Through erotic foliage and subversive historicizing, Danish artist Rasmus Myrup re-sees conventions in and out of the natural realm.

Photography by Petra Kleis

Tall and blue-eyed with sunny short blond hair, at first glance <a href="http://rasmusmyrup.com/" target="_blank">Rasmus Myrup</a> easily appears a poster boy for his home country of Denmark. And in fact he might have been&mdash;had his artistic practice not been about deifying one of modern society&rsquo;s strongest misconceptions.&nbsp;

Indeed, beyond his large smile, the artist continuously challenges the principle that natural order is based on heterosexual biological reproduction. Born in Denmark, and working now in Copenhagen after having lived in <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion-week/london-fashion-week-review-spring-2020" target="_blank">London</a> and <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/selah-marley-spends-a-day-in-paris-with-l-officiel" target="_blank">Paris</a>, he has elaborated a practice akin to an ecosexual manifesto that thinks of nature not as a worldly reproductive mother but rather a <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/queer-fashion-brands-to-shop-now" target="_blank">queer</a> orgy. An interest, the artist confesses, that came partly from his childhood. &ldquo;When you are a kid, you learn about nature in the sense of reproduction,&nbsp;like a seed becoming a flower,&rdquo; Myrup tells L&#39;OFFICIEL. &ldquo;As a gay person I just felt estranged; it was not something that I could belong to. The genesis of my artistic practices was a way to understand that nature is masturbating, having anal sex and orgies.&rdquo;&nbsp;

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In his quest to establish homosexuality as consubstantial to the evolution of mankind, Myrup went all the way back in time for his first solo exhibition, <a href="https://www.ofluxo.net/homo-homo-by-rasmus-myrup-at-tranen/" target="_blank">HOMO HOMO</a>, which opened at Denmark&rsquo;s Tranen Contemporary Art Center in 2018. Forget the prehistoric museum from your childhood in which a diorama of the perfect heterosexual family might be staged before the public&rsquo;s eye. Behind the apparent realism of Myrup&rsquo;s vision of a Homo neanderthal&rsquo;s settlement, one could see a jockstrap made of fur hanging from a tree branch, two&nbsp;dildos carved in wood seated next to a prototypal sex-swing, two hominids fellating, kissing, and cuddling each other, and the center of the exhibition: a prototype of a four-poster bed for two lovers. Myrup plays with the formal vocabulary of scientific display in order to engage in a <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/iconic-fashion-tributes-to-lgbtq-culture" target="_blank">queer</a> critique of the heterosexual premise of the prehistorical narrative. Beyond this, the exhibition is a camp pastiche of the natural history museum tradition; a gay detournement of the didactic mission of anthropological diorama. The philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georges-Bataille" target="_blank">Georges Bataille</a> once spoke ironically of the museum as a narcissistic surface that offers man the opportunity to contemplate himself from all sides and to be amazed by finding an object of wonder in front of him. In this case, the mirror that Myrup holds out lets us glimpse the face of a male Hominid covered in semen.&nbsp;

The problem with the word 'natural’ arises when it is used to define something right or pure.

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Such was a practice that the artist would grow into. For his 2019 New York exhibition <a href="http://jackbarrettgallery.com/remember-me" target="_blank">Re-member Me</a> at Jack Barrett Gallery, Myrup recreated a forest by collaging leaves&nbsp;sourced from Paris and trees originating from New Jersey. The viewer&rsquo;s attention is immediately drawn to the back of the room, to framed pencil drawings hidden behind or perhaps wreathed by foliage. Some of the hanging works portray bucolic scenes, their shared title &ldquo;Orgy&rdquo; contrasts with their apparent contemplative nature, while another, more dramatic moment depicts a male ejaculating with the semen replaced by samaras and other seedpods. Rural painting and pornography; it may be an odd parallel, but nevertheless it invites viewers to imagine the sexual darkroom behind each poppy field or a meeting of 17th century pastoral landscape master <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pous/hd_pous.htm" target="_blank">Nicolas Poussin</a> with pope of post-porn Bruce LaBruce. This vision of nature as a libidinal entity echoes the ecosexual movement of sex pioneers Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, and considers Earth not as a prude parental figure but as a lascivious sexual partner. Yet Myrup&rsquo;s approach is infused by a more ancient pictorial tradition: gay pornography. In the wake of Fred Halsted, who created an erotic portrait of Los Angeles as a libidinal continuum of dissident desires in L.A. Plays Itself, Myrup is ceasing the iconographic potential of pornography. Staging nature as a &ldquo;pollen bukkake&rdquo; allows the artist to challenge a painting history in which wilderness was most of the time either the site of epic battles or a romantic refuge.

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As a whole, Myrup&rsquo;s practice is a fight against the supposed unnaturality of homosexuality. Such is still the driving reason behind the persecution of homosexuals around the world,&nbsp;but for the artist the sentiment is ontologically groundless. &ldquo;The problem with the word &lsquo;natural&rsquo; arises when it is used to define something right or pure,&rdquo; he explains. Indeed, the idea of a natural order is a socio-cultural construction used to exclude behaviors and bodies that do not correspond to heteropatriarchal norms. Beyond this reasoning, Myrup drapes his thinking with a reflection on the history of gay representation and, most notably, a tradition that has praised homosexuality as an ancestral form of love. While homosexuality has historically been tied to the modern urban condition, a genealogy of artists and writers have, on the contrary, willed to embody it within classical artistic canons. These representations set homosexuality in a solar and open natural landscape, emphasizing a symbiosis between sculptural bodies and the wilderness.&nbsp;

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I do not think of nature and city in terms of dichotomy. I listen to Beyoncé with my iPhone and my white jeans in the forest, while I am a hermit in the city. I try to complement my urban skills with my rural skills.

It is in that context that Ancient Greece became a reference point for Myrup. In particular, Arcadia, a region nestled at the center of the Peloponnese, is considered to be the mythological birthplace of the homosexual utopia. Painters such as <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artist/paul-cadmus" target="_blank">Paul Cadmus</a> and <a href="https://www.moma.org/artists/1990" target="_blank">Jared French</a> in the U.S., Kristian Zahrtmann in Denmark, and Magnus Enckell in Finland have championed these representations and are among the artists that inhabit Myrup&rsquo;s personal Pantheon. In that regard, he says, Fire Island, a gay summer mecca since the &rsquo;50s located off the Southern Shore of Long Island, New York, is a particularly interesting illustration for the artist of such a representational shift today. Having stayed there&nbsp;during his three-week BOFFO residency, Myrup realized how the destination functioned not only as a refuge from the metropolitan homophobia but also pioneered a new form of rurality that did not obey heterosexual norms. Beyond the well-known festive rituals of the island, the community has been experimenting with novel definitions of intimacy, love, and hospitality that have produced its own urbanism, architecture, and sociability.

As it happens, Myrup lived in New York before returning home to Copenhagen. Two cities with opposite visions of&nbsp;nature: The former conceived nature as a holiday from its architecture, while the second is a model of a garden city. But Myrup refuses to give way to any notions of idealization, explaining, &ldquo;it is just that here [in Copenhagen] the landscape designer wanted something rougher.&rdquo; Thus, the artist&rsquo;s still-life installations hint precisely at this conclusion: the existence of primal nature untouched by man is an illusion. &ldquo;As for my personal experience, I do not think of nature and city in terms of dichotomy,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I listen to <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop%20culture/beyonce-rare-interview-family-social-isolation" target="_blank">Beyonc&eacute;</a> with my iPhone and my white jeans in the forest, while I am a hermit in the city. I try to complement my urban skills with my rural skills. I am an excited dilettante in both areas rather than being highly skilled at one.&ldquo;

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The artist&rsquo;s <a href="https://phipps.international/blogs/stories/an-interview-with-rasmus-myrup" target="_blank">collaboration</a> with the fashion brand <a href="https://phipps.international/" target="_blank">Phipps</a> might be the best illustration of this attitude. Following the forest culture thematic of the clothing, Myrup designed bags by twisting reeds into basket shapes, while <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/jewelry-gift-ideas-for-her" target="_blank">jewelry</a> was carved out of animal bones and walking sticks were created from tree branches for a <a href="https://hypebeast.com/2020/1/phipps-fall-winter-2020-runway-collection-paris-fashion-week-info" target="_blank">Fall/Winter 2020</a> collection entitled &ldquo;Treehugger: Tales of the Forest.&rdquo; Oscillating between the now-defunct Whole Earth Catalog (the radical late <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/beauty/mod-makeup-trend-ariana-grande-positions" target="_blank">&rsquo;60s</a> magazine that initiated survivalist culture), a <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/90s-outfits-celebrity-fashion-making-comeback" target="_blank">&rsquo;90s</a> Spiral Tribe free party, and a ranger seen through the eyes of Tom of Finland, the collection seemed to crystallize all the phantasms that forests have triggered since the world realized Earth&rsquo;s resources are finite. Without falling into total fatalism, however, Myrup remains careful to not indulge in any Emersonian idealization of the natural realm as a space of spiritual awakening.

The queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem believed that being gay was inhabiting an identity in perpetual motion, a state of contradiction between the norm and the marge, the public and the anonymous. As Hocquenghem once said, &ldquo;There is no promised land for homosexuals. We have to invent it. A territory that is not fixed in a state but a counter-world without a map or compass.&rdquo; This is precisely the territory that Myrup is drawing. Neither wonderland nor shelter, it is what the French call a Carte de Tendre (&ldquo;Map of Tender&rdquo;) for the age of extremes.

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Artist Rasmus Myrup Envisions Queer Prehistory

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