A diptych, which I have seen in Mcknight’s book, of a man holding another man’s mouth open and spitting into it, hung next to an image (probably referencing Steiglitz) of clouds. Printed well, I thought. Kathy and I have already discussed Mcknight’s images. So we moved onto an image, tall and warped, by Suzy Lake. “Could you imagine anyone we know making something like this?” I asked, and Kathy said, “no,” and so we walked through the gallery. Good art. Then I put a coffee shop into the GPS, as the most Los Angeles-type women walked into the gallery, “hiiiiii, oh my god hiiiiii,” they said to each other. We walked to the car, “how strange it is that we, on a Thursday morning, are walking around Los Angeles,” we acknowledged. We went to West Hollywood.
Inside of Dayglow Coffee, which is two blue buildings, almost underground, fragmented and wonky, Kathy and I chatted about photography and video. About movies each of us had seen, like when I only made it halfway through Tendaberry the night before, because although it looked gorgeous, in a style that I appreciate, I lost interest when the plot’s conflict became a pregnancy in the middle of a long-distance relationship. “There’s something about coming of age films, with actors portraying big and unsubtle emotions of youth, that does not require subtle or good acting. I do not think I have the patience for that anymore,” I told Kathy, and so I never finished the movie. “But I walked away with a few questions—about the predominance of visual style in a movie that has such a thin plot, or about the emotional lives of young actors in art-school coming of age films,” and Kathy talked about her favorite films. She wanted, once, to make a documentary of a Vietnamese man, but her brother, a filmmaker, did not want to. He was more interested in the technology of the camera, and, as Kathy put it, was a total camera geek. So sometimes, “people lack a vision,” I said, and Kathy said, “or any interesting idea,” she said; people are more concerned with representing than representing well, we said. Participation in a medium, or in a genre, might, for some, be more important than what they are stating. We sat in a blue coffee shop in West Hollywood, complaining about other people’s problems, sitting there not making anything of our own at the moment. Kathy looked up.
“Have you noticed that there are only men in this coffee shop? There are only men here. All alone. They look so lonely. Looks like a Hockney painting. I would totally take a picture of this moment, but I wish I had a smaller camera, so I could be discreet.”
“Not like this?” I said, pulling out my giant camera, and Kathy said, “no oh my God, that’s so obvious,” and then we looked at these men, and I said, “we are in West Hollywood, and there are women outside, so I don’t know, this does not seem so shocking to me,” and Kathy had to get up to pee. I pulled out my camera and took a picture. Kathy left the bathroom, and I showed her, and she said, “see!” and I wondered why she did not take the picture. We’re all so used to being surveilled by social media; I’m not sure anyone minds anymore.
I drove Kathy to Culture Edit, a gay bookstore and art shop and art gallery, just to get up and get something to do, rather than sitting and brooding over other people’s photography. I thought it would be fun to take Kathy to a very gay store. And so I drove up, and we could not find parking, so we circled and flipped and drove around until finally, we parked in front of Culture Edit. Door locked. So we walked to Regen Projects across the street.
Regen Projects, which once hosted a Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, held two giant rooms of art. The first, which Kathy and I speedran through, contained diptychs fragmented like some we did not mention from Anat Egbi. “How does this sort of diptych become trendy?” Kathy asked, and I said, “someone told me that my exhibition was trendy—in a way that reflects a body art in the ‘zeitgeist’ right now, so I spent some time wondering about that. I think there are just approaches to art that become worth talking about, especially if they’re ‘deconstructive’ and deal with contemporary problems. So everyone starts looking at similar things to deal with contemporary problems…” And we walked into another room.
One of the problems that I dealt with, speaking of the exhibition that I did, was that I got unanimously positive feedback: “we need more queer art,” or “you’re so brave,” people said. But that was the extent of it—and came with the territory of exhibiting in Orange County. Something, by proclaiming its genre, became good. And I do not know how most people understood the art.
A large, open space with concrete floors greeted us near the back of Regen Projects. Our voices echoed. And as a list: two sculptures stood, one hung from the ceiling. A projector also hung from the ceiling, pointing to a white wall, making noise. Looking to the northern wall: four pictures, shot with flash, of people with underwear on their heads. Two vertical, on the ends, with horizontals in the middle. Kathy said that they were repulsive. Next, something resembling a kite, hanging on the wall. Bags of marbles appeared to hold it down. A bamboo stick pierced the top. Another piece, like a map, with collage elements, stood next.
On the Eastern wall, a large fabric painted with almost a black ‘X.’ In the center, a strong, white, spilled out and onto the floor. “It looks like a body part,” Kathy said, and I asked, “which one?” and she said, “a body part,” and I said, “maybe a bit anal,” before we looked briefly at the video, then continued onto the South wall.
The next piece: pins, three-dimensionally, and collage. “This is popular right now,” I said, already tired of seeing things for their trendiness and their genre, already bored of being unwilling to figure out what they’re trying to articulate within that genre. So, we walked back to get a scope of the whole room. And the projector, with my own lack of attention to it, seemed louder. “What is that?” Kathy asked. “It sounds erotic,” I said, and Kathy said, “Was that a vagina??” and I said, “I wouldn’t know!” and Kathy laughed, and we walked closer. All I could make out was a man fucking a lightbulb, and then drawing on the sheets that encompassed him. I looked at the large, hanging fabric next to us. The same sort of scribbly marks suggested that the man fucked inside of this giant fabric; the fabric very much like a large, vaginal piece (how would I know?!) and all of this seemed complicated.
The two sculptural pieces loomed in the room. Kathy did not like them. I noticed that they were on wheels, and I threatened to push them around. Kathy was reluctant. I guess I was too, because I only tapped my foot against one, afraid that it would topple if I pushed it. I thought these pieces, by their height, seemed what some might call “phallic,” tall and erect and vertical—in second wave feminist circles, representing masculine power. And it seems strange, reflecting now, that the vaginal fabric takes on a tall, vertical form, taller than these sculptures.
While we walked out (I meant to ask the guards if I could push around the sculptures, but they had Airpods in their ears and looked busy), Kathy told me how much she disliked that exhibition. It was repulsive. Grotesque might be a good word. And I told her how there was an interesting coherence between some of the pieces; that they all played with something sort of erotic (although I do not know how to assimilate the fragmented, collage-y work into that coherence).
I told Kathy how strange it was that the day before, I had been at the library with my brother, scouring children’s books for a debate in the city right now, about whether the library houses porn. All we found were sex education books, which were really books that described the process of puberty. Body hair and periods, in the health section of the children’s section, without displaying anything explicit. My brother’s judgment: they’re not pornographic, but the art style is not so appealing, and it’s a bit uncanny, in the way that Tumblr or Reddit internet art is a bit naïve, so we can understand why people are disturbed. It's just bad art, in his words. Aesthetically, the book might not contain a “neutral-detached” scientific treatment of sex, but from one that is sex-positive and gung-ho about body parts (and although there is no neutrality, maybe we should sometimes pretend that there is!), with colorful art and all smiles in a way that, in my brother’s words, “felt like they had an agenda,” which, in a sense, made the whole book awkward, like religious propaganda. But we would not classify it as porn at all. So, after having taken our place in the debate about pornography at the library (all the other books listed on Chad Williams’—a conservative Christian, former Navy-Seal, Youth Pastor working at a conservative Christian Megachurch, also on City Council—website were not available in the library or not in the children’s section; interestingly, none of the books concerning male puberty, published in series with the female ones, were listed on the conservative book lists…), we found that the whole issue taking place in our city—of whether or not to have a City-Council Elected board determine which books are allowed in the library, or whether or not to privatize parts of the library—was blown up entirely. According to some, it was a distraction from the millions of dollars the city had wasted on a music festival…
According to some others, at the City Council meeting the night before, the whole issue was misdirected. Chad Williams, the former Navy Seal Youth Pastor, who I thought looked sort of like a pug, had placed signs with the word “PORN” on them across the cities, next to schools, and, according to several moms in the crowd, had prompted conversations with children on the way to school that should not have taken place until several years later. “Our city council KNOWS porn,” another had said ironically, and after an hour and a half of people walking up and speaking their mind about the issue of “book banning” in the library, and Chad Williams completely not understanding when speakers were making fun of him (he beamed while speakers satirized him). And swarms of people coming straight from Calvary Chapel sat in the audience, wearing bright red MAGA hats, waiting their turn to walk up to the podium and read (some with too much excitement and arousal) pornography that did not, in fact, exist in the children’s section of the library (but did, in fact, belong in Chad Williams’ personal collection of pornography).
The city council shooed everyone out of the room, only so that Chad could, at the very end of the night, call for an investigation of the Friends of the Library (a 501c3 non-profit) for supporting a ballot measure. According to some I knew in the room, they’re allowed to do this. And then the Mayor of the city says something about being previously in law enforcement, and how if the Friends of the Library are innocent, then they should have to prove their innocence. (When I was a kid I used to believe that police should go to law school, because this idiot has clearly never heard the phrase, innocent until proven guilty.)
The day before, I worked with Kathy and some others, printing out images in my large gay collection. Some were from pride, some were couples, and one final image raised conceptual issues for me. I showed Kathy and a few classmates, and we all saw a fragment of a man masturbating. “This raises problems,” I said, “because fundamentally, if we have a community oriented around sexuality—around sexual orientation—then gay culture and queer culture and all the media and relational configurations are almost secondary to this fundamental action: sex. And so there’s a problem of depicting a community in that sense: if what gay men share in common is a certain type of sex, then if we were to address the community by what binds us, we would have to figure out how to depict sex. But that’s taboo!”
Kathy and Arnold and Tram all stared at the image. “Hmmm.” Pornography became a certain type of problem, a subject of a discussion, something that diffused a particular message of a work of art. And I pulled out an image that was not porn at all, and said, “I need to figure out what this image is doing, and put it in relationship to the rest,” and Tram could see that I was thinking through printing.
“I never thought I’d think about this so much,” I told Snooze, “Like I’m inundated with this question about pornography, because I want to represent gay men well, but so many gay men want to be photographed nude and posted on Only Fans.” And so that’s where a problem comes in.
Last Friday, I took Thomas’ grad photos. We went to a spot notorious for cruising, so we could take nudes for his graduation photos. And so I pulled out my camera, and we tried to figure out what to do, and I only belatedly realized that I was involved with something that is unique to gay culture—that I should have figured out how to photograph the place of it all. Men cruised around us. But instead, I only got a few images of Thomas’ body, and some that seemed to be undeniably erotic, and wondered what to do about it.
If it’s been a week at all, it’s been a strange week. Mark Mcknight’s images of sex in a gallery; sex projected in a gallery; the conservatives debating pornography; taking images of cruising; figuring out what gay is if it is not fundamentally tied to sex; and, finally, taking a stab at a definition.
Well, “pornification,” according to a definition I read, is explicit imagery and sexual themes. That seems stupid: sexual education is not something we would consider pornographic. No one is getting happy to their sexual education books. I do like the word “imagery” though.
Garth Greenwell, near the end of Mark Mcknight’s book, puts forward a definition of porn. It’s gratuitous. For some, porn is ideological, like propaganda: it puts forward a single, uncomplicated emotion, for arousal only. I like this simple definition. (Mcknight, in an interview, talks about how even if people perceive his work as pornography, there is still a landscape of beauty to not only contextualize the image, but also to complicate that arousal.) Beauty, in an interview with Mcknight, displaces the pornographic elements of “porn;” so that, like the children’s sexual education books, ugly becomes pornographic. Hence, something like the statue of David; hence, the flatly-lit, bland styles of pornography, designed to show an entire body like a product in an Amazon listing. A definition of porn deferred to a construction of “beauty.”
One other approach, related to the other: that “porn” is too literal; That art should be metaphor; but porn, in its flat portrayal of a sex act, only to portray a sex act, becomes what it portrays. As an art, as a thing portrayed, it is so defiant of an everyday business of constructing meaning and culture, of moving us forward and beyond depiction, that it seems grotesque to some of us. And that might be uncomfortable.
To put a bow on this whole rant, this whole summary of the week: it is difficult to look at a genre transparently, to believe that it is first and foremost a category worthy of accepting (instead of critiquing), and listening for what lies beneath. It is difficult to be charitable to art. To find a more complicated sexuality in imagery and articulation seems to be a good challenge: there is no speaking of sexuality (hetero-, homo-, bi-, a-, and all the rest) without relying on imagery. And to be open to more complex meanings of sex, beyond a sort of sexual fundamentalism, is what art can call us to do (I am sermonizing), even if it strikes Kathy with disgust; even if it plays into a cruisey culture; even if it is never included in the children’s section of a library (our world is not built for children).