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Richard Meyer and Jon Davies

When asked to contribute to this volume, I knew that I wanted to engage in dialogue with a queer visual studies scholar of a younger generation. Queerness continues to transform, as if before our very eyes, particularly as trans and non‐binary genders become more visible. At the same time, the political conditions of life in the United States are becoming, almost day by day, more restrictive and authoritarian, the landscape ever more repressive. I thought a dialogue with a younger queer visual studies scholar who is experiencing these changes through a different optic would be most productive. I therefore approached the art historian and curator Jon Davies, who is also, and not incidentally, a PhD student with whom I work closely at Stanford. A departure point I proposed was thinking of the ways in which queer culture—including sexual culture—allows for an important contrast but also, for many people, an overlap between visual culture and “high art.” I was curious whether this idea was still valid and fruitful, or whether it needed reexamining in our current moment. The conversation was conducted over two sessions, in June and August 2019, then transcribed, and then updated before publication. My friend and queer visual studies mentor Douglas Crimp died in between our conversations, on July 5. His life and work shape the dialogue that follows.

Richard Meyer

JON Rereading “At Home in Marginal Domains” (Meyer 2000), the question of yours that jumped out at me was how, if at all, spaces of queer sexuality can be rendered visible to history without betraying the secrecy and anonymity that structured those spaces to begin with. I feel like that’s very relevant now not just to how “queer” is changing, but also to how people encounter images and objects. I’m thinking of how the Internet and social media platforms like Instagram change the affect or the urgency of encounters that people have with artworks.

RICHARD There’s a lot about sexuality that is not susceptible to visual representation or to history, but there’s also a lot of art and historical experience that can’t be divorced from sexuality. So not being able to capture something fully doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant. Visual studies attends to gender and sexuality as a dialogue between representation and what’s lost to representation, or between history and what has been lost to history. It tries to bring back certain traces or objects or art that have been overlooked, while acknowledging that retrieval is never sufficient or comprehensive.

One of the ways in which I got interested in this was through a series of nude and seminude photographs that George Platt Lynes took in 1938 of the painters and lovers Paul Cadmus and Jared French (I was writing about the censorship of Cadmus’s public paintings at the time). The photographs were among thousands of male nudes that Lynes produced privately in the 1930s and 1940s. While Lynes gained fame as a fashion, dance, and portrait photographer, his private photographic endeavors remained virtually unknown. Shortly before his death in 1955, Lynes donated many of these photographs, including the Cadmus–Lynes pictures, to Alfred Kinsey and his Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana, where they reside to this day. Lynes’s double portrait of Cadmus and French offer what we would call today a gay male couple in a totally eroticized and eroticizing context. Although Cadmus was portraying homosexuality in his paintings, he was doing so exclusively through the stereotypical figure of the effeminate “fairy” and of a homosocial intimacy among sailors (and other conventionally masculine figures) that couldn’t be acknowledged at the time. I had to stop myself and say, Lynes’s private photographs are just as much part of history as Cadmus’s paintings. I think the emergence of visual culture studies enabled me and many other art historians to take a broader view of cultural artifacts and to resist privileging public history over private art and culture. Even if no one else saw the photographs of Cadmus and French, I know that they saw them and that Lynes, of course, did as well.

JON That’s an audience!

RICHARD Why shouldn’t they count as one? I’m interested in the notion that such a limited reception might also be an enactment of intimacy. There was an erotics among those three. Cadmus told me the ripped t‐shirts the couple wear in the photograph were provided by Lynes as a prop. Famously dapper, Cadmus would never have worn such a tattered shirt. All of that suggests a much more elaborate visual and erotic choreography or set of possibilities than you get if you are looking at Cadmus’s paintings..

JONAnd there was no possibility of financial success or renown from making those photographs—Lynes was more likely to face ruin or prison for making them—which I think speaks to the potency or urgency of desire, friendship, and kinship as motivating forces for making work. I think a way in which modernist art history is typically narrated is that an artist sets out to solve a specific formal problem and then tries to do so, and then another artist advances that process forward. This narrative doesn’t really account for all the messiness and everything going on in a person’s life outside the frame, which all factors into artistic life.

I just read the biography of Samuel Steward, Secret Historian (Spring 2010), and he seems like a useful figure to bring into our conversation. He wanted to be a renowned literary figure, but discovered over the decades that sex was essentially his medium or the driving force of his life. And then he embraced the degraded, maligned form of the gay pulp novel later in his life, and it was his way of finally bridging his literary pursuits with the pursuit of desire or sex. These writing gigs were very poorly paid, you gave up all your rights, the publishers were very fly‐by‐night, but they provided a platform for him that the world of modernist literature just couldn’t. I was also struck by his explanation for becoming a tattoo artist—how it allowed him a proximity to sailors and other men’s bodies, and how tattooing was a way of marking them with his handiwork, which was disseminated out in the world, circulating on their bodies. I thought this was a beautiful metaphor, or even a model for thinking of these more underground or marginal forms of art or cultural production. I think this ties in with my interest in the unrepresentability of certain aspects of sexuality and with the way they require other forms in order to be legible.

RICHARD Didn’t he have some kind of mural over this bed?

JON That’s something else I was going to bring up—how art is produced as a form of seduction. Initially he had a mural he made himself of a sailor and a “floozy” above his bed, and then at a certain moment he replaced it with one of two men “in a moment of post‐coital relaxation” (Spring 2010, 168). And I thought that was fascinating, because he was very suspicious of gay liberation and of the new visibility of gay culture and the gay couple in particular. But that historical transition is registered right there, in his bedroom.

RICHARD One of the things Cadmus said to me, I think in our first conversation, is that he really disliked gay pride parades because, for him, pride was a bad thing, in fact a deadly sin. (He actually painted grotesque personifications of the seven deadly sins in the 1940s.) Even in the sense of being proud versus being ashamed, it just didn’t make sense to him for homosexuality to be either one or the other of those things. And pride was this over‐inflation of the self.

JON And now pride is a whole month.

RICHARD What started as the anniversary of a riot, the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day Parade, has now become a celebration rather than a call for liberation. Not that there isn’t a lot of politics going on in pride parades but there is also a great deal of corporate sponsorship and commodification. To the gay liberationists of the early 1970s, many of whom were avowedly anti‐capitalist, it would have been unimaginable that large corporations could publicly cash in on something called “the gay community.”

Turning back to Steward for a moment, when we say sexual experiences can’t be fully captured by representation, in many cases (such as his) we wouldn’t have access to these representations at all if private diaries, records of sexual encounters, and pictures had not been created and preserved for later audiences.

JON That was his masterpiece, basically: his card catalogue of all his sexual encounters.

RICHARD There has to be someone who values—even if it’s not valued in its moment—there has to be someone later who recognizes that there is not only historical but also creative value in this and that, if it’s retrieved in the right way, it will be meaningful to all these people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it. And that’s hopefully where we come in. We can recognize that there is meaning that hasn’t yet been offered to others, and maybe we can be part of how that meaning is established. I’ve always been interested in putting materials such as physique magazines and wheat‐pasted posters in conversation with high art. Or rather I’ve been interested in the fact that such objects have sometimes been in conversation with high art but in ways that couldn’t be acknowledged at the time and often have not been since. The way people, including artists, live their lives may involve very different domains of cultural production. Visual culture studies helps us retrieve some of the domains that have been lost or looked right past.

JON And Steward’s circle was Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, George Platt Lynes—and his being willing to talk about homosexual desire and rough sex gave them an outlet they wouldn’t otherwise have had for talking about those things in more rarefied circles. Having a figure like him allowed those conversations to happen, and who knows how much that fuelled their “high art.”

*

RICHARD I think there are things that register in the visual that don’t register anywhere else, or at least don’t register as powerfully or as vividly or, let’s say, libidinally. What art history gives us is a way of looking critically and closely at visual objects. We look not only to learn about form but to understand the relation between visual form and lived experience. I was lucky in that I was trained in college by feminist art historians. I knew that the skills that art history offered were relevant not only to canonical art but also to the exclusions it imposed and to the social world, more broadly conceived of. Feminist art history showed me how to take my high art training into other domains of the culture.

JON This brings us back to the tension between, say, a sexual experience and its representation or impossibility thereof. I think that central to art history, or at least to art history how we do it here at Stanford, is acknowledging that what we do as scholars and writers—and what we can do with the craft of writing—can never fully capture the visual image, and that there is always a tension between the image or artwork we are discussing and what we are able to do through language and description to actually articulate it. So I think that’s another way art history makes itself available to that question of representability or legibility that seems very queer.

RICHARD I’ve always been drawn to things that appear to be irreconcilable, and part of the logic of queerness concerns that. Including, I would say, elite artistic visual culture and gay subcultural images, for example David Hockney and his relation to the physique photography of Bob Mizer, which partially inspired Hockney to move to Los Angeles and is featured, in reimagined form, in several of his paintings.

I’ve sometimes thought, if I couldn’t have written about Physique Pictorial (Mizer’s magazine) or about the mural painted by Chuck Arnett at the Tool Box (an early 1960s leather bar in San Francisco at which Arnett tended bar), I wouldn’t have become an art historian—not because I was trying to make physique photography or bar murals into museum art but because I don’t believe that high art can (or should) be severed from other forms of cultural production and creative labor.

JON I feel like I share that same lack of interest in high art as a category; I never really held it up as a transcendent, aspirational category. I think that, for myself, it was always how a work of art was tied to social and erotic energies. Something I was thinking about was the way, say, erotic gay drawings circulated secretly and privately among men when this was illegal. I wonder how much the form and the aesthetics of those drawings really matter, by comparison to the intense social, emotional, psychic, and affective energies that are invested in them; and I wonder how art history can grapple with these things, once the people who had such intense relationships with those objects are gone. I guess it’s up to the writing to be able to re‐create such intense attachments in the absence of those who experienced them, though it’s a very tricky business.

RICHARD I think that’s really important and something I couldn’t quite comprehend early on when doing work on American art, homosexuality, and censorship: the ways in which meanings—the charge, the power that works have—cannot be attributed only to their visual or formal achievement but actually to what they spark in the moment of their making—and also in subsequent moments, when viewers may experience the work in ways that couldn’t have been predicted by the artist. Queerness in this sense might be thought of a practice of looking against the grain, against the overall logic or intention of a film, artwork, or printed text by attending to moments, however fleeting, that spark other possibilities.

*

RICHARD So what is now called “queer studies” (what in the late 1980s was called “gay and lesbian studies”), and cultural studies, and visual studies or visual culture—all these emerged in my intellectual consciousness more or less simultaneously. I was an art history major, I already had art history implanted in me, and I was out as a gay man; I wanted to bring art and sex together somehow. But I think there is a special rapport between queer studies and visual studies—both fields require that we look at things that we’ve been told in the past we shouldn’t be looking at. Part of the argument that Catherine Lord and I made in Art and Queer Culture (Meyer and Lord 2013) is that you can’t chart the dialogue between those two categories if you just look at museum and gallery art. Queer culture is also a culture of everyday life, it’s a history of underground imagery, of anonymous things, of activist things, of scrapbooks. That’s where visual studies seemed so liberating to me—not only was it acknowledging that there are all these things that are left out, but it was also making me look at the relation between writing and images, and work through the discrepancy between those forms of communication. The theoretical grounding of visual studies in its emergent days (and here I’m thinking especially of Foucault and Barthes) allowed people to think differently about the relation between writing and looking, or writing and objects.

JON I think it’s really important that queer studies—or just queer people—are, basically, attuned to reading between the lines and understanding that not all the meaning of an image resides on the surface, that it’s something to be decoded. I feel like that’s another point of coming together between queer studies, visual studies, and art history. And I wonder, as queer artistic production happens now, in 2019, whether there’s still a sense of being in opposition to a dominant culture, or of having to speak in code or to work with irony or camp or these other historically queer reading strategies. I imagine that queer art will change a lot as a generation comes up that doesn’t necessarily think of itself as being outside, or abjected, or hated by mainstream society. So I wonder what it means to lose that ability to speak in code or to read code in the future, and how we may keep it alive in some way.

RICHARD There’s this beautiful passage in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing where she questions why it is that she has always been so interested in the closeting of homosexuality in literature, Victorian literature more specifically, and not in later, full‐bodied affirmations of gay and lesbian identity. For Sedgwick, it was more interesting to think about layered and encoded meanings in nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century fiction than, let’s say, in post‐Stonewall gay literature. After reading that passage, I realized that I actually found (and still find) the visual and rhetorical devices of censorship compelling: erasure, partial obstruction of vision, the bar across the genitals, or the posing strap or G‐string worn by one of Mizer’s physique models. I’ve always been drawn, queerly I think, to visual images that have to struggle to be seen and to images that are structured by partial invisibility or necessary encoding.

JON I was thinking, again, about the Internet and the digital and how, in your recent “Fifty and Counting” article for Art in America, you quote the artist Zoe Leonard and you write that “powerful forces of desire were clarified by encounters with particular writings and films” (Meyer 2019, 84). I have this tendency to think that encountering, say, a queer historical image on Instagram or something like that is a degraded or less “authentic” way of encountering it, because there’s a kind of flattening in terms of scale and texture and context, but what you just said is making me think that maybe these digital platforms are more about a space of contestation or conflict. People assume that they have a high degree of freedom when it comes to expressing themselves and their identities, but then to have Instagram censor an image is a powerful reminder that representation is still contested. Just considering how the digital changes visual culture and how it’s consumed so thoroughly, I’m wondering what you think of these platforms, especially since, as art historians, we are very attuned to the object, and here the things we are dealing with aren’t really objects anymore.

RICHARD I remain nostalgic for objects. I wrote years ago about this exhibition called Queer and Kinky Danger (1998) at the Gay and Lesbian (now GLBT) Historical Society of San Francisco. That was the whole history that this amazing archivist named Willie Walker (now deceased) put together of leather culture, S&M (sadism and masochism), and kink subcultures; and it contained mostly 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s material. It included this tiny matchbook from the Tool Box (Figure 5.1), with George Washington in a leather jacket. And for some reason I really fixated on this idea of the father of our country as a leather daddy, and I thought it was both camp and not exactly sexy, but referring to a whole sexual subculture. But it was its smallness too: the fact that it was just a matchbook that no one would ever have thought was to become historical—it’s not like a painting. I wanted it to be published in its smallness, but on the Internet it’s just going to look like any other image. And so I feel things like the flimsiness of it, the fragility of it… once it’s an Internet image, it loses something. I think, for me, with both visual culture and queerness—and the connections between them—there is something important about fragile objects and fragile histories, you know, that these aren’t fully formed yet; let’s say, the history of gay bar matchbook covers or gay bars as things you might take seriously in your studies. I want not to be so suspicious of the Internet. This is our reality, you can’t say, “I’m not going to deal with the Internet.” I do think my students need to go to archives and museums, but I want them to understand the different experiences they are having, which is all part of visual culture.

Figure 5.1 Matchbook. The Tool Box, c. 1963.

Courtesy GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.

JON I’m just thinking about Douglas Crimp’s (1999) article “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” where he essentially says that cultural studies queers art history. There’s been a surge of interest among queer artists and scholars in queer archives specifically, and partly this is tied to their being, typically, a very tangible alternative to the digital. You wouldn’t have that kind of resurgence of interest if it weren’t for the digital; people wanting to have those experiences with fragile, tactile objects actually having to search through an uncatalogued box that’s covered in dust and found in a dark corner—all these things take on a renewed appeal. And at first I thought of the impact of queer archives as being more within queer studies or queer communities, but now I’m realizing that they have a particular lesson for art history and visual or cultural studies more broadly—in that it’s a completely different value system in terms of who is deemed worthy of being remembered, and what’s kept and what’s held on to.

RICHARD There’s a man named Tim Wood who was a Sears salesman in Oakland, and I ended up interviewing him because there are these beautiful scrapbooks in the GLBT Historical Society. The one I liked best had all these photos of men on nude beaches; they all had these decorative flourishes, like bits of fabric or wallpaper. And the frontispiece is this map of San Francisco that’s golden, with apertures floating in the water with these nude bathers, and each one is for a different nude beach. (One was “B.A. Beach” and I asked, “where is B.A. Beach?” And he said, “oh it’s Bare‐Ass Beach.”) I asked where he learned scrapbooking, and he said “oh, my grandmother had these scrapbooks full of cutouts of flowers and recipes and I inherited them.” And I thought it would be really cool if the queer archive accessioned his erotica, but also the grandmother’s scrapbooks, as a kind of queering of a scrapbooking tradition that was about femininity. And of course they didn’t, but I was really interested to hear that story—because you wouldn’t look at an early twentieth‐century scrapbook of flowers and recipes and think it would have anything to do with Bare‐Ass Beach; and yet in the life of Tim Wood it did. And he actually used his grandmother’s visual approach, and that’s why there were all these flourishes that you wouldn’t have expected if it had been just about the naked men. I’m sure those have been digitized, but in a digital image you can’t appreciate, let’s just say, the sheen of some of the wallpaper fragments that he’s pasted in, or the sheen of the bodies of the men.

JON The textures of those different components all index their different histories, and you lose that in a digital reproduction.

RICHARD But I also feel like sometimes queer archives or queer studies have their own exclusions, so that the relations between queer and seemingly non‐queer‐identified subjects are difficult to map, and once you have a queer archive presumably all the stuff that isn’t queer is left out.

JON Something I really value in your work is that the familial tends to be central. For me and certain other queer scholars, there’s a kind of jettisoning of the biological family. I’m always torn between the question of queerness and futurity or the lack thereof. I feel like your focus on the familial in dialogue with, say, desire or sexuality is better than throwing the biological family out with the bathwater.

RICHARD It’s brought me to think about my grandmother’s work as a seamstress… Right now I’m actually writing more about my family than ever before, but it’s more about the visual and material culture that my grandmother introduced into my consciousness as a kid. There’s also this old idea of “families we choose”—that we create alternative kinship structures—which I’m also interested in. I do believe that the family has been a very violent structure; and I’m also considering how it’s been used by the Christian right—the idea of “family values.” But I think of the bonds of affection that can exist between family members or other people, and that this is an important aspect to acknowledge as part of queer history. Often it offers alternative versions of how love can be organized.

Douglas Crimp was instrumental in exactly this dialogue about how visual culture could “queer” art history, and also about the ways in which activism, in his case AIDS activism, might pry open art historians’ modes of thinking about contemporary art. I remember when he presented “Mourning and Militancy” at the second annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Yale in 1989. (The paper is published in Crimp 2002, 129–49.) Douglas told a story about not being able to mourn his father after his death because of their difficult relationship. Shortly after the funeral, Douglas developed an infection in his tear duct, which swelled into a painful abscess and eventually burst. As “poison tears” oozed down his face, Douglas said that he would never again doubt the force of the unconscious. I have never forgotten the graphic image of pain Douglas conjured or the power of his argument about unconscious grief. As this example suggests, visual culture is not only about paintings, photographs, and other material objects but also about the images we have in our minds and the way we use the visual as a way to convince people of the points we are making. In Douglas’s “poison tears” story, what I’m so struck by is how visceral, but also how visual the image is—it was a tear duct in his eye, after all, so it’s all about an infection of vision.

JON Maybe scholars of visual culture are in a position where they can be image makers themselves and can use language in this less academic but more descriptive or literary way, to set a scene or to sketch an image that then has a rhetorical weight to it. That story is about everything that we can’t consciously know or analyze about ourselves, and the force of everything that can’t be known. An art history that’s completely object‐focused or “objective” can’t necessarily articulate the force of desire and everything behind why certain images and objects have such a hold on us.

RICHARD I really agree with that. Douglas was able to juxtapose subjects and objects that you wouldn’t expect to encounter side by side. In this case, the force of the unconscious, as evidenced in the physical manifestations of Douglas’s inability to grieve his father, is juxtaposed with the problem of mourning in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Douglas generated enormous power through such juxtapositions. He was able to do so, I think, because he was so attentive to ambivalence and contradiction. It was one of the things that made him a great critic.

JON This might be straying too far, but I wonder whether an experience of queerness as a tricky or complicating relationship with one’s family is in some way a primary critical “scene” that shapes one’s worldview. I mean that this experience of the family as the first place where you recognize difference or outsiderness could feed into your critical eye.

RICHARD Maybe for some people, but I’ve met a lot of queers who aren’t very critical at all [laughter]. I don’t even know whether this would apply now to this generation, but in my generation everyone I knew who was a homosexual—gay or lesbian—felt that they had had to suppress that or keep it secret. In writing Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐Century American Art (Meyer 2002), I realized that the suppression of homoerotic art reinforced the prior prohibition of homosexuality to which individuals are subjected at both the psychic and the social levels.

*

RICHARD In Douglas’s “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” part of what he is arguing is that we have to try to be as complicated as the artists we study. So it doesn’t make sense to just take these silkscreen paintings that Warhol made from 1962 to 1966 and separate them from his films, from the magazine, from Andy Warhol Enterprises, from the portraiture, the photography… But that’s what art history does—it takes the Art with a capital A. And I don’t quite agree with the proposition of this reader that visual culture studies has moved from the margins and has become an established field nationally and internationally, continuing to grow. I guess I would ask you about that—you, as someone from a younger generation and working on your PhD now. I, as someone who got his PhD in 1996 at the height of visual culture’s visibility, don’t see lots of departments, lots of jobs in the field now. My students—who often work on queer materials—are working on a range of elite culture and sexual and other subcultures, and I don’t find them using the term “visual culture” very much. I guess I want to slightly disagree with “all is well with visual culture studies.”

JON I guess that, because I was out of academia [between 2004 and 2016], it felt like the lessons that visual culture had to teach had become part of the broader cultural ether; and I assumed that art history had been transformed by this more expansive way of seeing cultural production. Now that I’m in an art history PhD program, I see how there are departments—though I think Stanford’s is very much an exception—where the practices and the ethos of visual culture haven’t penetrated as much, where those full‐throated critiques of visual culture are still holding sway. I also feel like museums are really going through a transformation right now whereby they have to think of themselves as democratic instead of elite institutions; but so much of art museum culture is object‐based and doesn’t know how to handle more ephemeral or everyday practices other than by putting traces of them into a vitrine. So I feel like a lot of the work of making sense of visual culture has fallen outside the capital‐A Art world. Perhaps we can connect this to the idea that “queer” is really up for re‐examination, and what it could mean now and in the future. I think of scholars like Kadji Amin (2017), who is writing about Jean Genet and saying that, rather than looking for “the Genet we want,” we could say, you have to look also at the “Genet we don’t want,” foregrounding his racial fetishism, his pederasty. He suggests that all the “bad objects” is where “queer” should look now.

RICHARD Rather than being self‐affirming?

JON Yes, rather than queer always being on the side of the politically progressive and liberatory. And I think there’s a sense in which, when queer studies is a really strong part of your formation as a scholar, when it’s so much a part of you, you maybe don’t think about it as a phenomenon that needs to be defended. We’ve created a bubble for ourselves, and it’s only when you are in a different context that you realize this might not be a shared affiliation but something more contested.

RICHARD When I started doing the kind of work I’m doing now, there was no queer studies, there was just gay and lesbian studies. So Douglas says this thing that I think is really important. In terms of the shift from art history to visual culture, he writes,

The subject of the discourse, like its object, cannot be exempt from the questions of historicity and relationality (of self and other) that are raised by the theory of subjectivity itself. This does not—in fact cannot—entail assuming a coherent subject position in advance. Rather it means recognizing the continency, the instability of one’s own position, the necessarily situated place from which one speaks, the fragmentation and partiality of one’s vision. And more, it means recognizing how one’s position is constituted, through what exclusions it is secured. (Crimp 1999, 58)

I think it’s really important that there was this shift from this idea that, as art historians, we are somehow going to get at the truth of the object, or that the historical context is going to be reconstructed as fully as possible without our actually thinking—not only about our subject position autobiographically, but about the one we inhabit because of our historical moment and identities. That you should be thoughtful about how you are constructing a past for the uses of the present. And that it’s not just about an archaeology that reveals or digs into the past until it finds the object; in a certain sense, it is also digging into the subject.

The queer studies that I’ve always been most interested in is the kind that looks at reception as much as it looks at production, at the ways in which we queer something often by how we read it and not because of how it was intended. Queerness can be about misbehaving as a viewer or as a reader. When I was in my twenties, I was an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we had to do a “masterpieces tour”; and there was this one portrait of a soldier by a baroque artist, Antonio del Pollaiuolo. I thought it was really beautiful and I deemed it a “masterpiece” for the purposes of my tour. The guy I was dating at the time said he wanted to hear me give the tour, a proposal to which I reluctantly agreed. After it was over and the small audience had dispersed, the first thing he said to me was: “The basket on that soldier is amazing! You should talk about that.” It had never occurred to me that you could check out paintings the way you might check out men, or at least that you could say it out loud. It was a very explicitly sexual way of reading against the grain. Douglas’s work does not instruct us to look at soldiers’ crotches in paintings, but rather to acknowledge our desiring positions as spectators, especially when those desires do not align with the normative expectations of the museum.

In the introduction to On the Museum’s Ruins, Douglas mentions that he was, at that moment, turning from poststructuralism and institutional critique to activism around the AIDS crisis, moving from the object—critiquing how the museum works, or how modernism flattens art history—to the (queer) subject (Crimp 1993). I came to awareness about art history when poststructuralism was extremely prominent through October, and psychoanalysis to a certain degree; and then there was feminism, which I was very drawn to, and the beginnings of sexuality studies. Although I couldn’t have understood it at the time, what I was looking for was a way to put the subject and the object in conversation.

JON I think it’s important to say explicitly that AIDS was the catalyst for Douglas’s shift in thinking, so how was your shift in thinking related (or not) to AIDS?

RICHARD I worked my first year in graduate school as an intern on Group Material’s exhibition AIDS Timeline (1989) at the University Art Museum at Berkeley. So that was Félix González‐Torres, Julie Ault, Doug Ashford, and Karen Ramspacher. What was really amazing about that project is that they were totally interested in my input. I remember I said, “we have to have Rock Hudson”—there was the cover of Newsweek or something when he came out with AIDS and we put that in the timeline. They went to visit all the local artists who either were dealing with AIDS or had AIDS, and there was an interesting artist named Rudy Lemcke, who did the paintings of Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West (Figure 5.2). There were these masks from a therapy group; and I thought, “you’re really going to put those masks in?” And they did. What I learned was that art doesn’t have to be about the individual object; it was about this congregation of things, and it could be informational and aesthetic and communitarian. It could use the museum against the ways in which the museum is typically used. What was really interesting is that, just at that moment, Félix—his work as an individual—was really beginning to take off. And I remember when I saw his billboards of that empty bed a few years later, I was just blown away by them.

Figure 5.2 Rudy Lemcke, Glinda, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 30 in.

Courtesy of the artist.

JON For me, the cultural production around AIDS really coalesced all my interests and affiliations in my late teens in Montreal, which coincided with the late 1990s: political activism, being really interested in film and art, and trying to date guys. Everything felt very disparate and compartmentalized, and then discovering Gregg Bordowitz’s work or John Greyson’s work made me understand that all these things could have a very generative relationship to one another. I worked with Thomas Waugh at Concordia University, and the academic, the activist and the aesthetic were closely tied together; the academic, the social, and the libidinal were all very much linked, and there wasn’t really a sense that anything could be an inappropriate topic to explore [in this vision of film studies and queer studies]. Doing a PhD in the field of art history now, I understand that there’s a historical discipline that for a very long time decided what you could do and what you couldn’t, and that it’s still very much being contested, and I was happily oblivious to all that through most of my promiscuous intellectual formation.

RICHARD Did you know that Waugh had a tremendous struggle with Columbia University Press over the sexually explicit images in Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (Waugh 1996)? In the end, the press allowed Waugh to publish the images, with one important exception. There could be no image of any kind on the cover, which was light gray save for a narrow black band with the words “Hard to Imagine” printed in red. I have always thought of this design as the equivalent of sealing the book in a plain wrapper. It is as though the book is pornography rather than a scholarly study of it.

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RICHARD I wanted to get back to that quotation from Zoe Leonard that was in Holland Cotter’s piece in Art in America for the twenty‐fifth anniversary of Stonewall in 1994 (Cotter 1994, 62)—a quotation that I then re‐quoted:

I think what sometimes happens is that we feel things inside—mysterious, curious, angry things that we can’t name. And if we see someone else naming those things, it gives us courage. Like when I first read Sartre of Jean Genet or Audre Lorde or Adrienne Rich. When I saw An Angel at My Table or Tongues Untied, I thought: Yes, I can think this.

Yes, I can take this one step further and live my life the way I want to. Demand respect. Treat others with kindness. You can create inspiration. And inspiration creates change.

Now that’s a very optimistic, amazing passage, but the part for me that’s really important is where she talks about “things that we can’t name”—and the importance of finding the work of writers and filmmakers who speak of those things. Leonard then describes the permission that such works offer: Yes, I can think this. Yes, I can take this one step further and live my life the way I want to. And that’s, in a way, what visual culture studies allowed. I just remember when Douglas’s essay “The Boys in My Bedroom” came out in 1990 (it is now reprinted in Crimp 2002, 151–63) and I thought, wow, Douglas is writing in the pages of Art in America about these “tricks” who basically think that the artist Sherrie Levine’s series After Edward Weston, whose images are on his wall, are child porn, while the culture wars are going on. That, for me, was a moment where I could think about things in a new way.

JON Also, I think that the benefit of an image or a non‐literary object is that it can express feelings or thoughts without putting them into words, so in some ways these things are even more powerful, because they maintain a certain unknowability.

RICHARD As art writers, we need to respect this “unknowability” while also trying to give it a voice. We need to both analyse visual images and leave them with the power of their opacity.

JON Another thing that’s so great about that Zoe Leonard passage is the way in which it acknowledges that everyone can have these really transformative encounters with images and texts, that this is not just the terrain of people with a certain education or connoisseurship; that it’s happening every day and is worth paying attention to. Which, I think, is more important than ever, considering that how we encounter images and what images can do is in a period of flux and rapid change. Even the most distracted, casual, or degraded swipe of an image could end up being a font of meaning or power, in ways that we could not possibly anticipate.