Anthony Goicolea is a photographer, painter, and video installation artist. His work focuses on subjects and themes such as Romanticism, masculinity, adolescence, mythology, personal identity, ritual and obsession. Goicolea received his BA in art history and a BFA in painting at the University of Georgia and and MFA from Pratt. His work is featured in a number of prestigious museums including the MoMA and the Guggenheim.
Goicolea describes his work in the series You and What Army as being informed or inspired by works of Henry Darger. Goicolea strives for a uniformity in his work and addresses such topics boyhood maturation and demarcation; at what point does a boy transition into a man? His army of "little Anthonies" thematically references Darger's repetitious cut-outs of little girls in cinematic landscapes in a seemingly dystopian society. His image titled "Pile" shows young boys playing what appears to be childhood games. This is image is playful in this aspect, however the coldness of the children's surroundings and the wall's seemingly endless height visually reference images from the Holocaust. In a separate series called The Detention Series, Goicolea focuses on child labor and the ideas of procession, ritualism and of futile, Sisyphean tasks.
As my work deals a lot with adolescence, I am attracted to this idea in Goicolea's work about transitioning from boy to man and what demarcates that transition in a male. I use my sister as a surrogate for my own wishes because she is yet at that age where it is yet required of her to accept responsibility; it is still socially acceptable for her to act like a child. However, when considering Goicolea's argument about what event(s) demarcate a boy's transition into adulthood, Goicolea explains that a girl becomes a woman when she has her first period. In the case of my sister, I completely disagree with this point of view. A girl's first period is a physical attribute that is out of her control and is determined by an internal clock. However, I think the mind acts separately from the body; the body may be maturing, but the mind could potentially be lagging behind. If the mind is not mature could you really argue that the person (though physically changing) has matured? I think a person's maturation (boy or girl) is determined by their acceptance of responsibility and an awareness of who they are in and out of their environment. Does that make any sense? Interesting conversation, I think.
(Note: I was unable to make it to my last 2 lectures and am referencing older visiting artist lectures through podcasts. )
