… like the speakers come up and we can have a little time for conversation.
And again I'm going to ask you that if you have a question that you please speak into
the microphone.
We have them stationed there and over there.
I have a question for Professor Latimer.
Yes.
I'm just wondering to what extent a Gertrude Stein and her circle were part of the larger
movement of the discovery of sexuality at the dawn of the 20th century, with the notion
that it was an ingrown phenomenon, and that masturbation and prostitutes didn't cause
vice, but we were responding to our own inner feelings.
I'm not sure I understood the question in that.
I understand the statement in that.
But what is it that I can…
I’m just wondering what the relationship is between Stein and her circle and this broader
trend.
Well, I'll try to front load my answer.
Sure.
That's a really complex question and a lot of the people in Stein's life and community
were reading sexological texts and looking in them and in their contradictions for different
cues, I guess, and clues about their own desires and ways to live out their lives with dignity.
I think particularly for lesbians because women at that time were disenfranchised, were
not fully citizens, that the question is perhaps even more complex than it might be for their
male counterparts and for the men that Stein hung out with.
Of what relationship they might have to emerging notions of dissident sexuality or variant
sexuality.
Stein herself was, I think, convinced by reading Otto Weininger that genius was inherently
male and that lesbians moving toward a masculine position were moving toward the possibility
of being considered a genius.
And that's kind of all she really had to know.
That's really what interested her.
And that's really what interested her, why she hung out with men instead of women as
well.
Because for her, that position and its possibilities, the position of masculinity, the socially
enfranchised position of masculinity, was where the horizons were open, and where she
saw her future, and where she wanted to be.
So, complicated, not just about sexuality but about possibility and how to live fully
a creative life and to become a legend which was manifestly her desire.
But other people were more in, you know, critical dialogue, with sexological texts, like Virginia
Woolf or even Jim Barnes or Natalie Barney than Stein was.
She had different priorities.
Thanks for your question.
Hi.
Well in terms of what you were talking about, that was a really wonderful paper.
I also have more of an observation than a comment which is about, I thought, I found
very provocative your statement about how Faith Ringgold’s work registers the intimate
and domestic spaces within, from within which, from which art emerges, this being the place
where it happens in a way first.
I found that really provocative and a beautiful way of connecting the kind of sentimental
texture of the work itself, which is a kind of work that doesn't kind of gel with discourse
in contemporary art history and sort of notions of sophistication, value, and the like.
And I think you did an incredible job of just circumventing, short-circuiting, totally disarming
that way of thinking.
So, and this is sort of related, I'm going to segue to Tavia’s talk because I'm, I
started working both on pop art and then also in Thomas Eakins- which was a weird pairing
with somewhat obvious connections, too.
But one of the things that I've always been drawn to in Eakins’ paintings, as well as
other portraits from 19th-century American painters, or Americans who were dis-identifying
with America- John Singer Sargent pops into mind- is the rich texture of their canvasses
when they take on dress, and especially feminine dress.
And I don't have any kind of sophisticated theoretical connection between this; I find
really seductive and moving part of their work which to me feels queer or disruptive.
And I know, for Eakins, you can actually absolutely connect that to his interest in the nude body
and his interest in actually shedding the illusory and the fraudulent trappings of conventions
of representing femininity.
I found the ways in which you were writing about popular culture, popular visual culture
in America in the 19th century, really, really resonant for thinking about 19th century painting.
With that, I actually have kind of a concrete question which is kept totally, also self-interested
as someone moving back and forth between 19th century and like contemporary performance
art.
Having read some of your wonderful writing about the performance artist Caleb Lindsay,
I was wondering if I could ask if this work that you have done in 19th-century, in queer
figures of the 19th century, in race and performance and gender, if this has informed the ways
in which you approach contemporary performance artists like you Caleb Lindsay?
Thank you Jennifer.
That's a really good question, and I'd like to have a conversation with you afterwards
about it.
You know, I think like you, it's a bit of a shift for me to go back and forth between
historical and archival materials, working with, I guess, with subjects about whom, I
assume, we kind of begin with the assumption that we have this very limited extent of materials.
I think one of the reasons why this why case has been so attractive to me and to other
people is we have this amazing image.
There are, there are no doubt comparable cases in the, in the archive, But this particular-
this document and artwork- is so resonant and it continues to do this, I guess kind
of performative work, right?
It continues to- it's not, to my knowledge, been exhibited, which is an interesting question.
I've been doing some studying to that.
But it could be, you know it's, it would work.
It is stunning, visually stunning, and I guess I would so I would connect it, in a way, to
my interest in how popular traditions- we were talking about masking traditions and
masking and masquerade, both specific art historical lineages that one can draw on African
and African-American, African diaspora cultures.
But as more generally these modes of transmission through performance that are like gossip-
hard to, certainly hard to document.
And another reason that this wide print has proved so rich and suggestive to people, because
it sort of, you know, about a century before most people began to look at things like Drag
Balls in Harlem in the Harlem Renaissance.
We have this amazing image which makes us wonder, like, how long has this been going
on?
And we don't necessarily know, but I think by looking at parallel- by drawing at unrelated
imagery of masquerade, dress, self-fashioning in that period, I can look to the different
moments in which these traces kind of emerge in the archive, and kind of indicate a kind
of richness of a popular tradition.
And that- just to kind of go back to Caleb Lindsay- is not so much the 19th century,
but certainly in the 20th century a lot of his work is engaging in popular vernacular,
African-American traditions of hokum, and body, blues.
Someone put up Gladys Bentley earlier.
These are traditions that are actually relatively more documented once you get to the 20th century.
We have race records, we have news prints, newspaper articles, we have the African-American
press that, that followed Drag Balls beginning in the twenties.
So, but he is like Leslie [Saar?], taking this history and I guess making it a kind
of archive of feelings and reinterpreting it in terms of what it might mean for a kind
of present, black, queer performance and visibility, but also kind of disappearing.
Thanks.
My question is also for Tavia, and first I wanted to say thank you for that wonderful
paper and I'm sorry for this schedule change because I think a lot of people who arrived
on the basis of the original schedule missed a lot of that paper and I wish that they had
heard it in their entirety.
Tavia’s paper, that is to say, in its entirety.
I also missed the first minute or two myself, so you may have answered this, and if so,
I apologize.
But I wanted to think about, and this is to some extent asking you to reprise your argument
in “The Amalgamation Waltz,” but I want to think about the relationship between the
image that you were dilating upon and the image that Diana Lindon showed in her paper
very briefly.
I think it was the only 19th century image there, that London Anti-Slavery Society seal
“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”
And following also the turn that you took…
can you hear me?
I’m sorry, you guys are sort of…
I’m hearing impaired, I can’t hear you and you’re speaking really fast.
Oh, I do that.
That was better.
Do you want me to reprise the whole thing?
No, I think you’re fine.
Okay, so, thank you.
I couldn't figure out what you were signing.
I wanted to ask you to reflect a little bit I'm on the relationship between the image
that you're dilating upon in your paper and the image that Diana Lindon showed in her
paper, the London Anti-Slavery Society Seal, which to some extent again reprises your argument
in “The Amalgamation Waltz.”
But I wanted you to try to follow the turn that you were making in this paper in terms
of thinking about the relationship, in terms of the visual culture.
Does that make sense?
I think it does.
Could you just say one more thing about what relationship that you might see between- you’re
talking about the Wedgwood icon “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”
Is there a particular aspect of it that you would like me to think about in relation to
[Sowali?]?
I suppose it’s historically resonant and prominently circulated but also very different
images, white-authored images of black emasculation, to put it broadly.
Oh, okay.
Again, it's I think something I'd like to think about further.
One thing to note is that the Wedgwood icon was produced in two versions: “Am I Not
a Man and a Brother?”
and also “Am I not a Woman and a Sister?”
And I don't know that I would rush to characterize either of those as representations of emasculation.
I think they need to be interpreted in relation to the sentimental codes of Christianity and
Christian sentiment that were assumed to be the common discourse of the Puritan terms
of moral suasion against slavery.
And they do, however, have, I think, very interesting- now that you point them out-
implications for the sexual imagination of the period that I'm looking at.
And I think that's part of where I guess I'm going in terms of this research into intersections
between abolitionist, anti-abolitionist, and just sort of popular, gothic, crime, sensationalist
imagery.
And a lot of that work, I guess I'll just be brief in this response- the new literature
on kind of obscene imagery and texts and images in this period, I think it's beginning to
come out, and is really shifting, I think, a lot of what we think we understand in part
because this whole question of fronts and, you know, or just establishing fronts.
The dominant society of the period, I think, to put it in a nutshell, was as much engaged
in creating a front behind which a lot else was going on as the ostensible margins that
they were exposing.
And I just wanted to add, when you're speaking about the Wedgwoods- and yes, that there are
two, a male and female- that’s been written about a lot by Kirk Savage in Standing Soldiers,
Kneeling Slaves.
But, also to think about how those images were then countered by Frederick Douglas'
words around 1893, around the World's Columbian Exposition, and then also the photographic
portraits that Sojourner Truth had commissioned of herself which no painter is written about.
And that it’s when describing Sojourner Truth who they always have to insist that
she strips bare not just her arm but her breast, the masculine quality to her arm, is she saying,
am I not a woman also?
And there's this kind of; I would just say look at the literature of Neil Painter.
There is this kind of this counter-balance there.
We have time for one more before lunch, Jonathan- you sure?
So selfless, thank you.
One more.
Quick one for Diana since you brought up the subject of masculinity and femininity.
I was wondering if you've written anything more on that topic.
On masculinity and femininity?
Or masculinity in itself-- have you written anything more on the subject of masculinity?
Yeah.
It's a former life.
I wrote about murals in Harlem Hospital by Charles Austin who was Jacob Lawrence’s
teacher.
They deal with- on one side it’s primitive medicine, the other side it’s modern medicine,
and it deals a lot with different aspects of masculinity, ties to Africa, skin tone
and privilege within African-American communities, and also outside voices who did not want the
murals to be painted because, in the words of the 1930s, negroes would not be interested
negro subject matter, and Harlem won’t be negro.
So, I guess that was it.
Otherwise it's been a lot of Ben Shahn for a long time.
Thank you all, we’re going to break for lunch.
I've lost track of when we're reconvening, but it's in your program.
Thank you all very much we'll see you in about an hour, hour and a half.
[Applause]