Continuing to Work toward US Manhood

Working toward Manhood

Raised in the Bible Belt of Tennessee, Skarbakka grew up surrounded by Pentecostal beliefs while he lived with his mother, stepfather, and brother. The artist participated in Bible debate teams and traveled to Europe for two summers as a teen missionary. These experiences provided him with early opportunities to act in front of an audience, and he quickly realized that he enjoyed performing for viewers. He has noted that these earlier experiences influence his current performative art making practices (Skarbakka 2011a, “Constructed Visions”). Skarbakka also revealed that his strict Christian upbringing failed to provide him with any “constructive information about how to deal with life” and, instead, left him full of fear and anxiety. Additionally, he spent many summers with his biological father, whose parenting style differed greatly from that of his mother and stepfather. Skarbakka’s father would promote drinking and “getting laid” to the teenage Skarbakka, which undermined the boy’s Christian indoctrination and led to confusion and bouts of depression (Marlan 2005, 28). The artist eventually left Tennessee by joining the US Army forced by his mother and stepfather to enlist because they thought it was part of his duty as a US citizen.

Leaving home gave Skarbakka an opportunity to escape from his upbringing, to a point, but his two years in the military, from 1988 to 1990, resulted in further depression and drug use. This time “led to an expansion of [his] mind in a very ungodly way” and to what he sees as his final breaking away from the religious teachings of his youth (DeWitt 2005, 31). Although Skarbakka’s chosen action of falling recalls the “fall of man” prevalent in Judeo-Christian narratives and beliefs, and the artist makes direct reference to Christianity in his image Jesus! (2003), he explains that he developed The Struggle to Right Oneself partially from a broader “life of anxiety, worry, and tension [that has] contributed to a certain sense of loss of placement and foundation” (DeWitt 2005, 31). ⁵ Skarbakka’s performative and demanding feats become ways for him to engage with the instabilities of his “placement and foundation,” which resulted from the various anxieties he has experienced. To such personal ends, he stated that this is the work that he had to make (Skarbakka 2011b, “Risky Business”). His art making seems to provide him with a personal way to work toward his self-understanding.

In a 2011 gallery talk, Skarbakka related The Struggle to Right Oneself to what he described as a Heideggerian understanding of loss. The artist urged, “[I]t’s our responsibility, basically, to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and continue walking through this life. We’re constantly falling toward, coming away from things, and dealing with so many things that these times, these moments, and these places are when we have to figure out the most how we are going to be able to pull through” (Art Relish Atlanta Visual Art 2011). Although Heidegger’s broader statements are about the philosophically abstracted individual, Skarbakka’s by-the-bootstraps sentiments connect the philosopher’s existential struggle of the individual back to Skarbakka’s specific cultural context of white, US manhood, or what men are supposed to do. ⁶

Individual struggle and responsibility are a gendered trope in the cultural history of the United States. By emphasizing the personalized aspects of his work, and himself as an individual making the work he has to make, Skarbakka’s masculinized by-the-boot-straps narrative has roots in the discourse of the “self-made man.” But the self-made man must constantly negotiate and prove his individual position among larger social dynamics. According to Kimmel, this type of man developed during the infancy of the United States and offered a distinct counterpart to European aristocratic masculinity. The self-made man was successful in the market and had social mobility (see Kimmel 2012, “The Birth of the Self-Made Man,” 11–31). The ideology of the labor and work of the self-made man has continued over the centuries, though the specific form this figure takes changes slightly to relate to his respective historical moment.

During the same 2011 gallery talk mentioned earlier, Skarbakka offered some of the personal issues he was dealing with while, at the same time, he connected the work to a broader audience. He described, “[T]hese are, of course, self-portraits to a certain degree. They are me, but they’re also me.” By repeating and emphasizing the word “me,” Skarbakka seems to suggest that on the surface level the images are self-portraits, but they also function more deeply as a place for him to work from his personal life. He continued, “The anxiety was … I was working out a lot of stuff. I was reeling off of …” Skarbakka trailed off and never finished these statements. He followed up by quickly listing, “My mother died of brain cancer in 1999. September 11th happened during grad school. Figuring out where my life is going as an artist and trying to figure out where it was I belonged—I was distraught. I was destroyed. This is where the work came from.” Skarbakka identifies personal issues, such as his mother’s death and locating himself as an artist, as some of the obstacles he must overcome as an individual. But, more broadly, he stated, “And I thought there was a lot of us in the work” (Art Relish Atlanta Visual Art 2011). To reference an “us” in the work suggests an empathy that viewers experience for Skarbakka. He solicits a sense of shared danger to further universalize his experience. However, because viewers most often do not intentionally place themselves into such physically demanding scenarios, this sense of a shared experience may give way to a sense of awe that returns viewers to Skarbakka’s individual feats amid ideals of white masculinity. Furthermore, the events of 9/11 created a collective “we” in the United States, to some degree, due to the sudden assaults on home soil. Skarbakka felt an individual sense of responsibility to “respond intelligently” to the events of the day and to the way the attacks shook the nation and its assumptions about its own stability and power (Marlan 2005, 29). ⁷

In other words, through his artist talks, which I understand as part of his performances, Skarbakka positions his personal existential struggle as one that he attempts to meet head on. But in his narration, there is also a larger we who holds a responsibility to be rugged individuals and overcome adversary as he attempts to do. The individual, national, and even larger cultural influences that provided Skarbakka with the impetus to create his series are too intertwined to delineate clearly. They suggest the labyrinthine processes of identity formation and societal constraints. Skarbakka positions his artwork among all three contexts, but he does not explicitly discuss the historical trajectories of the ideological tropes of white masculinity that he references.

Similar to Skarbakka’s struggle, art historian Martin A. Berger located Thomas Eakins’ (1844–1916) negotiation of the ideology of the self-made man in the artist’s creation of his nineteenth-century Realist paintings. For M. A. Berger (2000), Eakins’ gendered constructions in/through his paintings are created discursively due to the “interplay” or “friction between a community’s structures and its people” (p. 1). Often the disparity between ideals and an individual’s attempt to reach them is due to a possibility or sense of failing. M. A. Berger (2000) outlines Eakins’ negotiations of his “personal failings” among nineteenth-century US ideals of masculinity when he recalls that the painter “had bought his way out of Civil War service, was long unmarried, lived and worked in his parents’ home, was engaged in a profession that had consistently held effeminate associations, and was unable to earn his own living” (p. 11). It was the last failure in this long list of personal insufficiencies that Berger suggests was the most problematic for Eakins and his contemporaries. Recalling Kimmel’s more general description of the self-made man, M. A. Berger (2000) explains that while eighteenth-century middle-class men acquired their social status from their family connections, nineteenth-century men earned and proved their manhood through their work (p. 11). In an often-cited statement that Eakins made in 1893, the artist informed his larger public that his personal life was in his work, largely because he preferred not to write about his paintings. Eakins’ phrase sums up the struggle of the individual to negotiate his position and presumed failings in a larger culture, but he does so through being active and working.

M.A. Berger cites letters between the painter and his father who supported the artist financially, to trace how Eakins internalized and negotiated masculine norms and his personal failures. In a correspondence between father and son while Eakins trained in France, the painter wrote that he was “humiliated” and experienced “great anxiety” while spending his parents’ money. He suggested that after he completed his training, he would be able to make a good living upon his return to the United States (1867). In contemporary neoliberal culture, the emphasis on the individual meeting his or her responsibilities remains a pervasive trope. Like Eakins’ need to meet the requirements of the social status and masculine anxieties of his time, a sense of individual commitment leads Skarbakka to make statements about his need to succeed in the “art world.” He also voices his frustrations when he does not think he is doing so.

Such was the case in a 2009 artist talk when Skarbakka discussed his photograph Con-mporary (2005). In this frame, the artist wears a black suit, white shirt, and black tie as he levitates above the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago’s (MCA’s) main entrance. Onlookers watch his ascent as members of the media record his action (Figure 3). ⁸ When the performance-photographer described this frame to his 2009 audience, he pointed out that he had digitally removed the word “art” from the museum’s facade above the entry doorways. The word “contemporary” remains, although one of the onlookers blocks some of the letters on the overhang, hence the photograph’s title. During the talk, Skarbakka explained that he was thinking about adding art back in, but he had removed it as a joke on himself and the art world. He suggested, “What you have to be, now, in order to be a famous artist, is actually you have to be able to levitate. You have to be Jesus now in this art world to actually get some notice” (Baum Gallery 2009). His statement frames successful entry into the art world as a religious miracle. He has also commented that if he found himself unable to achieve success and make a good living, or if his series did not work, he would “make an exodus from the world of making art” (Marlan 2005, 29). Although the tone of his commentary has changed more recently from these earlier frustrated remarks, how Skarbakka would judge his accomplishments specifically remains unclear but harkens back to the success of the self-made man. Furthermore, threatening to withdraw from the art world recalls the masculine exercise of preserving one’s honor and status; if unsuccessful in navigating the situation at hand, manhood means that men tend to escape before they fail their specific situations completely. ⁹

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Figure 3.

Kerry Skarbakka, Con-mporary (2005), from Life Goes On (2005). (© Kerry Skarbakka and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA).

By many standards, Skarbakka would be considered a self-made man who has made his way into the art world. In addition to numerous international group exhibitions, the artist has held several solo shows including those at The MCA, Chicago (2002); Lawrimore Project in Seattle (2006); Irvine Contemporary in Washington, D.C. (2007); The Pittsburgh Filmmakers (2010); and the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles (2013). His photographs are held in numerous private collections and have also been collected by art institutions including Light Work; the MCA, Chicago; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. But the ongoing pressure continues for exhibitions in larger venues and support from renowned funding sources. For instance, in 2014 he was nominated, but not selected, for a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

Working among their respective (masculine) pressures, Skarbakka and Eakins used their artwork to negotiate their manhood and overcome potential failings. Eakins, as Berger argues, negotiated his manhood through both his subjects and his process. His well-known painting Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, or The Champion Single Sculls, (1871) becomes exemplary in these respects (Figure 4). The title figure glides past viewers after his rowing victory on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. During this historical era, sports served as a site to negotiate the self-restraint and morality associated with proper masculinity. As M. A. Berger (2000) contends, “On the simplest level, Eakins’ athletic canvases offered symbolic reassurance by linking the artist to a series of unimpeachably masculine characters and professions. Accepting the ideal of the self-made man as the model for manhood, the canvases work to associate Eakins with a handful of men widely understood by period audiences to epitomize that ideal” (p. 3). ¹⁰ The ideal manliness of Eakins’ athletes, one of whom this painting depicts, was due to a combination of the athlete’s apparent “success, modernity, and ‘whiteness’” (M. A. Berger 2000, 3).

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Figure 4.

Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (1871). Oil on canvas, 32 1/4 × 46 1/4 in. (81.9 × 117.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Purchase, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund and George D. Pratt Gift, 1934 (34.92). This image was provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Eakins imagined himself as participating in the modern world of the athletes. He had experience rowing with his classmates and his family, who lived only a few blocks from the Schuylkill. In Max Schmitt and the Single Scull, the painter demonstrated the assumed authority that his experiences afforded him by representing himself in a second boat behind Max Schmitt. The champion holds his oars stationary as he turns around in his boat to look back at the viewer, but Eakins painted himself actively at work as he rows his scull. He reaches forward to pull his oars back. By highlighting his action, Eakins emphasized his work and own authority with rowing; he was not just a passive spectator but, instead, framed himself as an active participant despite the fact that he did not race in the championship contest that he painted. Furthermore, Eakins chose not to represent Schmitt’s first championship in 1867. The painter depicted the October 5, 1870, race that he had witnessed personally and, consequently, emphasized his own experience in conjunction with the subject matter he represented (Johns 1983, 38). ¹¹

Like Skarbakka’s athletic struggle in vain in Clean and Jerk, Eakins used Max Schmitt and the Single Scull to construct his own masculinity rather than merely record a historical event “realistically.” And, like Skarbakka, he created a self-portrait of sorts by doing so. However, Eakins’ representations of physical prowess and other abilities gesture toward his apparent successes. In contrast, Skarbakka makes it clear that he has the strength to succeed in physically trying situations but appears to fail through the act of falling. He maintains control of his working process so that he does not injure himself terribly. At the same time, his resulting photographs must suggest failure due to his investment in evoking a more general sense of contemporary uncertainties and anxieties rather than the modern heroism of Eakins’ canvases.

Physical activity, or “working out,” has served as an arena in which US men test and prove their manhood. In the nineteenth century, sports became opportunities to participate in manhood through the character building activities that were understood to improve men’s health as well as their morality. Such is the case with Eakins’ focus on athletes including rowers and, later in his career, boxers (M. A. Berger 2000, 7–46). The turn of the twentieth century was a time when the urban workforce increasingly included clerical and professional occupations, so men used sports to prove their abilities when their occupations failed to provide them with physical forms of work (Kimmel 2012, 101). According to Kimmel, the more recent focus on men’s bodies is due to the increase in managerial forms of labor and larger numbers of women in the workforce. Because of these shifts in society, men retreat, or escape, from their workplaces to the gym, such as all of the men who Schuler and Cosgrove find use improper form when weight lifting. As Kimmel (2012) summarizes, “When our real work failed to confirm manhood, we ‘worked out’” (p. 225). ¹²

Skarbakka highlights the contemporary masculine focus on prowess more overtly by including images of sports and exercise, albeit in ways that continue to suggest failed masculinity. These include Clean and Jerk and Over the Handlebars (2008). In the former, he attempts but fails at weight lifting. In the latter, he remains midair after he flipped over the handlebars of a bicycle (Figure 5). He holds onto the handlebars with his left hand as he reaches his right hand above his head and in front of him. His failed attempt at the sport threw him over the bike’s frame. The artist’s choice to depict this exact moment suggests that he had developed the extreme core strength necessary to maintain his position as he hovers parallel to the ground, even though the click of the camera’s shutter is what actually paused his action.

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Figure 5.

Kerry Skarbakka, Over the Handlebars (2008), from The Struggle to Right Oneself (2002-present). (© Kerry Skarbakka and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA).

Again there exists a tension between Skarbakka’s individual strength and a larger collective empathy or shared experience. Regarding this frame he told one of his audiences:

I like this one largely because I’ve flown over the handlebars of a mountain bike several times … I really, really found it fascinating because you could fly for second, and you knew there was an ultimate something here. But if you could just enjoy this part, that was cool, that was really good. And I would enjoy that as much as I could, and I would cover up and hope that I didn’t take it on the chin too much. Those are some really interesting places [and] I think we don’t give enough credence to those spaces. They’re just moments. So these are documents of those moments. And some of them take it past that point and some are a little before, but, in general, that is the idea I try to edit these towards. (Art Relish Atlanta Visual Art 2011)

Freezing the action at the moment before the resolution of his fall over the bike’s frame invites an experience of anxiety. Viewers know that he will hit the ground but are left to wonder what happens to him when he does so. Skarbakka intends for the unresolved moments to cause a sense of anxiety. It is this lack of resolve that gives his images their edginess, while, at the same time, he unwittingly replicates broader tropes of masculinity as a constant, and unresolvable, process. He also photographed his nude body in Naked (2002), Shower (2005), and Drain Pipe (Upstream) (2012). Although Skarbakka displays his able-bodied form, he is always represented in some athletic feat. Therefore, these nude scenes do not read as sexualized as much as they demonstrate his physique and masculine abilities.

Cultural rhetoric situates white masculinity as a disembodied ideal. Thus, when art writers address the identity of white male artists, it is often based on their activities of “doing” rather than their corporeally identified positions of “being” (see Buick 2010, xvi). Eakins negotiated masculinity through his doing, or the way that his experiences with activities that included rowing gave credence to his ability to paint men like Max Schmitt. Over a century later, cultural ideals continue to associate manhood with acts of doing. Skarbakka and critics highlight how his training in martial arts and mountain climbing informed his actions for The Struggle to Right Oneself. Throughout his body of work, Skarbakka’s acts of doing involve repeatedly putting himself into mitigated physical danger and testing his limits as he remains, mostly, in control of his process.

For example, in Trestle (2003) an abandoned train trestle extends across a ravine of dizzying heights until it culminates into thick green overgrowth (Figure 6). Like the directional compositional forms in Clean and Jerk, the lines of the trestle lead to a lone man on the edge of the structure and provide a platform from which viewers experience the unfolding events. The man on the bridge bends his knees, extends his arms, and looks toward his imminent destination. The photograph frightfully arrests his action right at the moment that he is past the point of no return. He will fall, though we do not see it happen or how he lands. The man’s appearance also constructs a sense of confusion or unease. His white skin contrasts with his dark suit, a sign often associated with middle- or upper-class businessmen in the contemporary United States. Cultural rhetoric associates suits as signs of work but does not place a businessman jumping from a bridge into a deep forest ravine. This protagonist has escaped his employment to wander through the foreign, forested frontier, and leap, presumably once he could no longer handle the societal pressures and events surrounding him.

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Figure 6.

Kerry Skarbakka, Trestle (2003), from The Struggle to Right Oneself (2002-present). (© Kerry Skarbakka and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA).

To create Trestle, the artist leaned out over the edge of the Vance Creek Bridge, the second tallest railway bridge ever constructed in the United States. He tied a rope around his waist and attached it to a support on the structure. As he leaned out over the edge, an assistant released the camera’s shutter. Skarbakka then loosened the rope to lean out a little further, and the assistant snapped another picture. Skarbakka leaned, the camera shutter released. He leaned again, and the camera recorded him again. This process continued until, as Skarbakka explained, he began to shake from exerting himself and from the possibility of real harm. That little voice of warning or intuition told him he had gone far enough, and he stopped. He pushed himself to what he felt were the limits of his safety and went no further (Skarbakka 2011a, “Constructed Visions”). By having multiple shots of himself in this scene, the artist was able to select the frame he wanted to alter toward his final composition.

All of Skarbakka’s frames in his series involve the possibility of real injury, though the danger of Trestle is a more extreme case. There have been times when he injured himself through his art making, such as when he broke a rib during an early and rare live performance. He climbed a ladder to turn off a single light that hung from the ceiling. Just as he turned off the light, the ladder toppled out from under him. This was all part of the performance, but, unintentionally, Skarbakka (2006) slammed his rib cage into the ladder during his descent. Such injuries become (masculine) badges of honor as he retells stories about his art making processes. But he also explains that he is unable to continue this kind of work forever due to the difficulty and danger of it. Repeatedly, he has mentioned the challenge of performing such acts as he grows older. He also highlights the problems of creating his series during times when he did not have health insurance (Marlan 2005; Baum Gallery 2009; Skarbakka 2010). His statements about aging and lacking health insurance emphasize his need to do this type of work despite limiting circumstances. Skarbakka, like Eakins, tests, positions, and attempts to prove himself and his manhood through his work, and art making serves as Skarbakka’s, and Eakins’, selected form of labor.

The continued emphasis on men working is such a pervasive trope that a recent 2013–2014 group exhibition showcased several frames from Skarbakka’s The Struggle to Right Oneself under the exhibition title Men Working: The Contemporary Collection of Allen Thomas, Jr. Installed at the Turchin Center for the Arts, the exhibition contained fifty-four works by male artists. Yet, the exhibit’s title and accompanying statement did not question the association between men and work in the least, and many of the artworks do not engage with the subject matter of work in any visibly overt way. The only explanation offered in the exhibit’s brief pamphlet and online description describes:

Allen Thomas, Jr. is a collector who is passionate about contemporary art and about access to great art. While his collection features artists working in a variety of two- and three-dimensional media, he has established a stellar collection of photography, drawing and sculpture by artists around the globe …. The exhibition features male artists working in a variety of media and approaches. (Turchin Center for the Visual Arts 2013) ¹⁴

Marking the Unmarked

While I have described how Skarbakka’s art making functions as a site to construct his individual and cultural ideals of white masculinity, there are ways that white masculinity occupies a privileged position in society. Its treatment in the art world mirrors its larger social functions. Today, statements of individual and by-the-bootstraps responsibility feed into neoliberal ideology and, in favor of constructing an abstracted ideal individual, serve to erase structural inequalities that often disadvantage those “marked” by their positions that include race, gender, and class (see Duggan 2003). The prevailing description of Eakins’ paintings as “realism,” as though the painter merely recorded subjects from modern life around him, has been challenged by art historians Elizabeth Johns and Martin A. Berger. Both scholars highlight the various cultural discourses at play around the making and viewing of Eakins’ canvases. Likewise, Skarbakka’s series tell us about more than an individual artist’s personal obstacles and the anxiety of a post-9/11 United States. Both Eakins’ and Skarbakka’s works showcase the historical and contemporary advantages granted to white male artists through their assumed connections to ideals of white masculinity. An additional example will bring the privilege of white masculinity to the fore and expose the unintended ways that Skarbakka’s series replicates normativity even while it seems to represent a white man losing control and falling.

Global relationships and state power become apparent in Skarbakka’s Border Fence (2012), yet his whiteness mitigates much of the threat implied by the image (Figure 7). In the scene, he appears to have leapt over the newly renovated fence between Nogales, Arizona, in the United States, and Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico. The tall rusted brown posts of the fence cast parallel lines of shadows onto the dirt road that runs beside the metal barrier. The photograph suspends the artist who wears a black T-shirt, blue jeans, a black baseball cap, and a backpack. He remains in midair with his arms out and knees bent as he drops toward a small grassy mound. Though we cannot know for sure if he is entering Mexico or the United States, when seen in the context of his larger series, we know he is a white man, even though he hides his individual facial features. Skarbakka’s whiteness and his well-kept clothing do not evoke the body, conditions, or reality of border crossings. Border Fence counters the typical, yet overly simplified, narrative told in the United States that border fences are meant to keep (brown) Mexicans out of the (white) country to their north.

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Figure 7.

Kerry Skarbakka, Border Fence (2012), from The Struggle to Right Oneself (2002-present). (© Kerry Skarbakka and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA).

The fence’s large scale—its height and the way it snakes deep into the background of the photograph—dwarfs the artist’s body and visually displays the state’s power and attempts of control. The parallel rows of shadows cast by the bars of the renovated national boundary further emphasize the act of caging people to specific places as the shadows create lines that recall prison bars or stripes worn on prison uniforms. Like many of the images in the series, Border Fence implicates the viewer in the space of the six-foot tall image. The dirt road running along the fence extends past the bottom of the photographic frame. Led visually into the space of the image by the tapering grassy mound at the base and the top band of the fence that intersects Skarbakka’s body, we stand on this road and wait to see the outcome of his fall. But are we a border patrol agent waiting to capture him? A coyote helping him to cross? Or another visitor to this site—in which case, will we rush to aid him, report him to authorities, or ignore his transgression of this boundary?

Border Fence draws to mind Skarbakka’s interest in the loss of individuals’ control against a backdrop of global relationships. In a 2005 interview, he bemoaned, “[Society is] driven by greed and we have a leader [George W. Bush] who thinks he is ordained by the Western God to bring our ideology to everyone else. This is not right and there is nothing I can really do about it. I am continually stripped of the ability to control what my government does or how the rest of the world views us” (DeWitt 2005, 28). Once again a friction arises between the sense of individuality in the nation and larger communal structures. But we could ask if individuals ever had the control for which Skarbakka longs. Furthermore, we can remind ourselves that to talk of “individuals” often privileges white masculinity in the United States.

Skarbakka’s representation of the national border emphasizes the struggle of the masculine individual to take control against obstacles outside of himself—here the state. At the same time, the image highlights the privilege that Skarbakka’s whiteness provides him. The artist’s identity serves to lessen the threat of state power against his body/him/his whiteness. At the time he made this image, Skarbakka was a professor of art in Arizona. He visited the US-Mexico border fence with a group of his students while on a trip around the Southwest. Their aim was to examine the man-made impact on the land with the border fence as one stop on their itinerary. When approached by border patrol, Skarbakka explained the reasons why he and his students were there. The artist recalls that the US guards “seemed amused, if anything …. The patrols were obviously talking about us to each other on walkie-talkies, letting everyone know all was okay” (Skarbakka 2013). ¹⁶ The results of his visit to the fence could—would—likely have been much different when he entered into this highly patrolled space were it not for the privilege afforded by his whiteness.

Overall, there is something visceral and relatable to many viewers of Skarbakka’s frames, and their reactions seem to add to the sense of catharsis Skarbakka experiences through making his images. Stated differently, viewers’ approval offers reassurance that he is successfully proving himself and creating engaging images. For example, I was in the audience when Skarbakka presented The Struggle to Right Oneself at the 2011 Society for Photographic Education Southwest Regional Conference. Numerous times when he switched his presentation slides from one image to the next, members of the audience let out audible gasps. Likewise, when talking about his Over the Handlebars at the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery in Atlanta, he suggested that we try to enjoy our flight after we fly over the handlebars but before we hit the ground. Members of the audience chuckled in response, which made Skarbakka smile more and exaggerate his performative gestures further as he delivered the rest of his gallery talk (Art Relish Atlanta Visual Art 2011). Such responses position Skarbakka as successful in encouraging the audience to be able to relate to the work and/or feel anxious about, or even in awe of, his physical feats. For such reactions to happen, or in order for his art to work this way on the audience, viewers need to experience both the anxiety and the relief of the situation. The formal arrangements of the images implicate viewers so that we are left helpless to intervene in his falls. But because his series involves a possible relief to this helplessness—we see similar acts across multiple frames and know that Skarbakka was not permanently injured—we can enjoy the anxiety of falling momentarily while we stay out of any real danger.

If viewers do not realize the physical commitment involved in Skarbakka’s performances when they view the still images, they will understand it when he performs his talks. His narration of the stories behind the images often underlines the performative aspects of his project more so than it distracts from the complexity of the series. He performs while creating the images, and he performs during his artist talks. These performances act like double exposures; the multiple performances become inseparable and blur together into the layered meanings suggested by his series. While our—as viewers—anxiety is mitigated by knowing more about Skarbakka’s process and his physical training helps to lessen most of the harm that threatens his body, his white masculinity provides him privileged access. This happened during his visit to the physical space of the national border but also in terms of white male artists’ access to the unmarked positions in the art world and larger culture. At the same time that he has some advantages, such as when compared to nonmale artists or artists of color, he must also work continuously among masculine constraints in society. Privilege—with the dialectical fear of losing its foundation or stability—and the constraining expectations of manhood function as inseparable layers of another double exposure. Describing only one layer destroys the overall composition and results in an incomplete picture.

The title of Jon Yates’ (2005) article about Skarbakka’s live performance at the MCA offers a final point of analysis regarding Skarbakka’s construction and reconstruction of white masculinity as an individual negotiating social dynamics. The journalist’s title “Being a Fall Guy All Day Long; Relax, It’s Only Art” is revealing for three reasons. First, calling Skarbakka a “fall guy” emphasizes his chosen action while it also places him as a scapegoat. But for what? Does his positionality become the fall guy for white masculinity? He does not always follow the rules, such as when he transgresses politically sacrosanct spaces in his references to 9/11 and his representation of the US-Mexico border. Doing so has upset the public, but he also should have the opportunity to respond to these events and spaces. ¹⁷ Or, does he fail to reach ideal manhood so he keeps trying again and again? Second, “all day long” comments on the performance-photographer’s repeated commitment to his project. It also suggests that he cannot escape his individual construction and reconstruction of his own masculinity amid cultural ideals of manhood. These ideals, and his relationship to them, manifest all day long. And, finally, Yates tells us not to worry because this is only art. But, as I have detailed in this article, there is no “only” to art. Skarbakka’s The Struggle to Right Oneself is one site of many that serves to actively construct white masculinity through Skarbakka’s own struggle, the subjects he represents, and the reception of his images, including Yates’ title.

By marking Skarbakka as a white male artist, this article is not an attempt to keep hegemonic, or white, masculinities in place by suggesting that white masculinity is a subject position without privilege or power (see Carroll 2011). Additionally, I do not mean to place blame directly on Skarbakka for his working process and photographs or for his being male and white; I do not mean to position him as the fall guy for my critical analysis. Instead, I seek to highlight the ways the reception of the works like Skarbakka’s typically do not address “normativity” directly. Such reception further perpetuates the myth that certain bodies circulate without embodied particulars—a dangerous myth cultivated by, and necessary for, neoliberal ideologies and subsequent social inequities. Skarbakka may be able to create his works from a privileged position so that he negotiates his identity in unconscious or unintended ways. But until we further discuss identity in more nuanced ways as a relational process, white masculinity will continue to maintain its privilege as an unmarked position.

The Struggle to Right Oneself may be the work that Skarbakka had to make, just as Eakins recounted that his life is in his work. But in their respective contexts, the artists’ claims resoundingly highlight ideals of white masculinity as a process through which men try to reach the illusively ideal position; they follow the “rules” and work to reconcile their personal lives, or individual positions, amid the larger collective. The role of visual representations, such as art, and descriptions of such representations, such as art history, becomes important sites for the ongoing construction of white masculinity as well as opportunities to challenge institutionalized hegemonic assumptions. This is a critical intention that Skarbakka’s artist statement for The Struggle to Right Oneself begins to suggest but does not quite deliver. It is through the descriptions we offer about his affective and thought-provoking work that we can counter the gendered and racialized assumptions that underlie art history and broader culture.