i'm a very very complex person

"Arnold Comes of Age" by Grant Wood, 1930

Hide/Seek, currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, claims to be the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference as represented in American portraiture. I don't know enough to know if this claim is entirely true, but the show is quite different from most of the art exhibitions I've attended. I've generally gone to retrospectives of single artists, or shows that explore the relationship between a few artists (like the big Matisse/Picasso show at MoMA a few years ago, or an exhibition I saw in Philly more recently that examined Cézanne's influence over a variety of other painters). In comparison, Hide/Seek is a hodge-podge: Thomas Eakins shares wall-space with Grant Wood, and in the next room there's Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe, photographs by Annie Leibovitz, paintings by Andy Warhol... The juxtapositions are jarring--sometimes in fruitful, interesting ways and sometimes not--and they make it difficult to walk away from the show holding a coherent impression.

This difficulty is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps it means that the show resists simple interpretations, that it makes the audience work a little harder. I think this is true--the curators seem to enjoy the multiplicity of forms and representations on display--but it also emphasizes intellect over emotion. I could tell you a lot of things that I thought while looking at the exhibit, but I couldn't tell you what I felt. Mainly because I didn't feel much at all. And, as always, I want to feel.

The wall text of the exhibit was very well done: it offered clearly-written help in decoding the artists' modes of representation, and mostly avoided the pitfall of reductive interpretation. But the presence of so much text, and the fact that the text was often vital to understanding how each piece fit into the exhibition meant that I found myself spending more time reading than really seeing the art. I don't know how to solve this problem. Without the text, many pieces in the show would have been opaque to me--each artist used different visual cues that could be read by those in the know, but I'm not a part of every queer demimonde that has ever existed in America, so I need the help! But I also want to be able to just look at pictures, and respond. I suspect that this may have been easier to do if the gallery hadn't been so crowded, but...


"Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane" by Marsden Hartley, 1933

Though the exhibition was flawed, it was fascinating. It was wonderful to get to peek at the hidden meanings of the works, and the show made it easy to imagine what it would have been like to live and work as a queer artist at many different moments in American history. Perhaps most interesting to me was the sense of humor evident in so many of the early portraits (Look at these fellows, for instance, with their sneaky grins and secret hand-holding!), and absent in so much of the more recent work. And even encumbered at they were by text and carrying a heavy historical burden, there were works that shone. The Grant Wood painting "Arnold Comes of Age," was perhaps my favorite of the show. A sensitive portrait of Wood's young assistant, who looks thoughtful and slightly troubled, the warmth of Wood's depiction is complicated by the flat black expanse of Arnold's sweater, which functions as a strange sort of negative space. I also loved Marsden Hartley's "Eight Bells Folly," a forest of private signifiers that is actually all the more powerful for the mysteriousness of some of its symbols.