Why you should catch the Brooklyn Museum's groundbreaking, moving 'HIDE/SEEK'
HIDE/SEEK is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through Sunday
6:06 pm Feb. 10, 20122
Whatever its flaws, HIDE/SEEK, which ends this Sunday at the Brooklyn Museum, is a first—a far-ranging look at depictions of homosexuality and unconventional notions of gender in American portraiture.
The New York Times faulted the show for being overly safe and generalist, but it's had its share of more extreme detractors. When the exhibition debuted at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in the winter of 2010-2011, the culture wars flared up all over again. It was all over an 11-second clip of ants crawling over a crucifix in a quarter-century-old film by David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly. Outcry was heard from the Catholic League as well as Republican leaders in Washington. Worse still, the Smithsonian’s director, G. Wayne Clough, ended up removing the film from the exhibition, which in turn led to an outcry from artists and gay-rights supporters. A fine mess.
A year later, the exhibit, with the Wojnarowicz reinstated, arrived without incident at the Brooklyn Museum. Perhaps that’s because the museum learned a decade ago not to bow to blowhards on matters of culture. It features more than one hundred works spanning from the late 19th century to the 1980s. As National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan said in a statement after the Wojnarowicz incident, the exhibit seeks not to offend but rather to explore—and what exploration it offers is surprisingly moving.
Portraiture might seem like a rather narrow lens, but it offers a look into both how artists represent sexuality in their work and how they represent themselves and one another to the world. There is not much room to hide within a portrait—but there emerges plenty to seek.
A white-bearded Walt Whitman, who exploded all sorts of taboos through his sexually charged writing, sits wizard-like, regarding viewers in a sepia-toned stare, while a selection of works by Harlem Renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten—who was fascinated by the openness of black culture and the emerging LGBT community in the ‘20s and ‘30s—includes a stirring portrait of choreographer Antony Tudor and the dancer Hugh Laing, in which the two men are very subtly holding hands.
Portraits of Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, Berenice Abbott, Djuna Barnes, and influential art dealer Betty Parsons are also represented. The works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose romantic relationship was mostly kept silent through the ‘50s and ‘60s, sit imtimately, side-by-side. Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests,” the silent films he made between 1964 and 1966 of friends, celebrities, and his own coterie—including Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, René Ricard, and Bob Dylan, among others—play with notions of fame, beauty, gender, erotics, and voyeurism.
Catherine Opie’s photographs of women, often in drag, wearing fake mustaches and beards and gazing directly at the camera, provide as much provocation as intimacy. Far more engaging and potentially disturbing than Wojnarowicz’s film is A.A. Bronson’s enormous Felix, June 5, 1994, a photograph of a gaunt and skeletal Felix Partz, Bronson's longtime partner in the collective General Idea, lying in bed, taken just minutes after his death from an AIDS-related illness. Beside it is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ outwardly playful but ideologically charged Untitled: Portrait of Ross in L.A., a pile of colorful candy intended to slowly diminish as each visitor takes a piece, referencing the wasting away of the body caused by AIDS.
Perhaps by ending with Wojnarowicz’s chilling, unfinished work (he died of AIDS too before its completion), HIDE/SEEK reflects the silence that remained over the art world, and lingers still. That’s why A.A. Bronson demanded the removal of Felix, June 5, 1994 during the National Portrait Gallery fracas. The work of an artist silenced by AIDS should itself not be silenced by intolerance.
HIDE/SEEK is a valuable exhibition, taking an underexposed historical narrative and sewing it together for the first time, allowing a form of representation that’s been underappreciated a chance to finally come out.
HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture is open until Sunday, February 12, 2012.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified the subject of the photograph 'Felix, June 5, 1994,' as well as the official who was responsible for pulling David Wojnarowicz's 'A Fire in My Belly' from the original exhibition.
Just to clarify a point or two: It was Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who removed the video; Martin Sullivan, director of the NPG, did not have any say in the matter or recourse to change the matter after the fact. Additionally, the Times called the show "conservative" because Roberta Smith couldn't figure out any other way to cut down the show, which she so loves to do. Any more nuanced article would have perhaps considered the incredible impact of this show that has broken the silence on speaking sexuality in American art. In curating a show like this - and in hosting shows like this, Katz, Ward, NPG, Brooklyn, and soon Tacoma are defying an age-old blacklist on speaking queer lives in the American cannon. That's huge; but it doesn't make a juicy op-ed.
The piece by A.A. Bronson is not of Felix Gonzalez-Torres but his longtime collaborator Felix Partz.
Allison Hemler
The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation