Center Blog

Guest Post by Richard Allen

Though you may not be immediately familiar with the name Jonathan David Katz, you might be aware of the flap surrounding he and his co-curators, David C. Ward and Jenn Sichel last year. They originally organized HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

Jonathan David Katz

The exhibit sought to show the gay presence, both as subject and creator, in American art in the last century, and was intentionally as un-sensationalistic as it could be. (In fact, apart from two or three exceptions, Katz and his colleagues chose to only show nudes by straight artists, and only showed portraits by gay artists that were clothed, and at most obliquely sexual.) One piece, however, a short video by the artist David Wojnarowicz called “A Fire in My Belly,” was removed without the curators’ prior knowledge or consent, due to content that some, including Speaker of the House John Boehner, saw as anti-Christian.  

The content is a brief shot of ants crawling over a crucifix, within a slightly longer scene of ants crawling over other objects as well.  The 1987 short film is meant to allegorize the artist’s feelings about his own looming death from AIDS. (He died in 1992.) The video is uncontroversial, as is the majority of the work in the exhibit (who knew there were so many Robert Mapplethorpe photographs that didn’t contain nudity?), to the extent that one gets the impression that protesters and critics were looking for anything that they deemed scandalous or inappropriate, and that they were clutching at straws to condemn something, anything about the show, because none of the more obviously homoerotic imagery, which was the true target, was particularly shocking or objectionable.

At the Center’s most recent Second Tuesday Lecture Series on November 15th, Katz avoided focusing on that aspect of the exhibit, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in November; he instead highlighted the curatorial process of the exhibit, and discussed the gay shadow history that lay just past the surface of the twentieth century.  

Katz is currently the director of the graduate program in visual culture studies at SUNY Buffalo, and the depth of his knowledge coupled with his engaging and unpretentious speaking style quickly won over a room that was initially more interested in the mediagenic side of the exhibit.

He began his lecture with a painting by Thomas Eakins called Salutat from 1898, depicting a young, muscular prize fighter on display for a shadowy audience.  The body is not presented only as the winner of a contest, but also as an object for delectation, both for the viewers in the painting, and outside.  Eakins, however, was straight, and this first image laid the groundwork for one of Katz’s main themes in the lecture: that prior to the Lavender Menace of the 1950s, co-witch hunt of the Red Menace, being gay, nebulous concept though that was, was frequently treated with a casual awareness, and even winking tolerance, by the larger, heterosexual culture.  

He went on to show several images of public bathing in World War I-era New York by George Bellows, also straight, that had figures that we moderns clearly peg as “gay”, and Katz hastened to assure us that the original audience of these pictures would also have understood what was being depicted, in a neutral, documentary fashion.  

Katz continued on with his selective overview of the 105 works in the show, cycling through gay touchstones like Paul Cadmus and the wealthy lesbian ex-pat scene in Paris, but also teasing out the overtones of same-sex attraction and gay identity in the works of artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.  His characterization of the works of Johns and Rauschenberg during their relationship as a sort of lovers’ conversation was particularly poignant, and he convincingly argued that the mainstream art history community’s willful white-washing of this relationship not only robs gay culture of two major figures, but also ignores an entire set of clues for analyzing their output.

The final image Katz showed, and the final image in the exhibit, was of an enormous, wall-engulfing (84×168 inches) photograph by A.A. Bronson called Felix, June 5, 1994.  It shows the artist’s partner in bed, shortly after dying from AIDS, so emaciated that he looks barely human, his skin so drawn across his skeletal face that his eyes could not be closed after his death; there simply was no longer the excess flesh for eyelids.  The photograph is harrowing and brutal, and dares the viewer to look away, or to keep looking; both options are excruciating.  Its placement seems to say that this is where a hundred years of art and history and politics and disease have led to, and that the true scandal of this exhibit is not some ants crawling on a crucifix for a few seconds, but instead the photographic proof of the social and political indifference that led AIDS to ravage a community and a decade.

HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture runs through February 12, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.