The Guardian Saturday Review
Stroke of Genius

Steve Mcqueen won the Turner prize with a film of a house falling around his ears. His new work, Cold Breath, shows him fondling his nipple. Adrian Searle reports.

Around the corner from the new Tate, in Delfina Studios' new project space, Steve McQueen has just installed a new work, his first outing in London since winning last year's Turner prize. The Tate has a work on display too – McQueen's 1993 film installation Bear, featuring two naked wrestlers.
 
Over the past few years McQueen has astonished his audience with his manipulation of subtle images – the artist rolling an oil drum through New York, a wonky view of the sky above his head, a balloon taking off into the blue, and a wall collapsing around him. His new work, Cold Breath, is no less arresting and complex.
 
A light flashes on and off in a long, thin corridor. A TV faces out across the narrow space. It is a deceptive come-on, and I walk gingerly between the walls. There's an image on the screen. I walk past the television and take a turn, where more pulsating light leads me on into a large dark space. I turn. The same film is running, a big, cinematic image on the wall.
 
The first time I didn't quite believe it. It was, I imagined, a close up, a detail of a bigger picture. But no. On the screen is McQueen's nipple, and the patch of goose bumped skin around it. Fingers and thumb hove into view, huge and purposeful. They pull at the nipple, yank and tweak it erect. The fingers go into a blurred frenzy, and it is clear that at times, McQueen is more concerned with pleasuring himself than with staying in focus in front of the lens.
 
For long moments, the nipple remains alone. The bare chest looks like a lunar landscape, the nipple and its areola an image from the dark side of the moon. Then he's at it again. I'm reminded of Billie Whitelaw's mouth, filling the screen in the TV production of Samuel Beckett's Not I. The speaking mouth, that wet, fleshy, involuted organ, eventually becomes something alien and alarmingly mobile. Now the hairless nipple looks like an eye. The nipple looks back, all-seeing, like the jailer's eye framed in the cell peephole in Jean Genet's great film Chant d'Amour.
 
Like Genet's still subversive film, McQueen's Cold Breath makes you wonder about your sexuality. It is as erotic as it is absurd. I mean, men's nipples? Why does no one discuss how erogenous they are?
 
McQueen compares his singular image to the eye-cutting scene from Buñuel and Dali's Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. The Andalusian dog in question was the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who studied with Buñuel and Dali in Madrid, and whose gayness troubled them both. The references keep on coming: to the film Robert Having his Nipple Pierced, featuring Robert Mappelthorpe. Overtly gay images, like Wolfgang Tillmans's photo of his late boyfriend masturbating and wearing a pair of heavy duty nipple-clamps, also come to mind, if only because the erotic potential of the male breast has, unaccountably, been seen as a queer thing.
 
"Lots of people assumed I was gay", McQueen says about his early works, Bear and Five Easy Pieces. "I didn't mind", he smiles, but it raised the question of why sensual depictions of the male body are almost inexorably given a homoerotic spin. Don't straight men like having their nipples played with? 
 
McQueen, talking about the strange hinterland between pleasure and pain occasioned by tweaking your nipples, points to the middle of his forehead, the third eye, and says, " the feeling's here, sharp, and one reason I wanted to work with the image of the nipple is that it is like an eye. I have a lazy eye, a squint that had to be surgically corrected, and there was something about the image of the single nipple…"
 
When McQueen fumbles for words, it is because he is trying to work out what only his work can tell you. He has great intellectual honesty, but doesn't take any shit. "My work is not a crossword puzzle. I get so pissed off when people ask me to explain it. I make these works to discover something, not to explain anything."
 
To me, Cold Breath is about the space between the lens and the body. It strikes me that its subject is that disembodied sensation of being behind the lens, making a film, and the narcissistic, subjugated and objectified feeling of being in the camera's gaze. McQueen has dramatised the narcissistic moment. The viewer is also in the frame. It's easy to laugh at talk about desire and the gaze as though they were  concepts to be kicked to death by Cultural Studies pedants, but they exist. McQueen never lets you forget it.
 
McQueen was working on Cold Breath before the Turner prize announcement. Like everyone else who's ever been nominated, he found that the experience resembled a horrible numbing war. He now spends most of his time in Amsterdam, with his partner and child, out of the public eye. He's working on a film with author Zadie Smith and cult musician Tricky, who's living in New York and weaned off the cocktail of prescription drugs he was taking to damp down his asthma, but that drove him nearly bonkers. If what they ended up with is half so strange, so complicated and so direct as Cold Breath, I can't wait.