Aubrey Beardsley seems to be an influence in the work of American artist James Gobel. Gobel's works -usually made as a form of beautifully crafted felt marquetry, sometimes painting- create a camp sensual world that refers to iconography recognizable in most western gay cultures. Yet, there is something more than celebration going on here. In the construction of the images and the depiction of the characters that fill them, we are somehow invited to take stock. In much the same way that Beardsley is both complicit with and critical of the decadent creatures he created, there is something in Gobel's work that asks us to question the incessant drive for fabulousness, gorgeousness and fame (if only on the dance floor) that form the fallout out of the radical gay movements of the 1970's. The artist seems to be fully cognizant that the promise of community has been replaced with a form of corporal capitalism, yet he certainly pulls away from rejection. We are, at the very least, asked to understand the attractiveness of gay iconography for many men, the way in which it at least presents some hope of a hedonistic actual gay community free of heterocentric constraints and how the currency of fame and glamour an important role in sustaining the ideology of this hope. The faintly ridiculous visual language created by gay cultures may fall short of a Utopian solution, but it remains a powerful attractor. --Ken Pratt