How Erwin Olaf Married Freedom and Discipline

Erwin Olaf knew how to pick his people; he knew how to light a shot; he knew how to throw a party. You could put together quite a life knowing just those things. But it doesn’t make easy work for any museum attempting a retrospective of the lauded Dutch photographer, who died two years ago at the age of 64 mere weeks after receiving a lung transplant. Privilege any one version—activist, formalist, hedonist—and you risk overdetermining the others; keep them all in play and you risk diluting the intensity of those commitments to community, craft, and kink. What to do?

In “Erwin Olaf—Freedom,” the Stedelijk Museum polemically presents the scale of the artist’s diversity, devoting over a dozen rooms to a breathtaking range of photographs alongside occasional experiments with video and sculpture. This strategy produces incongruous juxtapositions. A technically exquisite portrait of the Netherlands’ Queen Máxima, with Olaf’s reflection visible in her pupil as befits a compatriot of Jan van Eyck, is hung on the same wall as Joy (1985), a crotch-level canted shot of a lip-parted boy ejaculating champagne mousse across his belly and thighs. If this produces tonal whiplash for the visitor—all the better. Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” makes for easy quote-porn but is difficult in practice. So many retrospectives try to divine some metanarrative flowing through the oeuvre, discovering signs of the late work in the early, demanding inconvenient differences conform to a unified vision. The Stedelijk refuses this lure, thereby displaying the boldest aspect of Olaf’s work: the possibility of there being someone who could find extraordinary beauty in both a barren landscape and a fucked-up clown.

The throughline, in other words, is the artist himself. (And the title. We’ll come back to that.)

Accordingly, the visitor wanders from documentations of subcultures (the joyful posturing of bodybuilding, the bittersweet bravado of drag) to the 1988 “Chessmen” series of nude models in mannerist sadomasochistic postures bearing anachronistic props. Another room reveals a different question of discipline and restraint in the 2022 series “Dance in Close-Up,“ abstract compositions centering the tension that a forearm or arch can support. Exceptionally close with the choreographer Hans van Manen, Olaf photographed dancers throughout his career; plantar flexion alone furnished ample material for his kinesthetic aesthetic.

Rooms unfold. Commercial work gives way to the glitter club grotesquerie of Paradise Portraits (2001) but also the gutting April Fool (2020), formal studies of the apocalyptic shock of social distancing made during the uncertain days of the first covid shutdown. Self-portraits, 40 years’ worth, surface everywhere, including his triptych I Wish, I Am, I Will Be (2009)—a chiseled golden ideal next to a middle-aged softening next to a projection of himself with an oxygen tube. Don’t rush past the posters and polaroids from the clubs—RoXY, Supperclub, Paradiso; they form a history of a pre-gentrified Amsterdam that doesn’t exist anymore. Fucque les Balles, Milkshake, the Black Tea Party: for Olaf, these parties were as aesthetic as activist, as necessary as euphoric.

No wall text can ease the shock that sets this vernacular material next to the large-scale series “Rain” (2004), “Hope” (2005), and “Grief” (2007). These cinematic tableaux of stunned figures make reference to history as what hurts: the Kennedy assassination, the murder of Theo van Gogh, 9/11. As Olaf’s later work turned to staged photography, the images become glossier, almost painfully refined. But then turn a corner and find yourself once more with playful carnality.

Not unlike Mapplethorpe, whom he cited as an influence, Olaf was an artist of bodies. Not The Body as an art-historical constancy but bodies, plural, as they live and heave, as they crouch and age. He lit for details—the folds of a pannus, the brutalized toenails of a dancer—with the eye of someone who loved the multiplicities of flesh the world puts on offer. While the show refuses to reduce Olaf to his most infamous works, nor does it sequester them in some curtain-segregated Gabinetto Segreto. You have to reckon with all his contradictions.

One such contradiction is that Olaf worked across the particular and the universal. He was a queer artist invested in the specificity of queer nightlife, queer activism, and a queer ethic of dignity and care. He was also a distinctly Dutch artist in the way he sculpted figures in light. (In his lifetime, the storied Rijksmuseum devoted more attention to his work than the contemporary-focused Stedelijk.) But he was also an interlocutor of art history, and something of a mischievous one. Cum—Self-portrait (1985) restages the glistening beads of Man Ray’s Larmes (1932), exchanging milt for glass. An inspired curatorial decision to cover several walls with enlarged contact sheets foregrounds the importance of the studio, meticulous preparation, the rigors of decision—this is Olaf as master of process. One need not choose only one of these appellations.

That ability to hold opposing things at once is also apparent in the lone throughline the Stedelijk permits itself: that titular word. Freedom, after all, only means something to someone who understands constraint, control being the precondition for the delirium of losing it. If freedom twinned with discipline is what connects political activism, artistic experimentation, and sexual exuberance, it is all the more moving that it is vulnerability that keeps showing up in Olaf’s works. Facts: the artist was a gay man who survived the 1980s, who lived for years with an emphysema diagnosis, unavoidably aware of the world’s cruel distributions of loss. His last series, “Muses” (2022–2023), returns to models from his earlier work, unflinchingly showing the effects of time on the human form. The tone is neither romantic nor grotesque—it acknowledges. Death comes untimely for all. No single response is required for that: grief and rage and glorious defiance are equally available. Nor is a love of crazy parties at odds with a technical obsession with craft. Everything is more interesting in the variety. If that makes for a fine exhibition, one senses it made for an even finer life.