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Seeing Things Differently. - Review - book review
Art Journal, Winter, 1999 by Grant H. Kester
Deborah Bright, ed. The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. London: Routledge 1998. 441 pp., 200 b/w and color ills. $85.
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As Jerry Falwell's recent attack on the "gay subtext" in Teletubbies suggests, queer identity in our culture has a particularly close and complex relationship to questions of visual representation. Is that a television antenna on Tinky Winky's head or a gay pride "pink triangle"? Is Tinky holding a purse or just a "magic bag"? And what are we to make of the Teletubby fascination with wearing skirts? Falwell's decision to fixate on remarkably obscure (and perhaps nonexistent) signifiers of queerness in the Teletubbies, while such obvious examples as Xena: Warrior Princess captivate millions of children each week, tells us a great deal about straight, conservative fantasies of queerness as a discourse of subversion and seduction. It raises another question as well. Is there a specifically queer hermeneutics of the image? What are its conditions, and how is it different from either Falwell's homophobic paranoia, or, for that matter, from mainstream art historical methodologies? In her book The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, Deborah Bright provides an invaluable guide to the conditions of queer visuality in the specific context of photographic history and art practice.
Bright, a photo historian and artist who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, has combined a wide range of materials, including historical and archival studies, analyses of contemporary art activism, short stories, and an impressive selection of works by contemporary artists. Given this diversity, the writing throughout is fairly consistent, with relatively few lapses into excessively turgid academese. Though at eighty-five dollars, the hardback price is a bit steep, the book is heavily illustrated, with both black-and-white and color images. Among them are works by Lyle Ashton Harris, Rotimi Fani-Kaynde, Hanh Thi Pham, Sunil Gupta, Catherine Opie, and many others, making the book an excellent resource for courses on queer representation in general and contemporary art in particular. Contributing writers include Michael Anton Budd, Mark Alice Durant, Liz Kotz, Mysoon Rizk, James Smalls, and Alisa Solomon. The book also features a useful bibliography of sources on queer theory, photographic history, and visual culture.
Bright's introduction reviews some of the political and theoretical questions surrounding the staging of gay sexuality in the mass media, political discourse, and art. Bright challenges what she describes as misinterpretations of the performative theories of sexuality and identity associated with writers such as Judith Butler, which tend to view the assumption of sexual identity as a kind of open-ended ludic play. She points instead to the material and political forces that impinge on and constrain what might be termed the "privilege of performance." Bright is particularly concerned with diversifying the construction of queer sexuality to include vectors of class, race, and ethnicity. Thus the book includes essays and stories by Elizabeth Stephens, Paul Franklin, Linda Dittmar, Mark A. Reid, and Catherine Lord, among others, which do a superb job of outlining the complex effect of these forces.
One of the key points of articulation for a theory of queer visuality concerns the status of desire within intellectual discourse. Conventional art history, founded as it is on the myth of disinterested scholarship, must expel or suspend the desire of the historian, whose job it is to dispassionately situate the recalcitrant "work of art" within the already established narrative of art historical progress. This attempt to make the difference of the singular work intelligible within, or conformable to, the normative standard of artistic achievement, might be seen as particularly problematic for a viewer whose own identity is constructed against the grain of a hetero-normative culture.
David Deitcher's discussion of his relationship to an anonymous ambrotype of two (possibly) gay men from the 1850s. which opens Bright's book, offers a revealing meditation on this dilemma. Deitcher uses the image to explore both his own ambivalent relationship to academic inquiry ("queer men and women are justified in maintaining a certain skepticism regarding the historian's positivistic and empirical method") and the complex position of queerness in the nineteenth-century concept of "romantic friendship" which granted a "special dispensation" (29) to same-sex relationships. At the same moment, Deitcher is less concerned with the historical specificity of the image than he is with its ability to give him the pleasure of self-recognition. Here intrudes Deitcher's own desire to read in or into the image something more, which may or may not be borne out by the picture's manifest content: "I am drawn to the men in this photograph because their pose strikes me as courageous, even defiant. And yet this may only he projection on my part, a measure of how much I would like to find gay desire reflected in an artifact from the pre-gay past" (25). It is precisely the anonymity of the image, its lack of authorial and historical stability, which allows it to function this way. Thus Deitcher describes his particular attraction to "orphaned" pictures that exist both "in and out" of history (29).
