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Reflections on a name: we're here: gay and lesbian presence in art and art history - We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History
Art Journal, Winter, 1996 by Flavia Rando
We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History
This issue of the Art Journal began with the 1994 College Art Association conference session "Who's Building the Closet? Visual Culture and Art Historical Suppressions," co-chaired by Jonathan Weinberg and myself and co-sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the CAA. The extraordinary interest and enthusiasm expressed by audience members both during the conference and in the following weeks seemed to be a call from within art history for perspectives derived from lesbian and gay studies. Work by participants in that session, the art historians, critics, and artists Joana "Juba-Ometse" Clayton, Laura Cottingham, Michael Lobel, Erica Rand, and James Smalls, comprises the nucleus of material presented here. As a group, the contributors represent diverse perspectives and training - activist and scholarly, visual and text-based, critical and celebratory.
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For more than two decades, precipitated by the feminist movement, the gay/lesbian liberation movement, and the AIDS crisis, discourses of gender, sexuality, and sexual identity have been central to visual representation. What are the implications of sexuality and sexual identity treated as "categories of analysis"(1) for the disciplinary paradigms of art history? Central to our inquiry is a commitment to a discussion of sexuality and sexual identity as they are known and constructed within frameworks of race/ethnicity, class, and gender.
In the process of bringing this issue to press, the panel's initial inquiry, "Who's Building the Closet? Visual Culture and Art Historical Suppressions," one that implies the complex of knowledge practices necessary to construct and maintain closed closet doors, was transformed into the assertion, "'We're Here': Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History," with its implied (but not articulated) coda/supplement, "We're Queer, Get Used to It." At once confrontational, celebratory, and hopeful, this statement invokes a history of putative absence necessitating, once again, the announcement of "Gay and Lesbian Presence."
The shift in project names - representing and, we hope, contributing to a continued cultural shift in discursive possibilities for lesbian/gay/queer standpoints - is notable in that it addresses readers who are assumed to have knowledge of gay/lesbian social movements and, almost casually, confirms the destruction of carefully maintained boundaries between scholars and objects of scholarly inquiry - between politics and art.(2) The implied "We're Queer" of the title claims perversion, affirms, even embraces, the impossibility of "zero degree deviancy"(3) and the appearance of academic distance: these are unavailable comforts in the discussion of "openly lesbian, gay, and bisexual spectatorship."(4) Feminist theory, and the attendant deconstruction of masculinity, have permitted us to see that the viewpoint that has been accepted as objective is profoundly marked by interests of gender, race, and sexuality.
This is a beginning - the announcement of presence is of necessity a starting point - that we have made again and again. And here I meet with my own resistance, an internal dialogue that taunts, "And yet again?" as well as questions the risks and rewards of the project. Reflecting on the shift in project titles, I ask myself why, at this late date, we are announcing our presence. Is there still discursive power in announcing such a presence even as we are called upon by queer theorists to deny the efficacy of such an announcement? What stance does this presence require, and what is the meaning of this announcement? Self-declaration? Self-affirmation? Finally, where are we? That is, what is the discursive field that constructs art history; what does this presence and the implied previous absence signify (to editors, contributors, and readers)?
My introductory remarks at the 1994 CAA session were cautionary, and because it is still necessary to note that the issue of sexual identity is most often treated as a special circumstance - exceptional and marginal - within art history and criticism, I am taking this opportunity to repeat that gesture. I would remind us of, in Monique Wittig's words, "the material oppression of individuals by discourses."(5) Representations can, and do, have consequences for the manner in which we come to understand who we ourselves are, and the way we live our lives. Refusing art historical suppressions in order to make visible the construction of lesbian and gay identities, experiences, and desires, we run the risk of appearing to confirm an already understood complex of negative difference. Presence can be dangerous, risky.
One aspect of the closet has been its promise of safety from material harm in exchange for complicity in the psychic violence of self-erasure; imagining oneself unseen, one might imagine oneself as unseeing, not able to know. As closet doors protecting "compulsory heterosexuality"(6) are opened - and the sight lines of those constrained within are expanded - our system of difference/s is seen at every level to bear traces of coerced subordination. We can now examine not only subjectivities formulated through, and in resistance to, such subordination, but those requiring dominance yet masquerading as objective, linking (once again) the deployment of political power to knowledge practices. If visibility is not pressed into the service of a critique of the systems and paradigms of art history, we risk seeming to reify the constructs we intend to question - presence made to certify discursive absence.
