Peter Berlin | “On Cruising Culture,” Paper Magazine

From Christopher Barnard’s interview with Peter Berlin for Paper Magazine:

To a certain generation, the name Peter Berlin evokes an image of strutting ’70s male sexuality, all overstuffed leather pants, and blond Prince Valiant hair crowning a body of rippling, tanned muscles. Born Baron Armin Hagen von Hoyningen-Huene, Berlin would come to personify the sexual freedom and insouciant attitude of an era with his gay cult sex films like “Nights in Black Leather” and “That Boy” that chronicled the very real encounters he based an entire life pursuing and perfecting. His relationships with the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol also established him as one of the more compelling figures of the moment, where hedonism for its own sake seemed to be a perfectly acceptable existential end.

In addition to his films, his series of self-portraits furthered his sex god status and could be argued as a pre-cursor to the selfie, if fully produced and knowing in their Narcissus quality. These images are now the new subject of an exhibition at ClampArt gallery in NYC, which opened last week, an occasion that provided the chance for us to talk to the man behind them. Now preferring to live a quiet life in San Francisco, coincidentally among the streets he used to prowl so famously, Berlin, now in his 70s, talked to us about the personae he created, his brief return to New York, and his first few weeks on Facebook.

Read the full interview

Browse the exhibition “WANTED” at ClampArt
Browse all of Peter Berlin’s work at ClampArt

William Wylie (b. 1957)

William Wylie (b. 1957, Chicago) is an American photographer and filmmaker whose work considers the intersection of human activity and the character of place. His series A Prairie Season (2012) follows a six-man football team at Prairie School in the Pawnee National Grassland, Colorado, capturing the rhythms of practices, games, and community life against the backdrop of an expansive prairie landscape. Wylie earned his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and is Commonwealth Professor of Art at the University of Virginia. His photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and he has received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Gardar Eide Einarsson

Gardar Eide Einarsson (b. 1976) is a Norwegian conceptual artist known for his work in painting, sculpture, and installation. His art critically examines the dynamics of power and social control by recontextualizing symbols and imagery from various subcultures and political sources. Einarsson’s aesthetic often employs a minimalist and monochromatic style, drawing from protest slogans, graffiti, and police manuals to create a tension between individual freedom and systemic constraints. A graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, his work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, and is held in prominent collections worldwide. He currently lives and works between Tokyo and New York City.

Richard Tuttle (b. 1941)

Richard Tuttle (b. 1941, Rahway, New Jersey) is a pioneering American postminimalist whose work resists categorization. Since the mid-1960s, he has created delicate and unconventional objects that blur distinctions between drawing, painting, and sculpture. Working with humble materials—string, paper, cloth, wire, and wood—Tuttle emphasizes scale, placement, and the subtleties of perception. His practice invites viewers into an intimate, poetic encounter with form and space. Tuttle has exhibited internationally for more than five decades, with major retrospectives at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and SFMOMA.

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