Take me back from whence I came
This essay is a work-in-progress which I plan to expand for my final project.
Dr. Cathy J. Cohen finds hope amidst her disappointment in a binary queer activism in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?.” Published in 1997 in Volume 3 of the Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ) journal, Cohen’s most famous text calls upon the work and failures of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC); Queers United Against Straight-acting Homosexuals (QUASH); the Moynihan Report; varied queer collectives, theorists, and subjects alike— including herself— so as to produce a prophecy for a coalitional queer politics which is capable of enacting radical change based on intersectionality rather than binary. She stresses the role of those on the (out)side of normativity as necessary facets of said coalitional politics, without which the nuances of hegemonic power can never truly be reckoned with. The queer political agenda, as Cohen perceives it, finds itself limited by a goal of “assimilation into, and replication of, dominant institutions” rather than “[engaging] in struggles that would disrupt dominant norms of sexuality, radically transforming politics in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered communities” (Cohen 437-438). I argue that the relic as a form of anti-portraiture provides an artistic model for Cohen’s framework of a revolutionary queer politics rooted in multilayered, nuanced consideration of the queered subject in materiality, utilizing Fiona Johnstone’s “Relics, remains, and other objects: Non-mimetic portraiture in the age of AIDS.”
In order to best understand Cohen’s dissatisfaction with a singular queer activism, it is necessary to engage with her conception of queerness as it transcends the presumed gay/straight dichotomy. Says Cohen:
We must also understand that power and access to dominant resources are distributed across the boundaries of “het” and “queer” that we construct. A model of queer politics that simply pits the grand "heterosexuals" against all those oppressed “queers” is ineffectual as the basis for action in a political environment dominated by Newt Gingrich, the Christian Right, and the recurring ideology of white supremacy. As we stand on the verge of watching those in power dismantle the welfare system through a process of demonizing poor and young, primarily poor and young women of color-many of whom have existed for their entire lives outside the white, middle-class, heterosexual norm-we have to ask if these women do not fit into society's categories of marginal, deviant, and “queer.” As we watch the explosion of prison construction and the disproportionate incarceration rates of young men and women of color, often as part of the economic development of poor white rural communities, we have to ask if these individuals do not fit society's definition of “queer” and expendable (458).
Thus, a queer politics worth taking seriously is that which takes responsibility for the intersecting outshoots of power and privilege rather than simply positioning of queerness— here in reference to identification with sexual acts that deviate from heterosexuality— against the “het” and the “het” alone. Cohen asks of her reader: does the (heterosexual) welfare queen not have more in common with, say, the impoverished drag queen than the (heterosexual) married white suburbanite? Rather than forming a flattened discourse of difference through presumed sameness, a truly revolutionary queer politics is built upon the understanding of power which marginalizes both the welfare and the drag queen; organizing, thus, must not homogenize, flatten, erase, or obliterate if it aims to enact change beyond successful assimilation into preexisting norms, as this assimilation is only a possibility for “those whose same-sex sexual identities position them within the category of queer, but who hold other identities based on class, race and/or gender categories which provide them with membership in and the resources of dominant institutions and groups” (Cohen 442).
If queer politics is as it does, then representation of a queerness that seeks to assimilate rather than destabilize may only go so far in an attempt to represent that which Cohen defines as queer, deviant, and expendable. Perhaps this is precisely what Fiona Johnstone troubles in “Relics, remains, and other objects: Non-mimetic portraiture in the age of AIDS.” Published 23 years after “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” Johnstone finds the medium of portraiture the basis of a confinement similar to the single-identity politics of so-called queer activism Cohen finds incapable of enacting true radical change. “The AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) crisis of the 1980s and 1990s occasioned a new mode of portraiture based on objects rather than images, evoking its subject through analogy, metaphor, and trace rather than direct depiction” she writes, insisting that fidelity to methodology and discipline within portraiture must be upended in representation of a queered subject, here in direct reference to human bodies wrought with AIDS (Johnstone 195). Johnstone draws upon the secular relic as an instrument of alternative portraiture which does not rely upon likeness to the subject at any given time but instead their essence; the spiritual or religious history of the reliquary object offers, here, a living materiality which challenges the static sense of identity that the pictorial portrait offers.
It is important to note that Johnstone finds this mode of anti- or alternative portraiture to be a natural response to the AIDS crisis as artists “[adopted] an abstract, object-based mode of portrayal instead of using a direct pictorial approach,” exploring Barton Lidice Beneš’s Brenda (1994) and Reliquarium (1999); Robert Blanchon’s gum, waste, indentations, stains and envelopes (1996); and Felix Gonzales-Torres’s “Untitled” Portrait of Ross in L.A. (1991) as undertakings of representation which move away from traditional modes of portraiture, holding the essence of the subject rather than performing a reproduction of their physical form amongst other forms by way of paint or picture. The relic as an alternative to traditional portraiture makes not a matter of accuracy, as the form of the portrait might lead one to believe, but rather a question of presence, which the portrait feigns, illusory, “its visually unified appearance allowing the viewer to disavow real-life absence of the sitter … [while] the indexical power of the relic is thought to guarantee the actual, authentic presence of its holy referent, yet its fragmentary form serves as reminder of its necessary incompleteness” (Johnstone 196). The “necessary incompleteness” offered within the relic acts as an opportunity for metaphoric kintsugi, the Japanese art of gold joinery in which a broken piece of pottery is repaired with veins of powdered gold, glowing remnants of a life lived and traumas endured; fragmentation of the AIDS subject, here, makes way for the absence of the subject to take on a life of its own. Johnstone hearkens back to the aristocratic roots of the portrait, “understood as direct substitutes for …[and] assumed to elicit the reverence due to their noble sitters,” a possession which reflects upon how light touches privilege, possession, and power (Johnstone 197). Early AIDS portraiture exists primarily in the photographic form, drawing “on one hand from the honorific tradition of portrait painting and on the other hand from a problematic history (primarily photographic) of identifying and regulating the criminal, deviant or non-normative bodies” (Johnstone 199). The photographic medium, thus, is insufficient in its attempt to convey the truth of its subject, spiritually bankrupt in the manipulation of the relationship between photographer and photographed, photograph and viewer, capturing the subject as decidedly either pre- or post-AIDS, thus a body whose visible markers of health are read into— this criminal non-normativity being made the primary mark of their lived experience— in lieu of their essence.
In order to hold reverence in representation for and of the subject queered by AIDS, Brenda by Beneš comprises 200 pieces of paper encrusted with human ashes, twisted into would-be AIDS ribbons pinned in lines to the gallery wall. Brenda does not operate on illusion, out of pity, or otherwise, but is instead a body reimagined, form redistributed; the body is obscured as it exists within the installment, ashen, tied in those 200 symbolic bows and mounted at eye-level. Johnstone reflects upon Beneš’s artistic process, specifically his use of Brenda Woods’ ashes, as Woods feared she would not be buried due to her HIV status; she takes up the question of anonymity provided within the form of the reliquary, and here through the use of Woods’ ashes in creating the installation, finding that the power “to signify a particularized subject while transcending the limits of a specific body is highly suggestive for a mode of expanded portraiture that seeks to both memorialize an individual and make claims on behalf of a broader community” (Johnstone 202). The materiality of the relic as exhibited through Beneš’s Brenda is “viscerally ‘present,’” evidencing a body’s own disintegration which continues even as it hangs preserved upon the wall as the art object; perhaps Brenda, created from ashes and paper as its ribbons are, will continue to break down, mingling with the dust in the air in the gallery, able to be breathed in by and thus incorporated, however impermanently, into the bodies of its audience, similarly to the ACT UP ashes action on the White House lawn in October of 1992 (Johnstone 203). “As a memorial,” writes Johnstone, “[Brenda] not only bears witness to the life of a specific person but also places that person in a broader context; namely, one of symbolic gestures but lack of meaningful action on the part of policymakers and other influential personages. One might also note that the relative invisibility of Brenda in her own portrait echoes her comparative lack of visibility in life; not only as a person with AIDS, nor just as a drug user, but specifically as a woman with AIDS, when, as scholars such as Cindy Patton have noted, women have typically been under-represented in medical, political and popular media constructions of AIDS. Brenda’s invisibility in death, as in life, is powerfully attested to by the aniconic format of Beneš’s portrait” (Johnstone 203). Brenda as an anti-portrait of Brenda Woods offers radical materiality in its representation of the queered subject, bearing a queer politics which coincides with Cohen’s insistence upon an intersectional agenda.
From the subtitle of her work onwards, Cohen positions her work as a question, probing the possibilities, offering a way through and out-of that does not seek to position itself in a hierarchy by engaging in assimilationist goal-setting born from binary hierarchies. So, too, does Johnstone, addressing the shortcomings of portraiture in its attempt to capture the subject queered by circumstance— by AIDS— as a photograph or otherwise pictorial work is capable only of flattening the subject into a body pre- or post-AIDS, erasing the spirit, that all-important nuance, of the life lived, a life which lives on in grievous reverence through artistic representation. Thus, a systems analysis of leftist politics which recognizes the hegemonizing quality of single-identity politics such as that of the assimilationist queer activism outlined by Cohen aligns itself with Johnstone’s complication of portraiture in its complication of queer politics and queer activism. Both “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” and “Relics, remains, and other objects: Non-mimetic portraiture in the age of AIDS” seek to escape from the normative forces of representation which ultimately fail to thoroughly represent those who suffer from said forces— those who are, in Cohen’s language, deemed deviant and expendable by the economic and governmental institutions alike.
Works Cited
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ, vol. 3, no. 4, 1997, pp. 437–65, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.
Johnstone, F. (2020). “Relics, Remains and Other Objects: Non-Mimetic Portraiture in the Age of AIDS.” In F. Johnstone, & K. Imber (Eds.), Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait (195-215). Bloomsbury Visual Arts.