Catherine Opie, Girlfriends

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of never before seen work by photographer Catherine Opie... “Girlfriends” combines brand new color photographs with a selection of black and white photographs from Opie’s archive that have never been printed. In this new series she explores the nature of butch-dyke identity through portraits including those of public figures such as k.d. lang and Eileen Myles as well as friends and partners who have appeared in her work throughout the years.

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.   

Assimilation Lunch

Abby: The other day on the Huffington Post, I saw something about Kim Kardashian “outing” a U.S. Air Marshall on Twitter, and I wasn’t sure what an Air Marshall is, but I assumed he was some kind of military person or something, if it was a big deal to out him.  I read through the article and there was nothing about him being gay, and I realized that the author was using the expression to mean disclosure of any kind of private status. That’s part of what assimilation is; letting them take parts of our culture and use it to mean whatever they want.

Sloan: Yeah, and it’s not even close to the original meaning... In that Michelangelo Signorile book he talks about media silence about the sexuality of public figures who were openly gay, that the point of “outing” was at least in part to break the media’s silence about queerness and address their failure to report any facts that would reveal that somebody is gay, because gayness was not something to talk about in public.  The practice of outing was not always about shaming homophobic/hypocritical closeted gay people but initially was about the media making our lives invisible and unspeakable.  It was not just revealing something secret but pointing out homophobia.

A: Of course words always change meaning over time, but what this made me think about was gay marriage.  And how we seem to have only two choices: assimilate and let them take whatever they want from our culture, or refuse and continue to be treated as outcasts.  In my class the other day we were discussing Tiger Woods’ apology. Somebody insisted that all professional athletes cheat, and another student responded, “Not all of them- some of them are homosexuals.”  Students laughed at the idea of gay athletes. That statement almost makes me want gay marriage to be legal, because at least then straight people would have to acknowledge that our relationships aren’t so alien, or less important.

S: And the professor did nothing, right? So now we are in a position where we are supposed to choose between exile and execution, between being shunned and being acknowledged but suffocated. And just like in any subculture, there will always be people ready to relinquish their uniqueness in exchange for belonging, in order to feel fully human and end the pain of invisibility.  But it won't work.  If we keep trying to attain equality only through similarity and conformity, we'll just end up losing our identities but still being considered less than human.  Sarah Schulman talked about this at the Kessler Lecture, that we’ve mistaken tolerance for love and lost sight of what we actually deserve.  

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds: Who Loved You Before You Were Mine.  Five deviant queers, their mythical beast secret identities, and all of their ghosts walk into a cabaret. The result is a show about yearning for ancestors, the empty spaces left by the first generation of AIDS deaths in fag/queer communities and the way the next generation is called to fill those spaces. What is the relationship between the loss of a generation of queer men and queens and the next generation’s expanding possibilities for transmasculinity? What is the relationship between a generation of dykes woven fiercely and intimately into ACT UP and support circles for dying friends and a next generation of dykes woven into radical faerie and transfag communities? In a culture based on chosen families, which of our desires are inherited?

In this re-interpretation of Yiddish theater classic The Dybbuk, the consensual possession of a lover by the ghost of their beloved is a model for acknowledging the collective loss we hold and reflect in our queer bodies. The cabaret is a love letter to the ghosts among us.

With three good friends working on Between Two Worlds, I saw an irresistible opportunity to start a dialog about collaboration among queer artists and activists.  Not to mention I was completely blown away by the show.  Shared obsessions: the persistence and evolution of subcultures over time, relationships, ancestry, history, personal connection and more.  Since ours is not a community of blood relations, I find myself committed to searching for and creating mystical, sexual, historical and cultural connections with my people.  These connections are enumerated in both the queer and supernatural in Between Two Worlds, and these three artists are certainly my people.

Following is a conversation with Emily Nepon, J. Dellecave and Niknaz Tavakolian.  Nepon, J and I corresponded over e-mail and Niknaz responded to my questions with a hand-written letter.  Following are excerpts from our correspondence.

Images by Nogga Schwartz


What inspired you to work on this project, what about it appealed to you?

Nepon: Well, I've been daydreaming about this project for years. I think the first thing that inspired me was visiting Olympia in 2000 while friends there were creating Nomy Lamm's rock opera “The Transfused,” although I just figured that out this very moment! I had been creating and performing in Purimspiels with Daniel Lang/Levitsky (DLL) and others involved in Jews for Racial and Economic Justice since 2004 and putting on those shows was always my favorite thing in my whole year, so I wanted to make a full show that wasn't limited by the themes of Purim or the needs of the organizations that produce the Purimspiels. I also wanted to make a star vehicle for myself so I could let all my art hero(ine)s now that I'm a star of the stage and screen and I can sing!

            This particular script was inspired by my experiences in ACT UP Philly, radical faerie community, traveling in Eastern Europe, and a lot of research about Jewish art/literature, Yiddishkeit, and the art/literature of the 1st decade of the AIDS epidemic. It was also an attempt to heal some of the trauma of touring the disgusting commercialization of Jewish trauma in Eastern Europe. It was, literally, a love letter to the ghosts among us.

J. Dellecave: Inspiration: A grad school lecture devoted to discussing embodied street protest during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s, early 1990s.  Many younger generation classmates began debating in this dry academic manner, and I had to raise my hand and emote.  I was outraged, I was shocked, I felt like I was going to burst into tears or vomit or scream at the top of my lungs. Yes… I was very moved by the ignorance I was hearing from a group of incredibly bright, incredibly educated, and very queer young people. The conversation went something like this: (insert an overly-dramatized, academic voice, with faux British accent and a holier-than-though affect)  “I just don’t think shocking people by lying down in the middle of church during a religious ceremony like mass is an effective way to disseminate information about people dying of AIDS. I mean maybe that went too far. I don’t think that could have worked.” (Several students had made this comment or a comment similar to this and it just going around in a circle without anything new being said).

            I responded by saying something to the extend of “I am appalled that we are even talking about the AIDS epidemic protests this way.” I remember my voice got all quivery and vulnerable – if I get that voice when I’m having an argument with a lover or friend, that is the signal to me that I need to take a break, and go take a walk, take a few breaths and come back to the conversation. “AIDS activists were struck with an urgency that I don’t think you are comprehending. Like if you took a group of ten gay male friends from that era, two of that ten are still living today.” Big pause. “It is not possible to debate whether or not these protests were effective, because today medication is available (at least here in the United States) that significantly prolongs the life of people who are HIV positive.  We can talk about it as a performance, but we cannot talk about this in terms of whether the performance was good or bad. It was effective, beyond debate, because people aren’t dying like they were in the late 80s and early 90s.” And as I stated before, this comes with the caveat, of at least not here.

            For a minute there, I totally lost faith in academia to actually grasp reality, but soon was reaffirmed that people like us need to be in academic dialogues to voice how things were, perhaps even with a lot of emotion and outrage. Coming of age and coming out temporally close to loss and death in the queer community profoundly shaped the way that I relate to issues of social justice. And then there is my one friend who is twenty years my senior who lived through the epidemic as a young person. I should have ten friends his age and instead there is the painful gap of missing elders. He and the ghosts that are always with him were the inspiration to be a part of Between Two Worlds.

            More Inspiration: Multiple frameworks, seemingly incongruent inspirations, the idea of weaving, embodied ghosts, consensual possession, the Dybbuk, gossip, showtunes, glitter, productive rants, queers of the moment. The chance for Killer (a.k.a. Nepon) and I to collaborate creatively – we have a ten-year history of collaborating on productions and events, and this was the first time both of us focused on the creation. BTW was the first time we both filled the role of artist.

What role did you play in the production? How many people contributed to this work? 

Nepon: I originated the project, produced it, wrote most of it, and brought together the performers and crew. I moved to NYC with the intention of making theater with Daniel Lang-Levitsky, and a lot of the pieces of this show were part of my initial fantasy. Daniel and J were both powerful creative partners from early on. There were four other performers, Niknaz on the film projection, and Patrick on the accordion plus Casey was stage-manager, so all together there were 10 people involved.

           

J. Dellecave: Collaborator, director, co-writer, choreographer. We were very specific about how we delineated our contributions in the program, and for some reason now I just want to say I did a lot of work. Often I donned a timeline engine, always saying “we have to get blah, blah, blah done by blah, blah, blah time”…and I think my role was also partly to become hyper-excited about every detail.

Niknaz: My role in Between Two Worlds was the projection maker.  Killer, J and Daniel described what they were looking for as far as backdrops and I went off and designed and built what was projected behind the action. 

How was the labor divided, and how did you deal with any conflict or disagreement?

Nepon: The division of labor was initially imagined as me and DLL co-directing, with J as choreographer and part of the creative team. Then I got pneumonia and J's other show got canceled (sort of) by HOTFEST, so the division of labor shifted without much chance to discuss it and J took on a really strong directorial role. That caused some conflict near the performance date as we all were getting stressed out, because I hadn't given up creative control on purpose (too sick to leave the house!) but she had put so much work into the show that a re-negotiation should have been more explicit earlier on. There were some hard moments but I have to say that we all loved the show, loved working with each other, and really believed in the project in a way that carried us through with very loving and generous behaviors. We made space, at least on the “crew” level, for people to vocalize their frustrations and that helped us all to just say it and move on. In the end, we all understood that Daniel was the main designer, I was the main writer, and J was the main director – though we did all three of those things very collaboratively. I guess the main thing I noticed is that this collaboration wasn't exactly easy or uncomplicated, but it was way more fun, supportive, exciting, inspiring than challenging.

J. Dellecave: The labor was divided based on individual availability. Meaning if someone was out of town or busy with their other life or sick with swine flu (!), others picked up the slack or picked up where they left off. Unemployed and then having my Hot Festival performance cancelled at the last minute, I found myself extremely time available last summer. I am pleased to have been able to offer a lot, labor/time-wise, to the process and production. Amazingly the collaborators had very few conflicts. In fact, I would say we had only one conflict that had to be processed. (I am intentionally separating this from the small, simple gripes or functional bemoaning that didn’t warrant more attention than a few snide comments here and there). We did what all good queers do to process our conflict – we went to a coffee shop, and talked out our feelings. We even did it in the midst of a day that was filled with hours of rehearsals and meetings! We were very committed; in my opinion we worked exceptionally well together! Conflicts or disagreement amidst the cast, or amidst the collaborators and the cast also occurred only rarely or in a minor way. We were all very entangled in interpersonal ways (and the scary ways – like you’re best friends with the ex I don’t talk to anymore, or your housemate used to date my new lover) and I was surprised and relieved there wasn’t more drama.

What about the content demanded collaboration?

Niknaz: First of all, I love working in collaboration.  To me, it’s like having a visual art conversation- a back and forth so to speak.  A call and response that leads to a collective idea (of sorts) so I was happy to be invited to play for this show.  At first I wasn’t sure what my contribution could be since the play was about a community I’m not a part of.  And while I did some activism around HIV/AIDS in the 90’s - it was nothing like what some of my friends were doing.  So I started the project in a place of “not knowing” which is a great place to start creatively.

            The aesthetical launching point for some of the projections was- well- it was an homage to Wojnarowicz.  One of the first inspirations they brought into the mix was Wojnarowicz’s sex series where solarized black and white images of buildings and structures are juxtaposed with circles of men having sex.  What we wanted to do was use this series as a springboard for contemplating poly, post-gender musings.  I don’t remember how the idea of having a wrestling scene play in one of the Wojnarowicz circles came about-- but it sounded beautiful and exciting and potentially political given the ghost of the past theme we were going for.  We set aside a day and invited some friends and videotaped the wrestling.  We kept the wrestling pairings random, which I think invited may possible representations in the queer community.

            One of the beautiful things about this play is that it really was a process from beginning to end that invited feedback and ideas.  There were writing sessions and idea sessions and of course rehearsals with tons of feedback.  I feel like we all felt some ownership over the process.

How do you feel the work is specifically located in NYC... this endlessly romantic and punishing city?

Nepon: Well, I was especially obsessed with locating the show partly at Coney Island because a) I'm obsessed with it and b) it used to be called “Sodom by the Sea” and was a site of sleazy underworld sexuality and queerness.  After the holocaust, Coney Island housed the largest community of survivors in the world. I personally think it's also full of ghosts of people who didn't survive but wanted to get the hell out of Europe and stay near their former community.

J. Dellecave: This work did a really funny thing. The work created (if only for a few months) a very strong community in the present by working through the past. The content of the work when viewed by the audience reflected the now NYC ‘community’. (Yet for anyone who lives in NYC, we know that really isn’t the truth or doesn’t represent the truth, and even some idea that there is some universalized truth is problematic). But it does represent some kind of utopian ideal or positivist slant on what our community can be. Since the production, I am beginning to formulate community as a transient and unfixed entity. 

            I know BTW was critiqued as valorizing a specific experience which inherently left out representations of certain voices. I am aware that this community we represented is not for everyone and cannot represent everyone. I think this it something we all grapple with and should continue to grapple with. NYC itself has this kind of build-in longing for betterment. You race, yet you never reach the better place. Part of living in New York seems to be that constant striving for something else. That is what is so great about NYC, and as you said Rocko, so punishing.

            Also, (and perhaps even off topic) making a work that talks about the ghosts of AIDS hedges on implying that the AIDS epidemic is over. All of us were very adamant about not wanting the idea of ghosting to represent that the plight of AIDS has in any way ended. Theoretically, ghosting functions to haunt unjust situations that deserve more attention and often go unrecognized. Perhaps AIDS not being over is what the ghosts of generation past are trying to illuminate.  

Why was it important for you to relate the queer community in the present to the peak of the AIDS outbreak and the Holocaust?

Nepon: Growing up strongly Jewish-identified and queer while AIDS appeared and decimated queer communities, AIDS and the Holocaust were the formative calamities that destroyed the cultures, queer and Yiddishkeit, that I come from. Jewish and Gay cultures have both moved towards (as you put it) valorization of the masculine out of fear for the vulnerability of “weak”, feminine, “sissy” images of our cultures. In the case of Jewish community it's a move towards idealizing the IDF soldier and away from the sissy scholar (“we fight back now”). In gay culture it's a move towards the butch gym queen and away from the femme (receptive, gets fucked, gets AIDS, dies). Both cultures have historical qualities that make me swoon, and PTSD responses to recent trauma that makes me miserable.

            The Holocaust is used frequently by Jewish queers writing about the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, for example Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust, Sarah Schulman's Rat Bohemia, and Eric Rofes' Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men’s Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic.

            It was important for me to link these stories to my own generation's struggles because I really believe there are deep cultural and spiritual shifts and struggles under the surface of the tensions we are dealing with. Why are there so many trans men in this generation? Why is transmasculinity so exciting for some communities, especially those that have been so brutally resistant to transwomen? When trans men start taking up space in fag cultures, who left those spaces empty? What's the history of queer women in these same spaces?

Niknaz: While I was doing research I was reminded over and over that Reagan sat back and wanted to watch the gay community disappear.  Whatever his impetus was, Larry Kramer’s response was one of the most important actions for our community. ACT UP and GMHC.  Thanks to both of those organizations, we have drugs that keep people alive.  I mean, for a certain demographic anyway.  I would love to see the queer community get back involved with the present state of the pandemic with the same fervor, join forces with communities that are also being devastated by HIV/AIDS with 25+ years of wisdom and experience.  But I guess it’s easy to speak on that podium from the safety of my apartment, behind the computer, and a bit disengaged from all of those communities.  It totally inspired me to think about where I am when it comes to the queer community and activism.  I think what inspired me the most was doing research on ACT UP and reliving some of those actions and the fervor of the activism then.  I could talk about this for much longer.  But I won’t.

For me, there was a lot about this sense of possibility in the work, the possibility that we are closer than ever to the inclusive community we have always wanted, the possibility that identity will stop being such a pain in the ass... what about the present moment gives you a sense of possibility?

J. Dellecave: That distinct sense of the generational or temporal gap that I experienced so strongly in the class I wrote of above. These gaps create spaces for us to interject utopian imaginings and endless possibilities.

Niknaz: I hope our issues of identity will be resolved soon, although I’m not so hopeful for myself.  My identity is so deeply tied with longing and home that I can’t imagine how it can possibly resolve.  Gender aside, queer aside, my Iranian identity creates such a disjointedness for me that it feels finding a community that encompasses all of this challenging.

Nepon: In some ways, I was writing these interwoven characters as a representation of our real community, and in some ways it was a wish. I wish we could all be lovers across bodies and sexualities and identities in the way that these characters are. It happens sometimes, but it still feels rare to me.

            On the other hand, we did this whole show about HIV/AIDS and gender identity and sexuality and it turned out that people were really not able to make assumptions about who in the show had what serostatus, body parts, or desires. It was excitingly surprising.

            It gave me a feeling of possibility that people responded to so strongly to the idea that our generation of queers is interwoven with the ghosts of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. I was especially moved by presenting the show at Short Mountain sanctuary to a group that was probably 85% people who lived through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, ACT UP members, people with HIV/AIDS who have lost so many of their loved ones. I think my generation of queers has really suffered from a lack of elders and the perspective of intergenerational relationships – because our elders were in large part murdered by the epidemic. Doing the show at Short Mountain seemed like the beginning of opening a conversation.