Hide / Seek….and boo! It's homophobia!
Okay, I'm just getting caught up with the latest news on this. I've blogged about it before. But lots has gone done since.
"Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian by Frank Rich." Read it. The whole thing. If you haven't heard about the Hide/Seek exhibit and the sad, pathetic, offensive bit of political theater orchestrated by the right regarding this gay/lesbian portrait exhibit, then read Rich. Trust me. And below there's more, just a few links from a boatload of stuff out there that's been written on this. It's sad and pathetic, by the way, because the "public outcry" (there was none, it was fabricated) worked the Smithsonian pulled a video. Yeah, that's offensive, too. At least there's this good news. Also, I urge you to go to the NPG's Facebook site and post a comment. I did. You can also read the
Rich: "It took only hours after Donohue's initial battle cry for the video to be yanked. "The decision wasn't caving in," the museum's director, Martin E. Sullivan, told reporters. Of course it was. The Smithsonian, in its own official statement, rationalized its censorship by saying that Wojnarowicz's video "generated a strong response from the public." That's nonsense. There wasn't a strong response from the public — there was no response. As the museum's own publicist told the press, the National Portrait Gallery hadn't received a single complaint about "A Fire in the Belly" from the exhibit's opening day, Oct. 30, until a full month later, when a "public" that hadn't seen the exhibit was mobilized by Donohue to blast the museum by phone and e-mail."
And: "It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian's surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" are rarely called out for what they are — "bigotry disguised as prudence," in the apt phrase of Slate's military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been granted serious and sometimes unchallenged credence as a moral arbiter not just by Rupert Murdoch's outlets but by CNN, MSNBC and The Post's "On Faith" Web site even as he cites junk science to declare that "homosexuality poses a risk to children" and that being gay leads to being a child molester."
Also from the Times: Sexuality in Modernism: The (Partial) History:
On reconsideration, it seems more purposeful, as if specifically designed to avoid any controversy that might distract from the major point it was trying to make: namely, that work of gay artists was fundamental to the invention of American modernism. Or, put another way, difference had created the mainstream.
But how was the presence of difference defined in art? By subject matter? By style? By the sexual orientation of the artist? And isn't gayness, the most familiar form of such difference, a period concept, inapplicable to life and art of a century ago? Today the very word is used for convenience rather than categorically, with "queer" often used. (One way to think of it: gay is something you are; queer is something you choose to be outside of the heterosexual norm.) [CH:Huh?]
…
It is way past time for mainstream art history to acknowledge the shaping role of sexual difference in modern art. And "Hide/Seek," with its many strengths, begins to do so in a persuasively accessible way. Equally important is the need to assess the price that acceptance into history, and into the world, on mainstream terms may exact.
Wojnarowicz believed, as have many artists, that the outsider position is a valuable one, and with difference comes responsibilities, resistance to acceptance at any cost being one. The absence of a sense of that resistance in the show is what disappointed me when I first saw the catalog. It deepened with the removal of the video. And it stays with me still.
I wonder if it's still on after this hotmess.
Some links before the debacle began show the other issues surrounding this. Thanks to reader Marshall for these:
So Band of Thebes's overview of Hide/Seek exhibit and the problems he's had bringing it to fruition.
ArtInfo had a piece called " What's Troubling About the Smithsonian's "Hide/Seek" Show"
And the NYT Book Review has its own issues.
