Hiding, Seeking, and Culture Warring

If you came across the recent reports on visual art in the news this past December, you may have considered checking the year on your calendar. Tales of the current exhibition—Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture—at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC revived memories of Jesse Helms and the culture wars of the late 1980s. Whenever sexuality and religion cross paths there is bound to be some commotion concerning national (aka: taxpayer) support of artists and art institutions. As was the case in the 1980s with Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, and again in the 1990s with Chris Ofili and Damien Hirst, the yarn spun for the public was not quite a clear picture of the artwork actually displayed.

The National Portrait Gallery did learn something from the mistakes of another DC museum—the Corcoran. The Portrait Gallery’s exhibited photographs by Mapplethorpe are clearly far from controversial. Mapplethorpe will forever be linked with his photographs of S&M acts that led to the cancellation of the infamous exhibit at the Corcoran, after an earlier uproar in Cleveland. Though many in the arts continue to cry censorship, one wonders when common sense and prudence were abandoned. Museums may have substantial private funding, but they remain, essentially, public venues. A curator should probably always ask whether or not he or she would want a five year old son, daughter, niece, or nephew to stumble upon a work on a gallery visit. There will remain differences of opinion, but common sense prevails at some level.

The National Portrait Gallery did not simply suffer from a lapse in judgment in the choice of exhibiting the video, A Fire in My Belly, by the late artist David Wojnarowicz, it did not work hard enough, initially, to explain the goal of the exhibition. Hide/Seek is somewhat like the museum version of Brokeback Mountain—it plays the “Gay Portraits” exhibit to Hollywood’s “Gay Cowboy” movie. These may be catchy descriptors, but they are far from accurate when considering the breadth of humanity examined in each. The exhibition is touted as the first major museum show to consider the role of gender difference in the creation of artwork. That tends to get boiled down to a tagline explaining that the exhibition is composed of portraits of and by gay and lesbian individuals. That is not quite the full makeup of the show if one looks into the artists and works included. (check out the video gallery tour)

Museum historian and co-curator David C. Ward explains the goal a bit better—though after the fact—in a YouTube slideshow of several works. He describes how the exhibition was meant to discuss how sexual ambiguity and ambivalence run as a coded thread through American portraiture, allowing personal nuances that transcend gender or sexuality to get to the core issues of personal understanding and identity. Ward claims that the show attempts to go past a very simple and tired concept that art in reference to sexual orientation is only related to sexual acts, and therefore, explicit nudity.

The other curator, Jonathan Katz, however, does the show a disservice with some of his rhetoric. As the Founding Director of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, Katz can, at times, come across as militant in his stance. When Katz defines the show as “an exhibition explicitly intended to finally, in 2010, break a 21-year-old blacklist against the representation of same sex desire in America's major museums,” he is drawing a line in the sand with the museum establishment.  His charge that “the museum world is and has been systemically and profoundly homophobic since the Mapplethorpe controversy in 1989” may hold some truth. The only problem is that he isn’t a fundraiser at any of the those museums. Museum staff across the nation may very well agree with Katz’s beliefs, but they are still running businesses and know that the American public—sex-crazed though it is—does not generally desire to be challenged with shows about sexuality when visiting museums. If people want that they can go to any number of commercial galleries where this is not uncommon.

Conversely, an enduring problem with the criticisms brought by the Religious Right is that they tend to focus on the wrong problems in the works in these exhibitions. Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary was derided as a dung-smeared Madonna. The elephant dung that was used in that work was hardly a concern if one looked more closely. The painting was covered with images of hard core pornographic photos of women. That was not mentioned by Mayor Giuliani and others when they called for a halt on public funding for the Brooklyn Museum. One imagines most children would have more difficulty recognizing painted elephant dung than graphically displayed female body parts.

A Fire in My Belly was bound to face a similar fate. Speaker of the House John Boehner led the charge in attacking the work because it depicted a crucifix overrun with ants. Many people were likely more troubled with the concept of the “Gay Portraits” show and so Wojnarowicz became an easy target. In fact, his work was always controversial in his lifetime so he was a perfect scapegoat. One would think the appearance in the video of a man stripping off his clothing and then participating in an auto-erotic act, would have caused more alarm. This is certainly one of those things a curator might want to avoid when considering the five year olds. However, this part of the video was never the top concern in the news reports.

Outside of all the excessive press, which should make the curators somewhat happy since the exhibit would probably have never been known otherwise by the general public, there are some works within the exhibit that more fittingly engage the stated theme. Though there are clearly more erotic works by Marsden Hartley, the paintings chosen for this exhibition are more in keeping with the way an early American Modernist could use abstraction as a language to express identity in a time when even the art world was less open about sexuality. Works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Cy Twombly skillfully exhibit the “coded language” of mid-century gay artists. Their early postmodern experiments with semiotic and appropriational imagery set the tone for later generations of artists—gay and straight alike. The inclusion of one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spill works is a prime example of this continuum.

 There are some works that seem more of a stretch. The inclusion of a painting of a proud male nude standing in an open field (The Clearing), by Andrew Wyeth, is a bit confounding. Wyeth was famous for generations though his most public notoriety came with the controversy surrounding his Helga paintings. A more appropriate connection for this exhibition would have seemed to have been the recent photographs by Collier Schorr that place an adolescent male in poses that mimic the Helga paintings. The ambiguity of sexuality is much more evident in those works.

The protestations of Katz that were actually the genesis for the exhibition reveal only a small segment of the current map of the art world. Gender and identity studies now abound in college and university course catalogs across the nation. Though this may be the first major museum exhibition of its kind, there is actually no lack of literature that discusses the role of sexual identity in the creation of art. Many artists showing at the major galleries in this country are now quite upfront and explicit about this fact.

In the new world where pluralism rules, the cacophony of specialized voices assures that no sub-culture or group can rise above the din. The voices that many would claim were the singular voices of the past—like Western Christianity—are now speaking in a foreign tongue. Consider the work of Tim Hawkinson. Many pieces are clearly influenced by the artist’s childhood, in which he was reared in Methodist Protestantism. An installation like Pentecost is equally misunderstood by the contemporary art world as the Hide/Seek artist’s works may have been earlier in the twentieth century.

At the pre-opening gallery walk for Hawkinson’s 2005 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, curator Lawrence Rinder was questioned about Pentecost. His simple response was that the title referred to a religious holiday. That the work taps out the melodies of hymns and references the New Testament coming of the Holy Spirit, resulting in the speaking of unknown tongues by Jesus’ disciples, was either not known to the curator, or more likely, was something he expected a post-Christian audience would not understand. Either way, the preferential position that Western Christianity once held is obviously no more. With this in mind, curators may consider that every new position examined in museum exhibitions will seem foreign to some segment of the viewing public. New viewpoints should be proclaimed but there are sometimes wiser ways to present them than through more controversial works.

Andrew Wyeth: Farewell to a Pariah

On Friday, January 16, the world bid farewell to one of the most popular American artists of the twentieth century—Andrew Wyeth. Many people would be hard pressed to name off more than a few Modern artists (I am using a narrow definition of Modern Art here, in which many concede that it was initiated with the creation of Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon). Aside from Picasso—and people would simply associate him with some vague notion of abstraction much more than any specific images or the concept of Cubism—the general population is often at a loss when it comes to Modernism. Yet there remain two mid-century American paintings that are easily recognized by the masses. Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one and Wyeth’s Christina’s World is the other.

But familiarity breeds contempt. Such is the case with Mr. Wyeth. His realism flew in the face of the Modernist movements that were desperately seeking validation and acceptance within the American art establishment of the mid-twentieth century. Modernism had moved past representation and that, after all, was Wyeth’s chosen style. He was to some another version of his father, N.C. Wyeth—merely an illustrator.

It is almost unimaginable that Wyeth’s widely recognized image, Christina’s World, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). MOMA is the great white cube; the quintessential home for elite art. It stands for the epitome of high art and is the repository of the iconic images of the twentieth century. Granted, when the museum acquired the work, Surrealism was just making inroads to the U.S. and Abstract Expressionism’s New York School was not yet the loose grouping of tendencies and persons that it would eventually become. Today, MOMA is nearly embarrassed to own the work, yet it is one of only a small number of pieces—Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is another—that the majority of visitors readily recognize and want to see on their tour of the galleries.

This iconic status is somewhat of a black-eye for the art establishment. One would be ridiculed in certain circles for having any affection for Wyeth’s work. It is seen as a sign of an undeveloped aesthetic sensibility. It might even be consider facile, sentimental, or nostalgic.

The artist is difficult to place within the timeline of Modern Art History and is summarily deleted from many art history texts. His work isn’t even placed alongside Regionalist artists such as Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. And so he floats around as a recognized figure, both praised and dismissed.

Wyeth’s own behavior in the art world has damaged his reputation within that sphere, to be fair. We may never know exactly what happened during the Helga Hullabaloo of the 1980s. When the nearly 250 works—many of them nude—representing Wyeth’s neighbor Helga Testorf were exhibited, there were rumors of an affair between artist and model. This only added to the hype generated from the sale of the entire suite of paintings and drawings to a single collector for the amount of $6 million. The collector later sold the works for over $40 million, total. The affair may or may not have taken place, and Wyeth’s wife may or may not have known, but the Wyeth’s did gain both a substantial income and increased notoriety at the time.

Aside from all this, why is Wyeth’s realism so appalling to the contemporary critics? I expect we will never know for certain. No one can bring serious accusation against his technique. At a time when practically no American artist used the early renaissance medium of egg tempera (though Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker soon took it on within their own particular form of Magic Realism), Wyeth was creating some of his best known works with the archaic medium. Dry brush, another obscure technique utilizing watercolor, was Wyeth’s other medium of choice. Among his contemporaries Wyeth had no equal when it came to his facility with these mediums.

My hunch is that Wyeth’s subject matter is equally as problematic as his realism for some of his critics. His landscapes and portraits lack obvious evidence of critical theory and exploration of newer modes of art making. But this is on a first glance. The images seem familiar but these are not simple portraits and they are not typically commissioned portraits. Wyeth chose his subjects, not the other way around. The landscapes and figures epitomized the artist’s keen sense of the laborious life of the common person. His paintings are peopled with characters that, like their ancestors, struggled for generations to sustain life on unforgiving plots of land. That conflict is reflected in their eyes and written on their faces. In that reflection the average viewer sees herself.

While the specific struggles of these figures may not be those of the average Manhattanite, let alone the contemporary art historian, the basic strains of life remain the same. It may come down to class conflict. The critics believing that the unenlightened masses can enjoy nothing but simple representational art, while their own sensibilities have far surpassed that lowest common denominator. That would truly be unfair. Enjoying and appreciating certain Modern and contemporary works may be contingent upon the viewer being educated in the contemporary idiom, but it does not mean that traditional formats and techniques are inferior.

New art does not negate the significance of work from the past. There is no set number of masterpieces that requires one work to lose that distinction if a new work is conferred with the title. And the pluralism of the 60s, 70s, and 80s actually gave rise to sub-movements like Photorealism. If these works could be honestly assessed by art critics why could Wyeth not receive the same treatment?

I think all can agree that we have, at the very least, lost a master craftsman. Perhaps one day Wyeth will be re-evaluated in a more favorable way. For now, I will be one of those who claims that Andrew Wyeth and Damien Hirst actually have sought to answer (or at least ask) some of the same looming questions of life with their work. There is room for both at the table, if we only allow them.