Pictures at a Deposition. - book review

Richard Meyer. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 376 pp., 56 color ills., 138 b/w. $35.

It is no small irony that Richard Meyer's lucid account of the censorship of homosexual imagery in twentieth-century art is now subject to the very mechanisms he so intelligently details: because of its inclusion of a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of a naked young boy, you cannot buy his book in the U.K., Europe, or Canada. Of course, no controls are ever seamless (at a recent lecture at the University of Toronto, thirty copies of the contraband Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art somehow made it across the border, ready to be signed), and that is precisely Meyer's main assertion: just as perfect, total surveillance is impossible because there will always be unconscious encodings and private utterances that fly under the monitoring radar, censorship is also an uneven, rupturable field. What do moments of censorship and instances of censorship's failure tell us about the processes by which culture legitimizes itself? The seeds for Outlaw Representation were sown during the height of the late-1980s "culture wars," a time when prohibitions were handed down from the U.S. Senate floor, curators were arrested for indecency, and federal funds were withdrawn from controversial art. Meyer's book responds to that historical moment, yet its publication has renewed relevance at a time in which governmental restrictions on contentious or unpopular artistic (and activist) practices and slashed funding for the arts are pushed through in the name of "security" The relation of censorship and homosexuality is peculiarly intimate, because they both contest what constitutes the spaces of public and private (these things cannot hr viewed in public and these acts cannot be performed even in private). Looking at how gay artists have been subject to censorship's redacting hand and have eluded or confronted its attempts at omniscience might tell us something about how twentieth-century acts of "transgression" (itself productive of the instability between public and private) are made to matter to various audiences, by turns shunned, embraced, and finally inscribed into history.

These questions about the regulation and disruption of lines between public and private frame, although not always implicitly, much of Outlaw Representation. In a disarmingly personal statement in the afterword, Meyer wonders if choosing a topic on gayness might put his professional credibility at risk. Focusing his study on homosexuality. he worries, might speak his own desires in a way that will obscure his scholarly intents, rendering the book marginal, outside the realm of 'acceptable' academic pursuits. I wonder how much his fretting about respectability is not just about his sexuality, but also about the book's interdisciplinarity. The 'danger" of unrespectability perhaps stems from his status not only as an academic grappling with the sometimes salaciously solicitous representations of gay male sex but also as an art historian who is straddling several disciplines. Within art history, the promiscuity with which Meyer selects his sources might leave some uncomfortable, while Meyer's emphasis on textual and formal analysis--at times his insistent proximity to his objects borders on the dogged--might seem burdensomely image-heavy within American studies. How, in fact, might the study of homosexual art disrupt certain still-held ideas about the correct object choices of art history? Meyer's book deftly models how to mutually understand history and questions of identity and subjectivity, while remaining grounded in careful attention to ephemera, mass culture, and the rarefied art objects that are our "proper" sites of study.

The book is organized into four major examinations--on the battles around the suppression of the works of Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Gran Fury/David Wojnarowicz. (While the introduction promises that Holly Hughes will have her own case study, this disappointingly short treatment is more of a coda.) The thematic focus on censorship allows the reader to see both the continuities and differences throughout the twentieth century of official and unofficial responses to homosexual imagery without relying on a narrative of progress or increasing accommodation. All subjects are mined primarily via images, and while this book is highly relevant for multiple fields (e.g., American studies and lesbian/gay studies), it is as a work of art history that it makes its most original contribution. Meyer casts his sharp eye on a tremendous range of visual materials, including postcards, political flyers, mass-market pornography, comics, caricatures, right-wing leaflets, journalistic photographs, and phys ique magazines, as well as artworks. This vast set of sources, buttressed by rigorous archival research, forms the basis for his investigations about the construction and regulation of fantasy, both legally and artistically.