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Sex Objects: Art And The Dialectics Of Desire by Jennifer Doyle

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PREFACE

• A recuperation of adolescent abjection, the Moby-Dick anecdote was my first serious foray into what we might call camp conversation. Like much of Melville's writing, Moby-Dick is a perfect candidate for camp conversation in which, as Gavin Butt describes it, "high-cultured learnedness--an 'elevated' discussion about the great figures of literature" slides into raunchy banter about outlaw sex. The wit that animates the bitchy give-and-take of this kind of conversation establishes its actors as masters of the very high, the very low, and as not terribly interested in anything that falls too far in the middle. Camp can allow a simultaneous claim to dissonant fields of knowledge (like art and pornography), and it can facilitate the use of one field to manage oppressive forces bearing down on the other (cultural sophistication, for example, against social abjection). When it is most empowering and subversive, when it is most queer, camp fuses a kind of sex radicalism to a denaturalization of hierarchies of class and culture, putting a rare and hard spin on cultural fantasies about racial and ethnic difference as well.
  In his rousing treatise on the ethics of queer communities, Michael Warner observes that "in those circles where queerness has been most cultivated, the ground rule is that one doesn't pretend to be above the indignity of sex." ... Warner's portrait of this social performance of queer abjection underplays the fact that, as euphoric as they can be, such performances do not always yield a happy or, at its most intense, even a humanizing sense of community. A degree of physical risk will vary in intensity, becoming painful, even intolerably so, depending on where your body puts you relative to the normal--depending on, for instance how strongly you resemble, or are interpolated as, the abject (as female, butch, black, etc.). The performance of queer abjection is only as dignified as your ability to walk away from the indignity of disenfranchisement and into the category of the human. 
  (cont) The flip side of the sublimity of communal parachute drops into the territory of sexual abjection is the terror of falling alone. Everyone is talking about a novel or sexual practice that you've never heard of, everyone is camping it up over something you can't find funny; someone makes a racist joke, someone says something really hateful about women; you find that you are the only Asian man in the room, the only drag queen, the only dyke; you are the only one who has known sexual violence, the only one never graduated college, or the only person without a decent job or health insurance. Something happens and you are taken over by fear, isolation, embarrassment, or rage. A second ago you were seduced by the genius of your friends, and now you feel terrorized by knowledge, experience, or privilege of others. 
• Looking back, I can say that on some level that photograph of a black man as Moby-Dick documented my fear--a fear of the process of othering that could reduce a man to a dick, in a violent reduction of person to sex that must have spoken volumes to my own anxieties as an adolescent girl--in which my body, in public, seemed to occasion other people's pleasure and my humiliation; in which my status a s a person (which already hinged on external recognition of my intellect) was perpetually triumphed by my potential to be a thing (a "cunt"). (....) It taught me something important--that the feeling of being stripped down to a sex object is very much a dressing-down in culture. That dressing-down in culture is in turn racially marked. 

INTRODUCTION

• Kusama's objects literalize the unruliness of sexual desire, its ability to cover everything, to spread. When confronted with her works, you can't help but feel that they vibrate with desire. The rowboat is so overrun with phallic objects, described by Claes Oldenburg as "a small thing that covers," that there is no room for anything (or anyone) else. Desire, they declare, works like this. (...) (Kusama's accumulations) also express the proximity of seuxal intensity with obsessive repetition and boredom. They overwhelm us with the hours of monotonous (and distinctly feminine) labor that the production of these objects require (cutting, sewing, stuffing) and with the maniacal impulse to subsume everything around us under the singular blanket of the sexual. This, I thought when confronted with the strange, small excesses of Kusama's objects, is how Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, thinks. 
• If I had to define the experience of writing this book in terms of one revelation, it would be the discovery of how very easy it is to write yourself into these kinds of concerns, how unsatisfying--because what we mean by "sex" in those sorts of declarations, and how it matters, is rarely transparent. Do we mean, for example, the "sex" of sexual identity? Of gender? The body? "Sex" as a discursive field, as something deployed? (What would that look like?) As something that happens to us? Or as something that we initiate and seek out? (How is art about that?) To assert that a book, or a painting, or a film, is about sex--or to assert that something is pornographic--is to say surprisingly little. To point out that Kusama's rowboat is all about sex is to state the obvious, to reveal no more than the work itself: her boat is so overrun with sex objects that there is room for nothing else. And this is, in a way, Kusama's point.
  And so while the following chapters may be described as about "sex in art," to say so would not reveal much. Each of these chapters has taught me just how inadequate such descriptions can be. 
• The texts at the heart of this project, on the other hand, rarely present sex as sublime or even beautiful--rather, they explore the everydayness of sexual subjectivity: the wanderings of desire, the importance of boredom, desire's haptic dimension, the stubborn and delicate nature of our attachments to each other, the seductive power of misunderstanding, and the inevitability of sexual failure and humiliation. 
• In the face of the willful institutional erasure of these facts (as well as of scholarship grounded in them), it is important to say that Eakins' work is homoerotic, that his work and his life are queer, and to insist on this fact as central to a full understanding of his importance as an American artist. 
• That camp performances of sexual violence should have such a frequent, even casual, place in gay underground filmmaking of the 1960s, the very years that produced feminist critical perspectives on heterosexuality and institutionalization of rape, should suggest radical feminism as an object of queer fascination and interest. Warhol's films, furthermore, are clearly played out against the backdrop of the sexual revolution and its aggressive revision of womens roles in the household, and against the relationships to their own bodies and sexual pleasure. 
• ...the problem of women in Warhol scholarship is similar to that which the film scholar Pamela Roberston describes in her work on feminism and camp: "Most people who have written about camp assume that the exchange between gay men's and women's cultures has been wholly one-sided; in other words, that gay men appropriate a feminine aesthetic and certain female stars but that women, lesbian or heterosexual, do not similarly appropriate aspects of gay male culture. This suggests that women are camp but do not knowingly produce themselves as camp, and, furthermore, do not even have access to camp sensibility." Within scholarship about camp, Robertson concludes, women are trafficked: "Women are objects of camp and subject to it but are not camp subjects." 
• But this distracted form of reading, listening, or watching has its risks. In 'A Lover's Discourse,' for example, Barthes writes, "Like a bad concert hall, affective space contains dead spots where the sound fails to circulate.--The perfect interlocuter, the friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?" In contrast with the resonant space of friendship, Barthes gives us the sonic void of love gone awry, in which the anxious lover finds himself confronted by a wall of indifference, the silence of the uninterested partner who tolerates the other's prattle. He writes, "This distracted kind of listening generates an anxiety of decisions: should I continue, go on talking, 'in the void'? This would require precisely the assurance that amorous sensibility does not permit. 
• ***To approach the subject of sexuality and art from these perspectives is to reimagine the subject/object relation that structures much scholarship in this area. It is to place special emphasis on the character of the relationship between ourselves and our objects, our books, photographs, paintings, and films--to ask what it is that we get out of our love for art. The following chapters therefore model an approach to the representation of sexuality that draws from, but is not bounded by, the analysis of the prohibition and production of sexual identities. 
• **In "Getting the Warhol We Deserve," Douglas Crimp makes this kind of claim for the complexity of representations of sexuality and for the importance of certain artists to thinking through that complexity. He writes, "That is one reason why an art such as [Jack] Smith's--and Warhol's--matters, why I want to make of it the art I need and the art I deserve--not because it reflects or refers to a historical gay identity and thus serves to confirm my own, but because it disdains and defies the coherence and stability of all sexual identity. That to me is the meaning of queer, and it is a meaning we need now, in all its historical richness, to counter both the normalization of sexuality and the historical reification of avant-garde genealogy." Crimp reasserts in this essay a principal theme of queer criticism--its investment not in the articulation and production of concrete categories of sexuality and gender but in the very real ways that queer art (novel/photo/film/performance) can cut across and dismantle the attempt to produce sexual subjects as inevitable members of a "type" and, at the same time, to call into question the disciplinary narratives that have formed around the queer art that has been absorbed into the canonical record or that stubbornly remains "underground". 
• We feel recognized in those sites where meanings do not "line up tidily with each other," in part because they mirror our struggles with those moments when, Sedgqick writes, "all institutions are speaking with one voice," when "religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourse of power and legitimacy" unite us as a monolith around one word, such as "family" or "nation." For those of us (which is probably most of us) who find ourselves living at odd angles with these monolithic structures, art is not a luxury but a necessity--queer readings of books, novels, films, paintings, and performances give us our maps, our user's manuals for finding pleasure in a world more often than not organized around that pleasure's annihilation. 
• (In Moby Dick) an excessive take on the attention to detail that marks the realist impulse of much nineteenth-century literature. Although grounded in Ishmael's attempts to visually conjure the whale, this digressive impulse takes on a life of its own and threatens to undo the novel's unity. The danger of the detail, Naomi Schor writes, resides in its power to upend the "delicate balance of the autonomy of the part and the unity of the whole" and reveal the artificiality of the model of the novel as an organic unit, complete in itself. The scandalousness of Roland Barthes's arguments on behalf of the superfluous detail (in his essay "The Reality Effect") therefore lies, Schor writes, in Barthes's direct challenge to "the legitimacy of the organic model of literary interpretation, according to which details--no matter how aberrant their initial appearance--can, indeed must be integrated into the whole, since the work of art is itself organically constituted." This is formally mirrored in Melville's novel by the alignment of Ishmael's catalog of whale detail with the action of pulling the whale apart. (...) The detail of Ishmael's frenzied assessments of the whale are therefore more evocative of the Marquis de Sade than, say, Henry James or Gustave Flaubert. Which is to say that they require a different sort of attention. Sade's "stories," Georges Bataille writes, "are full of measurements; often the length of the penis is given, in inches and twelfths; sometimes a partner will measure it during the orgy. The characters' speeches are... paradoxical... Their violence lacks a certain authenticity, but at the cost of their slow ponderousness de Sade manages at last to bring to violence an awareness that permits him to talk about his own delirium as if it were an external object. Moby-Dick is Sadeian in its coupling of the excitement with the excess of detail, *and* the boredom of such recitations. 
• ****The predicament of those who attempt to define pornography as a discrete category, argues Susan Stewart, is the "impossibility of describing desire without generating desire; the impossibility of separating form from content within the process of sublimation; and, most importantly, the impossibility of constructing a meta-discourse to *describe* without generating desire. The act of taking interest in any object undermines the subject's indifference from that object. (p9)
• When reading successfully for porn, the book feels like a body for all the ways it acts on your body. In exchange between text and porn consumer the material of the work (paint, canvas, ink, paper) seems to disappear, calling out as hypocrisy the fantasy of the pleasures of aesthetic experience as independent of the pleasures of the body in the world at large. 
• The urge to maintain the difference between books and bodies is a main ingredient in anxious discourse on pornography and representation--and this is the second set of problems posed by the pornographic. A defining aspect of the modern (legal) distinction between obscenity and art lies in the perception of the pornographic text as having no value--no textual density, no instructive purpose--other than a sexual one. *That* value is in turn negated because porn substitutes a text for "the real thing," opposed to "real" sex, as a fraudulent (mediated) version of "the real thing," Moon finds that "what the works of...aggressively 'queer' writers suggest is that all sexuality resides 'in touch,' that all sexuality is mediated and textual, that there is no such thing as unmediated exchange between persons, including unmediated sexual exchange." 

CHAPTER 2: Sex, Sodomy, and Scandal - Art and Undress in the Work of Thomas Eakins

• The kind of caution (critic Elizabeth) Johns displays can be taken up in other settings in the service of homophobic impulses to argue that those of us who would like to recover the painting's homoeroticism are, in essence, reading too aggressively in the service of academic "special interest." In other words, the risk with arguing that it is an anachronism to say Eakins was gay is that we will support desexualizing and degaying his work in every context. Eakins's work, however, in every sense of the word, is infused with the sexual. Even if his oeuvre is not legible as the expression of the sexuality of a gay man (and that is a pretty big "if"), it is shot through with a queerness immediately relevant to gay audiences. (ex The Swimming Hole) p22
• Generally (sodomy), the term describes nonprocreative sex (oral, anal) with members of either gender, and bestiality (which at times refers to the performance of sex acts with animals, but also, however, as is the case with the term's use in reference to Eakins, is a stand-in for a nonprocreative or illicit sex, such as incest). As (Johnathan) Goldberg describes it in an overview of current thinking on the term, sodomy is defined not by the sexuality or gender of the participants but by "the diacritical axis of procreative/nonprocreative sex, with its ramifying connections to sociopolitical arrangements" such as family, the nation-state, and the male bonds and privileges associated with homosocial spaces. It is not reducible "to either a simple or regular sex crime." (...) As a term used to manage threats to the dominant arrangement in gender relations, sodomy deries some of its force from its flexibility. p25
• Returning to the painting, I notice for the first time that the woman in "The Gross Clinic" is almost as hard to read as the patient. She is buried in clothes and gesture, and we have no more access to her skin than we do to the patient's identity: it is only through her posture and costume that we guess she plays the part of a woman. In this way, she is an inverted figure for the patient. *Her* gender position is immediately legible, but only as it is signified by costume and gesture, only as it signifies as performance. 
• The painting's failure to gender the patient allows us to place the management of the production of sexual difference at the core of not only the medical discourses the painting celebrates but the sociology of art that it allegorizes. The photograph, too, speaks to the sodomitical possibilities inscribed within the scene of producing and consuming art, as activities that allowed men and women a physical intimacy defined by something other than the imperative to reproduce, as a scene in which the pleasures of representing sex outstrip the epistemological drive to figure sex out. 

CHAPTER 3 Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art and the Rhetoric of Prostitution***

• As often as these critics animate their writing with hustlers, whores, and drag queens, they avoid speaking directly about the place of sex, gender, and sexual practices in Warhol's art. Criticism animated by sex but which evacuates sex from Warhol's work makes up a substantial amount of the writing in not only philosophical essays but also reviews, feature stories, and obituaries on Warhol in art journals and mass media outlets like NYT, Time, and Esquire. In glossing the language of criticism on Warhol, I am suggesting that we not take the queer figures that populate it for granted. They draw out some of Pop's most interesting attitudes--its curious configuration of agency that looks at once passive and active, its investment in art and sex as sites of exchange, its use of queerness of these sites to resist monolithic narratives about what sex and art are. 

CHAPTER 4 "I Must Be Boring Someone" - Women in Warhol's Films

• On this point (Solanas as Mad Woman) filmmaker Mary Harron said of her own hesitation to make her film about Solanas ('I Shot Andy Warhol'), "People will think I'm crazy. They'll think I'm like Valerie." This is an unfortunate but not uncommon characterization of feminism--a facile dismissal of feminist intellectual work on women like Solanas as "merely" an extension of hysterical identification. At the risk of giving more weight to an extension to Koestenbaum's remark than it probably merits, it also forecloses the possibility of critical thought unfolding around *exactly* the possibility of identifying with the woman in the story. Which, I would say, I do. If, in a flight of fantasy, I sometimes like to imagine I'd have made a great hag to Warhol's fag, in moments of realism I know I'd have been far too awkward and serious to pull it off--I am much more like Valerie Solanas than Edie Sedgwick or Brigid Berlin. I relate more to Solanas's hapless descent into paranoid madness than to the speed-enhanced scary charm of Warhol's prep school heiresses (Solanas called them "stupidstars"). 

CHAPTER 5 The Effect of Intimacy - Tracy Emin's Bad Sex Aesthetics

• (Leo Bersani's "Is the rectum a grave" vs philosopher Candace Vogler re: attraction to his writing in "sex and Talk"): Vogler writes that "the fact that some intimacies are *not* affairs of the self is what makes people want them" and, furthermore, want them with other people. What if, returning to the subject of bad sex, bad sex grows out of the failures of the mechanism that allows us to take pleasure in letting the body become a thing, a body "subjected" to another's desires--the play with one's own thingness being one condition of possibility for the ecstasy of being relieved, for a moment, of one's personhood. What if, following Voglers model, bad sex is what happens when the architecture that supports "depersonalized intimacy" falls apart?
• Bad sex, in this sense, may also happen around the production of one person's social privilege as the other's sexual abjection--and one's proximity to social, political abjection (via sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, class) may make the process of self-abandoment more emotionally tricky and more risky. Becoming object may not be sexy if objectness is always already thrust upon you. Or, for becoming object to be desirable, it may require feeling safe from the penalties that accrue in everyday settings to being the already objectified person. 
• Emin's reception is littered with come-ons and effusive praise for her attractiveness to others. Everyone is trying to "pick up" Emin--as if her use of props from her everyday life (like her bed) and personal experiences (like pregnancy and abortion) constitutes an invitation to think about Emin the artist as an always already available sexual object, as if these objects worked as metonyms for Emin the (injured) woman more powerfully than they do as metonyms for Emin the artist. 
• Emin similarly offers herself to us as a spectacle of feminine abjection. The unavoidably personal character of responses to Emin is always already a problem in criticism: she draws us too close, her work lacks emotional discipline. We reveal too much about ourselves in laying claim to this response (a risk that does not adhere--at least in the same way--to identification with O'Keeffe;s or Chicago's soft, slightly abstracted vaginal portraits). That the work feels as if it is addressing "me" does not feel like a critical response at all. Rather, it feels like a failure of intellect to rise above emotion. Add to that the popularity of Emin's work (her celebrity, the work's accessibility), and we find that the critic who writes about Emin faces the same kinds of suspicion that feminist critics have faced when they have taken up popular forms like melodramatic film or sentimental novels--"body genres" denigrated for their appeal to the spectator's/reader's body, for their manipulation of their audiences, and for their commercialism. (p111)
• The difference between a critic like (Michael) Freid and a critic like (Amelia) Jones is that the latter, as a feminist, sees the fantasy of transcending the body as deeply problematic--as, indeed, the fantasy of the critical subject whose body is itself experienced as unmarked. She writes: "The psychic dimension of aesthetic judgment as a strategic model of *othering* (of producing boundaries to define white, upper-middle class, masculine culture as superior in relation to a debased--non-white or 'primitive,' lower-class, feminine--alternative) is relatively clear." Traditionally, the critic sets himself or herself up as an authority on the object of his or her critique and writes as though the boundaries between this self and the object of critical thought are solid, impenetrable. "It is crucial, then," Jones argues, "for [this kind of critic] to claim 'pure pleasure,' to avoid acknowledging its investments in the determination of meaning: 'the loss of the subject in the object' [in which the reader or spectator identifies with the object of representation--is turned on, is repulsed, moved to tears or anger] threatens not only the interpreter's claim to authority, but his very coherence as a subject (who is implicity masculine, white, heterosexual, upper middle class, etc.).

CHAPTER 6 White Sex - Vaginal Davis Does Vanessa Beecroft 

• When guilt and shame register in contemporary art, it is frequently around spectacles of femininity, homosexuality, and blackness. The institutional consequences of material difference become differently visible in Dais's and Beecroft's performances *as* sexual and racial difference. We see in Beecroft's installations of nude women--and, implicitly, in much contemporary art that looks as if it is about sex--the reproduction of the repressive hypothesis (as defined by Foucault in 'The History of Sexuality'), insofar as the installations' shock value rests on the exposure of our supposedly disavowed libidinal investment in art. Davis's performances as Beecroft not only satirize this aspect of contemporary art, they in fact model an alternative means for making sex the subject of art--one *not* invested in uncovering sex as the ultimate truth of art but in using sex to make the social regulation of "art" visible. Art, as understood by Davis in her citation of Beecroft, is a form of class warefare. 
• In another iteration of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Care" (July 2001, at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival), for instance, Davis pulled out the palest of her boys from the ranks and praised the pallor of his skin, singing out "America Looooves Your Whiteness" as she bent him over, pulled down his underwear, and rubbed his ass cheeks for a cheering throng of gay men and women. As Munoz explains, one of Davis's most powerful contributions to contemporary queer art is an aggressive attack on white homonormativity, declaring a boredom, as does the title "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Care," with the organization of gay politics around things like participation in military culture by asserting the queer presence in military culture as always already there--and, to a certain extent, as always already *more* gay than mainstream gay culture. (...) Munoz names Davis's fearless avowal of the lure of those aspects of white hegemony that are most explicitly organized against the survival of queers of color as one of the most innovative and disturbing aspects of Davis's performances. (p127)
• (Davis) gives us a black drag queen's burlesque on the attraction of white masculinity as a spectacle and the limits of white masculinity as a performance, and imagines what might happen to Beecroft's installations if we staged them outside the space of Official Art. 
  Ultimately Davis's performance (a parody of an event Davis had never seen--the whole idea was, in fact, Athey's) offered us a camp deconstruction of the art world's fascination with its own shame. Davis's performance manipulated the conflicting investments of her audience (a fairly white expression of Los Angeles alterna-bourgeoisie: gay and straight, men and women, students, artists, academics, musicals). In general, one odes not attend Davis's performances in Los Angeles looking for an art experience--those who do are working with a different set of expectations than attendees of Beecroft's installations. (etc) 

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