During World War Two, the Australian government's Department of Information represented the male body in at least two distinct ways. The photographer Edward Cranstone photographed a heroically active, phallicised body and the cameraman Damien Parer filmed a heroically suffering abject body.
Let's speak about nomads and farmers... The acrid vapours that fill the cast iron nooks and crannies by day: the trickles on metal that appear in my black and white slides each night like blood from a more visible crime: this evidence of the distillation of men: these signs are signs enough of the collapsing consequences of 'farming'.
Vigilantly looking out to sea, the two manifestations of the life saver, the saviour and the sportsman, are combined in this 'gay greeting card' in such a way as to draw on the history of surf club masculinity and create an erotic pose.
Masculinity continues its argument with itself, quizzical at its self-propelled self-assertion. But in asserting aggression the pain is not just experienced in the victim. For even in the crudest acts of coitus, for a moment, the raper becomes the raped, he is tied by his penis and his balls into an abomination.
Harry's work immediately identifies the object as a site of meaning. It is fair to say that Harry is strongly opposed to any restriction or taboo upon what he may represent, particularly from the arena of representing the female object or gender.
Since 1927, the idea that the motor cycle is synonymous with assertive and unmediated masculinity has been enlarged and expanded through a broad range of visual, literal and cinematic imagery to the point where a machine which was once acclaimed as a means of transport has been transformed into a gendered cultural icon, an object of and for masculine display.