Review: Seeing Things Differently

Author(s): Grant H. Kester

Reviewed work(s):
The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire by Deborah Bright
Source: Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 101-103
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777919
Accessed: 17/02/2010 11:34

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the past. Do everything possible not to
repeat our mistakes and to make your
dreams become reality."'3
1. DavidA. Ross,"Interview: DavidA. Rossin
Conversationwith IlyaKabakov," inIlyaKabakov
(London:PhaidonPress,1998), 17, 19.
2. Correspondencewiththe author,March14,
1999.
3. Ross,8.
4. SvetlanaBoym,Common Places:Mythologies
of
Mass.:Harvard
Everyday LifeinRussia(Cambridge,
UniversityPress,1994), 193;thanksto Marianne
Hirschof DartmouthCollegefor suggesting
Boym'sworkto me.
5. Ibid.,193.
6. BorisGroys,"'WithRussianOn YourBack':A
ConversationbetweenllyaKabakovandBoris
Groys,"Parkett, no. 34 (1992):36.
7. Amei Wallach, llya Kabakov:The Man Who
NeverThrew AnythingAway(New York:HarryN.
Abrams,1996),86; citedfroma 1992letterfrom
Kabakov to Wallach.
8. PaoloFalconeinterviewwith llyaandEmilia
Kabakov, in llyaandEmiliaKabakov, Monument to
a LostCivilization/Monumento allciviltaperduta,
exh. cat. (Palermo:CantieriCulturali aliaZisaand
Milan:Edizioni Charta,1999), 17-18.
9. Wallach,84.
10.IlyaKabakov, Auf demDach/Onthe Roof,exh.
cat. (Dusseldorf:RichterVerlag,1997),8.
I 1. Boym,193.
12.Wallach,29.
13.Monument, 19.
AmyIngridSchlegelis curatorat the Philadelphia
ArtAllianceandorganizerof the currenttraveling
exhibitionYouCan'tGoHomeAgain:TheArtof
Exile,whichincludesthe workof IlyaKabakov,
WlodzimierzKsiazek,DinhQ. Le,TanjaSoftic,
IreneSosa,andAnaTiscornia.Itwas on view
at the BrattleboroMuseum&Art Center,
Brattleboro,Vermont,fromMay14to July18,
1999andwillbe on view in Philadelphia
from
February 7 to March19,2000.
Seeing Things
Differently
Grant H. Kester
Deborah Bright, ed. ThePassionate
Camera:
andBodiesof Desire.London:
Photography
Routledge, i998. 441 pp., 200 b/w and
color ills. $85.
As Jerry Falwell's recent attack on the "gay
subtext" in Teletubbies suggests, queer
identity in our culture has a particularly
close and complex relationship to questions
of visual representation. Is that a television
antenna on Tinky Winky's head or a gay
pride "pink triangle"?Is Tinky holding a
purse or just a "magic bag"? And what are
we to make of the Teletubby fascination
with wearing skirts?Falwell's decision to
fixate on remarkablyobscure (and perhaps
nonexistent) signifiers of queerness in the
Teletubbies, while such obvious examples
as Xena:WarriorPrincess captivate millions of
children each week, tells us a great deal
about straight, conservative fantasies of
queerness as a discourse of subversion
and seduction. It raises another question
as well. Is there a specifically queer her-
meneutics of the image? What are its con-
ditions, and how is it different from either
Falwell's homophobic paranoia, or, for
that matter, from mainstream art historical
methodologies? In her book ThePassionate
Camera: PhotographyandBodiesof Desire,Deborah
Bright provides an invaluable guide to the
conditions of queer visuality in the specific
context of photographic
history and art practice.
Bright, a photo historian and artist
who teaches at the Rhode Island School
of Design, has combined a wide range of
materials, including historical and archival
studies, analyses of contemporary art
activism, short stories, and an impressive
selection of works by contemporary artists.
Given this diversity, the writing through-
out is fairly consistent, with relatively few
lapses into excessively turgid academese.
Though at eighty-five dollars, the hardback
price is a bit steep, the book is heavily
illustrated, with both black-and-white and
color images. Among them are works by
Lyle Ashton Harris, Rotimi Fani-Kayode,
I 01 art journal
Hanh Thi Pham, Sunil Gupta, Catherine
Opie, and many others, making the book
an excellent resource for courses on queer
representation in general and contemporary
art in particular.Contributing writers
include Michael Anton Budd, Mark Alice
Durant, Liz Kotz, Mysoon Rizk, James
Smalls, and Alisa Solomon. The book also
features a useful bibliography of sources
on queer theory, photographic history, and
visual culture.
Bright's introduction reviews some of
the political and theoretical questions sur-
rounding the staging of gay sexuality in
the mass media, political discourse, and
art. Bright challenges what she describes as
misinterpretations of the performative the-
ories of sexuality and identity associated
with writers such as Judith Butler, which
tend to view the assumption of sexual
identity as a kind of open-ended ludic
play. She points instead to the material and
political forces that impinge on and con-
strain what might be termed the "privilege
of performance." Bright is particularlycon-
cerned with diversifying the construction
of queer sexuality to include vectors of
class, race, and ethnicity. Thus the book
includes essays and stories by Elizabeth
Stephens, Paul Franklin, Linda Dittmar,
Mark A. Reid, and Catherine Lord, among
others, which do a superb job of outlining
the complex effect of these forces.
One of the key points of articulation
for a theory of queer visuality concerns
the status of desire within intellectual dis-
course. Conventional art history, founded
as it is on the myth of disinterested schol-
arship, must expel or suspend the desire of
the historian, whose job it is to dispassion-
ately situate the recalcitrant"work of art"
within the already established narrative
of art historical progress. This attempt to
make the difference of the singular work
intelligible within, or conformable to, the
normative standardof artistic achievement,
might be seen as particularlyproblematic
for a viewer whose own identity is con-
structed against the grain of a hetero-
normative culture.
David Deitcher's discussion of his
relationship to an anonymous ambrotype
of two (possibly) gay men from the
i85os, which opens Bright's book, offers
 a revealing meditation on this dilemma.
Deitcher uses the image to explore both his
own ambivalent relationship to academic
inquiry ("queer men and women are justi-
fied in maintaining a certain skepticism
regarding the historian's positivistic and
empirical method") and the complex posi-
tion of queerness in the nineteenth-century
concept of "romantic friendship," which
granted a "special dispensation" (29)
to same-sex relationships. At the same
moment, Deitcher is less concerned with
the historical specificity of the image than
he is with its ability to give him the plea-
sure of self-recognition. Here intrudes
Deitcher's own desire to read in or into the
image something more, which may or may
not be borne out by the picture's manifest
content: "I am drawn to the men in this
photograph because their pose strikes me
as courageous, even defiant. And yet this
may only be projection on my part, a mea-
sure of how much I would like to find
gay desire reflected in an artifact from
the pre-gay past" (25). It is precisely the
anonymity of the image, its lack of autho-
rial and historical stability, which allows
it to function this way. Thus Deitcher
describes his particularattraction to
"orphaned"pictures that exist both "in
and out" of history (29).
A second and related theme is subver-
sion. We might draw a parallel here to
urban parks built during the late nineteenth
century. Originally intended to pacify the
immigrant masses through a therapeutic
exposure to "nature," they are now peri-
odically transformed into sites for cruising
and gay desire. In the same way, the queer
viewer temporarily inhabits, and re-maps,
the space of the straight image. Jos6 Esteban
Mufioz offers a fascinating re-reading of
the "queer charge" (i68) in LarryClark's
images of white adolescent boys (in Teenage
Lust,Tulsa,Kids,and ThePerfect For
Childhood).
his part, Clarkrefuses to admit even the
possibility that his relentless fascination
with teenage male sexuality (which reduces
women to the status of on-lookers or
"props") may somehow reflect on his own
desires. Perhaps he fears that this admission
would pose an intolerable threat to his
own "bad boy" self-fashioning, as Mufoz
describes it. Mark A. Reid's analysis of the
various readings that have developed
around Robert Mapplethorpe's images of
black men also addresses the question of
subversion. Reid relates the beatification
of Mapplethorpe as a kind of saint of gay
art to the relative neglect suffered by artists
of color such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode.
KaucyilaBrooke describes the difficul-
ties she encountered in trying to research
Berenice Abbott's images of the lesbian
subcultureof Parisin the I92os. Shein-
cludes a letter from Abbott, who vigorously
resisted Brooke's attempt to read the images
in connection to her sexual orientation, in
which Abbott, sounding a bit like an exas-
perated Dr. McCoy, insists, "I'm a photog-
rapher not a lesbian!" (suggesting precisely
the kind of elision of the sexual dimension
of photographic production that the book
is at pains to overcome, as if the positions
of "lesbian" and "photographer"were
mutually exclusive) (I30). At the same
time, the exchange between Brooke and
Abbott suggests some of the problems
(ethical and well as hermeneutic) that the
kind of reading "in" to the image practiced
by Deitcher raises when the photograph in
question is not an anonymous, nineteenth-
century ambrotype of two unknown men,
but the work of a living artist.
Other essays in the book explore
YasumasaMorimura's photographic re-
creations of "masterpieces"of Western art
in his attempt to overcome the "desexual-
ized Zen asceticism" of the Asian male ("if
Asian men have no sexuality, how can we
have homosexuality?" (238)) and Elizabeth
Stephens's staged photographs of dykes on
bikes, re-coding the image of the biker
102 WINTER 1999
outlaw and the mechanic's calendar girl to
satisfy butch and femme desire. But this
discourse of subversion and mimicry is at
the same time a product of oppression; a
language of citation and counter-citation,
of reading, writing, and looking between
the lines, necessitated by the homophobia
of the dominant culture. It is a form of
wisdom, of creativity, yes, but at a price,
and we (especially straight critics, histori-
ans, and artists) would do well to recog-
nize its origins. Among the more provoca-
tive questions that Bright's book raises
is, Can we imagine a queer visuality or
identity outside of this
repression? The collection
raises an additional ques-
tion. Just who is being
"subverted"?As the queer
writer Jane DeLynn has
noted in her book BadSex
Is Good:FictionandEssays
(I998), the reason why
so much "gay art seems
designed to tweak the noses
of the Jesse Helms's of the
world [is] because who
else really cares?" (196).
Who is the audience
for queer art? Is it straight viewers whose
consciousness will be expanded by an
encounter with a sexually transgressive
Other? Or do images of queer desire func-
tion instead to corroborate and confirm
an identity that is always at risk of dis-
solution? Bright's book suggests that the
representation of queerness in art can
only proceed through a questioning of the
rhetoric of art itself. Appropriatelyenough
the book ends (almost) with two essays
analyzing the visual politics of AIDS
activism with a particularemphasis on the
role of women. Both EricaRand and Mary
Patten write from a retrospective point of
view. Their essays look back at the AIDS
battles of the 198os and early 1990S and
look forward to the future of queer cultural
Yasumasa Morimura.
Portrait(Futago), 1988.
Color photograph, 823 x
I18 (210.2 x 299.7).
Courtesy Luhring
Augustine Gallery, New
York.
activism, now forced to contend with the
depoliticized mainstreaming of "lesbian
chic" (Linda Dittmar's apt term) and the
still powerful energies of Falwell, Pat
Robertson, and the conservative hordes.
GrantH. Kesteris AssistantProfessorof
Contemporary Art HistoryandTheoryat
ArizonaStateUniversity.
The Integrity of the
Artist
Mark Daniel Cohen
Robert C. Morgan. TheEndof theArtWorld.
New York: Allworth Press, i998. 256 pp.,
4o b/w ills. $ i8.95.
The nearly unanimous point of view that
dominates current art criticism provides an
ideal platform for contrarian thought. Thus
does conformity constitute a perfect back-
drop for nonconformity. The predictability
of the shared assumptions that compose
the amorphous body of postmodern theory
invites individual voices to arise and
demands that something truly critical be
written. This situation is an opportunity
and a responsibility that Robert C. Morgan
has elected to confront in his recent essays.
TheEndof theArtWorldis a collection of his
previously published essays and reviews,
most of which he wrote during the 199os.
Taken as a whole, they adumbrateMorgan's
argument against the prevailing tendencies
that have characterizedart and art criticism
for the last two decades.
He puts his condemnation in no uncer-
tain terms. He launches a full blown assault
on the general state of the "art world," a
marketing and publicity system bolstered
by the hardened academic rhetoric of post-
modernism that controls the creation and
selling of art. It is a fragmented network
of business concerns and careerist interests
that lacks any central artistic concerns and
serves only to divert artists away from
serious work and toward the pursuit of
marketplace success. As a result, contem-
porary art has become virtually lost in the
swamp of visual culture-the neutralizer of
artistic significance. Year after year, artists
chase the constantly shifting demands of
the market, creating art after a fashion and
offering up not works of personal inten-
tion and insight, but escapist spectacles
and anonymous analyses of cultural signs.
Art critics have become apologists for the
system, bandying about impenetrable ter-
minology that serves to mystify generally
meaningless works of art, suspending them
in an intellectual atmosphere that betrays all
adult expectations of meaning and quality.
103 art journal
Morgan believes that the way out of the
current quandary is to put an end to the
art world as it now exists. He urges artists
to struggle to liberate themselves from the
art world's temptations of fame and finan-
cial triumph. He recommends that they
turn to an art of personal consequence-
to strive for an inner-directed art created
out of individual experience-and that
they bring to bear upon their work their
full imaginative resources. His argument
amounts to a call for a return of aesthetic
standardsand objectives. He also urges a
return of art's status as a rarefied species
of awareness that embodies an intuition
arching beyond the limits of rational
thought into what may only be called
beauty, which "emerges when logic has
exhausted its limits" (47).
The determining characteristicof
Morgan's aesthetics is its grounding in
psychology. He argues that the revivifica-
tion of art must be based in the psycho-
logical coherence of the artist. Authentic
art requires and invokes a coordination of
emotion, intelligence, and intuition, instill-
ing the viewer with "a heightened sensory
cognition" (io). In essence, this critic's
solution to the social disintegration of the
art world is located in the psychological
integration of the artist, an integration that
is the foundation of the artist's integrity
as a creator. Ultimately the answer to the
imperious influence of the art world's
corporate marketing strategies is the self-
reliant capabilities of the artist as a mature
individual capable of personally directed
action and independent judgment.
Morgan presents his views directly in
the six essays in Manifestos, the first sec-
tion of the book. They weave a cogent
argument, yet his reviews of contemporary
artists who exemplify his conception of
inner direction even more clearly demar-
cate his vision. In these, he demonstrates
by example how works of art may func-
tion as apprehensions of an emotionally
dense intelligence, of a more difficult
and more valuable cognition. And here,
Morgan conveys his own thoughtful and
felt experience in confronting the art
object. These reviews exemplify the kind
of criticism their author recommends. They
are instances of Morgan's own integrity,