Arts & Entertainment
Images and outrage
Controversy aside, ‘Hide/Seek’ is a groundbreaking show
A still from the video that caused controversy in the current "Hide/Seek" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.
Catcher Yogi Berra once famously called it “deja vu all over again.” But it was Karl Marx who perhaps defined it best as “when history repeats itself — the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
That was the feeling at least for a moment last week, when officials at the National Portrait Gallery censored a video component of its exhibit titled “Hide/Seek,” the show about gay and lesbian sexual love and its impact on American art. Complaints by right-wing Catholics over 11 seconds of a depiction of ants crawling on a crucifix was enough for NPG director Martin E. Sullivan to decide to turn tail and yank an entire half-hour-long 1987 video, titled “A Fire in My Belly” — a meditation on the ravages of AIDS by David Wojnarowicz, the gay artist who died from HIV-related causes in 1992.
Shades of Robert Mapplethorpe and the cancellation of an exhibit of his erotically charged photos by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989. And now as then GOP politicians are on the attack under the banner of “no promo homo,” and also as before, another gallery — this time Flashpoint — courageously took up the challenge and began to show the offending video.
But what about the groundbreaking NPG show itself, which opened in October and runs through mid-February? It’s stunning with 105 pieces of art from the canon of America’s greatest artists of the past century and more, depicting the ways in which their sexual orientations expressed themselves — usually coded and concealed — visually on canvas and other surfaces and as images in motion.
The exhibit is titled as a playful reminder of the childhood game of hide-and-seek, when concealment is the first task for survival. “HIDE/SEEK — Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” with its range and breadth of seeing and finding works of art that dare speak, however sotto voce, the name of taboo love, boldly snaps in two the several decades-long taboo, welded firmly in place after the Mapplethorpe fiasco, of acknowledging same-sex desire in major U.S. museums.
The range of artists begins with Thomas Eakins and his scenes of naked boys swimming and passes through other giants of American painting — John Singer Sargent, George Bellow, Georgia O’Keefe, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others — to our own new century. But as co-curator Jonathan D. Katz contends, “seeking and noticing” the sexual subtexts of their work “are two very different acts,” and this exhibit “seeks to turn such seeing into noticing.”
As with their work itself, nothing is as it seems at first. Therefore, “HIDE/SEEK” features, says Katz, “straight artists representing gay figures, gay artists representing straight figures, gay artists representing gay figures, and even straight artists representing straight figures, when of interest to gay people/culture.”
For Katz, considered the dean of academic study of gay and lesbian art history, this has been the curatorial work of more than 15 years. Katz shaped this exhibit with Smithsonian historian David C. Ward, who has openly called Katz “my camerado — per Walt (Whitman).”
Ward also says that Katz, who founded the gay and lesbian studies program at Yale University and is the first tenured professor in LGBT studies in the nation, “is a model of the engaged scholar” and as a result ran afoul of academic norms in the past for his avowed interest in these subjects.
“He’s someone who managed to be thrown out of two institutions, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University,” Ward says, “for daring in the 1970s to want to write about gay and lesbian Americans.”
In the magisterial catalogue accompanying the exhibit, Katz confesses that their choice of subjects is “firmly canonical” and rooted in “the register of great American artists … within the American mainstream,” so that many artists, less well known, have been excluded. The key objective, says Katz, is to show that “the assumption that same-sex desire is at best tangential to the history of American art” is “utterly unsupportable.”
With “HIDE/SEEK,” and even with the Wojnarowicz censorship fresh at hand, it now seems safe to say, in Katz’s words, that the “pervasive silencing of same-sex desire in accounts of American portrait painting” is over.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the exhibit comes in its revelation that American artists at the turn of the 20th century could in fact be much more open about their subject matter than those of the mid-20th century in a period haunted by sexual McCarthyism and the hunt for “reds and gays” in government, the schools and the clergy. During that era only on the fringes of the entertainment world, and there not always, could different sexual proclivities find open or even closeted refuge.
In other words, same-sex desire could be expressed more freely in the arts at that earlier time “prior to the advent of ‘homosexuality’ as an available category,” says Katz, even though same-sex desire acted upon was literally a crime. But this was before an explicit “homo/hetero binary” was established as the enforced norm, he says, and before “gay” and “straight” were paired as strict opposites instead of subtle inflection points on a spectrum of the sort spelled out by Alfred Kinsey in his scale of zero to six.
Key to this transformation, Katz says, was when “sexual behavior evolve(d) into sexual identity, from what you did to what you were.” In the earlier era, after all, sexual identity was premised not on the gender of one’s sexual partner but rather on one’s own gendered role —insertive or receptive — in the sex act. As Katz notes, “it was socially acceptable to penetrate a queer” for sexual relief and as “tolerable stand-ins for women.”
Thus, Katz begins the exhibit catalogue with a searching exegesis of George Bellows’ print from 1917, “The Shower Bath,” where two naked men are depicted front and center – one thin and effeminate, looking seductively over his shoulder and thrusting his posterior provocatively at a second man, beefy of build, butch and masculine, whose towel barely conceals his sexual arousal. Opposites in every way, “they are made a pair,” says Katz, and what he calls “the odd couple” are “the focal point of this image.” But the forward homoeroticism of the Bellows print did not hamper its commercial success at the time. And Bellows himself was a man devoted to his wife and children.
There is, of course much more in this exhibit, with many works coded with layers of longing, that NPG director Sullivan — before the controversy erupted over the video — spoke of “with pride” as offering “a new lens with which to view the panorama of American life.” It is indeed, as he said earlier, “a sumptuous survey of more than a century of American portraiture,” asking “new questions and risking new interpretations.” It dares to be at once risky and risque.
With portraits such as these, we enter the lives of others, to explore how identities were forged in the past. With portraits such as these, we end up staring at ourselves.
Movies
Ethereal ‘Camp’ a moody allegory for queer shame
An unsentimental yet empathetic exploration of guilt
When one watches movies for a living, it’s as easy to fall into routine as it is with any job. Each movie is different, of course, each with its own characters, its own viewpoint, and its own story – (or at least its own variation on one), but in so many other ways, they have a tendency to be very much the same.
This is because there is an entire “language” of filmmaking, established from the earliest days of cinematic storytelling, a process so subtle that most of us are barely aware of it: the image directs our attention, the script provides the shape and structure of the story, and the actors are our stand-ins, allowing us to “experience” the reality of the film through a transference of identity that occurs so reflexively that we don’t even notice it’s happened.
That’s why it can be such a jolt when we come across a movie that doesn’t follow the expected rules, and we can’t think of a better recent example than Avalon Fast’s “Camp,” which drew attention as it made the rounds at last year’s festival circuit and embarked on a series of screenings in select cities beginning on June 26.
Fast, 26, is a queer Canadian filmmaker who specializes in “Girl Horror” (a genre that centers female experience), and who has already become a prominent force in the “new queer indie” movement. Her first feature, “Honeycomb,” got a Sundance “virtual” screening, and she’s appeared as a performer in films like Alice Maio Mackay’s “The Serpent’s Skin” and leading trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s yet-to-be-released Cannes hit, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” With “Camp,” however, she stakes her claim to territory in a burgeoning field of queer/trans/feminist cinema to establish herself as a formidable “brand” of her own.
Rooted in a blend of trope-ish horror conventions and presented in a dreamy, ethereal style that elevates feeling over cognition, it’s the story of Emily (Zola Grimmer), a young woman accidentally responsible for two horrific tragedies, who feels hopelessly trapped by guilt and shame. At the suggestion of her father (Mike Tan), she takes a summer job as a counselor at a camp for “troubled” young people like herself, where she is quickly embraced and assimilated by the core group of female counselors – most of them “hot weirdos” who are more interested in all-night partying and a kind of home-grown witchcraft than they are in the wholesome camp activities they supervise during the day. Her initial response to this new environment is guarded, but as the summer goes on she comes to feel a strong connection to her fellow counselors, beginning to hope that she has – at last – found her place among a “family” that accepts her despite the life-shattering incidents that have come to define her sense of self. Yet at the same time, she becomes ever more aware of a call to confront and quiet the ghosts of her misfortunate past – even if it requires an unthinkable sacrifice.
Dreamy and purposefully opaque when it comes to differentiating between real experience and metaphysical reflection, Fast’s movie draws us in from the start with its edgy mix of visual atmosphere, blending an aesthetic that combines home-movie nostalgia with the ironically whimsical flourishes of the digital age to establish a tone that feels like a half-forgotten memory reconstructed in the form of an Instagram “reel.” It’s a potent effect, creating an overall aesthetic of surreal impressionism in which the plot advances more through mood and fragments of subjective experience than through concrete narrative form; at times, it feels untethered, yes, but it always manages to orchestrate its seemingly disjointed perspective into a shape that makes sense — even if we’re not quite sure how or why, or even what is actually happening.
The effect is cumulative, as the story becomes less bound to logic and realism while leaning further into a perspective that favors the arcane and mysterious over the rational and concrete. And while that might prove frustrating for viewers expecting a more traditional kind of “horror,” it provides for an experience that’s more likely to satisfy the kind of fans who appreciate being left to provide their own interpretations. The most obvious comparison would be with the work of David Lynch; there’s clearly an influence there for Fast’s darkly intuitive approach, which goes beyond the obvious parallels of its “Twin Peaks”-ish setting (the forest is most definitely a character here) to emulate the stream-of-consciousness narrative flow that marked much of Lynch’s late-career work.
“Camp” is far from imitative, however. While it may share some traits with the work of Lynch and other masters of contemporary surreal horror, it creates a unique “vibe” by allowing its own creative feminine energy to take the lead. The traumas it depicts spring from a definitively female space, from first-menstruation nightmares to the absurdities of having to defer to the “leadership” of a mediocre male who has more power than you (in this case, Austyn Van de Kamp as the camp’s supervisor, a naive but endearing yokel whose Jesus-centric worldview is undermined by the “coven” under his tentative command), and the overall treatment of its few male characters is largely less than forgiving. Yet on a deeper level, its subtext of carrying “unforgivable sin” that affects every aspect of one’s interactive life feels ultimately as much an expression of queer trauma as it does feminist ideology. The result is just cryptic enough to leave us pondering what we’ve just seen yet clear enough to deliver a sense of emotional catharsis which feels, if not exactly curative, at least healing enough to pave a way forward.
Admittedly, it’s not a film that will likely tick off all the boxes for hardcore horror fans; while it might deal in dark emotions and a certain witchiness that ties it to the legacy of such pagan-flavored classics as “The Wicker Man” or “Midsommar,” its terrors are more existential than visceral, pondering the difficulties of overcoming self-hatred rather than pitting us against a palpable physical threat, supernatural or otherwise. Indeed, it’s more introspective psychodrama than it is traditional horror – which is less a criticism than it is a disclaimer.
Though it’s Fast’s moody aesthetic that emerges as the “star” attraction of “Camp,” much of its effectiveness hinges on the performances of its cast. Grimmer, especially, is central, and she succeeds admirably not only in winning our empathy but in peeling back the morally murky layers of Emily’s path to redemption in a way that feels like empowerment rather than ethical compromise. However, the ensemble of “soul sisters” that surrounds her (Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Ella Reece, Lea Rose Sebastianis, and Sophie Bawks-Smith) all play their own particular part in creating the “magic” that makes the whole thing work.
All in all, “Camp” is an exhilaratingly fresh – if sometimes opaque – expression of queer filmmaking from a feminine perspective; that’s a regrettably rare occurrence which makes Fast’s fastidiously unsentimental (yet deeply empathetic) exploration of queer guilt all the more powerful, and makes her movie an essential addition to your watchlist.
The 13th annual Frederick Pride Festival was held at Carroll Creek Park in Frederick, Md. on Saturday, June 27.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
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Photos
PHOTOS: Fredericksburg Pride March and Festival
LGBTQ celebration held in historic Virginia town
The sixth annual Fredericksburg Pride March was held in downtown Fredericksburg, Va. on Saturday, June 27. Stafford County Board of Supervisors Chair Deuntay Diggs led the march alongside Fredericksburg City Council Member Jannan W. Holmes. The Fredericksburg Pride Festival took place at Riverfront Park after the march. Bree Fram was the featured speaker.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
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