Hide/Seek: A Talk with Jonathan Katz

The following is a discussion between two art historians. Neither are historians of music, but rather her sister acts: painting, sculpture, performance, installation… in short, the visual. However, any student of art knows—whether she’s an armchair amateur or a seasoned Chelsea veteran—that music is never that far afield from the visual arts, whether as soundtrack, muse, or collaborator. Think of Andy Warhol’s early pop portraits of Elvis and his later “snap-shot” aesthetic capturing the likes of Debbie Harry, Mick Jaggar, Liza Minelli, Diana Ross. Much earlier in the 20th century, we have Pablo Picasso’s collages of torn-up sheet music and countless works with the fractured imagery of guitars. Jeff Koons once claimed affinity for Michael Jackson’s status as the “King of Pop,” resulting in the gilt porcelain portrait of the singer and his pet chimp. Perhaps artist Christian Marclay’s bond with music is tightest: the visual and the audible, inseparable. Perhaps more relevant to our topic here, the music of Hide/Seek and its politics: Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose legendary camaraderie helped catapult one another into the limelight.

The occasion for my conversation with Jonathan D Katz is the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Katz, along with his co-curator David C. Ward, organized this, the largest exhibition to date on the theme of sexual difference in portraiture. Katz and I discuss the impact of the show, what it means to be an “activist historian,” “the character of the exhibition’s critical backlash,” and the relationship between music and visual art.

In his encyclopædia of modern discontent, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, Theodor W. Adorno remarked that one’s unique historical experience, in some cases, puts him at odds with the dictates of dominant culture. This disjuncture can give rise to a unique position of critical insight. Katz appears to be an individual in such a position. He is a life-long queer activist. He proudly announced in one of his seminars at SUNY Stony Brook, “I have an arrest record a yard long!” describing his long-term involvement in non-violent protests. He translated this activism into a subject of academic inquiry. His dissertation, “Opposition, Incorporated: On the Homosexualization of Post-War American Art,” was written at a time when most art history departments were not willing to support such a project. This put him at the forefront of new methods of inquiry within the discipline. As queer activist and historian, Katz was uniquely perched to see through blind spots in the scholarly account of artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The dominant reading of these artists is “proto-Pop,” or what we have come to describe stylistically as appropriation or Post-Modern. Katz’s position is not necessarily counter to such readings. Well-versed in the early reception of this artwork, Katz will tell you the early criticism of the work—such as Clement Greenberg’s formal critiques and Leo Steinberg’s studied iconography—observed correctly the mechanics of the visual language and paved the way for the canonical interpretation. However, Katz argues the critics and later historians miss the larger historical question: why these artists and why their aesthetic?

Katz has tried to point out over the years that the aesthetic language that post-war artists like Rauschenberg and Johns dispatched had a particular—particularly queer—historical and cultural flourish. It was a language of code, appearing to say one thing on the surface yet somehow also saying “something else.” This aesthetic echoed the self-conscious experience of a 1950s “closeted homosexual,” argued Katz. Not everyone could access this “something else,” but many could identify.

Alfred Barr, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the time thought Jasper Johns now iconic Flag “too hot” to acquire for the museum, “though he very much liked it.” (The work does reside at MoMa today.) Barr was, however at pains to articulate why. “For it was just a painting of an American flag after all,” Katz asserts. “Johns’ American flag painting is brilliantly conceived to raise questions or to seed doubts in the viewer’s mind, as to whether the image is an orthodox and patriotic image or precisely the obverse.” The staunch ambivalence of the painting, Katz concludes, led Barr to pass on Johns’ painting, “for he feared that it could equally be seen as unpatriotic so he dared not” raise suspicion in the era of McCarthy’s “House Un-American Activities Committee.” As the story suggests, the Cold War intellectual’s anxieties were perfectly refracted through a queer artist’s patently queer lens.

Johns’ strategy is not, however—and I am sure Katz would agree—akin to what Wesley Snipe’s character says to Woody Harrelson’s in the movie White Men Can’t Jump: “You can’t hear Jimi [Hendrix].” The aesthetic code that interests Katz is exclusive, but not by virtue of one’s stripe on the diversity rainbow. For Katz, queer artists whose art is celebrated, like Johns and Rauschenberg, come to the fore historically by virtue of their opacity, not in spite of it. As “plain” speech became increasingly policed in the McCarthy era, this explains the increased popularity of this queer aesthetic.

Katz’s theory of queer identity is more complex than the one promulgated in the mainstream. This more pedestrian gay politics finds itself content with being asked to dinner by heteronormative (“straight”) culture provided that they follow its etiquette: hence gay marriage, gay adoption, and the effort to identify a “gay” gene (so, maintaining the nuclear family, whose organization is relied on by capitalism to function and the biological determination that guides mainstream Christian morality). I do not want myself nor Katz to be misinterpreted: of course gay marriage should be legal, but Katz’s project is much more radical (and, uh, that’s a good thing, by the way, even though that word has been co-opted and conflated as of late to mean something like Osama bin Laden’s Islamic fundamentalism, which is of course reactionary, not radical!). Katz argues that “sexuality” is historical, not biological: “The core of my activist intent is to make manifest and irrefutable the fact that sexuality is historical.” Katz admits, his projects, “sounds like a really ‘academic-y’ kind of project—like what the fuck does that have to do with activism? But if we can understand that sexuality is historical then we can understand that its configurations will always change, and do always change, and thus de-center any construction of the natural or the divine as that which governs sexuality.” His argument then suggests, that there is no “proper” or “legitimate” sexual behavior only that which has transpired in the course of history and what could transpire in the future. Sexual desire is broken wide-open. This is not to suggest that Katz’s project is a progressive one, as in, “things are so much better now and will continue to get better.” Katz refutes this bias towards our current moment, as the “most-mature.” He makes a good case for seeing sexuality as a debate, whose terms need not, and in fact should not, be couched in terms of one’s identity.

I ask Katz why he chose to broadcast this music. Though certainly historically accurate, what did it have to do with the visual art of the exhibition? “I’m interested in the ways in which music operates socially, number one, and politically, number two. I’m particularly interested in the way, for reasons similar to its operations in the visual arts, music allows people to say things that they can’t say in declarative speech. Art similarly creates the possibility of making statements that evade the policed vocabularies. You can do things in song as you can do things in pictures that don’t bring out the censors.”

I probe a little deeper: “But what do the blues have to do with a show about gay artists?” Everything, I find out. Katz first points out an illustrated advertisement for the single, “Prove It on Me Blues,” which not incidentally for Katz, was the “number one race record in the country in 1928.” He elaborates, “There is a large African-American woman pictured, who is of course Ma Rainey, chatting up two svelte young African-American women while two cops look on sheepishly.” This was a riff on the singer’s biography; “Ma Rainey in 1925 gets arrested for running a lesbian orgy in her flat (her neighbors complained). After the police arrive the young women escape, but Ma Rainey who is a large woman falls down and can’t escape. She gets charged because there is a NYC penal code for running a lesbian orgy and she gets charged with being a madam of a bawdy house. Everyone knew what the story was and Ma Rainey was certainly not circumspect about her lesbian proclivities.”

The visual was only part of the queer content. Katz recounts the lyrics: “‘They say I do it. Ain’t nobody caught me. Y’all gotta prove it on me. It’s true I wear a collar and a tie. I don’t like no men.’” She goes through this list of social stereotypes about lesbians, yes that’s all true I grant you, ‘but,’”—and this is key for Katz—“‘‘aint nobody caught me.’ The operative word is ‘caught,’ ‘so y’all gotta prove it on me.’ It’s a kind of elaborated tease in which she is continuously suggesting her lesbianism to the audience, not denying it at all, but at the same time suggesting that it’s all immaterial until you prove something.”

In the course of our discussion, Katz informs me that Ma Rainey’s is one of many queer-themed songs. The exhibition plays a sample of these artists collected on a 1931 album called “AC-DC Blues,” (re-issued in the seventies) containing songs like, George Hannah’s “Boy in the Boat,” about lesbian cunnilingus and orgies. The record contains two versions of the popular blues standard “Sissy Man Blues.” In a narrative entitled “Buffet Flat Story,” blues great Bessie Smith’s niece Ruby Smith recounts the common occurrence of the Buffet Flat in Harlem: multi-room apartments delegating each room to a particular sexual proclivity. However Katz makes the point that as the term “buffet” suggests, what attracted the viewer was not a function of any essentialized sexual identity, but merely a question of taste, and the wonderful thing about tastes is that they can change.

The Ma Rainey example is however most instructive for Katz as it makes explicit the loss of an artistic aesthetic and a way of life. As Katz explains, “What’s striking about this incident is that it helps explicate one of the key ideas that I was trying to bring about in the exhibition, which is that we reflectively use the term ‘Harlem Renaissance’ as if it represents something interesting and new that was happening in African-American culture. My argument is that it’s not African American culture that was new but rather that white culture finally discovered what was going on in African-American culture and paid attention to it and took it seriously. Upon entering this culture, what white people encountered was the prospect of a different cultural relationship to homosexuality.” So enamored were the wealthy white elites who “found” this culture that their relationship to this culture becomes a subject fit for depiction. Romaine Brooks, herself a lesbian, often dressing in drag, painted an eponymous portrait of Carl Van Vechten, commenting on his erotic life in Harlem and his other life as a married man in white affluent culture. The dapper moneyed-gentleman depicted in Brooks’ painting is of a light palette of creams and whites against a dark background that appears to be the sitter’s chair. However its amorphous shape demands closer inspection, upon which one finds that this background was hiding more than his chair. The fabric of the chair acts like stretched nylon hosiery where the features of African-American faces press forward and against this visual plane into the threshold of visibility. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” African-American faces hide in plain sight of Van Vechten’s domestic interior. Likewise, Van Vechten’s same-sex desire must cloak itself in the white world of privilege.

Music is not a quaint motif in the exhibition but a harmonizing element reflecting and refracting the visual, which for Katz can lead to profound political consequences. Enter Michel Foucault, an icon for Queer theory and famous French theorist of history who came of age in the era of the student revolutions in the late 1960s. Foucault wrote a history of sexuality, originally planned as a multivolume work, of which he was only able to generate three of the volumes before his untimely death from AIDS in 1984. He argued that the idea of the “homosexual” was a modern one. The idea of the homosexual as “genus” in the human “species,” was flawed in that it tried to make what one “does” into who they “are.” Foucault’s thinking was out of step with the emerging “Silence=Death” campaign of the 1980s that fought for legitimization in terms of identity—the politics of the “closet” emerged as the key project. Foucault was, oddly, both ahead of and behind the times in that he tried to latch on to a queer identity that was not viable at that moment. Artists and activists at the time struggled to gain recognition and medical treatment. As progressives have long pointed-out, the contemporary President Ronald Reagan was simply indifferent to these cries for help. These activists however tried to point out that the disease was not unique to gays, but rather a plague that had the potential to inflict anyone with a body. Dominant culture’s response was to ignore this claim, until the prophetic warnings came true and “straights” faced the epidemic.

The birth of the “closet” was not without its casualties. But perhaps at the same time the severity of the AIDS epidemic forced the hand of the community, as Katz’s show seems to argue. Not disputing the importance of art on AIDS, Katz champions a different model of sexual politics, which he argues takes center stage in the 1920s and 1930s Harlem. Like Foucault then, but on a more modest scale, Katz argues that at one historical moment, being gay was not an identity but a practice, “a verb, not a noun.” I ask Katz to tell me a bit more about this historical shift toward gay identity and how it plays out aesthetically for these artists.

In reference to George Bellow’s lithograph The Shower Bath, Katz says, “In part why I brought in that print (which is for me that is the Rosetta Stone for that exhibition) is that [it] shows a homoerotic interaction front and center. Where you have the classic queer, every stereotype indulgently represented. You know, leering grin, buttocks thrust back, hand on hip, the whole nine yards. And then you’ve got this sort of butch guy with a face like a mask but whose towel is very clearly covering an erection. It bespeaks the relationship at that historical moment between queer and straight,” It is this moment’s “model” that is abandoned during the AIDS epidemic and the era of gay identity politics as the second half of Katz’s show, makes evident. Katz tells me that, “It is the arrogance of the present that we assume that the model of sexuality at this earlier point in American history was modeled on what we understand today. But of course it was very different one.” With a passion for clarity, Katz puts forward his thesis one more time, “One of the things that this prior moment suggests is that it was entirely possible to have sex exclusively with men if you were a man.” The model was not without it faults, however “as long as you took on the ‘male’ role in the sexual act, you were normative and, thus, straight.” “The difference today,” Katz instructs, “is that we map queerness by the gender of the other person in the sexual act. In this past moment, sexual identity was marked by your own gender as you had sex. So if you took on the male role, you were heterosexual, if you took on the female role, you were queer. And so, it means, and this is the key point, that queer culture needed straight culture, and straight culture needed queer culture, for queers to even achieve that which defined them as queers. Straight and queer were utterly interwoven at this historical moment and the ramifications of this are profound. We tend to arrogantly look back on this and think this was an underdeveloped political moment where those poor homosexuals didn’t realize that they were oppressed. That’s the way we think. In fact, they wouldn’t have wanted any of the things that accompany queer culture today. They wouldn’t form ghettos, wouldn’t have bars, and wouldn’t have political movements, because all of these things would only land you among other queers and what’s the fun in that?”

Katz’s point then, is not to simply adopt the older method, but to realize that the historical clash of white and black queers demonstrated that there were alternative understandings to what we now take as gospel – whether one is conservative or progressive. Not to mention that given the show’s censorship, which suggests even the prior model may have to face criticism from Republicans and conservatives unwilling to cede any ground to same sex … well, anything same sex. If one visits the show, one does not find gay pornography, (however “straight” pornography is often the subject of art) but gay erotica at most. In fact the dearth of a “full-Monty” aesthetic makes it even bleaker politically that such a show was censored. Given that it was not the angle of the “pornographic” that was able to gain political traction for conservatives, one wonders if they did not fear the implications of Katz historical argument. That is a clear and persistent, albeit diverse, narration of queer life and struggle in the 20th century.

Following its original opening in October 2010 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., the show faced undue criticism. One piece in particular was singled out for its alleged sacrilegious content: David Wojnarowicz’s video, Fire in my Belly. Conservatives highlighted an image of ants crawling over a crucifix. The image was gathered from a roll of film he had shot while in Mexico during the festivities of Dia de los Muertos. The crucifix was an alter and the ants merely part of the mise-en-scene that the artist captured. In Fire in my Belly, it is one of many images that comment on suffering, as the piece was the artist meditation on his AIDS-afflicted partner. As Katz points out, in good humor, “If you’re going to get rid of the Wojnarowicz then what are you going to do with the Isenheim Altarpiece?” A work known to any Art History 101 freshman, Katz is referring to the longstanding convention of depicting a suffering Christ as an analogue for the ill and dispossessed. (To wit: Mathias Grünewald’s depiction of Christ in the Isenheim Altarpiece with the wounds of ergot poisoning.) Katz points out that the piece makes no sense as sacrilege. Rather, this is veiled homophobia, under the rubric of religious persecution. “Either they’re stupid or they’re cynical, and I’m charitable enough to think they’re not stupid. This is a manipulation.”

The show was not only attacked on the right, but also by members of the queer community, who were outraged that the Wojnarowicz’s piece was removed from the National Gallery. Katz was then seen as caving to the pressure of the right. Not to be dissuaded, Katz counters his critics in the queer community that the show must go on and indeed it did. “As people point accusing fingers at the Smithsonian, I do want to point out that the Smithsonian could have prevented me from showing the work in Brooklyn. As one can imagine, to show the censored piece again risked reanimating the controversy. But the Smithsonian had the courage to say, ‘Okay.’ Let’s not lose sight of the fact that there’s a certain politics in allowing the show to go forward, complete.”

« Read more from Issue 5: The Music Issue