Taking Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings of Amy Sillman and Johnson’s The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss, or I do not walk a line that is thin, straight, or secure as its starting points, this conversation will deal with both artists’ writing practices and the central question of form in rethinking art history and aesthetic categories.*
I saw these men as being in their domain, depraved and sketchy, whereas I was just passing through. Then again, I understood I’m the company I keep: a man over forty with a Friday night hard-on, passing as desirable in the dark. I didn’t end up here out of loneliness. I’d arrived with my companion, the Famous Blue Raincoat. We’ve been domestic for years. “It may seem difficult to understand why two men who are happy with each other will take the risk of going to these places where the whole atmosphere of the group will tend to drive them apart,” wrote GordonWestwood—a pseudonym—in his 1952 book Society and the Homosexual. It was the author’s hunch there was no other spot for these coupled men to rendezvous. To the homosexuals, “in a pathetic kind of way this place is their home.”
But that was another era. I hadn’t been driven to The Bar by society’s lack of understanding. Throughout the twentieth century, London pubs, cafés and clubs would be taken over—“selected” as Westwood put it—by a homosexual clientele. The unofficial meeting places could be so discreet most other customers wouldn’t notice, and occasionally so brazen an orchestra would strike up a tribute when an attractive male entered the room. Proto-gays were segregated by class as much as anything else, sticking to the exclusive cellar bar at the Ritz on the one hand or an East End boozer on the other—or, in the case of privileged men in pursuit of a bit of rough, moving from the former to the latter. In this diffuse network of commercial spaces, the clientele might be tolerated to various degrees because it brought business. (MattHoulbrook, an authority on London queer history, figures: “The pink shilling was a potentially lucrative market, and men’s demand for a ‘home’ always ripe for exploitation.”) Now we were being elaborately catered to: The Bar was designed for a demographic of masc-presenting homo satyrs. — Jeremy Atherton Lin,Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
This week, Atherton Lin and Isabel Waidner will be on Instagram Live to discuss the new book Gay Bar.
I saw a call for the “Best American Experimental Writing,” and it said something like, “Bring us your weirdest, your wildest writing.” And I thought, Is that it? What creates the experimental, the innovative, the hybrid that has to be weird or wild? There’s always grace, there’s always stealth, there’s always nuance, there’s always structural intervention. And, depending on readers, one might not always notice what literary forms are being manipulated until you get uncomfortable with your expectations not being met. The tag on the book says one thing, but your experience of what you’re reading is doing something else. — Tisa Bryant*
Join Bryant—author of Unexplained Presence and a forthcoming book from Semiotext(e)—and Cauleen Smith in conversation as part of LACMA’s Confabulations series.
I wanted to make a film about love, friendship, and sexuality among three people with the social currents of the times we live in today.
Performing as both director and cinematographer, I tried to create a sense of living realism where the environments, as much as the performances, seep into our awareness and shape our emotions. I wanted the camera to feel like another character experiencing an intimacy with the actors, but also have an omnipotent perspective that steps back at some moments, guiding the audience along on this journey through an unpredictable reality.
Our characters live in a film world that breaks the traditional rules of filmmaking to accompany their spirit of rebelling against social norms. — Svetlana Cvetko
Cvetko’s SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT conveys an improvisational mood appropriate to its subject—the story of three twenty-somethings whose immediate and intimate love for one another provides a brief respite from life’s uncertainties and responsibilities. The three leads—Neyssan Falahi, CristinaRambaldi, and Mattia Minasi—beautifully capture the easy-going receptivity required of such arrangements.
This contemporary homage to Jules et Jim opens today with an online weekend-long gala. It’s also streaming at LaemmleVirtual Cinema. See links below for details.
As images from the civil rights era migrated in the American visual lexicon, some becoming icons… a shift also happened in the aesthetic understanding of what images do and how they function. American society has been saturated with images since the post-Second World War period, and artists growing up at that time were some of the first to turn a critical eye to the production of images and cast doubt on their narrative function…
Black artists understood that though Black people may be the subject of many images throughout U.S. history, those captured by and circulated within those images gave little or no consent. In addition, the Black body and its visual reception have been so predetermined by stereotype that their presentation may undermine even good intentions. — Naomi Beckwith*
See MEETING WORLDS—ON OKWUI ENWEZOR’S WORK, an online conversation featuring UteMeta Bauer (the founding director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore), Franklin Sirmans (the director of the Pérez ArtMuseum in Miami), Terry Smith (a professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh), and Octavio Zaya, an independent art critic and curator. New Museum director MassimilianoGioni moderated the January 21 talk.
*Naomi Beckwith, “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder,” in Grief and Grievance: Art andMourning in America (New York: New Museum; London: Phaidon, 2020), 182.
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