Lee Siegel on Cy Twombly in 2005:
You cannot fully understand Twombly's art unless you know that he is gay. It's often fatuous to reduce an artist to his or her sexuality, but Twombly is working in a tradition that associates homosexuality with an ideal human freedom.For art writers that sentence stands as an example of what's to be avoided in art criticism. It's not merely wrongheaded analysis. It's shoehorning the biographical into the critical, conflating the two as though they're one and the same. Or worse, as if knowing some gem about an artist's life or disposition is the key to judgment about that artist's work.
I didn't mention the fact that Robert Rauschenberg was gay in my obituary for the Dallas Morning News, an omission that one friend picked up on the day it ran. Later it surfaced as an item in Tyler Green's roundup of article that he claims heteronormalize Rauschenberg's work, career, and life.
One point to make is that Green's picking up on a metanarrative. Individually, a press omission about Rauschenberg's sexuality may be benign and even reasonable. What part of his career or work should the writer under space constraints neglect in order to discuss his sexuality? What about an obituary of a person for whom simple binary modifiers don't seem to fit or for whom sex doesn't seem especially significant? Or the publication that's past all that?
In sum, however, it's a different story. I don't think that a gloss of the obits on Rauschenberg reads straight-by-omission—though a reader wouldn't know any better about certain aspects of his life if every article had ended with the old journalistic obit trope on confirmed bachelors: "He never married." At the media level (as opposed to the sole press account), Green's point holds.
That Rauschenberg's relationship with Jasper Johns was sexual as well as professional might be a detail that writers, in an overabundance of caution, neglected to mention so as not to appear to indulge in salacious reporting. That wasn't my thinking—I was focusing very specifically on his work in Texas and wrote in one draft more extensively on his influence today over sculpture, and I wasn't planning on discussing Jasper Johns at all—but that sort of thinking might occur to me.
Green's examples of hostility toward homosexuality in press accounts (specifically in the Baltimore Sun) strike me as flimsy. His suggestion that my reference to Rauschenberg's charity work on AIDS was a workaround to acknowledging that he was loud and proud isn't right and undercuts the importance of that charity work to Dallas.
Still, one gay artist asked me later, "Why didn't you talk about Rauschenberg as a mo?" Fair question—and it's good for the practice that Green is bringing the discussion forward. I didn't talk about that because I don't think it's crucial to the work. I find those readings of works like Bed and Monogram as dedicated statements about sexuality to be provocative but lacking. I don't think that identity politics were so significant to arts practice at the time and I don't think that he opened up an era for that discussion. He did use gay imagery—but he was a devourer of imagery. He didn't shy away from his sexuality—but the barriers he trampled right over were different ones.
To be sure, I don't think his sex is irrelevant to his work. But you can fully understand Rauschenberg without knowing that he is gay.
Posted by Kriston at May 27, 2008 12:47 PMYes, you can understand Rauschenberg without knowing that he was gay, but boy would you find some of those combines confusing! ;-)
The point I was trying to make -- and obviously didn't do a good enough job of making because several people have said/emailed me with same -- was that Rauschenberg had a real impact on America's slow movement toward gay equality. In the 1950s, when he started including autobiographical, gay-referencing content in the combines, almost no one else in American life was inserting their own homosexuality in their 'work.' (And this was almost a whole generation before Stonewall! Compare Rauschenberg's inclusion of being gay into what he did to, say, Frank Kameny.) By inserting 'gay' into the work, Rauschenberg (and Johns and the others) made it possible for gay to become louder and prouder. And that's for what I was trying to argue that he deserves more credit.
(Also, it was funny to see such a disconnect between the scholarship on Rauschenberg -- the scholarship on the combines, for example, spends a lot of time on gay-themed content -- and obits. I mean, it was as if the scholarship was non-existent. Because it was. It dealt with that icky gay stuff that Michael Kimmelman just was not going to write about.)
In a related story, art people spend WAY TOO MUCH TIME thinking about only the work, and not the impact of the artist and how s/he and his/her work impacted the broader culture and the nation/world.
Posted by: Tyler Green at May 27, 2008 3:15 PMI'm not sure you can FULLY understand his work without a basic working knowledge of his own personal experiences and motivations. Rauschenberg's work has always seemed to me to be largely reflective of his private life, (1968's Autobiography from the recent show at the National Gallery is a perfect example).
Nonetheless, your point about space constraints etc. is perfectly valid; I'm not sure you can provide enough secondary information about ANY artist in a single article to provide a complete picture of their life and thusly the motivations behind their work.
And in response to the first comment, you probably can't spend too much time thinking about the work without the risk of infusing contemporary concerns and attitudes anachronistically into the lives of [albeit recently] deceased artists. (See Roger Kimballs The Rape of the Masters for some hilarious examples of this)
Posted by: Jeff S. at May 27, 2008 8:48 PM"That Rauschenberg's relationship with Jasper Johns was sexual as well as professional might be a detail that writers, in an overabundance of caution, neglected to mention so as not to appear to indulge in salacious reporting."
Excuse me?
Since when is homosexual identity, or a relationship between homosexuals, defined solely by sex? And since when does gay identity or gay sex = salaciousness?
Posted by: Christopher Knight at May 27, 2008 8:57 PMWho said homosexuality was only defined by sex? I was just responding to Tyler's prompt. He suggested that not enough writers noted that they were lovers at some point, but that detail is secondary to so many other aspects of their collaboration.
Posted by: Kriston at May 28, 2008 1:53 PMUsing the term "homosexual" when describing someone kinda narrows the range of the discription; wouldn't ya say? You're implictly defining them with only their sexual proclivities in mind. In an inclusive society it's a term that's become a stigma.
I thought Twombly married the Baroness Tatiana Franchetti in 1959; or am I several partners behind.
Posted by: Joseph Barbaccia at May 30, 2008 4:05 PMIn light of Rauschenberg's three-year marriage to Susan Weil, I figured that his sexuality defied easy categorization and his obituary writers had more important issues to tackle. Tyler protested too much, but what really rankled me was his response to Roger Kimball's article:
In other words: The only thing worthwhile in Rauschenberg's entire oeuvre is that which (Kimball claims) had its origins in the heterosexual.
It's one thing to disagree with the man; it's another to ascribe an ulterior motive when a straightforward motive will do.
Posted by: Franklin at May 31, 2008 11:19 AMwhat peeves me, is the assumption that twombly and rauschenberg only were ever gay, as opposed to queer.
with both twombly and rauschnberg both, it was not a gay sensiblity, but a sensiblity of fluid, corporeally concerned works. it was a discussion of the push and tug of bodies in the dark, more then it was a up with people, gays are awesome, pride thing.
Posted by: anthony at May 31, 2008 5:55 PM