On Sunday 30th June my good friend, the poet and
art critic Cherry Smyth, and I will be leading an LGBT tour of the newly
unveiled re-hang at Tate Britain. We’re going to Queer the Collection and, believe, it’s not been difficult to find material to talk
about – in fact, the issue has been which artworks to leave out, such
are the riches on offer.
Portrait of David Hockney in a Hollywood Spanish Interior (1965), Peter Blake.
How important is it to offer up queer readings of large
public collections in this way? Do we even need to do it given that contemporary
audiences for art have surely seen it all, and most don’t much care about the
sexuality of an artist or their subject? Well, it’s surprising to me how often large art institutions gloss over gay relationships that are relevant to an artwork’s
conception, execution, or provenance, either choosing not to mention them at
all, or neutralizing relationships by referring to them as 'intimate friendships' or to lovers and partners as 'companions.' As Arts Editor of Polari Magazine I've also come across the same kind of unease in the commercial sector. It’s not hard to guess at the motivations for this – they’re the same as the
motivations in wider society for running scared of discussing sexuality – fears of offending people's religious and/or moral sensibilities or worries particularly around children asking awkward questions. It can dis-comfort people, un-settle
them, marginalize the artwork and the artist as a result – but these aren’t necessarily bad
things.
An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877), Frederick, Lord Leighton.
Even those institutions with a reputation for being more 'cutting edge,’ can indulge in the practice of placing artists
back in the closet. Recently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on a
small exhibition entitled ‘Rauschenberg and Johns,’ using works from the 1950s
in their permanent collection to explore the relationship between the two great
American artists, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, describing them as being ‘in dialogue with each other.’ What
the show’s curator failed to mention was that the two men were lovers for over
six years during this time, even referring to them at one point as ‘friends.’
Johns and Rauschenberg were themselves coy about discussing their relationship
and you could argue that MOMA was really just respecting this, but art history
and art curators are not obliged to go along with the ‘authorized version’ of
an artist’s personal history. They don't do it elsewhere, so why should they here?
The complicated nature of John and Rauschenberg’s
relationship when discussing and contextualising their art is probably compounded by the fact that
neither they, nor their work, fit into a pre-established
stereotype of what ‘queer’ means in art. Young men showering in California,
that’s obviously queer, right? But Rauschenberg’s Bed,
his seminal work of 1955, is also queer, it's just that it doesn't immediately appear to be so, lacking the usual 'signals.'
Bed (1955), Robert Rauschenberg
Bed is queer in form, breaking through conventional bounds of representation when, in 1955, Rauschenberg apparently took his own bedding and stretched it across a wooden frame, in place of, and so becoming, a canvas. Bed also explicitly references Rauschenberg’s two lovers, Cy Twombly and Jasper
Johns, the first with looped scribbles in pencil drawn on the pillow - a direct
reference to Twombly’s drawings - and the second with patches of bright paint on
the quilt that mirror the colours of Johns’ famous Target paintings.
Bed (1955) Robert Rauschenberg (detail)
Drawing, Cy Twombly
Target with Four Faces (1955), Jasper Johns
By incorporating such artists into the queer canon, you blow
open exactly what it means to categorize artists as queer and take it beyond the purely figurative, which is where the emphasis tends to be. But in order to do
that, the institution and its curators need to give the relevant biographical
information, just as they might tell you which
of Picasso’s mistresses appears in a particular painting. MOMA’s website gives
none of this information and you realize how far there is to go when even the biographical entry for Andy Warhol on the same MOMA website makes no reference at all to his sexuality, as if that wasn’t an intrinsic part
of his art, a large part of which was explicitly gay and given that Pop Art is, arguably, intrinsically queer.
Jasper Johns
Could you imagine MOMA, or any other institution, failing to
mention an artist’s gender or ethnicity (if those things were not immediately obvious) when
that was a large part of their work’s thematic concerns? Rauschneberg’s Bed is considered an intimate portrait
of him, and so it is, but it is one in which Cy Twombly’s head shares his
pillow while Jasper Johns lays on the bedclothes – this shouldn’t be ignored
and neither can it be separated from the work. Rauschenberg himself said “painting relates to both art and
life…[and] I try to act in that gap between the two.”
Robert Rauschenberg
Cy Twombly
Rauschenberg, Twombly and Johns all hung out in New York with that other A-List Avant-Garde gay couple John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and at times they even collaborated on performances and artwork. This gives me an excuse to include a video here of Rauschenberg talking about creating 'Automobile Tire Print' with Cage in 1953.
John Cage, Merce Cunningham & Robert Rauschenberg
At Tate Britain they've
taken the decision to remove all but the minimum information about works on display from the
labels that sit alongside them and that’s a decision I support and which has
been carried out consistently across the collection. You can, of course, find
out any more information you’d like about a work or an artist on their
excellent website and at appears that Tate, at least, have not closeted any of
their artists. As Cherry and I prepare our talk I’ll be blogging occasionally
on the works we’re researching and may well talk about - works such as this one, John Singer Sargent's Portrait of W.G.Robertson from 1894 - and it would be great if you came along.
This is my first blogpost, so, welcome to
The Celestial Homework Club. The blog’s name references Allen Ginsberg, a man
whose work and life I really admire and am inspired by. There’s a directness
and honesty in his poetry that’s like someone speaking right into your ear in
order to provoke and invite a conversation and that’s very much the spirit I’d
like this blog to invoke.
Allen Ginsberg
Recently, The Paris Review posted a copy of the reading list that Ginsberg
drew up for students on the course he taught at Naropa Institute (now Naropa
University) in Colorado. Ginsberg and another poet, Anne Waldman, had launched
The Jack Kerouack School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa and his course was
called ‘Literary History of the Beats.’ Ginsberg realized that a lot
of his students hadn’t read many of the writers (“antient [sic] scriveners” he
called them) who had influenced the Beats so came up with a reading
list that he designated their “Celestial Homework.” It includes Yeats, Blake,
Whitman, Poe, Dickinson, Shakespeare and many others, including some of the
Beat writers themselves.
By taking Ginsberg’s phrase and creating
The Celestial Homework Club I intend to write about those things that have
influenced and inspired me – the books, art, music, films, etc. that make up my
experience of the world – and would love to hear about yours. Here’s the first page of Ginsberg’s
original reading list, with The Poetry Foundation's helpful links to many of the texts mentioned:
I love it when writers you like offer tips for reading and more of this is becoming available through online resources - I'd much rather them than Amazon! Wonderful writers such as Milan Kundera (in Testaments Betrayed, The Art of the Novel, The Curtain and Encounter) and Alberto Manguel (in The History of Reading and The Library at Night) are like trusted friends leading you along the labyrinthine path towards becoming a better reader - by that I mean someone who's always searching to be challenged, stretched and stimulated by reading to become, in my case, a better writer.
Milan Kundera
Alberto Manguel
I’m also going to write about myself –
something I actually find quite difficult – because there have been some
changes in my life recently. A year or so ago I gave up my relatively secure,
relatively well-paid lecturing job at the University of Greenwich, to go
freelance and focus on my own work. I loved teaching, and would never say I’ll
not go back to it, but being in the classroom with Creative Writing students
was becoming less and less what the job was about. It’s also the case that, try
as you might, your own creativity takes a back seat to facilitating the work of
others and, after ten years, that really got to me. It was a family bereavement
that finally prompted me to change all that and, whilst I sometimes miss that
regular salary, I’ve no other regrets at all. On top of all of that the Higher
Education sector in the UK is changing, and not for the better (more on that,
I’m sure, in future posts). I’m glad I got out when I did. I've been lucky enough to get involved with the LGBT arts & culture online journal, Polari Magazine and was recently made Arts Editor. All of us who write for Polari do so for free because we believe in what the magazine is doing - offering intelligent, interesting and creative content that's about lives and not lifestyles.
The magazine's two founders, Christopher Bryant (Editor) and Bryon Fear (Designer), have worked like demons, again for no money, to produce the magazine since they set it up 5 years ago. It's growing in circulation and reputation and there are exciting things in the pipeline - watch this space! http://www.polarimagazine.com/
Another big change coming up is that I’m
going to live in Lisbon, Portugal, from August – though I’ll be making frequent
trips to London (every month or so). I’m following my heart there after 2 years
in a long-distance relationship. When considering where we should base
ourselves my boyfriend and I figured out that it’s actually cheaper for us to
rent a large flat in Lisbon and for me to commute to the UK than it is for us
to get a one-bedroomed flat in London (he’s an artist and has even less money
than me). That’s a crazy financial situation and one that I know a lot of other
people struggle with. Surely it’s unsustainable?
It’s odd to think that I’m going to live in
a country that is essentially picking itself up from bankruptcy but where the
quality of life in many ways still seems pretty good – you can eat out and
drink so cheaply there but it has all the advantages of being a
capital city – and there’s a high level of spoken English generally (thank
goodness as I’m still at the very early stages of learning Portuguese!)
If you’ve never visited Lisbon I would highly recommend it – it’s a beautiful little
jewel of a city that puts the shabby into chic and I’ve grown to love it over
the past couple of years, as I’ve grown to love my partner.
Talking of love, here’s Ginsberg reading
one of his poems that I love – 'King of May' – in 1965 at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and sitting next to
him is Neal Cassidy who Ginsberg loved.
Neal Cassady
The French novelist Emile Zola wrote, "If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I came to live out loud." This is an appealing and frightening idea for me - living out loud doesn't come naturally, but that's something I aim to change. I've become increasingly interested in the relationships between life and art and how art can be a portal to your own emotions, a way of talking about yourself when you talk about art, but also how it can create a cocoon as well as offer a sanctuary. It can be difficult to get the balance right. The Celestial Homework Club is somewhere I hope to explore all this and more. Living out loud.