Thought for the Week – Queer Art and the Look of Love

Almost all art with which I grew up was religious art. It wasn’t framed this way. It’s simply the history of how art evolved in the Western world with the seminal church from the dying days of the (Christian) Roman empire onwards; the church becoming the most important patron for art and artists.

Jump forward nearly a couple of millennia, and we encounter the evolving Gay Liberation Movement, the subsequent Queer agenda, and all of those other letters of the alphabet that have joined a shared agenda since. It’s been evolving at a rate proportional to the evolution of the Christian church since it first became an official religion in the twilight of a divided Roman Empire. As there, so too did (and does) art play a pivotal part in conducting a discussion in modes words can’t always articulate.

Yes, of course I would say that. With a parallel career as an art and architecture curator, I have made exhibitions and contributed to books for international institutions, from Whitechapel Gallery, London and the City Museums of Ljubljana to the Prada Foundation, Milan or the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, among numerous others. Blowing my own trumpet? Perhaps. I prefer to see it as offering my credentials, to underscore that I have earned the right to express an opinion on art.

But, back in the day, when I lived another life working in and managing health and social care services as a pretty young person at the height of the AIDS epidemic (as it was called then), my passion for art seemed almost peripheral to the more pressing matters of the day. Nonetheless, it was first when I encountered what was called “Gay art” and later “Queer art”.

In a lot of it anger and resistance were foregrounded. That was both easy to understand and hard to dismiss given the church’s historic relationship with LGBTQ+ people. But, I wasn’t a newbie, wasn’t introduced to visual art by my angry generation. I could see a lot of things beyond the provocation that gained column inches (when we still had newspapers) or, to many, seemed a simplistic “up yours” to organised religion.

I was mesmerised by Andres Serrano’s ‘Immersion (Piss Christ)’ (1987). Even before the brouhaha and controversy that surrounded it — more so after it won the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts Awards in the Visual Arts competition, partly sponsored by the (US) National Endowment for the Arts. I understood this was not some cheap punk gimmick, some low-rent blasphemy, but a work that spoke of real faith below the surface, no matter how conflicted. Serrano later described it as a “serious work of Christian art” in an interview, speaking of how one of the things that prompted him to make it was a “cheapening of faith” in America at that time.

Closer to home, Derek Jarman. Primarily a filmmaker who made narrative films with cinema releases, he was, in fact, a broader artist than simply a film director. Often known as “Saint Derek” among the HIV activist community of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Derek was older than people thought, the product of an earlier art school generation. His non-film art works, such as painting or assemblage (or perhaps even that forgotten performance in Scotland featuring Tilda Swinton), were always a little contradictory: decidedly punkish bullets and plastic dolls stuck to the canvas in one work, and wadges of oil paint carved out with a palette knife in the mode of French 1950s abstraction in another. Those of a psychoanalytic bent might cite Frankl: the will to meaning. But, Derek could be very lucid about places to which he looked for meaning. Though technically an atheist, he is buried churchyard of St Clement’s Church in Old Romney, Kent. Derek documented the process of being allowed this burial in his diaries.

Or, a bit later, there was Catherine Opie. She had gained recognition largely for self-portraits and documentary photography. While apparently without a faith, in the early noughties she started producing a series of works, self-portraits in which she cast herself as the nurturing mother, channelling iconography taken straight from the Christian canon of Old Masters in which she turned a “burning mirror” back on the viewer. Here was the mother of the Holy infant as a photodocumentary “bull dyke”. Gender, social identity and biology were the probing questions about what the mother of God might actually have looked like.

I lived inside this world of art, this world filled with questioning and angry people. And it was good. Yet, there was one work that changed everything for me. Ironically, it was a work that had been made in 1982, though I did not become aware of it until a decade later.

Duane Michals (b.1932) is a respected American photographer, though it would probably be reasonable to say that his work is not as widely known as it should be today. In 1982, he made a series called ‘Christ in New York’.

Duane Michals, ‘No. 4: Christ is beaten defending a homosexual’ (from the series ‘Christ in New York’, 1982. Gelatin silver print and pencil on paper, 20 x 25 cm, The Portland Art Museum or Ackland Collection.

From it, a work that will forever be seared into my memory is ‘Christ is Beaten Defending a Homosexual’. It lingers for many reasons. It has the fierce documentary aesthetic of a childhood brought up on troubles and The Troubles. And, yet, it is not only that. Whilst a first glance suggests the aesthetics dating from the 1960s (and very present today) that validate violence as a means to political ends, inside that aesthetic, we find the opposite.

Many of the works of gay and Queer artists of this period, including those touched on above, place themselves at the centre of the action, a certain kind of narcissism standing for resistance. They become the Christ, or a suitable martyr, or sneer at traditional representation by deploying overt homoeroticism.

However, stunned in a sudden moment by the work, Michals casts an actor in an almost Baroque sense to play Jesus. This is not a work in which the artist “speaks” for Jesus, but in which we return to the age-old question of why Jesus should care for us. It is a question of faith.

It’s largely interpreted as a reworking of Jesus defending the adulteress (John 8:3-11). Maybe it is. In this work, Michals commits a transhistoricism in which Jesus no longer intercedes in defence of the most reviled of his contemporaneous Judea—an adulteress—but the most reviled in 1980s America. For me, the pivotal point of this work is that it returns to a tradition of that huge question of why Jesus may care for us, love us.

Reactionary? Sure, you could argue. I don’t actually mind. It was the first example I saw of work by an artist of the post-Gay Liberation generation whose gaze was not purely introspective or self-absorbed, but, instead, pointed to the notion of a God who could care, could embrace, could love all, no matter what.

A powerful piece of art, Michals’ work resonates on multiple levels. Raised a Catholic, like Derek and many other artists who made gay art in the 1980s who were a bit older when getting started on this path, Michals’ work is not a rejection, a flat-out denial of the religion that traditionally cast him and his kind as abominations, but a quest for reconciliation and return. It is decidedly classical in its composition, the crucifixion of Christ pre-empted in a fake photodocumentary image; a meditation on the stations of the cross played out in tabloid format.

In marking this year’s Pride, I’m acutely aware that I am old enough to know the work of literally hundreds of LGBTQ+ artists pretty well. I’m equally aware that while many of them may look to love as a powerful force in their work, few have moved me in the way that this work by Duane Michals does. This is because it is one of the few works by a living (yes, he’s 93, but he’s living and still making work) LGBTQ+ artist I can think of that pulls the quest of the Western art back to that red thread in which art contemplates the love of Christ for humanity.