Review: Man bites painting at Vox Populi

Things have changed since 1961, when Jasper Johns made his Painting Bitten by a Man, an encaustic painting out of which he actually took a chomp, thereby embedding it with a vague eroticism (that Johns, a quiet gay man, kept the painting in his personal collection for many years before giving it to MoMA only added to its mystique). Now, a few decades down the road, another "Painting Bitten by a Man" — this time an exhibition at Vox Populi titled after the Johns painting — brings together the efforts of two artists, Brian Kokoska and Jonathan VanDyke, who seem happy to let their queer sensibilities permeate every aspect of their art. I did not see VanDyke's presentation of his three-hour performance, Cordoned Area, on opening night, but have since walked around the large piece of canvas on Vox Populi's floor on which two male dancers cavorted with each other and paint, covering their clothing and the canvas (and part of the wall behind) in smudges and smears of vivid turquoise, purple, orange, and pink. The residue makes for a lively abstraction, but you also realize how deeply and broadly the human body is impressed and implicated in this work. Yves Klein, who famously directed nude women to roll around in blue paint on canvas, is the obvious touchstone.