Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art

Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art

Introduction

• Early Pop art is linked to the growth of gay identity in the New York and London art scenes.
• Gay artists introduced a visual language during the decline of Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism vs. Early Pop

• Abstract Expressionism suggests rather than labels, aiming for ineffable content.
• Early Pop began to explicitly label male homosexuality, a subject previously avoided.
• Labeling, according to Warhol, is an indelible act.

Jasper Johns and the Dilemma of Signification

• Johns confronts the challenge of expressing subject matter and feelings within Modernism.
• $Painting with Two Balls$ questions and resolves the issue of signification by exposing the gendered rhetoric of high abstract art.

Deconstructing Abstract Expressionism

• Johns critiques Abstract Expressionism's \"instinctual\" gestures, challenging notions of authenticity.
• $Painting with Two Balls$ turns abstract seriousness into comedy by inserting real balls and labeling them, undermining the non-specific aesthetic field.
• This act can be seen as a counter-castration of Abstract Expressionism, challenging its masculine rhetoric.

The Unspoken Term

• Johns reveals the \"master equation\" of Abstract Expressionism: artistic authenticity linked to masculine behavior.
• The artificiality in $Painting with Two Balls$ points to the idea that tough, serious art is made only by rough-hewn, spontaneous, male artists.

Gay Identity in Art

• Johns's dismantling of Abstract Expressionism's rhetoric set the stage for forging a gay identity in his art.
• The homosexual themes in Johns's work are densely coded and elusive, influenced by the Abstract Expressionist code of non-specificity.
• The work exists within the \"epistemology of the closet,\" as termed by Eve Sedgwick.

Objects and Words as Ready-Mades

• Johns integrates objects and words into a painterly field reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism.
• He alludes to gay American poets (Frank O'Hara, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman) and painters (Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth).
• The art demands hermeneutical investigation, mirroring the dynamics of \"closeted\" behavior.

In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara

• The painting uses pictorial rhetoric to suggest powerful feelings, referencing O'Hara's poem about lost love.
• The title and O'Hara's name ensure that gay allusions are present.
• The work may reflect Johns's feelings of desolation during the end of his relationship with Robert Rauschenberg.

Hart Crane as Inspiration

• Johns created multiple images dedicated to Hart Crane, referencing his poetry and life.
• Works like $Periscope (Hart Crane)$, $Passage$, and $Diver$ pay homage to Crane's suicide and his memorial to Walt Whitman.
• Johns links the hands of Crane, Whitman, and himself in his paintings, connecting three gay American artists.

Marsden Hartley and Memorializing Crane

• Hartley's painting $Eight Bells Folly: Memorial for Hart Crane$ serves as a precedent for Johns's tribute to Crane.
• Both artists depict Crane's suicide, reflecting the trope of the death of the gay artist as a symbol of homosexual experience.

Charles Demuth and Coded Images

• Johns draws inspiration from Charles Demuth, particularly his coded portraits and hidden sexuality.
• $Figure 5$ is an homage to Demuth's portrait of William Carlos Williams, $I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold$.
• Demuth's need to conceal his sexual interests led him to create picture-puzzles and coded imagery.

Hartley's Influence

• Demuth's coded portraits were inspired by Hartley's German military series, which served as coded portraits of his lover, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg.
• The commonality of surface between Hartley and Johns results from the combination of private emotional geography and public emblem.
• Johns found a way to publicly express his private experience of being gay through the symbolic portraits of Hartley and Demuth.

Target with Plaster Casts

• The imagery of the closet is prominent in Johns's $Target with Plaster Casts$.
• The hinged doors that can be opened or closed, reveal or conceal specific parts of the anatomy.
• The juxtaposition of target and fragmented body parts encourages to attempt to make them cohere in signification.

Male as Target

• The work associates danger with the nude male body, unusual in modern art.
• The male body is endangered by the gaze, reflecting the male homosexual experience.
• $Target with Plaster Casts$ portrays the homosexual man of the postwar period, with the gay body fragmented and sorted into compartments.

Parallels and Precedents

• The image evokes the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and references Marsden Hartley's $Sustained Comedy (Portrait of an Object)$.
• The work can be read alongside Robert Rauschenberg's $Bed$, both works embody the excitement, intensity, and danger of two men falling in love.

Andy Warhol's Entrance

• Andy Warhol aspired to be a full-time artist and looked up to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg as role models because they were the most important artists in New York, they were gay, and they were lovers.
• Warhol recounts being told that his \"swishiness\" and commercial background were hindrances, setting him apart from \"Jasper and Bob.\"

Warhol’s Queerness

• Warhol's queerness was manifested by his comportment and it was also shown in his early pre-Pop art.
• Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men refers to the FBI's desire, but to Warhol's own. That “wanting men” was synonymous with criminal activity must have made the joke all the better to Warhol

Gendered Discourse and Commercialism

• Warhol's willingness to embrace both his \"swishiness\" and commercialism contrasted with \"Jasper and Bob's\" refusal to do either.
• Warhol's collector behavior and shopping habits challenged gender norms, as consumerism was associated with women.

Greenberg's Critique

• Clement Greenberg's \"Avant-Garde and Kitsch\" highlighted the distinction between elite and popular culture.
• Greenberg associated the avant-garde with production (men) and kitsch with consumption (women), reinforcing gendered stereotypes.

The Anti-Domestic Trope

• Abstract Expressionism was constructed as \"anti-domestic,\" emphasizing the virilizing American landscape and rejecting commercialism.
• Pop artists parodied this construction, challenging the masculinizing rhetoric of postwar art criticism.

Warhol's Retrospective

• Warhol's decision to wallpaper the Whitney Museum for his retrospective transformed the space into a domestic interior, subverting traditional notions of avant-garde \"production.\"
• This act of transvestism allowed Warhol to express his allegiances in terms of gender identification, sexual orientation, and class origins.