and the reception of the book?
A: A lot of people were curious as to how I managed to get from the anecdotal to the critical in such a smooth way in Before Pictures and I have no answer to that question. That book was so much about the pleasure of writing. And it was a pleasure that came from being freed from having to make a particular argument, I suppose. I could go where the writing took me; and sometimes that meant putting things aside and doing a whole lot of research on Watergate, for example, and that was fun! It was fun to do that research, it was fun to think what I could make out of it, and somehow that resulted in a kind of smooth flow of the prose between very different subject matters. I always knew what personal stories there were that chronologically belonged to a particular chapter’s given subject, whether the painters Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, my stint as a reviewer for Art News, or disco.
You know, one thing that is missing from most reviews of Before Pictures is attention to the pictures. I’m always surprised by this because the book is so lavishly illustrated, and because every one of those pictures is the picture I wanted. I think the pictures tell the story too. You can almost flip through the book and read it visually. I suppose it is similar to the problem in the reviewing that many people seem to be hampered in their understanding of it by thinking of it simply as a memoir and comparing it to other memoirs and not noticing that it’s also art criticism, a picture book, a hybrid. But I don’t have much to complain about with Before Pictures. It’s a book I’m very happy with.
References
1 Crimp, Douglas, ed. 1988. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2 Crimp, Douglas. 1999. “Getting the Warhol We Deserve.” Social Text 59: 49–66.
3 Crimp, Douglas. 2002. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
4 Crimp, Douglas. 2012.“Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5 Crimp, Douglas. 2016. Before Pictures. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
6 Crimp, Douglas and Adam Rolston. 1990. AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Chapter 5 A Dialogue
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
