Difference and Desire on Display

ebfrye — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:31:03 +0000

Image Credit: Ellen DeGeneres, Kauai, Hawaii, 1997, photographed by Annie Leibovitz via NPR

At the end of October, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. opened “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The new exhibition features gay and lesbian artists and portraits of prominent figures in the gay community.

As noted by NPR, the exhibition, given the location and the involvement of federal funds, marks a “landmark achievement.” With a tinge of pride, the Gallery states that “this is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture.” Focuses include “how artists explored the fluidity of sexuality and gender; how major themes in modern art—especially abstraction—were influenced by social marginalization; and how art reflected society’s evolving and changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment” (National Portrait Gallery).

As the phrase “Hide/Seek” indicates, the project seems to oscillate between emphasizing various forms of “desire” and highlighting a poignant sense of public and private struggle. Tellingly, the above image of Ellen DeGeneres as photographed by Annie Leibovitz opens the exhibition’s website and emphasizes what arguably appears as the contemporary gay mainstream. A closer look at the images on display reveals a who’s who of iconic artists and intellectuals: Walt Whitman, Robert Maplethorpe, Susan Sontag, Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol, etc. Yet, the project also features images of lesser-knowns including those lost to the AIDS epidemic.

The works of art in the exhibition are grouped along crucial periods of public gay definition, including “Before Difference,” “Stonewall and After,” and “AIDS,” which allows the exhibition to function as a documentation of gay rights. Given the National Portrait Gallery's position as a federally-funded Smithsonian museum, such historicizing and legitimizing moves take on added political significance.

Visit the websites linked above for soundslides and a closer look at the gallery. The exhibition runs through mid-February.

Visual Rhetoric and Invisibility

Sarah Wagner — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:18:28 +0000

Where is the line between visual and textual rhetoric? A brief event brought this question up for me on a personal level recently.

I was on the phone with the IRS and they asked me two questions. First, is my last name my married name or my maiden name? Second, on my last return, how did I file? The answer I gave to the first was “married” and to the second was “single”. And I'm being forced to lie, or rather, to leave out part of the story. Sure, the IRS woman doesn't care--married people file single every day--but I hate it. Time after time, I have to answer questions like those the same way. I'm not single, I've been married for three years, and was with my wife for seven before that. My maiden name is my married name; my wife took my last name. D'you see? I'm a woman (if you didn't catch the byline), and I married another woman in Massachusetts before we moved to Texas. Here, I'm married only because I say so. Here, I'm “married.”

So why does this have anything to do with visual rhetoric? Because in one sense it has something very much to do with visibility. I'm not only not married because the text of many of our laws says I'm can't be, but because others' ability to picture in their heads a woman saying “My wife and I were talking the other day...” affects their ability to accept my reality. And it's my inability too: back in Massachusetts, there was a columnist—I forget the name—who wrote every so often for the back page of the Sunday magazine. The back page was on relationships, and this writer was great. Not once, but twice, I thought, “I have to remember to read this writer more often”, and when I looked for the byline, I was caught off guard both times because this person writing “My husband does this and that” was a man.

Another case of visibility--or rather, invisibility--is when I fill out a form. Just take the word “form”: there's form and then there's content, right? So the expectation of the folks handing out and filling out forms is that there will be certain predictable requests for information. We don't read forms for content—we look to see which line takes our name, whether there are brackets for our area code, and so on. The extra boxes giving us more choices to identify ourselves are equally visual arguments. If we agree you exist--Pacific Islanders, “Other” ethnicities, gays and lesbians--you get a box of your own. Again, it's about whether or not people can envision me. Can they picture my relationship in their heads?

viz. - lesbian

Difference and Desire on Display

Visual Rhetoric and Invisibility