subjects are difficult to map, and once you have a queer archive presumably all the stuff that isn’t queer is left out.
JON Something I really value in your work is that the familial tends to be central. For me and certain other queer scholars, there’s a kind of jettisoning of the biological family. I’m always torn between the question of queerness and futurity or the lack thereof. I feel like your focus on the familial in dialogue with, say, desire or sexuality is better than throwing the biological family out with the bathwater.
RICHARD It’s brought me to think about my grandmother’s work as a seamstress… Right now I’m actually writing more about my family than ever before, but it’s more about the visual and material culture that my grandmother introduced into my consciousness as a kid. There’s also this old idea of “families we choose”—that we create alternative kinship structures—which I’m also interested in. I do believe that the family has been a very violent structure; and I’m also considering how it’s been used by the Christian right—the idea of “family values.” But I think of the bonds of affection that can exist between family members or other people, and that this is an important aspect to acknowledge as part of queer history. Often it offers alternative versions of how love can be organized.
Douglas Crimp was instrumental in exactly this dialogue about how visual culture could “queer” art history, and also about the ways in which activism, in his case AIDS activism, might pry open art historians’ modes of thinking about contemporary art. I remember when he presented “Mourning and Militancy” at the second annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Yale in 1989. (The paper is published in Crimp 2002, 129–49.) Douglas told a story about not being able to mourn his father after his death because of their difficult relationship. Shortly after the funeral, Douglas developed an infection in his tear duct, which swelled into a painful abscess and eventually burst. As “poison tears” oozed down his face, Douglas said that he would never again doubt the force of the unconscious. I have never forgotten the graphic image of pain Douglas conjured or the power of his argument about unconscious grief. As this example suggests, visual culture is not only about paintings, photographs, and other material objects but also about the images we have in our minds and the way we use the visual as a way to convince people of the points we are making. In Douglas’s “poison tears” story, what I’m so struck by is how visceral, but also how visual the image is—it was a tear duct in his eye, after all, so it’s all about an infection of vision.
JON Maybe scholars of visual culture are in a position where they can be image makers themselves and can use language in this less academic but more descriptive or literary way, to set a scene or to sketch an image that then has a rhetorical weight to it. That story is about everything that we can’t consciously know or analyze about ourselves, and the force of everything that can’t be known. An art history that’s completely object‐focused or “objective” can’t necessarily articulate the force of desire and everything behind why certain images and objects have such a hold on us.
RICHARD I really agree with that. Douglas was able to juxtapose subjects and objects that you wouldn’t expect to encounter side by side. In this case, the force of the unconscious, as evidenced in the physical manifestations of Douglas’s inability to grieve his father, is juxtaposed with the problem of mourning in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Douglas generated enormous power through such juxtapositions. He was able to do so, I think, because he was so attentive to ambivalence and contradiction. It was one of the things that made him a great critic.
JON This might be straying too far, but I wonder whether an experience of queerness as a tricky or complicating relationship with one’s family is in some way a primary critical “scene” that shapes one’s worldview. I mean that this experience of the family as the first place where you recognize difference or outsiderness could feed into your critical eye.
RICHARD Maybe for some people, but I’ve met a lot of queers who aren’t very critical at all [laughter]. I don’t even know whether this would apply now to this generation, but in my generation everyone I knew who was a homosexual—gay or lesbian—felt that they had had to suppress that or keep it secret. In writing Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐Century American Art (Meyer 2002), I realized that the suppression of homoerotic art reinforced the prior prohibition of homosexuality to which individuals are subjected at both the psychic and the social levels.
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RICHARD In Douglas’s “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” part of what he is arguing is that we have to try to be as complicated as the artists we study. So it doesn’t make sense to just take these silkscreen paintings that Warhol made from 1962 to 1966 and separate them from his films, from the magazine, from Andy Warhol Enterprises, from the portraiture, the photography… But that’s what art history does—it takes the Art with a capital A. And I don’t quite agree with the proposition of this reader that visual culture studies has moved from the margins and has become an established field nationally and internationally, continuing to grow. I guess I would ask you about that—you, as someone from a younger generation and working on your PhD now. I, as someone who got his PhD in 1996 at the height of visual culture’s visibility, don’t see lots of departments, lots of jobs in the field now. My students—who often work on queer materials—are working on a range of elite culture and sexual and other subcultures, and I don’t find them using the term “visual culture” very much. I guess I want to slightly disagree with “all is well with visual culture studies.”
JON I guess that, because I was out of academia [between 2004 and 2016], it felt like the lessons that visual culture had to teach had become part of the broader cultural ether; and I assumed that art history had been transformed by this more expansive way of seeing cultural production. Now that I’m in an art history PhD program, I see how there are departments—though I think Stanford’s is very much an exception—where the practices and the ethos of visual culture haven’t penetrated as much, where those full‐throated critiques of visual culture are still holding sway. I also feel like museums are really going through a transformation right now whereby they have to think of themselves as democratic instead of elite institutions; but so much of art museum culture is object‐based and doesn’t know how to handle more ephemeral or everyday practices other than by putting traces of them into a vitrine. So I feel like a lot of the work of making sense of visual culture has fallen outside the capital‐A Art world. Perhaps we can connect this to the idea that “queer” is really up for re‐examination, and what it could mean now and in the future. I think of scholars like Kadji Amin (2017), who is writing about Jean Genet and saying that, rather than looking for “the Genet we want,” we could say, you have to look also at the “Genet we don’t want,” foregrounding his racial fetishism, his pederasty. He suggests that all the “bad objects” is where “queer” should look now.
RICHARD Rather than being self‐affirming?
JON Yes, rather than queer always being on the side of the politically progressive and liberatory. And I think there’s a sense in which, when queer studies is a really strong part of your formation as a scholar, when it’s so much a part of you, you maybe don’t think about it as a phenomenon that needs to be defended. We’ve created a bubble for ourselves, and it’s only when you are in a different context that you realize this might not be a shared affiliation but something more contested.
RICHARD When I started doing the kind of work I’m doing now, there was no queer studies, there was just gay and lesbian studies. So Douglas says this thing that I think is really important. In terms of the shift from art history to visual culture, he writes,
The subject of the discourse, like its object, cannot be exempt from the questions of historicity and relationality (of self and other) that are raised by the theory of subjectivity
