Holland Cotter:
WASHINGTON — With the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” one of our federally funded museums, the National Portrait Gallery, here in the city of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” has gone where our big private museums apparently dare not tread, deep into the history of art by and about gay artists.
Over the last few years there has been plenty of speculation as to how this show would shape up, and when a copy of the catalog arrived, I felt a bit let down. All the artists were well known — stars — as was most of the work. The whole enterprise looked like an exercise in Hall of Fame-building, rather than like an effort to chip away at the very idea of hierarchy and exclusion. We were getting a “pride” display, an old model, very multicultural 1980s.
Then, when the Catholic League and several members of Congress demanded the removal of a piece — a video by David Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) that included an image of ants crawling on a crucifix — and the gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, said O.K., we really were in the 1980s, back in the culture wars. Which led me to understand the show in a somewhat different way.
On reconsideration, it seems more purposeful, as if specifically designed to avoid any controversy that might distract from the major point it was trying to make: namely, that work of gay artists was fundamental to the invention of American modernism. Or, put another way, difference had created the mainstream.
But how was the presence of difference defined in art? By subject matter? By style? By the sexual orientation of the artist? And isn’t gayness, the most familiar form of such difference, a period concept, inapplicable to life and art of a century ago? Today the very word is used for convenience rather than categorically, with “queer” often used. (One way to think of it: gay is something you are; queer is something you choose to be outside of the heterosexual norm.)
Clearly the exhibition covers a lot of ground and raises many questions. It also has wonderful art, and the art stays wonderful whether you ask the questions or not. Again this seems part of the plan devised by the curators, David. C. Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, and Jonathan D. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. They have assembled a historical show with a very specific slant, but with rewards for everyone.
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