Goodbye lesbian/gay history, hello 'queer sensibility': meditating on curatorial practice - We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History

This piece is dedicated to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an inspiring artist and activist, who died of HIV-related complications in January 1996 during its editing.

Looking back at the Stonewall 25 art season (loosely defined), two emblematic events stand out: Art in America's "After Stonewall" cover story in its June 1994 issue, and the In a Different Light exhibition at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, which opened seven months later. Both disturbed me deeply. Instead of the varied surveys they implied - the former of a quarter-century of gay and lesbian art, the latter of so-called queer sensibility in twentieth-century art - both virtually erased lesbian and gay art history of the seventies and early eighties. But the organizers of In a Different Light did far more than that. They not only passed up the opportunity to compile a much-needed historical record of lesbian and gay artists, but consciously rejected the notion of identity politics in favor of an amorphous notion of queer sensibility.

Art in America's "After Stonewall" package of twelve interviews was conceived and realized by Holland Cotter, a talented (gay) art reviewer at the New York Times. To his credit, Cotter selected worthy artists (Ross Bleckner, Nicole Eisenman, Louise Fishman, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deborah Kass, Cary S. Leibowitz [Candyass], Zoe Leonard, John Lindell, Donald Moffett, Frank Moore, Ellen Neipris, and Hugh Steers). They were allowed to speak in their own voices in extended, oral-history-style gulps unbroken even by questions, and they often spoke compellingly. But as a package, the feature remained lighter than air both for the narrowness of the artists selected - virtually all commercially successful and New York-based - and for the limitations of the method itself. At its most problematic, the contemporary-oral-history format obviates any give and take. This reader yearned, for instance, for Cotter's response to Hugh Steers's observation that "gay art is a marketing label ... it's important to discuss it and expose the fallacy of lumping us all together."(1)

As Cotter noted in a very brief introduction to the piece about modern gay liberation and the Stonewall riots that helped trigger it, "the majority [of the interviewed artists] were too young to have known the nascent gay and lesbian movement at first hand."(2) This is an understatement: half were born in the 1960s and only Ross Bleckner and Louise Fishman were born prior to 1950. Nonexpert readers - almost everybody - would have no idea from these interviews that gay and lesbian imagery even existed prior to 1985.

Where was even a mention of the artists who made the art world safe for the majority of those featured in the magazine? Artists such as Scott Burton, Tee Corrine, Nancy Fried, General Idea, Nancy Grossman, Harmony Hammond, Geoff Hendricks, Peter Hujar, Nicolas Moufarrege, Jody Pinto, Joan Semmel, Michael Tracy, David Wojnarowicz or Martin Wong? Not to mention Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, who actually participated in the Stonewall riots. As Frank Moore noted in his fascinating comments about older gay artists: "I learned so much from them. It was like a tunnel back into a past . . . I know a lot of gay artists who come to New York and connect with older artists . . . . Many people get this sort of thing through family, but for a lot of gay people the art world becomes that ancestral lineage network, where wisdom and history are passed along."(3)

Cotter's ahistorical approach surprised me; after all, he and I are part of the baby boom generation that largely came out and pursued our art historical studies after Stonewall. I did both simultaneously. Coming out in graduate school in the mid-seventies, the accomplishments of gay and lesbian artists fortified me (I wrote my master's thesis on Francis Bacon), as did the prospects of unearthing the hidden (art) history of queerdom. (This was identity politics, long before the term was invented.) It's unthinkable to me that any historian could uncouple identity politics from the establishment of a historical record. Such an approach is misguided. The gains of progressive moments - such as the post-AIDS dismantling of the art world closet in the late eighties - must be institutionalized, as the interwar history of gay men and lesbians in Germany, or the more recent (and complex) demonization of feminism, remind us.

Still, the placement of a lesbian-and-gay-art feature on the cover of a mainstream American art magazine was a milestone, even if the cover image (a detail" of eco-disaster from a Frank Moore painting) doesn't read as gay. The problem with such firsts is that they're rarely followed by seconds and thirds. So it's a pity that this one signified as a well-intentioned but incomplete effort.

Cotter's identity-based modus operandi (only the art of elder statesperson Louise Fishman doesn't telegraph that it's gay or lesbian made) is precisely what (gay) curators Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake were reacting against in their ambitious exhibition, In a Different Light. Catalogue readers hardly needed to read between the lines to determine the curators' hostility to identity politics: "Much of what queer artists are doing these days is questioning the value of identity politics," Blake wrote admiringly.(4) Whereas Cotter's artists were selected because they were out lesbians and gay men, Rinder and Blake selected artworks on the basis of their so-called queer sensibility. Skirting - or at least muddying - the question of sexual orientation, the show included work by important nongay artists, many of them feminists such as Carolee Schneemann or Ree Morton. (Despite such relatively fine distinctions, many gay and nongay viewers I spoke with assumed all the show's artists were same-sexers.)