by Jon Lackman | 15 December 2010 | Modern
Museums all over have come under fire in recent weeks for their handling of gay/lesbian subject matter — for their responses (or non-responses) to the controversy over David Wojnarowicz, but also for their general timidity in addressing queerness, for example in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Art historians too have work to do, writes Tom Folland in the December 2010 Art Bulletin:
Leo Steinberg’s canonical essay, “Other Criteria” … has long served to occlude any theoretical attempt to come to terms with the profound sense of alterity in Rauschenberg’s work … [His] Combines have been situated art historically on the fault line of modernism and postmodernism–between Greenberg’s self-defining autonomous field of art that shored itself up against the onslaught of commercial culture and artistic practices of the 1960s that forced modernist dogma to its breaking point. But this neat binarism has resulted in a deracinated postmodernist theory of the Combines that has settled into a kind of neoformalism. In upholding Rauschenberg’s work as the product of an exalted and hermetic avant-gardism, postmodernism has elided the question of Rauschenberg’s homosexuality.
You are hereby nominated for Pseuds’ Corner.
There’s been some attempt at this before–in Jonathan D. Katz’s work, and in Kenneth Silver’s essay in the “Hand-Painted Pop” catalogue. I’ll have to read Folland’s essay, though. Disappointed that he didn’t make it to the Black Mountain College conference in Asheville back in October.
Take a look at Moira Roth’s brilliant articles on this subject that preceded any of the other attempts to relate sexuality and artists’ styles.
ha .. how many hundreds of times in grad school at UCB did I hear that gender makes no difference to art work? its a blind spot and a timidity for art mainstream.