Review: ‘Savage Beauty’ & ‘Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas’

By Steve Barnes “I think everyone has a deep sexuality,” Alexander McQueen says in the astonishing catalog for “Savage Beauty,” the retrospective of his work that is in its last few weeks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it’s up through August 7). “And sometimes it’s good to use a little of it—and sometimes a lot of it—like a masquerade.” Both sexuality and masquerade make their presence strongly felt in the photograph on the page facing that quote. A provocative skirt and jacket ensemble that mixes black leather, fox fur and a series of silver metal hoops and studs, it seems to be made for a woman who is equal parts dominatrix, socialite and heroine from an Edward Gorey book. Its combination of childish whimsy, in-your-face sadomasochism and classically flawless high style makes it a near-perfect introduction to the unique world that McQueen created. If you can’t make it to the Met, or don’t want to face the show’s daunting crowds, this sumptuously produced catalog is a good way to enter McQueen’s world. Its hundreds of photos show off many of the designer’s strengths—his amazingly precise hand at cutting garments, his unconventional yet always controlled sense of balance and his ability to bring together the most unexpected materials in ways that make the results seem as if we should have expected them all along. This is a man who makes a jacket on which crocodile heads serve as epaulets, creates a bodice from feathers, and constructs an aluminum facsimile of a spinal column to run along the backbone of a vest. And most importantly, none of these things ever feel like stunts. McQueen always saw himself as a storyteller, his shows relating back to themes taken from film, literature and history. The clothes exist simultaneously as fashion statements and part of a larger artistic discussion. They absolutely belong in an art museum—and they will definitely repay the amount of time spent going back over them in the pages of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. Sexuality and masquerade also figure prominently in another recent book that’s also well worth looking at. Christopher Reed’s Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas is an engaging, well-written history of how the development of homosexual identity and the major movements in art history have fed off of each other. Reed, an associate professor of English and Visual Culture at Penn State, discusses a broad range of ways that same-sex relationships have appeared throughout history, arguing that it was really not until the early 20th century that a homosexual identity as we currently understand it emerged in any public sort of way.
That is not at all to say that he finds no examples of homosexuality itself in earlier periods. From the patronage system of ancient Greece (in which relationships between an older man who served to “initiate” a younger man were common), through the many examples of same-sex relations in feudal Japan, the South Pacific islands, and the culture of the American Indians, Reed constructs a long history of alternatives to what we see as “normal” gender roles. But just as those social alternatives remained somewhat open-ended and unformed, so did their representation in sculptures and paintings. Open-ended and unformed certainly does not mean invisible, however. We see a 12th century illustration depicting the wedding of two men, representations of rather bawdy relations between 13th century knights and monks, and 16th century engravings showing groups of fleshy naked women pleasuring themselves with no men anywhere near. We also get to know many of the artists who drew outside the lines when it comes to sexual behavior: Gianantonio Bazzi, who referred to himself as “Il Sodoma,” or the Sodomite; the 19th century painter Rosa Bonheur, who needed to file an official permit with the Paris police to allow her to wear men’s clothes and keep her hair cut short; and the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, whose brute strength permitted her to do the kind of rough cutting on marble that even most male sculptors left to their workmen. Once modernity takes over, according to Reed, artistic temperament and homosexuality became intertwined in the public imagination. When homosexuality was turned into a medically and politically applied label, it became a much more direct target of attack for the powers that be, and many avant-garde artists strenuously tried to distance themselves from any suggestion of it. The macho posturings of the Abstract Expressionists are a major case in point, as are the directly anti-homosexual pontifications of such critics as Clement Greenberg. Reed points out the difficulty that such gay artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and especially, Andy Warhol, had in being accepted as serious artists by the boys in the Ab-Ex pack and their hangers-on. Vivian Gornick even went so far as to label Pop art “a malicious fairy’s joke” rather than an art movement. But as our vantage point in history shows, Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol certainly succeeded in entering the highest reaches of the esthetic and financial art worlds. Despite the power of the many artists who fought the AIDS epidemic in their work and the extraordinary strides made by feminist and lesbian artists, however, Reed still finds a reticence on the part of museums and critics to open themselves up to the political messages that many gay (or queer, which seems to be his dominant term) artists are still trying to deliver. Thanks to this book, though, that message is getting a worthy platform. Steve Barnes is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as ARTnews and the Wall Street Journal. ]]>