The Brooklyn Rail

The words “Bring Me Men,” which titles Gray Wielebinski’s show at Nicoletti, greet visitors across the gallery’s façade in large letters, just as they once greeted his father from above the parade ground at the United States Air Force Academy in the seventies. It is a demand that has only grown more loaded as masculinity and its most florid expressions have become a cultural spectacle. Wielebinski fetishizes too, but with images that reduce men to bodies in a queer way; the assemblages he builds from them are wry and pop-inflected, calling to mind Isa Genzken and Wallace Berman.

Wielebinski sees virility as a seductive impossibility and deflates it with raunchy humor, though on both counts he is hardly the first. Strap (2026), for example, presents a wooden box with folded jeans at its base. An image of a silver bullet is lodged in the button fly, from which springs a bush of dark, wiry pom poms. Other contents include two magazines, one showing a pearl necklace looped around a gun barrel, the other two femdoms and their sub. A double entendre is never far away.

There are also rulers scattered around the gallery, lined with star-shaped stickers bearing the faces of male idols (Vin Diesel and Timothée Chalamet among them, as avatars of the brute and the boy). I took them for a hilarious indictment of Hollywood as a dick-measuring contest. The numerals don’t add up, but that is perhaps the point: the measure of a man is made up anyway, even if the standards feel no less binding for it.

The disjunctive, anti-hierarchical aesthetics of assemblage are well within Wielebinski’s command, but the unpredictability that his visual glitches promise is harder to find. The problem begins, in part, with his choice of image. Entering the gallery, you find an Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bag splayed against the wall like a cross. A shelf bisects it, holding five editions of A Man, Oriana Fallaci’s novel about someone she both exalted and unmade. Ambivalence extends to the bag’s image of young men in low-slung boxer shorts, and even more so to its photographer, Bruce Weber, who remains untouchable despite repeated accusations of sexual misconduct by his models.

The irony of these Abercrombie & Fitch ads, and much else in the show, is that virility at its most heterosexual is vain, self-conscious, and more than a little gay. Sylvano Bussotti, Richard Hawkins, and Pacifico Silano have already exhausted that insight, as have the irony-pilled Tumblr accounts that traffic in the very same images. The ads are, it should be said, beautiful, the boys in them aggressively so. This is where the trap is set, for Wielebinski as well as the gay man writing this review. Wielebinski sets out to reckon with masculinity—that “ripe, hairy armpit, by turns toxic and intoxicating,” as Paul McAdory put it in his review for The Cut of HBO’s Half Man. But here, desire has a way of undoing the arguments made against it. The desire, in this case, seems to be for the image itself, even if there is little left to subvert.

Bring Me Men is ultimately about whether clichés can be critiqued with clichés. Too often, Wielebinski’s borrowed material functions like shorthand, and there is little genuine juxtaposition because there is little misalignment. Take a stack of three collaged boxes featuring images from the golden age of Hollywood, collegiate sports, physique photography, and gay porn, all of them emphatically vintage. The same constellations are all over the party posters and bedroom walls of a certain kind of young creative: cynical but romantic, culturally porous but insular, self-aware but not immune to self-mythology. Such legibility extends beyond meaning into the signaling of a highly specific and recognizable taste, the very idea of which is, of course, intrinsic to any appropriative practice. But taste is desire’s purest product, and therefore dangerous; it collapses the artist’s self into a kind of editorial intelligence, one that exposes a fantasy only to reproduce the pleasures of entering it.

To be fair, this recursiveness is part of Wielebinski’s point about the pathologies of the masculine. His materials are as time-worn as what they seek to critique. This is most evident in a series of three chests of drawers fronted with frosted perspex, obscuring, among other things, a JanSport backpack, a high school yearbook, a fraternity paddle, and an adult model release form. Here is an archaeology of hardening—its first compressions, its initiations, its ritual violence, all mechanisms for wringing contradiction from a child to make a man.

What Wielebinski’s references cannot account for, weighted as they are by sentimentality, is the logic of mutation as endurance. They evince so little granular interest in the grotesqueries of manhood as it is currently being sold to the impressionable.

My favorite work in the show, A Deskful of Boys (2026), also engages with the past, but on memory’s own peculiar, irreducible terms. It is a first-aid box with the cover of Music for Chameleons on its front. The inside reveals a full frontal nude of a young man with “boy” scrawled across his body. Scattered at the bottom are photographs of two men in a snow-covered forest, two men running naked, a man smiling in a way that makes the photographer present—alongside a VHS tape and a porcupine quill. Peering in felt like going through a box someone hides under his bed, a portal into thwarted desire and a eulogy for a different surrender. The men here have a past rather than a meaning, and in that distinction, the show breaks the closed circuit of its references.