Queering Art History ‘As a category of identity, “queer” is used to denote non-normative sexualities. It sometimes includes or is aligned with nonnormative genders, but it should not be conflated with transgender or other trans-identities. [ … ] Queer studies as an academic discipline also emerged in the 1990s, in conversation with post-colonial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and other schools of thought that center on ideas and experiences of difference. The ways in which multiple marginalized subjectivities intersect and interact is essential to the methodology of queer studies. Queer studies also introduced the use of “queer” as a verb. To “queer” something or to do something “queerly” is not only to resist normativity but to point out and articulate the conventions that sustain and perpetuate normativity.’ Sylvia Page, ‘ “Making Visible the Otherwise.” Queering the Art Library,’ Art Documentation 37 (2018) p. 21 L: Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective (London, 1986) R: Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality (Oxford, 2011) Catalogue cover of the Queer British Art exhibition, Tate Britain, London 2017 Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Art and Queer Culture (London, 2019) Piotr Piotrowski Ars Homo Erotica (National Museum, Warsaw, 2010) Themes: •Homoerotic Classicism •Male Nudes •Ganymede •Saint Sebastian •Lesbian Imaginarium •Transgender / Androgyny Installation short of Ars Homo Erotic with (l) Harmodius & Aristogeiton and (r) David Černý, Poland (from Entropa, 2008) David Hockney Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966) UB Scans202.jpg David Hockney Domestic Scene, Los Angeles (1963) Robert Gober L: R: X Playpen (1987) Thomas Eakins The Swimming Hole (1885) Homosocial or ‘Homosexual’? Anton von Maron Portrait of Johann Winckelmann (1768) Roman copies of the lost Greek original sculpture the Doryphoros (“Spear carrier”) Achilles and Patroclus Red figure vase, ca. 440 BC Roman 2nd century copy of a Greek sculptural pair of Harmodius and Aristogeiton ‘I was interested in having my students challenge the rather sanitized, if not down right inaccurate, accounts propounded by various proponents of "our Western heritage." Lynne Cheney wants students to study Socrates; and why not? I thought. Socrates was surrounded with pretty boys; the dialogues, as narrated by Plato and others, are partly just fancy versions of the intellectual cultivation, the osten tation, contest, and romance, and the idealization of the merely sexual into the broadly ethical that characterized Greek male courtships. Certainly most of the standard textbooks of the his tory of art do not address the issue, despite the great importance that studies of gender and sexuality have come to have in art history generally and the obvious presence of an erotically meaningful representation of the male body in classical art.’ Whitney Davis, ‘Founding the Closet: Sexuality and the Creation of Art History,’ Art Documentation 11.4 (1992) p. 172 Jacques –Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787) LIMITS OF CONCEPT: CLASSICAL AND RENAISSANCE SEXUALITY • Copy of Michelangelo Ganymede (1532). Original now lost. L: Zeus abucting Ganymede 6th century BCE R: Zeus and Ganymede mid-5th century BCE Red figure vase depicting an older man bargaining for sex with a younger man (mid 5th century BCE) Ganymede on a crater by the so-called Berlin Painter (ca. 500-490 BCE) Andrea Alciati The Rape of Ganymede in Emblemata (1531) Nicolò degli Agostini – Zeus and Ganymede from Ovid, Metamorphosi (Venice, 1522) Michelangelo The Fall of Phaethon (1533) Given to Tommaso dei Cavalieri Correggio The Rape of Ganymede (1530) Benvenuto Cellini Ganymede and the Eagle (1545-46) ‘If you would share in my society Do not discourse on female love to me How pitiful the man who changes his mind For woman, or for her feels joy or dismay Or who permits her his liberty to bind Or trusts her words or glances that betray’ Angelo Poliziano, Orfeo (1480) Benvenuto Cellini Narcissus (1545) Parmigianino Amor (1532-33) Donatello David (1440s) ‘In Florence, Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, known as Donatello (1386–1466), never married and the records from his patron Cosimo de Medici repeatedly refute rumors that the artist’s erotic interests led him to choose apprentices more for their beauty than for their talent. This has led some scholars to interpret his winsome statue of David, the boy warrior of the Bible as a record of the artist’s erotic desires.’ Reed, Art and Homosexuality, p. 44 ‘The argument for civic iconology would alleviate both Janson's and Schneider Adams' assertions of intentional homoeroticism from problems inherent in a presumed contem rary Florentine religious reaction. In other words, had the s ue been consciously commissioned as both religious symbol and homoerotic emblem, one could plausibly argue that the Church and contemporary Catholic sensibilities would have unconditionally condemned a blatant eroticizing of so potent a connection to Christ, particularly one conspicuously visible in the palace cortile of an eminent Florentine patrician.’ Peter Weller, ‘A Reassessment in Historiography and Gender,’ Artibus et Historiae, 33.65 (2012) pp. 52-53 ‘When one looks upward at the statue from this more severe angle and distance below the base, di sotto in sù, the elongated lower abdomen visually col lapses by means of Donatello's gift of intentional foreshortening and the viewing angle now emphasizes an adolescent chest that may be gendered with a hetero-prowess and self-confidence. As Munman opines, the statue's legs become stronger and the countenance more defiant, the entire body evokes torsion and dynamism that overpowers the modern eye's notion of effeminacy endowed by the current view displayed from the shallower angle and shorter height.’ Weller, p. 54 Furthermore …. ’ … records suggest that sexual behavior in Renaissance Italy was not seen as a basis for individual identity. When preachers fulminated against sodomites as a group, their hyperbolic claims about the seriousness of the problem cast sodomy as a ubiquitous form of youthful delinquency, rather than a characteristic of an identifiable minority. Their ongoing recourse to such rhetoric also suggests that sermons did little to change behavior. The absence of modern notions of homosexual identity in the fi fteenth century should not be surprising, however, for modern ideas of individual identity in general postdate the Renaissance.’ Reed, Art and Homosexuality, p. 43. MODERNIST READINGS • Marsden Hartley Portrait of a German Officer (1914-15) Marsden Hartley Painting No. 48 (1913) Claude Cahun Self-Portrait (1920) Claude Cahun – What Do You Want? (1929) Claude Cahun Self Portrait (1929) Man Ray Photograph of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy (1921) Marcel Duchamp Fountain (1917) Charles Demuth – Three Sailors Urinating (1930) Charles Demuth Sailors urinating (1930) Andy Warhol – Oxidation Painting (1978) (Copper metallic pigment mixed with acrylic and urine) Jackson Pollock – Number 1 (1948) Robert Mapplethorpe Jim and Tom, Sausolito (1977) Andres Serrano Piss Christ (1987) ‘These bad boys of modern art – metaphorical bed-wetters all – Duchamp, Demuth, Mapplethorpe, Warhol, Serrano and perhaps even Pollock … void the civilized boundaries placed on our concept of the body’s beauty, on what is clean and dirty, and finally on what is sexually permissible.’ Jonathan Weinberg, ‘Urination and its Discontents’ in Davis, ed, Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, p. 242