The photographs positioned directly across from the entrance are of Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig. These actors are familiar from the L Word, so anyone coming in to the gallery to see lesbian representation is given an easy entry point in faces they recognize from TV. In her photo, Daniela Sea presents as herself, not her character, maybe to remind the viewer we may be seeing actors but we are not looking at fiction. My initial experience of this part of the gallery was an urge to hurry through, thinking to myself, I have looked at these faces enough, I don’t need to look at them here. But I wonder how more straight-leaning art world visitors felt about these two. I wonder if Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig served as sentinels of the portal into Cathy Opie’s particular variety of queer representation. Maybe for some visitors, these two faces provided a gentle welcome and permission to stare at the butches in the gallery. For me, I pretty much hurried past them to get to the good stuff.
Getting stared at/glared at/looked over/given the hairy eyeball is something of a foundational experience of being butch. And yet, so is invisibility. Here in the gallery we are allowed the pleasure of staring at butches, evening staring long enough to be considered rude or inappropriate. Further for some is the pleasure of both looking and being seen. The contradiction of dirty looks and invisibility is stirred up here. But there is more at play than technically excellent photography and queer representation. As the gallery grew more and more crowded on opening night, the room with filled butches looking at butches looking at pictures of butches, like a hall of mirrors or an alternate universe.
The combination of new and old photographs show the same people younger and older, showing the viewer something rather personal of the subjects. In our lives, the people we are close to age along side us, and when Cathy Opie shows us the same subjects over the course of years, we feel a connection to the subjects. Maybe we feel the kind of connection we do to friends and family. It gives the show a kind of intimacy and familiarity. I have never met Pig Pen. I watched Pig Pen in Hallelujah, a documentary about Ron Athey, I had seen Cathy Opie’s pictures of Pig Pen at the Guggenheim. The stunning photo of Pig Pen at the center of the gallery stopped me in my tracks. I felt simultaneously like I was seeing this person for the first time and like I was seeing an old friend... whom I’ve never met. Opie’s portraits often show queers as royalty surrounded by bold colors, but this one shows a saint with slightly bowed head and glowing backlight. (Image below, with my snapshot from opening night. Notice the little bit of space gallery goers give this portrait, maybe a little subconscious reverence, maybe just a gap in the crowd.)
Many of the pictures feature butch people in wide-open spaces, outdoors, with a visible horizon. A vertical person within a horizontally infinite space. Butch standing by the ocean, in the woods, or mountains. The spaciousness is so vast that much of what is pictured is sky reaching back out of site, woods filling the entire frame, a road trailing off into the horizon, the ocean trailing off to meet the sky. The subject is at home in the frame, and it gives the impression they could move limitlessly in any direction. There is this sense of freedom to being the only person in the frame, existing only in relationship to oneself, able to go near and far or anywhere in this wide-open space.
There is a room of all black and white pictures where the point of reference is Robert Mapplethorpe. I can’t really remember exactly how I first heard about Robert Mapplethorpe, but I have loved him since high school. The idea of revealing such classical beauty in expressions of sexual perversion was as exciting to me then as it is now. No one could deny that his photography was captivating and beautiful, but of course there was always controversy attached to his work. A friend with a more liberal mom had the book Mapplethorpe, published in 1992, a year before my graduation from high school. The book is enormous and heavy in more ways than one, and I studied it in a celibate teenage stupor until it became synonymous with queerness in my mind. So the black and white room added yet another familiar touch point in the gallery for me. (See the images below, Mapplethorpe's Self Portrait 1978, followed by my snapshot of one of Opie's self portraits from the black and white room. Love the whips!)
The first time I saw photography by Cathy Opie was at the Whitney Biennial in 1995. I was visiting the museum with my college aesthetics class, professor included, and had no idea about what we were going to see. There was the now-classic self-portrait where she is wearing an S/M hood and has the word “pervert” freshly cut into her chest, still bloody. Her shoulders and arms are crowded with needles piercing her skin. There was also a picture of Ron Athey in thigh-high boots, and I recognized him immediately from his interview in Details magazine, also in 1995. I studied that interview and still have the magazine where he talked about sexuality, pain and transcendence. (It would be another ten years before I was fortunate enough to attend one of his performances, see image below, a treasured digital keepsake of mine!) This interview and Opie’s photographs provided me with a window into the world I knew I needed to move into and set up my permanent residence.
When I went to see Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim in 2008, there were some self-portraits displayed together: The infamous Pervert picture. Another one where she is nursing, with the word "pervert" visible as a well-healed yet perfectly legible white scar. (Admittedly difficult to see in the digital image below, but very clear in person.) In a third photo she has her back to the camera to show a fresh cutting, similar to a child’s drawing of a family with the house and the parents and the sun shining, only both parents are drawn with skirts. Reviewers seemed to think the proximity of these pictures represented some sort of progression, but I think it does quite the opposite. The desire for family is present in the bloody cutting, and the perversion is visible in the image of motherhood. Here, I thought, is a vast and expansive observation about being a lesbian. There is no contradiction, no before-and-after. Our lives include all this and more.
I have never met Cathy Opie. I attended a talk she gave at the NYC homo center during her show at the Guggenheim, and I saw her talking with friends at the Girlfriends opening. It is curious that someone I do not know personally could evoke such a powerful sense of familiarity and inclusion. I imagine that speaks to the experience of being part of a queer community that at its best shares more than individual relationships.
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