ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
FROM THE COLLECTION
OF TERRY VAN BRUNT
June 28-August 4, 2002
San Francisco LGBT Community Center
Reviewed by Tirza Latimer
The exhibition ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FROM THE COLLECTION OF TERRY VAN BRUNT, curated by the art-historian and queer-cultural activist Jonathan Katz, launched an ambitious Visual Arts Program at the Queer Cultural Center’s gallery in San Francisco. The dozens of art objects and documents exhibited here -- all tokens of affection that Rauschenberg bestowed upon his companion and assistant Terry van Brunt during the 1980s -- make visible an important (if often cryptic) dimension of the artist’s practice, a dimension shaped by his emotional life.
Katz has explored this dimension in some depth, attending to the intimate artistic dialogue between Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, and now Rauschenberg and Van Brunt, in publications ranging from “The art of the code,” in the anthology Significant others, edited by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron in 1993, to the current exhibition catalogue essay “Love letters.” Katz’s book on Rauschenberg will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003.
The curator personally introduced this unknown body of work to San Francisco viewers in a series of slide presentations and gallery talks at the Center; a follow-up symposium on “Art in the closet: politics and ethics of revealing sexuality in art” invited the viewing public to consider and discuss some the art-historical, political, and ethical issues (censorship, ghettoization, marginalization, the problematic of status of biography, debates about outing ...) raised by this unique show.
The gallery, housed in San Francisco’s newly constructed LGBT Community Center, is one of the only museum-quality exhibition spaces in the U.S. conceived to showcase art produced by, and/or of particular significance to, queer communities. This fact alone should have lured members of the mainstream and alternative press to the gallery for the opening, or subsequent events during the show’s run, and guaranteed a minimum of media coverage. But --surprisingly? -- neither the show nor the opening of the gallery attracted media attention. Those of us who assume that the closet, in this era of queer visibility, is no longer a powerful regulatory institution, are left, in the wake of this show, with two hanging questions: Why does the homoerotic content of Rauschenberg’s work represent such a blind spot in the critical and art-historical record, when, as Katz demonstrates, it constitutes such an important axis of interpretation? Why did the Visual Arts Program’s ground-breaking Rauschenberg events transpire in a virtual media blackout? To ask these questions, and to formulate answers, is to recommit to a struggle that is farther from resolution than the existence of this show, this gallery, this community center, might tempt us to believe.
Tirza T. Latimer
ttlatimer@earthlink.net
The compact exhibit initially struck me as “that's nice,” until I learned the background succinctly offered by the knowledgeable Jones, and also the handsome accompanying publication “Love letters: Robert Rauschenberg and Terry Van Brunt.”
This is a spectacularly exciting exhibit. I look forward to even more insights when Katz, Tirza T. Latimer, Ph.D., and Professor Richard Meyer present “Art in the closet: politics and ethics of revealing sexuality in art” on Sunday, September 8. Bill Picture’s article “For the love of Rauschenberg” in the August 20 San Francisco Examiner further explored the importance of exhibiting this work and the pioneering research which contexutualizes it.
Jim Van Buskirk
James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center
San Francisco Public Library
e-mail: JimV@sfpl.org
Art in the Closet: Politics and Ethics of Revealing Sexuality in Art
Sunday September 8, 2002, 4 to 6 pm
SF LGBT Community Center
A special symposium, Art in the Closet: Politics and Ethics of Revealing Sexuality in Art, will be held on Sunday, September 8 from 4 to 6 pm.
PANELISTS Tirza T. Latimer, Ph.D., Richard Meyer, Ph.D., Jonathan Katz, Ph.D.
In a recent article published in the New York times, Holland Cotter addressed the lack of focus on sexuality and queer themes in a retrospective of the work of Andy Warhol, currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “Why,” he asked, “if queer is now so in the clear in the culture at large, has it been muted if not silenced in a major show devoted to the American artist who, more than any other, gave it a voice?”
Almost at the same time as Cotter asked this question, the Queer Cultural Center engaged in a unique visual arts program placing art and sexuality into a productive dialogue. The Visual Arts Program’s first exhibition “Robert Rauschenberg: From the Collection of Terry Van Brunt,” a unique display of never-before-seen works by one of the most celebrated American artists, unveiled new themes in the artist’s work. Drawing from a collection assembled by Rauschenberg’s studio assistant and companion for most of the 1970s and ’80s, the exhibition explores the emotional exchanges and day-to-day interactions between the two men, which shaped the artist’s practice.
While contextualizing sexuality and queer meanings in art, this exhibition raised important questions and issues. Following up on these issues, the Queer Cultural Center will bring together three art historians in a panel discussion. They will discuss the politics and problematics of writing about the sexuality of artists in relation to their work. These scholars are aware of how difficult it can be to write about such controversial subjects. Yet, through their continued efforts, often being the subject of censorship, they have created a momentum which will foster new approaches to art and its history.