Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures
in the New York Art World, 1948-1963
by Gavin Butt
Duke University Press.
232 pages, $21.95 (paper)
GAVIN BUTT’S BACKSTAGE exposé of the New York art world of the 1950’s careens between artsy jargon and artsy gossip. He rather defensively lays out his thesis in a lengthy introduction peppered with breathless 55-word sentences stating his themes. Doubtless the author is on his guard because he incorporates hearsay, rumor, and urban legend into dissection of this pivotal post-World War II Manhattan subculture.
Butt readily acknowledges that his methodology might give pause, but convinces us that without this pillow talk, the real story behind the making of modern art might never be told. And, to be sure, there is some fascinating material here that admirably seeks to set the record straight, so to speak, by recounting who did what to whom and why. The author engages in a lively polemic on the politics and socialization of gay iconic art that burst onto American culture’s homophobic landscape in this era.
The academic framework breaks into a raucous chronicle of what was really happening on and off the canvas (grab your smocks and your cocks). This includes discussions about what kinds of brushes were used (and in some cases their sizes) by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Larry Rivers and “what they like to do” with them. Rivers is particularly colorfully rendered as gay poseur de camp who viewed gay sex as a necessary element of art of this period. He’s quoted as saying: “They had more ego, drive. They seemed to be more equal to my notion of what things should be about.”
Butt rescues mostly forgotten touchstones of the early gay movement, such as the first graphically gay magazine, ONE, along with such curiosities as Warhol’s ad illustrations from the 50’s. John Giorno, writer of the bitchy art gossip column “Vitamin G” in the 60’s, is quoted as saying that this is “really art history.” There is properly noted evidence of queer canoodling among the artists, many of whom were suffering from homosexual panic related to their careers but were nonetheless randy. A boy’s got to keep his bristles supple, after all. Butt also delves into the backdrop of New York’s gay cabals that brought in such literary idols as poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, as well as highbrow luminaries like choreographer Merce Cunningham and composers John Cage and Ned Rorem.
Between You and Me can be so thorough on some points that the prose becomes as motionless as a Warhol Factory art film in which the camera was trained on an object like the Empire State Building and never moved. However, there is no detracting from the book’s engrossing account of how the entrenched gay art world collided with a conservative art establishment. It’s a citadel that traditionally wanted only to exploit gay artists without publicly embracing their sexual orientation.
Butt is at his best when he steps away from bloated theory and just tells his stories. In a chapter entitled “Andy Abjected,” he shows Andy’s fey persona being vilified in a New York art world filled with closet cases desperate for broad recognition and anxious to avoid guilt by association. Warhol’s demeanor “was marginalized by the social circles of his would-be artist peers. His effeminacy was incompatible with that of the avant-gardists of Greenwich Village—he remained too undeniably gay and working class to be accepted within bohemian society.” The chapters on Warhol paint a critically accurate picture of that enigma in the platinum wig, while the book as a whole draws into focus a three-dimensional art world in which life imitated art and art imitated life.
