by John Champagne

Introduction: Why “queer?

Unlike the terms heterosexual/homosexual, straight/gay, or man/woman, queer does not propose that human sexual experience and expression can be divided into an either/or. A slur revived and appropriated by AIDS activists in the ‘80s and ‘90s, queer is an umbrella term for anyone who rejects the idea that sexuality and gender are fixed, immutable categories. It acknowledges the actual diversity of human sex and gender expression, and it has no opposite. While some scholar/activists propose the term “heteronormative” as its contrary, a rigorous use of “queer” insists that no such thing exists: none of us fit neatly into the categories of sexual identity and gender that society has urged on us. All of us experience some level of pleasure and discomfort around our bodies, our sexualities, and our gender identities. And while it might seem anachronistic to apply the term to men of the past who did not employ it themselves, in many cases, it is a more accurate term than either homosexual or gay to describe how they understood their own desire.

Artifacts at the End of a Decade

Conceived by cultural historian Steve Watson and photographer Carol Huebner Venezia in 1979, Artifacts at the End of a Decade (1981) was a collaboration between forty-four New York avant-grade artists who had been invited to submit works reflecting on the previous decade. The plan was to bind the submissions together into a single portfolio, but the contributions of the artists were so varied in terms of media that a box was designed to house them instead. Produced in an edition of one hundred, Artifacts was acquired by several prestigious museums, including MoMA, Buffalo’s AKG Art Museum, and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which exhibited it in its entirety in 2022.  We at the EAM are excited to be in such illustrious company! Pride in the Collection highlights six queer artists who contributed to Artifacts: John Ashbery, Bern Boyle, Jimmy De Sana, Evergon, Stanley Stellar, and Robert Wilson. A mini time capsule of queer art of the 1970s, the works reflect a moment in queer American history after the famous Stonewall Riots protesting anti-queer police violence but before the devastation of HIV disease. Of the six artists, two have since died of natural causes, two of HIV disease, and two continue to make and exhibit art. While all of the works articulate and define a queer sensibility, including elements of camp, some also include then contemporary gay iconography like the figure of the eroticized policeman.

Camp is a strategy of cultural appropriation employed by groups who historically have been denied access to official and “legitimate” venues of self- and community expression such as popular media. It rediscovers previously discarded cultural symbols (including language) and objects and reinvests them with new value and meanings. Camp is a form of in-group communication, as it divides its audience into those who are “in on the joke” and those who are not, the former engaging in a form of public speech that, were it understood by those who are hostile to the group, might result in violence. While camp appropriations often produce the (sometimes self-mocking) laughter that arises when what was once trash is treated as art, they also convey serious meanings — about the role of consumerism in our lives and the agency it does and does not make possible; about how people who are under the threat of violence find ways to communicate that go undetected by those who would do them harm; about creating, between group members, a shared sensibility or worldview; about learning to just “get over yourself” — i.e. drop any sense of superiority you might have, as “we” are all in this together. In a world where some people are subject to violence simply for expressing their shared values, desires, and perspectives, camp provides a vital means of both finding humor amidst oppression and forging shared cultural values, rituals, and norms.

In addition to camp, a common feature that links the queer works in Artifacts is the employment of relatively inexpensive means of mechanical reproduction like photography and even Xeroxing, and a collage aesthetic whereby the artist has brought together images culled from other sources. That queer artists would use inexpensive technologies testifies both to their lack of access to the typically expensive resources of the media industry, but also as a way to produce an art that bridged the gap between “high” and “popular” art and their sometimes different consumers. Xeroxing in particular was a way for these artists to make their works available to a larger audience, while also rejecting the idea of the art work as a precious or even “holy” object that only lived within the hermetically sealed walls of the museum, its exclusions and its value judgements. Congruent with a then contemporary critique of the museum as the place where art works go either to die or be reverentially worshipped, the employment of inexpensive techniques of reproduction — and the similarities shared by advertising and art produced by these inexpensive means — was part of the modernist avant-garde attempt to explode the distinction between life and art that also characterized modernist movements such as Italian futurism, Berlin Dada, and “Happenings.”

While collage is one of the defining techniques of much modernist art, in the case of queer artists, it suggests, like camp, how people who have been largely excluded from mainstream cultural representation still find ways to express themselves, and in a language that is illusive  enough to avoid the censoring impulses of homophobia. Pop culture provides accessible, ready-made images that can be recombined into a collage, collage also providing a way for queer artists to comment on such culture.

While the images of hyper-masculinity employed by some of the artists might strike us today as self-hating or even misogynist, in their time period, they signified in a number of complicated ways. The adoption by some queer men of a hyper-masculine style that might appear to suggest a homophobic worshipping of one’s enemies was an insistence that queer sexuality did not require any particular relationship to masculinity or femininity. Specifically, this hyper-masculine style was a rejection of the long held assumption by scientific, medical, and legal institutions that male homosexuals possessed an “inverted” gender, a pathological femininity, whether that pathological condition was due to biology or psychosexual development. It insisted that, in any homosexual encounter, no one was required to “be the woman.” Furthermore, it is no surprise that men attracted to other men might find displays of conventional masculinity desirable. If gender is indeed a cultural construct, some men who sexually desire other men will be attracted to masculinity as it is understood by the dominant culture in such figures as the construction worker, the cowboy, or the soldier. That is, no one — even queer men — can simply step outside of the dominant culture and its values. Those values, however, can be resisted via processes of adoption and transformation; note, for example, the ubiquitous plumber, truck driver, or pizza delivery man in ‘70s and ‘80s queer porn. When these constructions of masculinity are figures of authority, they also engage fantasies of the shifting power dynamics that arguably characterize all sexual acts, and the way sex complicates such distinctions as passive/active, penetration/engulfment, self and other.

John Ashbery

“I grew up very fast, before learning to drive, /even. There was I: a stinking adult.” (“The History of My Life,” first published in the New Yorker, 1999.) While best known as perhaps the twentieth century’s most influential poet, John Ashbery (1927-2017) was also an art critic for the prestigious ARTnews and a creator of collages. The poet began making collages as an undergraduate at Harvard, his earliest appearing on the cover of the Harvard Advocate in 1948. Ashbery suggested that the collages stimulated his writing without taking energy away from it; critics suggested that, like his poems, they were a mix of familiarity and foreignness. As is suggested by his contribution to Artifacts, Ashbery drew elements of his collages from his own personal trove of images from old children’s books. In the 60s and 70s, his collages were described as a vindication or rediscovery of childhood. While the space evoked is surreal, Ashbery’s employment of a landscape (or in this case, seascape) revealed from behind a curtain finds precedents in the Renaissance, where curtains were used not only to exaggerate the illusion of depth but also suggested that something holy and mysterious was being unveiled. The three children on the right seem to be looking at something on the horizon, but what they are seeing is withheld from us. The figure of Alice further suggests that these children might travel to a world beyond the everyday. At the same time, there is something sinister in the relief-printed figure of the child in the foreground, with its accompanying birds. Are Alice and her friends trapped or hiding in this curtained cave?

Bern Boyle (1951-1992) grew up in Philadelphia, where in 1973 he helped to found Giovanni's Room, the nation's oldest and largest LGBT bookstore and community center. Boyle is also credited with founding, in 1976, the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival, now known as the Frameline Film Festival. In the '80s, living in New York City's East Village, he was involved in the mail art scene, wherein a group of artists sent one another small works via the postal service. In 1986, Boyle was diagnosed with HIV disease, which compelled him to chronicle his own deterioration with once-a-day photobooth sessions. (Boyle ultimately died of AIDS-related complications.) He is especially well known for his photography of roadkill, street art, and street scenes in New York’s East Village Alphabet City. Boyle’s contribution to Artifacts was a 35mm photograph taken with a telephoto lens and flash attachment and then blown up and fed through a Xerox copier. The photo was taken at what Boyle said was his first Mexican lucha libre wrestling match. A popular form of entertainment for working-class audiences, it is characterized by fast-paced, high-flying acrobatics and colorful masks that express the persona of the wrestler (and hide his “backstage” identity). As Boyle explained, “Losing luchadors have to unmask themselves; if an unmasked wrestler loses again, his hair is immediately shaved off after leaving the ring, as a sign of humiliation.” Boyle’s contribution engages a number of queer themes, contaminating the supposedly immutable divisions between high and popular culture, the homoerotic and the homophobic, sport and performance, art and advertising, the true and the staged. And like the matches held by the US’s own WWE, lucha libre wrestling also has a certain camp appeal.

Erotic, transgressive, and surreal are all adjectives used to describe Jimmy De Sana’s photography. A member of New York’s East Village underground punk scene, De Sana (1949-1990) was both an artist and commercial photographer whose subjects included Talking Heads, Billy Idol, Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and William S. Burroughs. One of his earliest series, 101 Nudes, consisted of grainy Polaroid photographs of De Sana and his friends posing nude in their homes, and human bodies — sometimes, eroticized; sometimes, abstracted; often, both — remained a focus throughout his career: after having his spleen removed due to HIV, De Sana created a red-hued portrait of himself dressed in red briefs, a white strip of light illuminating his scar. The image is haunting, sexy and disturbing. An early proponent of using color photography for artistic ends, De Sana also produced surrealist images that featured human-object hybrids, always accompanied by a good dose of humor. A 2022 show at the Brooklyn Museum brought renewed attention to this artist who died from HIV disease. Like those of his contemporary Robert Mapplethorpe, many of De Sana’s photographs explored s/m— the primary difference being De Sana’s employment of humor. In De Sana’s contribution to Artifacts, a uniform-clad policeman is appropriated and transformed from a symbol of oppression to one of homoerotic desire, but in a way that is highly ironic and self-conscious. De Sana catches the helmeted cop relaxing, smoking a cigarette, his eyes cast down, his hand between his legs, with the wooded background suggesting a spot where men cruise for sex. But the purple cast of the photo, particularly the smoke, deconstructs the image, bringing to the foreground its contradictions as symbol of both social repression and sexual desire. (Associated historically with royalty, purple is also a symbol of magic and mystery.) Is the cop about to bust some queer men for having illicit public sex, or is he himself cruising the woods and enjoying a post-coital smoke? With its double significance, humor, and effort to imbue the well-worn figure of the motorcycle cop with new, erotic meanings, the photo is exemplary of camp.

While he began his career taking photos of men with tattoos before they were ubiquitous — tattooing was notoriously illegal in New York City from 1961 to 1997 — for more than forty years, Stanley Stellar (1945) has documented New York’s West Village queer life, from men socializing on Christopher Street, in dance clubs, and at Gay Pride parades, to studio portraits of people living with HIV. Abandoned since the 1960s, the piers along the Hudson River became, in the 1970s and ‘80s, a haven of queer socializing, sunbathing, sex, and art-making: muralists such as Keith Haring and Luis Frangella decorated its abandoned buildings, and, from 1983 to 1984, David Wojnarowicz and Mark Bidlow created an alternative art and exhibition space. Stellar documented this period of sexual freedom through a series of candid impromptu photos and eroticized portraits staged against the backdrop of the piers’ decaying buildings. In the 1980s, he began a series of nude and semi-nude portraits of men living with HIV, including some couples. Stellar’s contribution to Artifacts, a color Xerox made from a 35mm transparency, is entitled “Men Standing on the Street with me on Sunday, July 1, 1979 in Front of the Cock Ring Disco, NYC.” According to Stellar, the disco no longer exists but is now a hospice for people with AIDS. The photo simply documents a moment on a typical Sunday afternoon in the 1970s, when many discos were open for what were campily termed “tea dances.”

The Canadian artist and early queer rights activist called Evergon (1946) has adopted several other aliases, including Celluloso Evergoni, Elon Brut, and Eve R. Gonzales. Sometimes, these aliases are transformed into more fully developed personas that then create their own unique art works. The artist describes his work as “very personal, unapologetically homoerotic and imaginatively sensual.” Evergon uses his photos to “tell fictions,” and many have a magical, surrealist quality. Exploring the themes of queer sexuality, nudity, and gender, his works have both won major awards and generated controversy. In the booklet accompanying Artifacts, he describes his process. Evergon began by taking black and white photos of his lover. After chemically and hand toning the photos, he cut out the figures and collaged them with imagery found in books and magazines. The whole assemblage was then reproduced with a Xerox 6500 color copier. Evergon explained that what he termed the “paper doll/actor”  in the collage was a close friend or lover and that the imagery was drawn from “private symbols” tied to that relationship.

Robert Wilson’s contribution to Artifacts was a set design for his play Golden Windows, described as a “dream-like, 100-minute fable” inspired by a children’s story by Laura Shapiro. Wilson (1941-2025) was a director/playwright/choreographer/set designer/painter. He created, with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, the 1976 avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach, which rejected narrative coherence for an exploration of the various elements of theater, including visual images, movement, words, and music; his set designs reflect his training as an architect. Wilson’s highly experimental work has been described as a theater of presentation rather than representation, and it is known for its slow pace: as a child, Wilson had a stutter that he learned to control when a ballet teacher suggested he simply try slowing down. Critics have praised his experiments with the uses of time and space on stage, and his blurring of the distinctions between painting, theater, and “the furnishings of an imaginary world.” Wilson spent significant parts of his career collaborating on theatrical works with people with disabilities, including the poet Christopher Knowles and deaf mute actor Raymond Andrews, whom he adopted. Golden Windows was first produced in Munich in 1982 (in German translation), where it was well-received. A review of a subsequent staging in the US, however, was equivocal: “In the visionary theater of Mr. Wilson, we are not meant to look for meaning, let alone story, characters or psychological reality. We are asked, instead, to share a dream. But all dreams, Mr. Wilson's included, are not created equal. ‘The Golden Windows,’ . . .  is a distinctly minor reverie.” While Wilson lived his sexuality openly, the “queerness” of his work is not represented in the content of his plays, but rather their refusal to conform to other people’s assumptions concerning theatrical performance.

Lincoln Kirstein and the Magic Realists

Perhaps best known for having founded, with George Balanchine, Lincoln’s Center’s New York City Ballet and School of American Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) also encouraged the careers of several artists, some of them queer. The primary patron of Paul Cadmus, who had trouble selling his work due to its eroticized images of working- and middle-class men, Kirstein also commissioned several portraits from Pavel Tchelitchew and one from Gray Foy. In his role with New York City Ballet, Kirstein collaborated with Tchelitchew and other queer artists such as Corrado Cagli, Mirko Basaldella’s teacher, on sets and costumes. He also curated exhibitions featuring Cadmus, Tchelitchew, and Foy. What Kirstein valued in these artists was what he terms their “magic realism,” their ability to employ their high level of technical skill to depict the magic and mystery that lurks beneath the surface of the everyday. While the surrealists probed the mysteries of the unconscious, the magic realists turned to the physical world in search of the fantastic elements of everyday life. An interest in the magical also characterizes the work of some contemporary queer artists like Evergon, perhaps as an antidote to the many traditional religions that treat homosexual acts as sinful (and in concert with groups like the Radical Faeries, who combined queerness with spirituality, gender fluidity, and respect for nature). But this search to link queer sexuality to spirituality occurred in a variety of guises from the late 19th century on, from the ecstatic democracy that characterized some of Walt Whitman’s homoerotic poems, to the queer artists and intellectuals of Britain’s Oxford Movement, who were drawn to what they perceived as the residual pagan elements of Roman Catholicism.

It was likely that Kirstein’s relationship with Erie native James D. Baldwin led to Baldwin’s purchase of the works in the EAM collection by Foy, Cadmus, Tchelitchew, and perhaps even Basaldella. Married to Cadmus’s sister Fidelma, Kirstein also had affairs, both prior to and after his marriage, with men.

Violating the boundaries between fine art and mass culture in a manner that until then had few precedents, Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) was one of several artists who, in the interwar years, rejected abstraction for images of human beings. Given their eroticization of bodies —via tight-fitting clothes stretched over anatomically detailed physiques — and satirical bent, Cadmus’s paintings engendered controversy: the US Navy was particularly outraged by a series of three, commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project of the WPA, depicting drunken, carousing sailors on leave. In one, a sailor appears to be propositioning a well-dressed male suitor. A skilled portrayer of human anatomy often compared to Renaissance experts such as Luca Signorelli, Cadmus frequently worked not in oil but instead the historically earlier medium of egg tempera. In addition to satirical works, Cadmus drew, painted, and etched some startlingly intimate homoerotic images. By the time of his death, he had been with his partner Jon Anderson for 34 years.

From the mid to late 1940s, Cadmus painted a series entitled The Seven Deadly Sins, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The drawing on display is a study for Envy. Critics argue about the significance of the cycle, assuming it is a satire on this Medieval theme. But the critique seems to go in multiple directions: is the genre itself the object of satire, its assumption that sin is legible on the body, and its obsession with moral guilt? Or is the finger-wagging directed at queer men who gossip behind one another’s back? Cadmus’s friend Kirstein, however, did not see the work as satire but instead evidence of Cadmus’s (alleged) guilt over his own sexuality.

Sculptor Mirko Basaldella’s bronze Neophyte can be found in the Vatican Museum’s collection of Contemporary and Modern Art. He also designed the main gate for the Mausoleum at Fosse Ardeatine, where 335 of the victims of the Ardeatine Caves massacre are buried. The massacre occurred in 1944 as retribution for an Italian Partisan attack on German soldiers, Hitler ordering that ten Italians be executed for every German soldier killed. Basadella (1910-1969) grew up and came of age as an artist during the Fascist period and had a complicated relationship to Mussolini’s regime, helping to hide and protect works of art created by his teacher Corrado Cagli after Cagli fell out of favor and escaped Italy’s anti-Jewish laws for the US. While Basaldella is rumored to have had a sexual relationship with Cagli, he also married Cagli’s sister. Although it was created in the post-war years, Basaldella’s Boy with a Serpent is richly illustrative of the contradictions around the representation of the male body under the Fascist government. While artists were encouraged to draw on Italy’s rich artistic heritage — and the Roman Imperial period in particular — Mussolini’s government sought to produce a “new man” who would counter the stereotype of the Italian as lazy and ill-suited for war. This man was to be characterized above all by his virility. While, unlike Hitler, Mussolini never designated a particular style as “fascist,” the figure of the young man, so prized by first the Greeks, and then Renaissance artists such as Donatello, and then eighteenth-century Hellenist and queer art historian Johann Joaquin Winkelmann, was to be avoided, as he risked associations with Ancient Greek and Roman pederasty. While aspects of Basadella’s boy call up this forbidden figure, the size of his feet defy Greek standards of ideal masculine beauty and proportion. Additionally, the choice of a serpent is itself an odd one, as in the iconography of Ancient Greek sculpture, the God Hercules wrestles with a snake, but the boyish Apollo instead slays a lizard. (Though perhaps the most famous ancient example of boys with snakes are the sons of Laocoön.) What is perhaps most interesting is the boy’s face, however, which bears no resemblance to the idealized faces of Greek sculpture and represents instead a particularly modern synthesis of non-Renaissance — including non-Western — styles. Perhaps he is meant to represent a snake handler of sorts.

Like several of the artists on display, Gray Foy (1922-2012) risked being forgotten —  until a 2018 book and exhibit revitalized the memory of this remarkably skilled drawer. Critics compare his work to Tchelitchew’s surrealism, and it is clear that Tchelitchew influenced Foy: in 1946, Foy produced an image of a skull with exposed arteries and neuromuscular systems similar to the one on display by Tchelitchew (although Foy’s image was a watercolor); his first professional exhibit, in 1948, also included Tchelitchew. While an art student at Columbia in the 1940s, Foy took botany and anatomy classes that clearly influenced his hybrid plant/animal/human being creations. Like Tchelitchew, he “bucked the tide” of then contemporary movements: Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Pop, New Realism, Minimalism, Happenings. He described his own work as “hyper-realism.” Foy had his first one person show in 1951 but said that his art production ended about 1975. From September of 1948 on, he lived with his partner, writer and editor of Condé Nast Leo Lerman, entertaining in their home figures such as actor John Gielgud, singer Maria Callas, and burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee. The human body became a focus of his work after WWII. (He was exempt from military service due to asthma but drew in his spare time working at a defense plant). In addition to his commercial illustrations for book jackets, record album covers, and magazines, Foy produced about 100 pencil drawings. His work was long neglected until his death, when a significant stash of his drawings was found in his apartment. Foy’s drawings have been described as meticulous. The result of a painstaking process of taking pencil to paper, they also show the influence of the Renaissance artists Arcimboldo and Hieronymus Bosch. As is clear from the two displayed works, Foy created densely populated worlds of magical hybrids and queer transformations, providing, for the patient viewer, a search-and-find odyssey that can be richly rewarding.

Like other artists in Kirstein’s circle, Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957) was a set and costume designer as well as a painter. Hailing from an aristocratic Russian family, Tchelitchew fled the 1917 Revolution first for Berlin and then Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein, an early patron and the subject of one Tchelitchew’s portraits. Tchelitchew’s style went through a number of transitions. Prior to arriving in Paris, he worked in an abstract, geometric style. In Paris, he was associated with a group of painters who were termed “Neo-Romantics,” as they championed an abandonment of abstraction for figurative painting characterized by melancholy and nostalgia. Forgotten with the rise of American Abstract-Expressionism and the shift of the art world from Paris to New York, Neo-Romanticism was characterized by a recent exhibit as a forgotten moment in modern art. With his lifelong partner, the writer and photographer Charles Henri Ford, Tchelitchew moved, in 1936, to New York. (Ford wrote what is considered to be one of the first openly gay novels in English, The Young and Evil.)  Continuing to experiment, Tchelitchew eventually adopted his own unique style, characterized by surrealism and elements of fantasy and often employing a color palette described as “luminous” or, unfavorably, “pus-and-ketchup-colored.” Throughout his career, however, he continued to paint portraits, including one that combines three images of Kirstein, one as a nude boxer. Tchelitchew’s work has been subject to extremely varied critical responses, from unjustly forgotten to “conscientiously hideous” to a forerunner of psychedelic art. The two images on display represent two different aspects of his work. The surrealist skull, with its exposed network of nerves and veins, was inspired by Da Vinci’s anatomical studies, and versions of it appear in several of his paintings. The drawing may have been a preparatory sketch for his 1949 Maze or one of his many other paintings from the series entitled “Interior Landscapes” (1944-1949). These images are characterized by varying degrees of accuracy (though he studied anatomy, he admitted having fainted while observing an operation) and reflect his interest in alchemy. Tchelitchew’s primary concern was not the physical body as understood by science. Rather, he sought to unsettle (or, according to some critics, transcend) the boundaries between inside and outside, spirit and matter, magic and reason, body and mind. The second example of his work speaks to his gift for portraiture. It also raises complex questions around the representation by white queer artists of Black men. While it is impossible to view the image outside of a history of racism and racist depictions of Black men, the composition of the image also mitigates this history. For one, the two male figures are not presented with either exaggerated features or genitals, “exoticized” in any obvious way, or made an object of humor or derision. Nor are they posed frontally as if to offer themselves sexually to the viewer’s gaze. While it might be argued that the fact that they seem engrossed with one another turns the viewer into a silent voyeur to their intimacy, given the history of racism (as well as the role vision plays in sexual desire and fantasy), there is no way to insure that the image is not subject to racist readings. The only alternative would be to exclude Black men as a subject of art — itself a racist gesture. And given in particular a history of Black queer men’s experiences of being ignored by white queer men or even sexually rejected due to their race, there is nothing necessarily “anti-racist” in NOT treating the figures as handsome and sexually desirable. We should not forget that the image responds to a long history of ignoring Black subjects in Western art or only portraying them as slaves, “Blackamores,” or criminals. Inserting the Black man into the canons of “Western” beauty is, at least according to some art critics, itself an anti-racist act. And that they may be erotically interested in one another is itself significant, given the self-hatred and internalized homophobia that some queer Black men experience. At least one queer Black artist, the late Marlon Riggs, proposed that Black men loving Black men might be a revolutionary act.

David Hockney (1937) is a painter, drawer, set designer, printmaker, and photographer. He has lived as an openly queer man since he was 23 —seven years prior to Great Britain’s decriminalization of homosexual acts. Since the 1960s, Hockney has explored themes of same-sex desire and queer life. An important contributor to the Pop art movement. Hockney has had several partners, the most recent of whom is Jean-Pierre Gonçalvas de Lima, his chief assistant and studio manager. Since 2018, they’ve shared a home in France. Like many of the queer artists in the Artifacts portfolio, Hockney experimented with newer techniques of mechanical reproduction that were inexpensive and associated with advertising. He appreciated the way these techniques allowed for spontaneity and autonomy. In its time period, this do-it-yourself aesthetic countered queer exclusions from mainstream arenas of representation, as well as proposed a deconstruction of the boundaries between art and non-art, life and art. Given the way in which the term is useful in discussing the works of queer artists, it is important to recall that deconstruction is not a synonym for destruction but rather the effort to think through how, despite the assumption that the two terms exclude one another, opposites are impossible to maintain: the fact that the concept of light depends upon that of dark means that there will always be something of one in the other. Regarding his foray into printing, there is a now famous anecdote that, as an art student at London’s Royal College of art who was short on funds, he discovered that, unlike paint and canvas, the school provided all the necessary tools for printmaking. Hockney preferred the term “translation” rather than copy to describe the multiple versions of a print. He insisted that “Techniques are inextricably linked to meaning.” Potted Daffodils (1980) displays many of the chief characteristics of the artist’s prints. Hockney’s prints have been compared to Matisse’s, and the leaves of the daffodils particularly resemble the French artist’s paper cut outs, while the flowers themselves mimic Japanese ink flower paintings (Sumi-e). Hockney treated lithography as a drawing medium, and this is very clear from the EAM print, which looks in parts like a pencil drawing. This combination of techniques suggest what critics have called the interest and joy Hockney takes in the medium itself. He also believed that a print should show traces of the labor that produced it — something also revealed in this combining of different means of producing the image.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was another queer artist who resisted making distinctions, not only between high art and popular culture, but also painting, drawing, and print-making. Some of his works included fabric, and he sometimes printed on the variegated surface of paper he himself made by hand. This refusal of purity went against the grain of modernism as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, who argued that each artistic medium should pursue what is specific and intrinsic to it: painters, for example, should avoid illusionism, as sculpture was the medium that explored three dimensionality, and the whole purpose of photography was to reproduce the world as the eye saw it, in three dimensions. Rather, painting’s proper role was to explore its own unique elements, such as the flatness of the canvas. One of Rauschenberg’s signature techniques was to soak magazine photos in solvent and then rub the back of the image so as to transfer it onto canvas. The resulting image created a confrontation of flatness with depth, as the transfer image retained the three dimensional qualities of the photographs. The whole surface of the EAM print engages in this dialogue between flatness and depth: the flatness of the pages of the open book contrast with the depth produced by the book’s inability to lay flat, which contrasts with the flatness of the yellow field on which the book is placed, which contrasts with the illusion that the book is literally resting on the surface of the print. The layered photographic images are particularly significant in this regard, as, while the illusion of depth in the photographs is in tension with their flatness, that competition between flatness and depth is made more pronounced by the cutting of the photo into strips to reveal the background on which they have been placed. Even the “painted” watercolor areas are of different depths, thanks to the employment of variegated, graded, and flat washes, not to mention Rauschenberg’s refusal to orient all the collage elements vertically. While the work is actually a print, it appears to be a collage of painting, printing, and photos — including one of a window through which we can see another image.

In discussions of Rauschenberg’s sexuality and its pertinence to his work, some critics look for queer symbols or references. For example, such a critic might point to his inclusion in the print of the painting Primavera by the allegedly queer Botticelli. Other critics look instead for a queer sensibility: given the way in which scientific and medical experts claimed to know with certainty why someone was queer, Rauschenberg might have created art that resists interpretation, just as his own sexuality could not be easily defined as either straight or gay. Rauschenberg married his friend and artistic collaborator, painter Susan Weil, with whom he had a son. After their divorce, he had male lovers, including the artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns; for the last 25 years of his life, Darryl Pottorf was his companion. Like several of the other queer artists on exhibit, Rauschenberg sought to unsettle distinctions— between flatness and depth, between art and non art, between life and art.