CHRISTINA SCHLESINGER is a wickedly interesting, unapologetic, and high-spirited visual artist whose erotic works were featured in a “pop-up” exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York’s Soho district in late January.
The show was called Tomboys, and it featured 36 paintings of butch females by the artist, many of them self-portraits painted onto T-shirts and other articles of clothing. In self-portraits based on old photographs of herself, Schlesinger tomboyishly mugs for the camera. Her portrayals collapse time and space like the pages from a lesbian version of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, detailing the sweetness of lost time and memory. Yet the artist’s images are not just about her own memories but speak with wit and compassion to every tomboy who has felt same-sex desire and loved another girl.
Schlesinger came of age in the 1970s, at the dawn of the gay liberation era but a time when gay men and lesbians were still reviled and ostracized and known only by names like homo, sissy, faggot, bull dyke, lesbo, and queer. Even as late as the 1990s, the idea that a lesbian artist would dare to depict her authentic sexual self, much less display same-sex eroticism in a public context, was unthinkable. It was against this backdrop that Schlesinger began to create images depicting her own coming of age and the various sexual practices and pleasures of women loving women.
But finding an outlet for her work would prove another matter. Boyish girls with stiff dildos on their hands and knees adoring their girlfriends were the stuff of future lesbian wet dreams. In the 1990s, images of lesbian sexual desire did not figure prominently in the mainstream, or even the underground, art world. Only in 2015, and only because the Leslie-Lohman Museum made it happen, was this aspect of Schlesinger’s pioneering work shown to the general public. When this work was first created—even though she was well-known for her landscapes and other paintings, and even though heterosexual (and even gay male) art was experiencing a new period of sexual freedom—she couldn’t find a venue for it. The idea of parting and penetrating another women with a dildo, something that’s taken for granted today among lesbians, was taboo.
As an out lesbian, Schlesinger put herself in a dangerous position by being overtly joyous about lesbian sex and declaring herself to be the subject of her art. She wasn’t out to shock anyone but was only rendering her lesbian desire and illustrating the erotic pleasure she derived from making love to women. Her intimate drawings depicting, say, a woman using a dildo to part the folds of a lover’s vagina, were considered outragous at the time. This kind of imagery is repeated in slightly differing variations throughout the series, showing lesbian erotic desire as simply a part of nature.
It is gratifying to me as an art critic and a lesbian to think that after 22 years of gathering dust in her studio, these works can finally be exhibited—all because a curator named Cupid Ojala believed that Schlesinger’s work would make a new generation aware of how far we have come. My only regret is that these pop-up shows are so short-lived, so her work was on display for far too short a time. However, a good introduction to her work can be found on her website (www.christinaschlesinger.com).
I communicated with Christina on-line in late December about her forthcoming show.
Cassandra Langer: Let me start by asking you about the historical context for lesbian erotic art.
Christina Schlesinger: I can’t say that there’s much “lesbian art” in the annals of Western art history. However, I do consider my work to be contextualized by Romaine Brooks, who was the only “out” lesbian artist in the 20th century—excluding the final decades—that I am aware of.
CL: Who were some of the other artists that influenced your work?
CS: First, I would cite Toulouse-Lautrec. He did a small sketch of two women in bed, their hair tousled, the sheet up to their chins. This 
painting totally enthralled me when I first saw it. It might have been the first time I ever saw two women depicted in such a way. After this I began sketching women in bed together. I later discovered that he did a couple of other drawings of women in bed, much more explicit than the one I first discovered. I wish I had seen those drawings earlier!
Going back in time, I’d also like to mention a late-16th-century painting called Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters (Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs), by an unknown artist from the École de Fontainebleau. This painting riveted me when I first saw it. Upon research, I discovered it did not necessarily have a lesbian meaning, that this gesture of a woman squeezing another woman’s nipple apparently was common between sisters and may have indicated that one of the sisters was pregnant. I made a painting called Sign for a Lesbian Bar based on this painting, replacing the faces with Romaine Brooks’ portraits of Peter and Lady Una. Judy Chicago included this painting in Women and Art: Contested Territory, a book that she wrote with Edward Lucie-Smith.
Let me also mention [20th-century Hungarian photographer] Brassaï, whose photographs of lesbian bars in Paris were an early inspiration for me. I made monoprints and paintings based on the women he photographed.
Creating in another medium, I sometimes use paint on my own clothing in my work. The use of fabric by Miriam Schapiro and Sigmar Polke in their work has been an influence.
CL: I’m working on a biography of Romaine Brooks, as you know, so I’m always happy to learn that other women have been inspired by her work.
CS: The “outness” of Romaine Brooks’ lesbian portraits exhilarated me when I first saw them in the mid-80s. I chose Brooks as my Guerrilla Girl artist name.
CL: Oh, you mean the anonymous group of feminist artists, curators, and critics devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. I remember several of my friends were members, including yourself. They were feminist activists who wanted to expose the white male dominance that discriminated against women in the art community. New York in the mid-’80s was still a beehive of feminist activity in the arts. The Guerrilla Girls made it their mission to focus on gender and racial equality within the fine arts mainstream, including galleries, museums, and art schools. These were very smart, savvy, professionally active women who had won their spurs in a patriarchal art world. They hit upon wearing gorilla masks to remain anonymous and to get attention. They had to conceal their identity for two reasons: they wanted to make a point that issues, not who you are professionally, are what matters; and they had to protect
themselves from a backlash by powerful men who would have had them fired from their jobs and/or made sure their work was never shown or reviewed. The posters and billboards they created were funny, sharply pointed, and got immediate attention from not only the world of art but society in general. So your taking Romaine’s name and being the only out lesbian in the group was also a radical lesbian feminist statement.
CS: So, I made a series of monoprints and paintings based on Romaine’s work. These include the monoprint Lesbian Artist and the painting Self-Portrait as Romaine Brooks. Her serious consideration of the women she painted, capturing their inherent strength and individuality, along with both their tenderness and vitality, moved me greatly. I also loved the mystery and melancholy of her self-portrait.
CL: Are there any living lesbian artists whose work you especially admire?
CS: Other lesbian artists who work with lesbian imagery and whose work I admire would include two American artists: [documentary photographer]Catherine Opie and [painter, sculptor, performance artist] Patricia Cronin.
CL: In making your explicitly erotic work in the 1990s, to what extent were you consciously setting out to make a political statement?
CS: I don’t think I was consciously making a feminist statement at the time. I was more just fooling around. It was also, I guess, about how wearing the dildo made me feel: “cocky,” for sure, and confident—yes, I can have one too—and I liked the thrusting movement it gave you in sex. Later, I had an affair with a woman who used the dildo on me, and that was a whole other feeling, being fucked rather than fucking, though both were good. It seemed to depend more on the partner you were with.
CL: How did it feel to create and attempt to show work with lesbian feminist content that subverted male power, authority, and privilege?
CS: My insistence on representing female masculinity meant that I had claimed the right to give and take pleasure with other women, thus refuting the notion that the artist’s erotic gaze is exclusively male. It wasn’t long before the era of lipstick lesbians and the girls-just-want-to-have-fun attitude. Girls actually did enjoy being the object of desire and flaunting their femaleness without inhibitions about wanting to have sex with other women.
CL: How would you characterize the current state of lesbian representation in the arts and in the popular culture? What has changed, if anything?
CS: When I tried to show my paintings in Provincetown, people were uncomfortable with them. Now nobody seems to care because gender has become so fluid. Representations of lesbian sexuality are all over popular media now: witness The L Word and Orange Is the New Black. Lesbians are presented as attractive, sexy, compelling, and interesting women. It’s no longer a big deal to represent women making love and or for a character to identify as a lesbian. This was not true when I made the dildo and lesbian sex paintings in the early 1990s.
CL: You live in New York now, but you started out in L.A. after going to college there in the ’70s. How did you position yourself between the two coasts? Was there in fact a difference between lesbian culture and art between the East Coast and the West? Was there a different attitude—edgy versus quirky, butch-femme roles, etc.?
CS: I came out in the 1970s in Venice, California. While briefly at the Feminist Studio Workshop at Cal Arts I did a project on lesbian bars. My mural pal Judy Baca and I drove all over L.A., from the [San Fernando] Valley to West Hollywood to the beach, photographing and audio-taping women in these bars. In those days, women were very much into role-playing, and the Chicano women were the best, with strict femme and butch roles and attire, flouncy dresses, and sharp suits. In the Valley we saw a lot of women with big hair who would definitely pass as straight housewives or secretaries on the outside. Now, of course, the butch is a vanishing breed, as more butch women transition into men, thereby gaining the privileges of being male.
However, this is not really answering your question. Which coast was edgier? In Venice there was Big Linda on her chopper, and Jan, a recovering heroin addict who cared for a talented sculptor named Gaylen Vaughn, loving her and protecting her from drink. It wasn’t being painted. Who in New York City was making edgy lesbian art? I am sure there were plenty of edgy dykes, but I can’t point to anyone who was documenting their world or making art about it.
