel visits are cited as proof that settles every question. For many men of the period, they settled nothing.

The table below sets the two readings side by side. The same four events appear in both columns: the relationship, the Yellow House, the arguments and the ear. Traditional art history describes a professional rivalry, a shared workspace, debates over theory and an unexplained illness. A queer reading describes an intense bond, a domestic life outside the family structures of the time, emotional friction and a breakdown that followed rejection. The facts in each row are the same. Only the interpretation changes.

The 1956 film Lust for Life fixed the standard account in popular memory. Kirk Douglas plays Van Gogh as a tormented genius. Anthony Quinn, who won an Academy Award for the role, plays Gauguin as a brawling, confident man. Both are presented as heterosexual by default, at the height of Hollywood's production code.

These collages reverse the arrangement. The actors are stripped to their bodies and repeated in rows. Douglas, the screen Van Gogh, stands in a Gauguin landscape. Quinn, the screen Gauguin, stands in Van Gogh's Les Alyscamps, the avenue the two painters worked on side by side in the autumn of 1888. Each man is placed in the other's world.

The bodies the film presented as rivals are presented here as subjects. What the official account omits is now in the picture.

Sources: Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, 1–2 November 1888, letter 716, Van Gogh Museum, vangoghletters.org; Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, December 1888; Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, ed., Rime (1623); Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Metropolitan Museum of Art; Lust for Life, dir. Vincente Minnelli (MGM, 1956).

Just what is it that makes today's bunkers so similar, so unaffordable?

The Original Room

In 1956, Richard Hamilton makes a small collage for This Is Tomorrow, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. He titles it Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? It is printed in the catalogue and on the poster, and it becomes one of the founding images of Pop Art.

The room is a catalogue of postwar promise. A bodybuilder holds a giant Tootsie Pop. A woman poses on the sofa. A tape recorder sits on the floor. A vacuum cleaner climbs the stairs, with an ad arrow claiming that ordinary cleaners reach only this far. A canned ham rests on the table. A television, a comic-book cover, a Ford emblem, and a movie marquee fill the walls. Above it all, the ceiling is a photograph of the Earth.

The message is simple. The good life can be bought, and it is coming to every house.

Seventy Years Later

Today the most talked-about new homes are not in the suburbs. They are underground.

Survival condominiums are built inside decommissioned missile silos. Billionaires dig shelters beneath ranches in Hawaii and estates in New Zealand. These spaces come with pools, theaters, gyms, and air filtration systems. They are sold as protection from collapse, war, pandemic, or unrest.

They are also sold to very few people. The luxury bunker is the clearest statement yet from the top 1%. It assumes that a disaster is coming, and it plans for only one group to survive it in comfort.

The New Room

My collage keeps Hamilton's layout and moves the room below ground.

The ceiling is no longer a picture of the Earth. It is an opening to the surface: grass, a fence, the sky, and a man in a black coat looking down into the shelter. The danger is up there. The residents are down here.

The bodybuilder returns, multiplied and flexing, still holding an oversized lollipop. The woman on the stairs with her vacuum is replaced by a young man in briefs, phone in hand, with a cordless vacuum waiting at the bottom step. The woman on the sofa is replaced by a man in a college tank top. The television is now a wall-sized screen. The canned ham is still on hand, because every bunker needs a pantry. A flying saucer hovers near the stairs, the old fear of the 1950s still in the room.

Subtext Made Context

Hamilton's bodybuilder comes from a physique magazine. In the 1950s, those magazines are among the few places gay men can find images of other men, published under the cover of health and fitness. Hamilton places that figure in a conventional household beside a pin-up woman.

In my room, the household is all men. What sits in the margin of the original is the subject of this version.

Similar, Unaffordable

Hamilton asks what makes homes different and appealing. The honest answer for bunkers is that they are all the same: concrete, filtered air, stored food, and a door that locks from the inside. What separates them is price.

This collage imagines the opposite of the current model. If bunkers are needed, everyone gets one. The same canned ham, the same screen, the same safe room, for the same reason that public schools, public libraries, and public shelters exist. Safety in a crisis is not a luxury product.

If the people building these shelters believe the future requires them, the question is not how to buy one. The question is why only they are planning to live through it.

— Behan

Sources

  • Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, collage, Kunsthalle Tübingen.

  • This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1956, exhibition catalogue.

  • Richard Hamilton, letter to Alison and Peter Smithson, January 16, 1957, in Collected Words 1953–1982 (Thames and Hudson, 1982).

  • Guthrie Scrimgeour, "Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Top-Secret Hawaii Compound," Wired, December 2023.

Monsters Out of the Closet

For most of its history, the zombie was a body that society marked as dangerous: feared, quarantined, and treated as a threat to everyone nearby. For many gay men, that description is not fiction. In the 21st century, however, the roles have reversed. From a queer perspective, the zombie is no longer the outcast. The zombie is the mob.

The link between gay men and the zombie began with AIDS. Infection films of the 1980s and 1990s were released while the epidemic was killing gay men and the public was calling for quarantine and testing. Critics have read the films' fear of contagion, and of people visibly marked by it, as a reflection of that panic. Harry Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet (1997) documents how horror monsters have long served as stand-ins for homosexuality.

Some filmmakers made the link explicit. Bruce LaBruce's Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010) present the zombie as a gay man who is alienated and treated as diseased. The BBC series In the Flesh (2013–2014) took the idea further. Its recovered zombies take daily medication, wear makeup to pass as living, and are rejected by their families and their town. Its gay lead, Kieren Walker, faces the same pressures as a closeted man.

That is the irony. The people who once treated gay men as a contagion now fit the zombie's description more closely than anyone. Much of the conservative straight community moves as a single body. It repeats the same slogans and turns on anyone who does not conform. It shows little capacity for independent thought.

Yeon Sang-ho's Colony (2026) makes this dynamic visible. Its infected share a single hive mind, and the crowd acts as one. In my collage, two men stand apart from that crowd. They are individuals set against a mob, and the mob is the danger.

Two icons from my recurring visual vocabulary frame the scene. The Blue Moon, in the upper left, stands for longing and witness. The Jupiter 3 spacecraft, at the right, stands for freedom, escape, and witness. Both icons share the role of witness. They record what happens to the two men, and they show that the men's longing and their way out exist outside the mob.

Eight Collages, Five Elements

These eight collages share a set of formal decisions. Each one is built from different source material, but color, value, line, shape and space are handled in consistent ways across the group.

Color

Saturated blue dominates most of the series. It appears as sky, water, rain-streaked windows and night. Warm skin tones sit against that blue, and the contrast between the two is the main color relationship in the work. The champagne gold of the Jupiter 3 adds a third, metallic note. Three pieces shift the key: one to lavender, one to deep green-black, one to amber gold. Each still keeps the warm figure against a single dominant field.

Value

Digital processing pushes the darks toward black and the lights toward white. Faces receive the strongest light in each composition. The middle values are compressed, which flattens forms and gives the surfaces a poster-like quality. The nighttime pieces use a low-key range, with light reserved for skin and the moon.

Line

Line comes mostly from cut edges. Each figure has a hard silhouette, and in several pieces a thin halo outlines it. This keeps the collage process visible. Horizon lines run across the landscapes, and window mullions divide the interior scene. The horizontal rim of the saucer repeats the horizon wherever the two appear together.

Shape

The circle is the constant. A moon or globe occupies an upper corner in every collage, and the ellipse of the Jupiter 3 appears in all eight. These geometric shapes contrast with the organic shapes of the bodies and with the rectangles of windows, car interiors and a magazine cover.

Space

Space is layered rather than continuous. The upper register holds the sky, the moon and the craft. The lower register holds the figures. Scale changes abruptly: large heads crop at the frame edge in the foreground while small landscapes recede behind them. There is no single perspective. Many foreground faces look directly out at the viewer, which places the viewer inside the arrangement.

The Result

The repeated decisions make eight separate images read as one series. The moon and the Jupiter 3 hold the top of each composition, and the men below them carry the content.