Two days ago, I viewed the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery.
The exhibition explores such questions as gender, sexual identity, and the AIDS epidemic. 105 works were selected by artists with varying perspectives; how same-sex love has been portrayed in art for the past 120 years or so, beginning with a photograph of Walt Whitman, to oils by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent, works by Georgia O'Keffe, Marsden Hartley, to breeders like George Bellows and Andrew Wyeth, to Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol; and photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibovitz. It ended with "Felix" by A.A. Bronson.
Communicating same-sex attraction is nothing new in the history of art. Seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters used symbiosis in their works. Barely a hundred years before in
I fail to understand the outrage the media has created around this exhibition. It depicts life -- a life that has always been in plain sight; a life which has been a part of us.
One work was pulled from the exhibition. The Smithsonian removed a video by David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) which was completed in 1987 and entitled "A Fire in My Belly". (The original 30 minute video was edited down to four minutes to make it more 'suitable' for the majority of museum visitors.) Still, pressure from certain Congressmen, the new Speaker of the House and the president of the Catholic League proved too much for the museum to withstand.
I cannot understand why.
I viewed this work which was available in
The video represents the artist’s anger; Wojnarowicz not only lost his friend, mentor and partner, but also faced death from AIDS. When the work was first included in the exhibition, the public got most upset over eleven seconds of four minute footage depicting ants crawling over the body of a small Mexican crucifix. Most of the people speaking out had never set foot in the exhibition to view the works and read the text panels in the manner in which they were designed to be viewed. Many critics, as I understand, were sent links from Youtube which took the work out of context and made it difficult to understand the message of both the artist and the curator.
Regardless of what religion anyone may or may not embrace, Jesus Christ was a figure in history who was betrayed into the hands of his enemies by one of his own apostles. A person whom he trusted. He was mocked, scourged, spit on, a crown of thorns was pressed into his skull, his hands and feet nailed to wooden posts and then sentenced to death by crucifixion, because he was seen as different, as an outsider.
Surely people -- homosexual or not, god-fearing or not -- have questioned the mercy of Jesus Christ when they have witnessed the death of a loved one or faced the prospect of their own. Haven’t we all asked why? Why her? Why him? Why me?
Does it really matter who we sleep with at night, to whom we pray, who we turn our backs on and who we welcome, inevitably our stories still end the same way: with death.
The image of the artist in the video piercing his lips with a needle and sewing them shut is powerful and shocking -- reason enough not to sensor the work but to lay it out so we can each make our own decisions about the silencing of one another as we continue to live our lives surrounded by hatred, fear and segregation.
above image: We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) by David Hockney