After a visit to the photography show at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, I walked up to the LGBT Community Services Center for a lecture and reading by David Deitcher from his book Dear friends (Abrams, 2001; 2nd, corrected reprinting to follow soon since the first printing of 10,000 copies has about sold out). Jim Saslow appeared a few minutes before the lecture began and we talked about the shows we’d been too in the last month or so. He’d just been to the New-York Historical Society to see the John Koch show; we both had seen copies of a wonderful postcard from the Brooklyn Museum of Art of a Koch painting of an artist and his nude male model and had found the scene compelling. Jim says any hopes for an unknown gay artist to add to the repertory are very small as Koch was married for many years and other paintings were not rich in homoeroticism. Sigh.
The talk by Deitcher was a solid retelling of the finding of intimate male/male friendship in photographs from 1840 to 1918. Two of his most compelling anecdotes about the book and its aftermath were his early query to the Daguerreian Society and a fashion spread in the New York times magazine. The contact person at the Daguerreian Society had suggested being coy about the purpose of the query; Deitcher said his respondents were however quite clear about what he was looking for. The fashion spread took the warm intimacy of the images from Dear friends and turned homo-unfriendly with captions like “Straight down the middle” in a take-off of a picture of Walt Whitman and Pete Doyle. Deitcher had been promised a look at the fashion-spread text before it was printed but didn’t see it ahead of time.
After the warmth of the lecture and seeing Jim Saslow, I continued uptown to some galleries. One stop was “Subcutaneous” by Matthew Buckingham at Murray Guy Gallery on West 17th Street. Buckingham’s installation is a two-projector film about the study of physiognomy by Johann Caspar Lavater in the second half of the 18th century. The text of the film includes a quote from Lavater from his youth about unrequited love for another boy that goes beyond physiognomy. During the question period with Deitcher, there was some discussion of reading homoeroticism into imagery, and the Lavater excerpt may not be as homoerotic as it seemed to me. “What is gay art?” has been a question around for a long time.
From Murray Guy, I went to see the Collier Schorr show at 303 Gallery. The Village voice notice for the show by Vince Aletti is so bold as to state that you’d think the photos were by a gay male. Schorr is however lesbian. The innocence of the young men is jarred by the partial Nazi uniforms and swastika graffiti on the basketball backboard.
What’s next? Duane Michals’s appropriations in “Who is Sidney Sherman?” at Pace/MacGill on 57th Street. Not especially queer in content, but interesting stuff by an established gay photographer.
Postscript: I went to see the John Koch show soon after talking to Jim Saslow about the gay possibilities. Several paintings seemed to be promising. After viewing the show, I went to the bookshop to look at the catalog. The essay by Grady Turner discusses the homoerotic tension in several paintings and talks about the closet in the earlier part of the 20th century. Koch lived from 1909-1978. He and his wife led an active life in artistic circles.