Smithsonian exhibit moves from hide to seek

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Written by Debra Brehmer
Dec 30, 2010

Keith Haring’s “Unfinished Painting” of 1989. – Photo: Courtesy

As might be expected, controversy has befallen the “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., through Feb. 13. The show represents the first time a major art museum in the United States has staged a thematic exhibition about gay identity, relationships and the LGBT influences on modern art movements. The fact that the conservative National Portrait Gallery (part of the Smithsonian organization) stepped up to the plate is shocking in and of itself.

Ironically, the controversy does not center on sexual identity issues but the old saw horse of religion. A four-minute excerpt from David Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire in the Belly” contains a brief glimpse of ants crawling over a crucifix. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at age 37. Like the “Hide and Seek” theme, the Catholic League/Republican call for removal of the video most likely contains layers of prejudice against the entire exhibition.

Smithsonian administrators withdrew the video without discussing the decision with the exhibition’s two curators, David C. Ward of the NPG and Jonathan D. Katz of the State University of New York at Buffalo (one straight, one gay).

This misguided institutional choice caused the art world to rally against the show. Most recently, artist A.A. Bronson asked that his mural-sized photograph of his deceased partner Felix (the final image in the exhibition) be removed in protest and the Andy Warhol Foundation threatened to withhold future Smithsonian funding. In this sense, the conservative sect has ingeniously turned the art world against the show, setting it on a path of self-destruction.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalog are a massive curatorial feat. The 105 works stitch together the role of LGBT perspectives into a larger cultural framework and reveal, perhaps for the first time, how integrated and essential gay artists were to the developments of modern art .

The show is quietly staged. You traverse the permanent collection of presidential portraits to find the entrance where the title wall presents Thomas Eakins’ 1898 “Salutat,” a 50 x 40 inch painting of a young boxer addressing the crowd after a match. The real subject here is not boxing but the admiration of the athlete’s near naked body, which glows with a heavenly light. His “salute” beckons us into the galleries and sets the tone for the nuanced, layered readings of all the work.

The exhibition unfolds chronologically. The 19th- and early 20th-century room is held together by the commanding gaze of Walt Whitman (who lived with a man, Peter Doyle). The photograph, taken by Eakins in 1897, shows daylight creeping into a dark room with the elderly, busy-bearded poet anchored in his chair, staring directly at us with a look of fitfully weary resolve. Whitman tried to “remove the veil” and amplify the “hidden voices,” as did so many others in these rooms, but our lingering feeling is not triumph but exhaustion.

By the mid 1900s the larger forces of the post World War I avant-garde allowed sexual identity to show itself more directly. The female artist Romaine Brooks’ stunning self-portrait in gray tones presents a creature of the night in male attire peering from under the brim of her top hat, stubbornly separate from mainstream culture but courageously confrontational. Nearby we have Marcel Duchamp in drag, photographed by Man Ray as Rrose Sélavy, his alter ego. We begin to see the fluidity of sexual identity as a freeing force in history. It plays into the larger transgressive art world role of standing outside the mainstream in order to see it more clearly.

How much to disclose, how much to keep hidden, when and where to assert one’s identity are questions that occupy all of the works in the show as well as life itself, gay or straight. Even at times of heightened tolerance, the game of hide and seek continues. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas look directly out of Cecil Beaton’s 1935 photograph with a stubborn sense of “coming forward,” but the picture plane feels like a prison wall with the societal boundary of ‘them and us’ rigidly binary.

At the heart of the show, a coded, private exchange between Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were lovers, seems hesitant and tender. These giants of the 1960s New York art world use the push and pull of collage, with its messy amalgamation of signs, found objects, erasures and indecipherability, as the perfect disjointed response to the previous heroic, heterosexual world of abstract expressionism. Johns and Rauschenberg reground art to the everyday but also reinstate a beneath-the-surface emotional intimacy and vulnerability that is easy to overlook in the standard story of their work.

The 1970s and ’80s bring newfound expressive freedoms. Queer, feminist and multi-cultural studies pried open an insular art world. Peter Hujar’s photograph of writer Susan Sontag relaxing but deep in thought (1975) calls across the room to Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of the leather-clad Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979), a humorous re-framing of the family portrait. Sontag and Mapplethorpe spoke of universal conditions like beauty and mortality, making their work especially dangerous.

Keith Haring’s “Unfinished Painting” of 1989 best introduces the devastation of AIDS. By the next year, 18,447 people had died of the virus, including Haring. In the corner, Felix Gonzalez Torres’ pile of candy pays bittersweet tribute to his deceased partner Ross Laycock. The 175-pound mound represents the healthy weight of Ross. The public can take pieces, which then diminishes the pile. A cycle of wasting and re-birth ensues, not unlike ants crawling on a crucifix – a ceaseless erosion of even the things we love.

We know we are in Washington, D.C., when we get to the Torres piece, which sports a warning sign: “Eating candy from this exhibition may present a choking hazard.” This little bit of legal paranoia amplifies how truly daring an act it was to stage this show at the National Portrait Gallery.