Hide & Seek: An Interview With Jonathan Katz

“Portraiture constitutes the greatest and most extensive archive of sexuality and sexual difference in existence.”

Cass Bird, I Look Just Like My Daddy, 2004. Chromogenic print, 40 x 30 in.  Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

Hide & Seek: An Interview With Jonathan Katz
Kate Meng Brassel

“HIDE/SEEK: Difference & Desire in American Portraiture,” which started its journey at the National Portrait Gallery, will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from 18 November – 12 February 2012. Art Historian and activist Jonathan Katz, who conceived of the show, sat down with us to discuss its inception, politics, and impact.

Kate Meng Brassel: “HIDE/SEEK” is the first major exhibition to tour national museums that focuses on queerness in art: why did you choose this genre? Why portraiture?

Jonathan Katz: The intrinsic reason is that portraiture was without a doubt the most sensitive register for forms of sexuality that could, during periods of history in which words could not be used, elude normative representation. So you could put into pictures what you couldn’t say and couldn’t write. Portraiture constitutes, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest and most extensive archive of sexuality and sexual difference in existence, an archive that’s been almost completely untapped.

KMB: Does portraiture also highlight the importance of the individual?

JK: It does, but it’s never clear which individual we’re talking about, the subject or the photographer or painter. Portraiture is in some sense a battleground between the sitter and the artist; each is trying to “win” in the portrait. In that particularly fraught context, questions of queerness would often be mobilized by artists in a way that their sitters might not otherwise have authorized.

KMB: Did you want to show that portraits that are found in other art narratives could also be included in this context?

JK: Absolutely. The whole point of this show was continual multivalence. The last thing I want is to essentialize queerness as the defining aspect of any work of art as much as I also don’t want to ignore queerness as a defining aspect of work of art. The thing about queerness that’s so complicated is that it typically becomes the eight thousand-pound elephant that keeps everything else off stage—then it becomes a situation in which the complexities of works of art become simply denotative. And I’m not interested in the denotative, which is of limited intellectual “chewiness.” I wanted to tell a history of American art; I wanted to tell a history of American culture; and I wanted to show pictures that had been in every major museum in the world in a completely different context.

KMB: Why now?

JK: I’ve been trying to do queer exhibitions for fifteen years, but I’ve not been able to get to the national level until the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery came on board. You earlier asked, “Why portraiture?” In part, it’s because the Portrait Gallery wanted to do it. That’s the banal reason.

KMB: Do you think the endorsement of the show by prominent museums will change the underrepresented status of queerness in art?

JK: I don’t think it’s going to make a damn bit of difference and, in fact, I think it’s going to reinforce a lot of the blacklist that this exhibition was intended to break because of all the controversy that attended it. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that it’s not ticket sales that determines major museum decisions, it is what boards of directors want. So the fact that this was the most successful show in the Portrait Gallery’s history is irrelevant. What matters is whether there is going to be Republican on the Board of Directors who is going to find this show objectionable. The idea of democracy, the idea of public service—these go out the window in the American museum world.

KMB: So you think that “HIDE/SEEK” will most likely be anomalous.

JK: I can say this definitively because I’m working on a new show called “AIDS/Art/America” and I’ve gone to many museums that I thought after the success of “HIDE/SEEK” might be more inclined to take on the new exhibit. And they all said, “No.”

KMB: What was it like when you were pitching this exhibit?

JK: I found an extraordinary partner at the National Portrait Gallery, David Ward, who did a show on Walt Whitman and rightly mentioned in a photo of Whitman’s partner that they were, in fact, intimate. I was flabbergasted because I had never seen that on a museum wall, especially at the Smithsonian. And so I asked David, “Was there blowback for this?” He asked, “Why would there be blowback?” “You did the first wall label that talked about Walt Whitman as a queer!” And he said, “It’s true, right?” And I said “Yes…” So he said, “What’s the problem?” And I thought, “OK, this is the guy I want to be working with!”

The great thing about the Portrait Gallery, at this historical moment, is that it’s committed itself to chronicling the expansion of American civil liberties and it’s done shows on women and people of color. So there wasn’t much they could say when someone proposed a queer show. I think the Smithsonian recognizes the degree to which a portrait gallery has a much more contemporary political brief than, say, a history museum, or even one of the big art museums because a portrait gallery is necessarily invested in the social historical possibilities of representation.

KMB: Do you think that New York specifically will get something out of the exhibition that may or may not be received elsewhere?

JK: Absolutely. In part because—I hope—this delivers a challe

nge on the doorstep of the Manhattan museum world, which has been criminally inattentive to questions of sexuality. We did a study of 10 years of representation of sexual difference across 8 of Manhattan’s big museums. That study was horrifying. The Metropolitan scored 1.6%, using the most extraordinarily capacious markers of recognizing sexual difference. They merely had to use a code word once to get credit. Less than 3% at MoMA and the New York Historical Society got a zero. They never once in their

history have done anything with regard to sexual difference. When other countries celebrate Gay Pride Day, then often call it “Christopher Street Day” after the street downtown. So other countries can recognize Stonewall’s centrality, but New York’s own museums can’t?

KMB: That’s depressing.

JK: What I do see happening is that this will coalesce a group of activists who will watch and protest. There’s a label at the Met on which the relationship between Marsden Hartley and Karl von Freyberg is still denied. But now that there’s a label at the Smithsonian, it’s going to be harder for the Met to ignore it. Not impossible, but harder.  

KMB: What are your own favorites in HIDE/SEEK?

JK: For me, the inclusion of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly was earth-shattering. I can only say that. I came of age as an art historian in 1989, which is exactly the year that the Mapplethorpe Perfect Moment brouhaha exploded and Jessie Helms acted like a Neanderthal. All my life as an intellectual this has been foreclosed. So when I started

planning the show and raised the prospect of including Johns’ work in the exhibition, I thought, “Well, there’s no chance in hell this is going to happen, but I’m going to go for it.” Remarkably, Jasper Johns agreed to a loan from his own collection. This is the first time any of these artists have been addressed in this way. And it’s not like these artists haven’t been addressed.

KMB: Do you think Johns wanted to be part of the kind of acknowledgement of queerness that HIDE/SEEK represents?

JK: I don’t think he wanted to be part of it—I think he agreed nonetheless, which gave lie to the idea that the reason these other museums aren’t addressing the sexuality of these blue-chip American artists is because the artists themselves don’t want it to happen.

KMB: Do you think that “HIDE/SEEK’s” success has been due to people’s ability to recognize themselves that this is what they want to see?

JK: People want relevance to their social lives. The striking thing is that it was not unusual for someone to spend three to five hours at “HIDE/SEEK” at the National Portrait Gallery. For many people it was a social space of great beauty. And it’s not just the fact that lesbians saw themselves reflected off the walls for the first time in an authoritative institution, it’s also that the context was one of young people and old people talking about a shared cultural experience, a space that in some sense enabled and authorized the articulation of things that had not been articulated before in the museum world, from the most banal things, like “Is he gay?” to the most complicated questions like, “How is transsexuality represented?” And I found that there’s such a disconnect between what artists produce and how museums frame it. None of these artists have not been seen before, it’s all been seen. Framing it has been the problem.

*** This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.