by Jon Lackman | 25 May 2011 | Books, Theory
A quick preface: I managed somehow to post regularly for five years straight, but over the last few months I truly got in over my head — between finishing my PhD (I am done, and after just 14 years!), writing two long articles and taking a delicious sabbatical at the MacDowell Colony to work on a novel, I became too strapped to keep up. Well, here’s hoping it doesn’t happen again.
Various interesting books have piled up on my desk meanwhile. Given the recent controversy over “Hide/Seek,” the publication this month of Christopher Reed’s “Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas” seems particularly timely and in need of an immediate perusal. The book covers much terrain from the “Sambia” of New Guinea and the ancient Greeks and Romans to Polynesia, Tokugawa Japan, and European art from medieval times through the present. Reed begins his book by asking why his topic hasn’t received more attention yet:
Conventional art scholarship shies away from divisive social issues, habitually treating art as something that is–or should be–purely aesthetic or an act of individual expression with (paradoxically) universal appeal. An identity as controversial and collective as homosexuality fits awkwardly with these conventions. For many historians of sexuality, it is sexual identity that suffers from being linked to the aestheticizing and universalizing conventions of art history and criticism. Homosexual identity, they say, is an invention of modern Western science, so it is there–not in art, and not outside the West or in deeper history–that we must look to understand it.
Also, “the history of art, which is usually based on assumptions of continuity, is not easily integrated with the history of homosexuality, which is conventionally premised on alienation.” However, Reed asserts, to be daunted by such challenges is to “reveal a failure of historical imagination.” There are many ways in which the terms of art and homosexuality can be examined together productively. For example:
The institutionalization of gay and lesbian identity into organizations seeking the political and social normalization of homosexuality … was often marked by disavowals of flamboyantly visual manifestations of minority sexual identity. At the same time, an examination of the history of modern art from the position of the history of homosexuality explodes myths of the avant-garde as either an arena of freewheeling inventiveness or a safe haven for misfits. On the contrary (again), the avant-garde often exploited homophobia to attract attention while energetically suppressing affirmative expressions of sexual deviance and policing the behaviors and beliefs of artists who aspired to its rewards. Groundbreaking visualization of the physical and emotion bonds between people of the same sex, therefore, often originated outside the avant-garde in realms of popular culture before being appropriated as avant-garde spectacle.
Reed’s arguments strike me as admirably lucid and ambitious and they are well-illustrated by a variety of plates, many in color. Unfortunately his book isn’t footnoted (it’s “intended to invite a diverse readership”) but an extensive bibliography answers most questions.
Congratulations Dr. Lackman!
Hip, hip, hooray! Congratulations, Jon, on finishing the Ph.D. — and a fine posting, too.
Yes, I add to the chorus – congratulations!
Congrats John. Celebrate.