Band of Thebes

David Wojnarowicz Biography: Fire in the Belly

Just out from Bloomsbury, Cynthia Carr's bio of essential artist / writer David Wojnarowicz takes its name from his work censored at the Hide/Seek exhibit, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle]. PW chose it as a Pick of the Week, writing "In this lucidly composed, skillfully contextualized first complete biography of David Wojnarowicz, former Village Voice reporter Carr reveals how the controversial artist’s life experience shaped his art and politics. Tracing his early life as a withdrawn, unstable student, sometime hustler, and store clerk in the troubled New York of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Carr reveals the artist’s struggle to express his emerging gay identity and the violent intensity of his family life."

The NYT says, "Ms. Carr’s biography is both sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s... The author braids small, unlikely narratives among the large ones. There’s an account of the art store clerk who gave away free supplies to poor artists he admired, and one of Redden’s, the sole funeral home in Manhattan that would accept AIDS patients in the early days of the crisis, winning the loyalty of many gay men. Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The knowing cover photo is by friend and mentor Peter Hujar, whom David called "the parent I never had," except they did sleep together. See Peter's nsfw portrait of David's nude handwork.

If you haven't already, read David's journals and diaries.

Antigay Humor Calendar Removed from B&N, Amazon

 

God knows I'm always happy to see The Gays flex their muscles. Nevertheless, I have mixed feelings about this week's uproar causing B&N.com to remove cartoonist Joe King's tacky humor calendar I'm Not Gay, I'm Just a Sissy. (UPDATE: Amazon continues to sell it. also has removed it.) The product is ignorant, unfunny, in bad taste, and steeped in tired stereotypes about effeminate men. It does not libel, defame, spew false facts, or incite violence. At heart, the problem appears to be the silly and mean-spirited attempts at humor are offensive to some people. We are in for a world of trouble if the criteria for removing a product is that some people say it fails their personal taste test. As with the Hide/Seek debacle, I think the best response against offensive work is to make one's case articulately, and shun it, but not censor it.

Philip Kennicott Slams the Art World's Homophobia

In the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott blasts a favorite Thebes topic: the entrenched homophobia of museums, galleries, and critics, with much discussion of Christopher Reed's new book, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas. Kennicott's essay is must reading:

"Even the arts world, often seen as a haven for diversity, is being forced to confront a long record of using cultural power to demean, control and hide the contributions of gay artists...

"While both [Hide/Seek] and Reed’s book make a positive case for the often intimately entwined histories of homosexuality and art (especially in the 20th century), they also document a litany of shameful events and grievances, many of them perpetrated by institutions and people who may be forced to confront past bigotry and make amends...

"Even museums that are not actively in the business of anti-gay bigotry are often prone to hiding the rich history of same-sex desire... Rarely, if ever, is any explanation given for the role that figures such as Ganymede (a boy kidnapped by Zeus), Saint Sebastian (depicted as a handsome youth pierced by arrows) and Orpheus (who in some versions of the legend turns away from women and to the love of boys after his ultimate loss of Eurydice) play in the iconography of same-sex eroticism.

"In some cases it is museum policy not to explain anything about the art (another suicidal habit of the modern American museum). But in other cases, the information is simply missing. As cultural change continues... institutional silence on gay themes may no longer be seen as an innocuous, 'family friendly' strategy. 'Family' is now understood to include gay parents, married gay couples and people with gay children, and the absence of basic information about the role of same-sex desire in art history has become an overt sin of omission."

As Kennicott explains, "Whole movements and eras, from the aestheticists of the late 19th century to the abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century, simply don’t have coherence without reference to same-sex desire."

While unmasking the antigay biogtry of straight powerbrokers -- "the downtown Artists’ Club, which served prominent ab-ex painters, also encoded a 'no homosexuals' clause in its constitution" -- Kennicott also points out that gay artists Gilbert & George refused to allow their work to be included in a gay show in 1982 or in Reed's book now.

More to come about Reed's intriguing book, just out from Oxford University Press.

Big thanks to a favorite reader for the tip.

Study Documents NY Museums' Wide Suppression of LGBT Themes

Last week, Out History released a previously unpublished study by curator Jonathan David Katz and Weena Perry documenting the suppression of LGBT themes in exhibits, online education, and printed catalogs at New York's leading museums. Of the seven institutions, the Guggenheim ranked the highest with a nonetheless low score of 12% inclusiveness and the worst, with a total of 0%, was the New York Historical Society. The Met earned an abysmal 1.8%. Such willful exclusion of queer scholarship and information is deeply damaging; the report argues  

"The failure of museums to engage in a wide swathe of art historical scholarship is of grave concern because it raises the question of historical accuracy. Failing to educate the public about the LGBT subject matter or significance of the work, or of the work’s producer, does a profound disservice to the work as a cultural document, to the LGBT community which has produced a number of greatly respected and admired artists, and to the society as a whole."

Beyond the macro view, the details of the museums' pettiness are painful to read: "As recently as 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was asked if they would simply list a symposium on Rauschenberg and sexuality among their publicity materials for their Rauschenberg Combines exhibit. They refused, as they refused to include sexuality in any way in the exhibition itself."

The full report covers the years from 1995 to its completion in August 2007 but was never been published.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Smithsonian is hosting a two-day free public forum called Flashpoints and Fault Lines:  Museum Curation and Controversy, which will be broadcast live on the web starting at 6:00pm. Katz and Charles Francis are two of the speakers on the panel Representing Sensitive Topics: Gender and Sexuality, scheduled to begin at 7:15pm. They will dazzle, of course, but otherwise the majority of participants are so uniformly establishment -- handpicked by the Smithsonian -- the event might be renamed Curation and Conformity. Notice on Wednesday's panel titled Curation, the questions include "To what extent do public figures have a say in how they are presented? How do we listen to cultural communities and account for their sensibilities and sensitivities?" When the "cultural community" complaining was the Catholic League, the museum immediately removed the Wojnarowicz piece from Hide/Seek. When it's criticism from the LGBT community, the results are documented in the report above.

After Hide/Seek, Corcoran Symposium on Culture Wars: Then & Now

In the wake of the Smithsonian's appalling removal of the Wojnarowicz piece from Hide/Seek, the Corcoran, Transformer, and the National Coalition Against Censorship are banding together today for an seven-hour symposium, Culture Wars: Then & Now. Svetlana Mintcheva, director of programs at the NCAC (which was founded in 1974), nails the greater problem in saying, “We are convening this symposium because the fear of controversy and subsequent institutional self-censorship that come in the wake of a censorship incident are much more dangerous than the incident itself.”

The panels include many hotshots, from keynoter Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr [pictured] to People for the American Way president Michael Keegan to Art+ activist Bill Dobbs. Absent from the lineup are the Hide/Seek curators, who perhaps have already contributed everything they can on the subject, or anyone else connected to the show.

The four topics are Censorship Examined; Culture Wars Redux; Give Me a Revolution: Artists’ Responses to Censorship; and Free Speech & Arts Funding

The full agenda after the jump

Born March 13: Janet Flanner

How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker, which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years, and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.

Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.

Born February 12-13: Jacqueline Woodson, Grant Wood

In fourteen novels for young readers and seven picture books, Jacqueline Woodson has given voice to characters usually ignored or silenced in mainstream stories, and in doing so she's been a finalist for or won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Booklist Editors' Choice Award, and many, many regional prizes. She most often writes about friendship, especially across racial and class lines, and family or first love. Her girls are strong and her boys are caring, and she has included glbtq characters as adults and children, sometimes as the primary storyline. She's created a complete bibliography of her novels, with plot summaries and where and why she wrote each book. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their two children, loves pizza, hates artichokes, and doesn't believe in writer's block. The ALA's 2009 list of great lgbt reads for young readers included her most recent novel, After Tupac and D Foster, about a trio of 11 to 13 year-olds coping with a tough neighborhood and the homophobia aimed at one of their brothers.

Today is Grant Wood's 120th birthday and the first on which you can read a fully integrated account of his life and work and how both were influenced by being closeted in Iowa, thanks to Tripp Evans' breakthrough biography. (Today is also the closing day of Hide/Seek, which gives prominent placement to Wood's homoerotic Arnold Comes of Age.) Evans' book reprints that color image and many other of his paintings that are more interesting and more beautiful than his more famous American Gothic. Tripp Evans will discuss Wood at Christie's in New York on March 1, the University of Kansas on March 4, the Providence Athenaeum on March 18, and at Kenyon College on March 24. For later events click here, and definitely buy the book, one of my favorite nonfiction titles of 2010.

WaPo: Smithsonian Secretary Must Resign over Hide/Seek Removal

Philip Kennicott, a Washington Post staff writer, has published a tough commentary demanding the resignation of Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough, who made the decision to remove the David Wojnarowicz video from Hide/Seek after a right-wing protest. Kennicott says the decision "showed an astonishing lack of perception about the humanities as well as the dynamics of museum culture. It was tactically, strategically and historically stupid." Summarizing the aftermath, he writes:

"The removal of the video was a tiny gesture of exclusion meant to thwart the powerful march of democratic openness that museums in general, and this exhibition in particular, exemplify.

"Thus: Gays are allowed to be seen in the museum, but not entirely; scholars control the agenda, unless bureaucrats countermand them; new forms of the sacred can be represented, unless old defenders of the sacred take offense."

Last week, another artist in Hide/Seek, AA Bronson of Canada, asked the Portrait Gallery to remove his large-scale photograph "Felix, June 5, 1994" in protest of the museum's caving to censorship. The museum has refused, claiming the legal right to keep the work in the exhibit. Kennicott argues they must let Bronson remove his photograph:

"Although it would harm the integrity of the show, allowing Bronson to remove his work would create a large symbolic hole in the exhibition, a blank space on the wall, which could be explained as a marker of the Smithsonian's mistake and the aggression of outside forces that resist the powerful, democratic agenda of the modern museum at its best.

"That agenda, the result of decades of efforts at reforming an institution that once bluntly manifested state and class power (through architecture, art and hierarchical social codes), is the backdrop against which Clough made his ill-fated decision. The modern museum has evolved from a straightforward display of power - this is Culture, so genuflect, ye masses - to a paradoxical place where old forms of power and discipline are harnessed to create new kinds of debate and criticism."

Hide/Seek runs through February 13. See it. If you can't, buy the catalog, still only $29.70.

Hide/Seek Week #8: Annie Leibovitz's Ellen DeGeneres

Ellen DeGeneres in Kauai Hawaii, 1998, by Annie Leibovitz

Hide/Seek's undercooked analysis here completely avoids Leibovitz's lesbianism and largely rehashes Ellen's coming out. The curators say, "Leibovitz's photograph presents a carnival of visual signs that highlight the ambiguities with which DeGeneres presented herself in public and on her television shows. Amid the madcap mugging in the photograph, notice the aggressive presentation of the breasts versus the exposed boxer shorts. DeGeneres's mimelike mask both reveals and hides, and the cigarette gives her a tough-guy look."

Hundreds in NYC Protest Hide/Seek Censorship

Art Positive's NYC protest of the removal of David Wojnarowicz's Fire in My Belly from Hide/Seek attracted hundreds of people yesterday in front of the Metropolitan Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt. I'm sorry I missed it (flying) and I'm disappointed that their lead sign only calls out the Smithsonian, not the antigay right wing extremists who demanded the censorship. Hyperallergenic has several photos; the one above was posted by PeeWee to ArtPositive's Facebook page. The Wall Street Journal (via Towleroad) quotes the typically anemic response from the Smithsonian:

Linda St. Thomas, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian, expressed regret that the video's removal had overshadowed the exhibit itself. "One hundred and four pieces remain," she said in a telephone interview. "We're sorry that the video had to become the focal point."

The video is not the focal point here; it's the bigotry and cowardice.

Hide/Seek Curators Show Art, Skim Controversy at NYPL Event

That it's taken three days to write about the Hide/Seek curators' presentation at the NYPL is all the indication you need of how little happened. Understandably, David Ward and Jonathan Katz said they wanted first to do what they were invited to do -- present highlights from the show (rushed, and still too long) -- before addressing the controversy around the Wojnarowicz removal. Unfortunately, they didn't address it afterward -- several esoteric art questions came first -- until absolute hero Ann Northrop reminded them of their promise and asked for answers. Ward's canned replies were along the lines of 'Are we unhappy about it? Absolutely. But there are still 104+ works to see.' Katz's response had more heat -- calling the Catholic League "anti-Semites" and "an American Taliban" -- and revealing himself as a political naif to say he "can't believe in 2010" that politicians would align themselves with such a group. A more interesting point Katz made was about the bitter sting of hearing criticism about the cowardice of the removal from the very New York art institutions that refused to mount or co-curate the exhibit.

Very roughly, the crowd was perhaps forty-percent more angry about the removal (a chant of PUT IT BACK! PUT IT BACK! did not catch on) and sixty-percent more supportive of the NPG for being the one institution brave enough to host the exhibit. The problem with the latter view is that the Smithsonian has said to the homophobic bigots, You're right, we're wrong. The group's trumped-up falsehoods were confirmed as truths; to ignore that travesty and only rally round the capitulators for their earlier bravery gives the haters a free pass and further emboldens them for their next baseless attack on anything they deem unacceptable.

Art+ is organizing Sunday's 1:00pm march from the Metropolitan Museum to the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, protesting the removal of A Fire in my Belly.

Hide/Seek Week #7: Cass Bird's I Look Just Like My Daddy

I wish it weren't the case that the male curators' energy and insight is usually deepest on the male works and weaker, more shallow, and more obvious regarding lesbian art.

I Look Just Like My Daddy, 2003, by Cass Bird

"Through her photographs, Cass Bird asserts the positive existence of people who subvert and push the perceived boundaries of gender specification. She thereby suggests a world that is polymorphous, indeterminate, and androgynous. In this photograph, taken on a rooftop in Brooklyn, Bird's friend Macaulay stares out from under a cap emblazoned with the words, "I Look Just Like My Daddy." Macaulay's gender -- powerfully self-determined against societal assumptions of what it means to be male or female -- is ambiguous. Her cap's proclamation is likewise ambiguous -- perhaps it is true, perhaps it is an ironic statement of an expectation that will never be realized. Bird's sensitivity toward lives that both resist and intersect with accepted notions of gender and family informs her entire photographic practice."

Hide/Seek Week #6: Cecil Beaton's Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas

If you needed any proof of the benefits of controversy, the New York Times' art critic Hollard Cotter said he was initially disappointed in the Hide/Seek catalog and decided not to cover the show, dismissing it as a "pride" event, but after the Smithsonian removed the Wojnarowicz piece, he decided to go take a look in person. Today it's a front page news story and finally earns a review on the front page of the arts section.

The Guardian also sent a critic to review the show and talk to curator Jonathan Katz about the fracas.

About 100 protestors demonstrated outside the Portrait Gallery last week, and curators nationwide are highlighting Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly" in their museums. A Facebook group Support Hide/Seek already has more than 3,400 fans.

Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, 1935

The catalog calls this "an image of exotic domesticity," but otherwise offers too much biography and far too little art criticism. Instead, enjoy this brief highlight by Cecil Beaton in his two pages about "these remarkable ladies" from his 1951 Photobiography:

"I had been extremely impressed by the warmth and simplicity of this American couple, who showed such a passionate interest in everything that was going on around them. But it was when they came to London...that I first photographed them and, as a result of one long morning spent together in the studio, became a devoted admirer and deeply grateful friend of both Alice and Gertrude, who were like newly found fairy godmothers and gave me so much sympathetic encouragement.

"...The twists of electric wire hanging from on high reminded them of a mobile Picasso had made for them.

"They were quite a startling-looking couple; Gertrude with her closely cropped iron-grey hair, in her flowered waistcoat and tweed skirt, Alice in a large black felt hat and grey flannel suit. In whatever juxtaposition I took them, the effect was incongruous and strange; yet so great was the integrity of their characters that they could not possibly be made to look ridiculous. About Gertrude there was always something monumental. Her magnanimity shone through her trusting brown eyes, so that she was the best sitter any photographer could ever hope to have."

Hide/Seek Week #5: Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera

Given the Smithsonian's censoring David Wojnarowicz's ants on a crucifix from Hide/Seek, it's appropriate to feature this week the image curators worried would spark the greatest outcry, Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera. As religious groups trample the public square, we're wading deeper into cultural quicksand where cartoons, art, speech, ideas are erased from everyone's view if anyone is offended. You don't need to have seen Hitler and the Germans this week to know that's the path to disaster. But we live in a time of enormous cowardice in which no one at the public pulpit is willing to tell religious institutions to keep it in their houses of worship. And by and large LGBT people have reached a level of comfort we don't want to jeopardize by complaining. Or we're too busy.

Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, invites public comment at npgnews [at] si.edu or send an old-fashioned letter to NPG, PO Box 37012, MRC 973, Washington DC 20013. The museum's general phone number is (202) 633-8300.

Hide/Seek is on view at the NPG through February 13. See it and buy the catalog.

Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera, 1994, a triptych by Lyle Ashton Harris (created with his brother Thomas Allen Harris)

"...the Harris brothers weave a complex visual allegory that invokes ancient African cosmologies, Judeo-Christian myths, and taboo public and private desires. In this provocative center image, the brothers exchange a passionate kiss as Thomas presses a gun into Lyle's chest -- conjuring the original biblical story of Cain's treachery toward his brother, Abel...'As black queer cultural producers, we are celebrating the liberatory potential of this black nationalist icon [UNIA's tricolor flag] by expanding the notion of who may claim to it,' Lyle explains. The image transgresses many dualisms we use to structure society: male vs. female, black vs. white, 'brotherly love' vs. homosexual desire. And it raises provocative questions surrounding themes of domestic abuse between lovers, perceived violence among black men, and the dangers that come from engaging in an 'illicit' love -- whether it be from disease, homophobia, or a lethal combination of the two."

Smithsonian Removes Wojnarowicz Video After Catholics Complain

Ants walking on a crucifix in a 30-second video David Wojnarowicz made to honor his dead lover, photographer Peter Hujar, has been called "hate speech" by the Catholic League, and as a result the Smithsonian has removed it from their Hide/Seek exhibit. (Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor also complained.) As Blake Gopnik writes in today's Washington Post: "Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards."

He continues:

"Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.

"This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "

"The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.

"And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack."

(The image is Hujar's portrait of Wojnarowicz, not the video removed.)

 

Hide/Seek Week #2: Thomas Eakins' Salutat

Curator Jonathan Katz considers Thomas Eakins' Salutat one of the masterpieces of American painting. He told me he was particularly thrilled to be able to include it in Hide/Seek. So, unless you spend a lot of time hanging with the preppies at Andover, you haven't seen Salutat in person; this is your chance.

Salutat by Thomas Eakins, 1898

"...Yet Easkins turns Gilded Age conventions of the male gaze on their head. By making the object of desire an undraped male instead of a nude female, Eakins resisted social norms. He furthered his deviation from convention by having his boxer not box, thus stripping away the sole acceptable rationale for contemplating a nearly naked male form. The crowd is not admiring the boxer's jab, but his body, especially his buttocks. The boxer is also hardly a paragon of masculine power: he was a featherweight twenty-two year-old working-class lad named Billy Smith, who became much admired in Eakins' circle for his continuing devotion to the painter."

My parents toured the Hide/Seek exhibit in DC this week and loved it. If they can make time to go, so can you. And if you can't, then get the catalog.

Hide/Seek Week #1: Mapplethorpe's Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979

Had he lived, Robert Mapplethorpe would have turned 64 on Thursday. Instead, aids killed him at 42. Three months after his death, the Corcoran canceled his retrospective in a far-reaching act of curatorial cowardice that derailed major museum gay exhibits for decades. Jonathan Katz's brand new Hide/Seek show at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery is a rebuke to that homophobia, and -- not coincidentally -- includes four images by Mapplethorpe. Go see the show and buy the excellent catalog, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, co-authored by Katz and David Ward. Band of Thebes will run one work from the show each week through the end of the year. For a look at Mapplethorpe's early NYC years, get Patti Smith's Just Kids.

Plate 64, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979.

"...The machismo of the couple's leather gear is undercut by the flamboyance of their living room -- replete with an Oriental rug, pewter vases, sculpted lamp and clock, and grass cloth wall covering. This complicated interplay of hypermasculine and homosexual attributes, of perversion and domesticity, undoes any interpretive move that might confine Ridley and Heeter in or as their sadomasochistic roles. That this homosexual S&M ritual takes places in the context of the couple's 'normal' life (which also includes antique collecting), powerfully destabilizes received notions of what it means to be a 'normal' or 'domestic' couple."