Karlheinz Weinberger, "Vintage Prints: Belts, Jackets, Couples and More"

There are two things the art world seems certain about these days: (1) A major contraction is coming, and (2) it won’t be as bad as the one at the turn of the 1990s, when scores of spaces closed and an entire gallery district—the East Village scene northeast of the current boomtown around the Bowery—disappeared. This optimism is supported by the belief that the art market is too global—and too much has been invested in it—to be allowed to fail. We’ll see. One thing you can expect, though, is a wave of people poor-mouthing the work of the past 12 to 15 years, as The New York Times’ Roberta Smith noted in a piece just before Christmas. Dubbing this trend the “aughties backlash,” Smith went so far as to mount a counterargument: Sure there have been excesses, but the period has been characterized by artists pursuing various strategies of social engagement, reaching out to wider audiences with the collateral effect of expanding opportunity for everyone involved—collectors, curators and university departments, not to mention auction houses—which has to be a good thing, right?

The virtues of successful careers, however, aren’t always reflected by the quality of the artworks they produce. I’d submit that, going forward, what we need is less aughties-style social engagement, where the goal too often seemed to be proximity to the glamorous and powerful, and more good, old-fashioned antisocial attitude. At least, that’s what occurred to me, taking in “Vintage Prints: Belts, Jackets, Couples and More,” a show of the Swiss outsider photographer Karlheinz Weinberger.

If asked, “What are you rebelling against?” Weinberger, who labored in obscurity for 30 years before dying in 2006 at age 85, wasn’t the sort of person who would answer, “What have you got?” That would have been a more likely response from his most famous subject: a group of teenagers in early-’60s Zurich whose obsessions for Elvis, James Dean and denim resulted in a florid subculture know as the halbstark, or “half-strong.” Teasing their hair into gravity-defying bouffant hairdos and pompadours, they retrofitted drainpipe jeans with machine bolts for fly enclosures. They trimmed Levi’s jackets with barbarian fur, and sported enormous, hand-forged belt buckles with images of their icons—crotch-level billboards, in effect, for the American pop culture they sought to escape into. Weinberger captured it all in poses that were alternately glamorous and gritty, and leavened with humor. More than just fodder for his lens, however, the halbstark were invited into his life, to hang out at his house. But he was no Larry Clark. Weinberger kept a cool, classical distance from these kids, though undoubtedly he empathized with their alienation, knowing that they’d soon become straightjacketed by the same repressive society he had to contend with.

A gay man in squeaky-clean Switzerland, Weinberger worked his entire life in a warehouse, picking up the camera as a weekend hobby. He started out in the 1950s doing beefcake shots for a local homosexual publication, and continued shooting male subjects—drifters, mostly—to more pornographic effect into the 1970s and ’80s. Some of those images are here, alongside those of the halbstark, suggesting that he saw both groups as one and the same: not so much objects of erotic fascination as monuments to a fleeting sense of mortality and, ultimately, a futile grab for glory. More interestingly, as someone who witnessed the catastrophic events of the 1930s and ’40s (if again, from a safe remove), Weinberger in his images hints at the sexual underpinnings of fascism—a political expression, in part, of one’s willingness to submit to another’s desire. This is made explicit in Neonazi (1975), in which a well-endowed if dissolute character sits naked in front of a swastika flag. His penis is mottled by a large brown spot, a sardonic nod, perhaps, to the impurities hiding in the woodpile of racial supremacy.

By the mid-1960s, the Swiss media began to take note of the halbstark, and Weinberger’s photos, as documents of a bewildering phenomenon, appeared in magazines of the time. In 1999, his work was collected into a book, and subsequently became an inspiration to fashion photographers such as Steven Meisel, as well the subject of exhibitions like this one. The fact that Weinberger’s work has so much more resonance today than the efforts of so many “socially engaged” artists is an object lesson in the difference between reaching for a wider audience and finding one for keeps.