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

[Reggie Woolery]

Thank you Robert for foregrounding the work of Issac and Essex.

I wanted to share a review I wrote of a few years back on Lyle Ashton Harris
that looks at power relations between desiring lookers. The piece attempts a
reading of his latest photographic work, calling into question certain
notions of black/gay/male identity politics (the innocent subject) by
seeking to interrogate the artists' ambivalences, SM desires, aspiration to
art world fame -- which are left exposed as Harris implicates himself within
his work (a strategy of the new documentary -- and pop reality show).

I reference a collaborative essay by Kobena Mercer and Issac "Skin Head Sex
Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary" from the same "How Do
I Look" anthology as Virginia mentioned.
 
http://radiofreehamptons.net/publications/WateringHole.pdf

Reggie

On 7/12/09 10:20 PM, "Robert Summers" <robtsum at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

>  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.

> 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.
> 
> Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre