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