Queer Seriousness

I'm researching for something I'm currently writing and I came across something I think I've posted here before, about the painter and writer Joe Brainard and queer seriousness. I've been thinking about O'Hara but this is also of interest in the rather long piece. Oh, and it mentions Tim Dlugos and I am currently devouring his Fast Life: Collected Poems just out. So, here's the quote from the piece that interests me and hopefully others:

However, once we attend to Brainard himself on the issue things appear anything but straightforward. In an interview with Tim Dlugos in 1980, he said:

'Most artists are very straight, I mean straight in their seriousness and in what they're trying to do. I think I'm a lot more sensual, I mean a lot more ga-ga than that – but on purpose. No, not on purpose.' (Lewallen 2001: 18)

Thus Brainard suggests that straightness is not only a sexuality, but also an attitude, a serious attitude, which his art departs from by dint of what we might therefore call its 'un-straight', deliberately 'ga-ga' sensuality. This is not to suggest however – at least upon my reading – that the homosexuality of Brainard and his work be considered simply as non-serious and trivial, and judged accordingly. Instead, and more interestingly, Brainard might be read here as inviting us to consider how his work might be taken as providing an alternative approach to serious meanings, ones which we might construe in terms of an un-straight seriousness, a 'queer' kind of earnestness.

Brainard's own commentary here might be taken as example of just such a queer earnestness. For even as he makes such an earnest comment about the nature of his work he quickly moves to undermine its serious import by swiftly contradicting himself ('I'm a lot more ga-ga on purpose. No, not on purpose'); demonstrating in the process his own interpretive uncertainty, and maybe even appearing a bit 'ga-ga' himself as he is called upon to talk about his art. Thus, in a manner akin to Andy Warhol's tricky and calculated pronouncements about his own work, Brainard casts doubt upon his own authority, especially when called upon to comment straightforwardly upon his art, appearing perhaps as the stereotypically befuddled fag when faced with matters of hard intellectual thought. Similarly, on the subject of the relationship of this 'un-straight' seriousness to his sexuality, Brainard says in the same interview:

'I'm not really sure that has anything to do with being gay, though, 'cause I think my work is very sensual, very lush and all that, but I'm not sure that has to do with being gay. If I was straight it might be that way too. I don't know.' (Lewallen 2001: 100)

The uncertainty of this statement is mirrored by another one written in his 1981 book 'Nothing to Write Home About': 'I can't see that being a gay painter makes any difference whatsoever, except that now and then my work seems shockingly 'sissy' to me'. (Lewallen 2001: 83) Both of these statements are interesting to me here because they keep in play clashing and dissonant perspectives on homosexuality: it is seen both as insignificant for an understanding of Brainard's art whilst, at the same time, as being something just written all over it.

In some respects such statements proffer an interesting challenge to the (queer) interpreter not to take homosexuality too seriously in attending to Brainard's work whilst playfully acknowledging that it might indeed be the most fundamental thing about it.