Hide/Seek Timeline: February 2011

February 3, 2011

[CULTURE WARS 2011: DAVID WOJNAROWICZ UPDATE". ARTNET NEWS. Feb. 3, 2011

More than two months have passed since Smithsonian Institution chief G. Wayne Clough, prompted by the Catholic League and Rep. John Boehner, removed an exhibition version of David Wojnarowicz’s short (and unfinished) film, A Fire in My Belly, from the National Portrait Gallery’s pioneering show "Hide / Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture."

The censorship, such as it was, ignited a controversy that’s not going away. The curators of "Hide / Seek," Jonathan Katz and David C. Ward, begged other artists -- like AA Bronson -- to refrain from withdrawing their works in protest, and further gutting the show. Protests have continued, at the Smithsonian and elsewhere (see www.artpositive.org).

P.P.O.W. Gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, reports that it has distributed over 90 copies of a DVD of the film (containing both a 13-minute-long version and another 8-minute-long section, which were each found among the artist’s effects) to museums and universities, for exhibition or use in educational presentations. Most are in the U.S., but copies have gone to Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, and to the Tate in London. One of the most recent loans of the DVD is to Emory University in Atlanta, for screening as part of a panel discussion.

P.P.O.W. has also issued a fact sheet to clear up some misconceptions about the film -- the footage exists in several unfinished versions, for instance, and the film was never completed, for unknown reasons. These sorts of questions are addressed in Marcia Vetrocq’s final editor’s letter in the current Art in America, and recently Culture Monster blogger David Ng did his own entry of "corrections."

Perhaps most importantly, coming up at P.P.O.W. is "Spirituality: An Exhibition of Selected Work by David Wojnarowicz," Mar. 3-Apr. 9, 2011, a show designed to explore the broader use of religious imagery in the artist’s works.

February 4, 2011

Hirsch, Faye. "Seeing Queerly." Art in America.

Excerpts:

“Hide/Seek” comes at a time of unprecedented inroads into social equality for LGBT persons (though also, as the winter “Intelligence Report” by the Southern Poverty Law Center reveals, during a period when hate-crime violence against gays is on the rise). Gay rights as an issue crosses the political divide, as was demonstrated by the recent repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and several gay marriage cases that are steadily making their way to the Supreme Court. The appearance of “Hide/Seek” at this relatively staid institution in the nation’s capital is at the very least a symptom of changing attitudes. Moreover, the show’s rather conservative roster of establishment artists, from Thomas Eakins, Grant Wood and Marsden Hartley to Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Georgia O’Keeffe, gives it a further air of legitimacy. This exhibition was designed to outrage no one.

. . .

There are some real coups. Jasper Johns assented to the inclusion of Souvenir (1964) from his own collection, a piece that is on long-term loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is hung in proximity to several works by Rauschenberg, including a small, rare self-portrait collage from 1965. Thus, in effect, the show is a coming out of sorts for the circumspect Johns, who was, for a time, Rauschenberg’s lover. On the other hand, the curators scared up an extremely rare figurative painting from the late 1940s by Agnes Martin, who did her best to destroy all of her pre-abstract work. It depicts a naked young woman whose identity—self-portrait or lover—is unknown. Martin may have lived as a lesbian, but this fact was not manifested at all in the work we know best—and perhaps not in this one, either. It was the mere biographical fact of her sexuality that seemed the pretext for the inclusion of the painting.

. . .

It comes as no surprise that there are fewer entries by women than men, since much of the work was made in an era when there were fewer women artists in general. Moreover, in the early days, a doubly erased identity—woman artist and lesbian—made for a very low profile to be sure. Nonetheless, among the strongest works on view are paintings by Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) conveying the cool, fashionable elegance of lesbian expatriates in Paris between the wars. I do not understand why, however, there is no painting by Nicole Eisenman among the few post-AIDS works on view in the last section, titled Postmodernism. Eisenman has often portrayed herself and friends, since the start of her career in the mid-’90s, in a style that would have resonated very effectively with that of Brooks.

Indeed, beginning in the 1990s and continuing today, there has been an efflorescence of high-spirited, cutting-edge art by lesbians dealing with gender identity. You wouldn’t know it from this show. The curators chose, for example, a 2003 portrait by the hipster scene celebrity photographer Cass Bird of an ambiguously gendered adolescent, when Collier Schorr, who has been treating the same subject matter for nearly 20 years, has been so much more influential among artists. Catherine Opie’s Being and Having (1991), showing tattooed young women masquerading in fake facial hair, is present. Yet one instead longs for her portraits of lesbian family life, given the pressing issue of gay marriage.

Ward told me in a conversation that they did not wish to end on the sad note of AIDS, and that is understandable. All the more reason, then, to have included maquettes or drawings for Patricia Cronin’s memorial of herself and her partner, the artist Deborah Kass, embracing in bed, nude and forever young, which was unveiled at Woodlawn National Cemetery in the Bronx in 2002. (Both artists are alive and well.) Cronin’s 3-ton monument is remarkable, a very public affirmation of lesbianism and, in addition, a joyous alternative to the sober images of death that saturated the art world during the AIDS crisis and are very well represented here. It should have been in this show.

Perhaps the only answer is a sequel—at a major museum, again, one hopes—focusing on the new queer identity in contemporary art, which is much less bound to stereotypes of gayness, and ever more heterogeneous and unpredictable in its manifestations. Until then, “Hide/Seek” offers a good historical survey with its own subtle twists. Hopefully the curators will have proved sufficiently clever to foil any further efforts by today’s culture warriors to censor a timely show.

February 9, 2011

Joy. "Policing the Sacred". #CAA2011. Via CAA conference blog: Posted on February 9, 2011.

February 10, 2011

Green, Tyler. "The latest sign that the Smithsonian appropriation is not a GOP target". ArtInfo.com. FEBRUARY 10, 2011, 12:08 PM.

Trescott, Jacqueline. "'Hide/Seek' visitors register their opinions". Washington Post. February 10, 2011 5:00 PM ET

"The show at the National Portrait Gallery became a flashpoint for many cultural issues and was the loudest uproar at the Smithsonian in years. The show, the largest in the portrait gallery's history, also drew record crowds. In January, the entire building, shared with another museum, had 85,656 visitors."

. . .

No matter the point of view, the show attracted thousands of visitors to the museum. The National Portrait Gallery shares a building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum at Gallery Place . It also shares visitor statistics. The entire building had 320,003 patrons from November 2010 to January 2011. American Art was hosting a successful show of Norman Rockwell at the time. For the same period the year before the two museums had 199,927 visitors.

The Rockwell show closed January 2. The January visitor numbers, released by the Portrait Gallery, show 85,656 visitors, compared to the January 2010 tally of 64,968.

On the last day, one more protest is planned. Two men who were removed from the museum for showing the banned video outside the exhibit entrance, have been screening the entire film in a truck outside the museum. On Sunday they have invited people to form a flash mob inside the show and show the video from their iphones and ipads.

Ulaby, Neda. "As 'Hide/Seek' Ends, A Step Back To Look For Lessons". NPR.org.

February 11, 2011

{http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/the-scene/2011-02-11/caa-jonathan-katz/Hirsch, Faye. "Hide/Seek Curator Speaks Up at CAA. Art in America.]

February 12, 2011

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