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ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Johanna Burton
Amid dozens of artworks stridently addressing the politics of identity at the infamously "PC" 1993 Whitney Biennial, Glenn Ligon's Notes on the Margin of the Black Book took a more elliptical and ambiguous approach. This elegantly conceived structural amendment to Robert Mapplethorpe's original Black Book consisted of two rows of individually framed images, appropriated directly from the photographer's controversial series of black male nudes. In the newly expanded "margin" between the photographs, Ligon inserted all manner of uniformly typed texts on race and sexuality, appropriated from heretofore unrelated commentators, ranging from high theorists and articulate drag queens to conservative politicians and zealous evangelists. Yet what Ligon was really inserting into the margins was himself. Insisting on the double connotation of "margin," he slyly suggested that as a black, gay artist, he'd always been there anyway, and perhaps we'd all do well to shift our attention to the sidelines. And it was there that he claimed a space in which his own ambivalent desires, identifications, and resistances might circulate among the desires, identifications, and resistances of others: not so much within the pirated images as between them.
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Ligon's intervention revealed a potentially deep connection between appropriative practices and investigations of identity, a link that was overlooked during the important early phase of theorizing appropriation in the '80s--especially as far as an artist like Mapplethorpe was concerned. For if Ligon was able to see in Mapplethorpe's work a latent point de resistance at the height of the identity-driven art of the '90s, such potential had not always been obvious. On this point, in 1982, Douglas Crimp, now considered one of the foremost theorists on subjectivity and representation, penned a short essay that he later deemed necessary to amend. Crimp's text, "Appropriating Appropriation," was an attempt to establish and then contrast two types of appropriative strategies: a modernist appropriation of style and a postmodernist appropriation of material. (1) Crimp deemed the first mode conservative, aligned as it was with traditions of "aesthetic mastery." The second was heralded as deconstructive, able, however briefly, to interrupt such modernist discourses. Crimp chose Robert Mapplethorpe and Sherrie Levine to flesh out his argument. Mapplethorpe, he argued, provided an example of the first kind of appropriation since--despite the sometimes explicit content of much of his photography--he appropriated numerous stylistic devices from prewar studio photography (whether Vogue fashion spreads or neoclassical nudes). Levine, on the other hand, undermined modern myths of mastery by baldly re-presenting high-art images without the camouflage of "originality." Rather than join a filial chain of creative genius by taking up and subtly transforming (or even actively refuting) the work of previous generations, she performed a kind of stopgap measure, disabling the smooth mechanisms of artistic legacy.
Looking back on this essay a decade later (coincidentally enough, in the same year that Ligon reread the Black Book), Crimp saw that he had neglected the relevance of Levine's position as a female artist who typically seized on allegorical images of those society deemed "Others." (2) But even more surprising to the author in retrospect was a radical element of Mapplethorpe's practice that had remained to him as invisible as Poe's purloined letter, hidden in full view. "What I failed to notice in 1982," Crimp writes in the introductory essay for On the Museum's Ruins, "was what Jesse Helms could not help but notice in 1989: that Mapplethorpe's work interrupts tradition in a way that Levine's does not." (3) That interruption, Crimp continued, had nothing to do with Mapplethorpe's style, which had seemed to him so cozily aligned with tradition, nor did it depend on appropriating the literal material of other art, as in Levine's approach. Rather, Mapplethorpe's radical interruption was defined by what his images facilitated outside the frame: how they "momentarily rendered the male spectator a homosexual subject," thus offering the possibility for an active, political, self-defining (defining through desiring) representation of gay subculture. (4)
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My reason for rehearsing Crimp's critical double take is relatively simple. In the 1980s, appropriation came to be seen as one particularly effective means to reveal the working mechanisms of various cultural, social, and psychic institutions--and thus considerations of subjectivity and identity necessarily surfaced in such deconstructive terrain. Yet these latter exposes, in contrast to those directed at the museum, the media, or structures of signification, were apparently much harder for critics, artists, and audiences to see. In fact, an episode similar to Crimp's transpired for Craig Owens, whose canonical essay "The Discourse of Others" recounts his initial blindness to sexual difference in Laurie Anderson's 1979 Americans on the Move. (In part 2 of "The Allegorical Impulse," his discussion of the semiotic ambiguity of the raised-arm gesture for "hello" in one of Anderson's slides failed to note that the erect arm of the gesturer--a nude male--could be read in more obvious ways.) (5) But why this blindness? Was Crimp's queer eye eclipsed by the imperatives of institutional critique, and Owens's feminism temporarily trumped by his role as poststructuralist? Were such critical identities not simultaneously habitable? Were considerations of identity and subjectivity seen as incompatible with more "rigorously" critical enterprises?
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