[-empyre-] Virginia's Questions: Bathers: Colonialism ...

[Robert Summers]

Virginia,

I want to answer your question (you posed re: my previous post) by way
of a brief discussion of "Looking for Langston" (1989) by Isaac Julian
-- a film that explores (the author-function) "Langston Hughes," the
Harlem Renaissance,  and same-sex and inter-racial desire, and given
film, touches the viewer: touched the eye/I.
Julian's film disrupts chronology, and it is ahistorical -- in that is
jumps from the Harlem Renaissance to the AID/HIV pandemic in the late
80s -- early 90s and back again to the time of Langston.  Furthermore,
it pays a certain -- ambivalent tribute to Robert Mapplethorpe: it
shows his photographs in the "middle" of the film, with the display of
the black, (gay) male bodies for a  white, gay viewing audience.  The
film also shows multiple scenes of inter-racial attraction.
The showing of Mapplethorpe's photographs of black, male bodies and
the inter-racial scenes can be easily read scenes of the gay, white
male gaze -- the colonial gaze par excellence -- upon the black, gay
(or not) male body.
Even though Rotimi Fani-Kayode took similar images, he is not
critiqued on the same level (or on any level for that matter) as
Mapplethorpe: does this have to do with the color, the race of the
artist?  Also. Julian is the "author" of the work, and thus changing
the reading, given we know Julian is a black, British artist.  I
wonder if we did not know the race, the nationality, the ethnicity of
the author: what would we say?  I think we that many still make a
causal connection to the artist and his work: the
artist-and/as-his-work.
Nevertheless, the camera (film or photographic) turns the black, male
body into an object of gay (white) male desire, but also, it must be
admitted, gay, black desire: there is no easy way to read the film --
nor the images.  It should be also noted that Julian made another film
that makes it difficult to put "things" into proper categories; for
example, Julian's  film "The Attendant" (1993), which includes SM (in
relation to relations  and specifically in sexual relations, and which
the roles are chronically reversed: black male "bottom" becomes top;
white male "top" becomes bottom -- the roles are not stable).
In this way Julian deploys a "politics of aesthetics" that disrupts
common notions and ruptures the "common of the community" -- to draw
on Ranciere.  I think the Julian films show that a "queer tactic" can
be (or rather is) deployed in refusing normative (read: white male --
gay or straight) society's desire (and it is a desire, to be sure) for
the placement of bodies and desires into "proper" categories.
Turning back to "Looking for Langston," there are many voice overs by
various black, male poets: one being Essex  Hemphil, the black poet
who was one of many of the artists and photographed subjects who died
of ARC.  Hemphill's poem (below) resonates with several images by
Mapplethorpe who, as we all know, took numerous photographs of black
men ("Rick,"1980; "Bob Love," 1979; "Tom," 1986; "Felix Brown", 1984),
the Hemphill's poem also resonates with Julian's Aforemention film but
also his film "The Attendant" (1993), which shows that subject/object
relations are not stable, and being an object, if you will, can have
powerful undercurrents:

"Object Lessons," Essex Hemphill

If I am comfortable
on the pedestal
you are looking at,
if I am indolent and content
to lay here on my stomach,
my determinations
indulged and glistening
in baby oil and sweat,
if I want to be here, a pet,
to be touched, a toy
if I choose
to be liked in this way
if I desire to be object,
to be sexualized
in this object way,
by one or two at a time,
for a night or a thousand days,
money or power,
for the awesome orgasms
to be had, to be coveted,
or for my own selfish wantonness,
for the feeling of being touched.
The pedestal was was here,
so I climbed up.
I locate myself .
I appropriate this context.
It was my fantasy,
my desire to do so,
and lie here
on my stomach
Why are you looking?
What do you wanna
do about it?

I think this poem by Hemphill, one poet among others that is spoken in
"Looking for Langston," shows the fluidity of subjects/object
relations and placements.  Of course, there is a history of (gay)
white men turning the black man (or men) into an object (of desire and
more), but I think we need to remember the desire to be turned into an
object, which Hemphill articulates through much of his poetry can be
rerouted in a shame-less way;  after all shame and shame-less are but
a suffix away. And, shamelessness can be a powerful queer tactic.
Here, I also want to turn to Kobena Mercer's "ambivalence" toward
Mapplethorpe's photographs of black men: he both them finds them
problematic -- and rightly so, let there be no doubt -- yet, he finds
them extremely erotic -- he desires _these_ black, male bodies.
Indeed, there is nothing _in_ the photographs to make them outright
"bad" or "colonialist," but rather it is the engagement by a
particular subject in engaging with the photograph/s that bring about
the "meaning" -- what they "mean" and to whom, and how these
"meanings" (which are always in the plural and in-progress) change.
By stating this I think that there is a relationality in viewing art
(however construed; and art of any kind).
Now, what I am trying to say is that instead of finding the "truth" --
reveling the so-called "real meaning" -- of the photograph, we should
investigate our investments in certain readings, and I think we can
begin to articulate a "queer reading" -- which is a reading that
refused to look straight and finds worth in the most unlikely of
artworks: I think this is an invaluable queer strategy, or tactic.
That stated, I think Mercer did this very well when he re-approaching
of Mapplethorpe's photographs of black, male bodies from _another_
angle. I think looking at things "queerly" can reveal, if you will,
what cannot be seen or what has been elided and/or erased.  So, in a
sense, I am arguing for not only a certain anamorphic looking but also
a strategic and personal one as well.  This lead me to Barthes.

I think that Barthes also does this: he does not look for the
_studium_ of the photograph, but rather the _punctum_, which is
different for everyone.  He also shows the violence of any aesthetic:
the _punctum_ wound; it disrupts and un-does.  Following this line of
thought, I want to quote Tim Dean, "aesthetic experiences should be
considered no better or no worse -- no higher or lower -- than sexual
ones" (Beyond Sexuality, 277).  I quote this because I think there is
a certain eroticism in Barthes _Camera Lucida_ and on the level, or
the plane, of aesthetics.  and it does _not_ conceal the erotic
investments of the critic.  This, I would argue is another queer
tactic, which, of course, is indebted to feminism.

On the notion of race, I think that we must talk about race in every
photography in _Camera Lucida_.  I think Barthes has his blind spots,
to be sure, but a text such as _Camera Lucida_ gives us a tact that
can be deployed in a queer way.

So, in the end, I think we have to think more about queer relations to
"objects" and how aesthetics can be as "violent" and un-doing as
"queer" -- which Segwick has argued is filled with twisting and
turning and undoing.

I hope that I have gestured to an answer; I could write more, but I
fear I have taken up too much time and space; I would welcome any
questions for clarifications and/or corrections.  Indeed, a queer
disagreement, an agonism of what I have possible too quickly written

Robert Summers, PhD/ABD