THE CURATOR of the recent show Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York (Feb. 13–May 3, 2015), Jennifer Tyburczy is an art historian whose mission it is to explore the history of censorship by galleries and museums, especially in the realm of GLBT-themed art. The exhibition spotlights some important cases of censorship at the institutional level—situations in which an artist or a work has been removed from a show, or restricted from view, after it had gone on display.
Tyburczy is assistant professor of feminist studies at UC–Santa Barbara. Her book Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press this fall. “Many of the ideas for the exhibition Irreverent were drawn from this book project,” she told me in our interview. Another project is a collaboration with Gisela H. Muciño and Susana Go on a group exhibition of female-identified artists living in the U.S. and Mexico, which will be shown at the Museo de la Mujer in Mexico City.
I posed a limited number of general questions to Dr. Tyburczy via e-mail, and she obliged with a series of lengthy and, I believe, extremely thoughtful replies.
Cassandra Langer
Cassandra Langer: Do you believe that censorship in art is inescapable, especially when dealing with issues of gender and sexual orientation? Jennifer Tyburczy: It depends on what we mean by “censorship.” We can go to the Oxford English Dictionary and look up the etymology of the word, but when it comes to gender and sexual orientation, we need to expand our usual assumptions of where, when, and under what circumstances “censorship” happens. One of the focal arguments of Irreverent is that when tracing a genealogy of censorship vis-à-vis the history of sexuality, censorship is revealed as something that takes many forms, occurs all the time, and more often than not happens behind the scenes. And yet, these scenarios of censorship, as I like to call them, need not have unfolded, at least in the manner in which they did, if not for the geopolitically contingent and historically produced affections, anxieties, and fears of and about (queer) sex. Let’s consider, for example, the censorship of Michelle Handelman’s video installation Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume, which I describe in the exhibition as the quintessential example of the moral panic that can ensue when queer art is displayed in mainstream museums. The video is a modern, queer interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and was originally shown as a solo exhibition at Austin, Texas’ Art-house in 2011. After the opening, and without explanation, Dorian was shut down, then later presented with limited screening times and a guard outside the gallery entrance. These decisions were precipitated by the president of the board, who was personally offended by the content, concerned about “underage viewers complaining to their parents,” and worried about offending future donors. On the one hand, then, censorship is simply the other side of the curatorial coin: all curators and the institutions they work for set parameters of what “fits” in any given show or in the horizon of possibilities for imagining their visiting publics or what the genre of their museum should be displaying. Handelman’s experience manifests the centrality of children as one such public that may need to be “protected” because of their assumed corruptibility and sexual innocence. On the other hand, if we step back from the localized politics of any one curator or institution, these spaces and people, whether they realize it or not, are also operating under larger macroeconomic and historical contexts that mold and massage bias, prejudice, and stereotypes into these parameters and questions of “fit,” “genre,” and “personal taste.” For instance, let’s consider censorship in the case of the multi-disciplinary artwork of Toronto-based Cree/British/Irish artist Kent Monkman. Monkman challenges romanticized depictions of European colonization and of First Nations peoples in Canada through homoerotic and two-spirit interventions. For the 2007 Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) exhibition Shape-shifters, Time Travelers, and Storytellers, the artist and curators Kerry Swanson and Candice Hopkins proposed to display a Monkman painting in the First Peoples’ Gallery, a space designated as historical and controversially dominated by Anglo explorer-artist Paul Kane. When the curators of the First Peoples’ Gallery refused, Monkman created Duel after the Masquerade [shown above], which interrupts the history of North American colonization and landscape painting through the insertion of his genderqueer alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Depicting Miss Chief vanquishing Paul Kane in a painterly duel, the painting responds to the scenario of censorship and the history of colonial portrayals of First Nation’s peoples, as in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting of the same name and Paul Kane’s Medicine Mask Dance. And yet, Monkman’s work was ultimately relegated to a contemporary art wing, thus marginalizing his speculative fiction of two-spirit First Nations people to be considered only as “art” and not as informative when questioning the parameters of a largely whitewashed, “historical” archive of paintings created by white settler colonialists in Canada. Censorship arguments based on “fit,” “genre,” and “taste,” as Pierre Bourdieu has shown, reproduce class hierarchies, and I would add gendered and raced hierarchies, as they assign economic value to certain objects that can remain in the category of “high art” or “historical.” Especially when an object references the pleasure and politics of the experiences of women, people of color, and transgender artists, these are the pieces that are most frequently attacked as “offensive,” “pornographic,” and “obscene.” For this reason, Irreverent emphasizes artwork by women, trans artists, and people of color as these artists often experience the most intense backlash against their work, at times, even within the mainstream gay community. Thus, the exhibition is not positing censorship as an “us” versus “them” dynamic wherein we can clearly delineate two binary camps of sex positive versus sex negative publics or straight publics or even politically Right publics against the GLBT community. Queer theoretical scholarship has finally caught up to what queer artists and activists have long known: that there exists a politics of homonormativity, as well as heteronormativity, against which artists interested in queer sexualities must also contend. For example, consider the story of trans artist Tobaron Waxman and the censorship of his work: After seeing Portrait of Severin on Waxman’s website, specifically the central panel “Severin Changing His Bandages (My Olympia),” the artistic director of the Amsterdam-based arts festival that was organizing a Jewish cultural exhibition removed an entirely different artwork by Waxman (Techiat ha Metim, or “Revival of the Dead”) from the display. Waxman was not informed that his work would not be shown as scheduled. Years later, Waxman discovered that after seeing Portrait of Severin online, this same artistic director, who happens to be a cisgendered gay man, became extremely agitated and aggressive, exclaiming that “photographs of a transsexual changing his bandages has nothing to do with being Jewish,” and therefore, the director must have reasoned, the artist’s entire body of work had no place in his exhibition. In this instance and in others, Waxman’s experiences evidence the myriad ways in which censorship happens. CL: Can you tell us about your criteria in choosing the artists for this exhibition? JT: I chose artists and censorship scenarios that would draw out this complex approach to censorship. Sex—queer, dissident, explicit—is central to the exhibition, as it was for the censors who put the plunging necklines of queer sexual appetites on the art historical map. But as much as the exhibition revels in queer erotic pleasures, so too is Irreverent fascinated by how the defamers of queer life have consistently used sex to prohibit all kinds of border-crossings as they relate to immigration and religion, to race, gender, and disability, to globalization and capitalism. With this in mind, Irreverent invites the public to celebrate the resilience, survival, and rebellion of the diverse social and political issues that queer artists audaciously depict in their work. In other words, I looked for stories and their attendant artworks that would elicit from spectators the importance of celebrating the unintended consequences of the failed attempts to suppress queer creativity. For example, the show includes a triptych from Zanele Muholi’s Being series, a body of work in which Muholi explores black lesbian relationships and aims to increase awareness of and participation in safe sex. For years, Muholi has documented the African LGBT community. Over five years she amassed an unprecedented archive that pushed back against rhetoric that claims homosexuality to be “un-African” or a “Western import.” In April 2012, thieves broke into Muholi’s Cape Town apartment stealing nothing but her archives of photography, video, interviews, and camera equipment. Muholi believes the theft was a targeted hate crime. Little has been done to retrieve her works. Irreverent shows an artwork the censorship of which did not occur in the museum or gallery space, but in Muholi’s own home to destroy her entire archive and the equipment needed to construct her work. Or consider the case of Harmony Hammond’s A Queer Reader. In response to the 2001 vandalism at the San Francisco Public Library of over 600 books, many with gay and feminist in content, the city’s library system collaborated with the local LGBT community to counter the hate crime. Artists were given the damaged books to transform into saleable works of art, the proceeds from which were used to purchase new copies of the vandalized books. Hammond repurposed two damaged books, one of which was A Queer Reader: 2500 Years of Male Homosexuality, an anthology of writings by gay male authors. The original cover displayed Pierre et Gilles’ Le Marin (“The Sailor”). Hammond made a print that called attention to the removal of the sailor’s eyes, a violent act of extraction that evoked for Hammond the mythological theme of blinding and the psychoanalytic symbol of sexual mutilation. His Queer Reader graces the first gallery alongside the opening wall text for a reason: to signal to the viewer that these works were chosen because they were in some way attacked or maligned, but also because they offer us a vision of artists and communities that pushed back, spoke up, and refused to be silenced. CL: Umberto Eco has said there are limits to interpretation and that there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Can you tell us what limits you encountered in putting the exhibition together, and how free you were able to be in dealing with its central themes of sex and gender? JT: I was asked to create a show that would be as theoretically sexy as it would be visually sexy. Irreverent is a group show that gathers sixteen artists from three continents and puts at its center the most marginalized communities within the LGBT community. I encountered no limits to what I could include or show, other than space or design constraints. Thematically and conceptually, I was not hindered in any way. I did, however, encounter institutional and media censorship of various kinds. At my previous home institution, in trying to share the work I was doing in New York for my local audiences in South Carolina, I was told that my department’s website was not the “proper location for these kinds of provocations,” and on Facebook the triptych by Zanele Muholi of two women embracing in bed was reported and censored by that medium. So while I felt no pushback within the museum, the exhibition’s reverberations, especially in its digital circulation, were met with quite a few prohibitions and warning signs. Interestingly, this was also the first time that the museum made a concerted effort to reach out to local law enforcement in the event that they needed to make an emergency call. Seeing as how some of the scenarios of censorship discussed in the show had elicited, in their local contexts, threats or actual violence, the museum leadership made a choice to be proactive in the event that something happened. That said, those who know the Leslie-Lohman well consistently shared with me that this was one of their tamest shows. So, yes, to riff on the quote you pulled from Eco’s work, claiming absolute freedom in the museum would be incorrect because it only partially covers the story of where and when the meaning of an exhibition and the artworks included is made. CL: Do you think the show will change anything and did it meet your expectations? JT: The show far exceeded my expectations in every possible way, and that is a testament to the people I worked with at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, but also each and every artist who shared with me their stories, their artwork, and their faith in me as a curator that I would tell their stories and display their work in such a way as to forge a counter-history of artists, artworks, and exhibitions that were considered too irresistible for the taboo-frenzied sanitizers of the world. Irreverent rejuvenated my hopes for collaborative projects and cross-cultural understanding that uses the museum as a space for critical pedagogy, conviviality, and radical politics. We are currently looking for a second home for the show, and as I am relocating to California within the month, I think it would be wonderful to share the exhibition with a west coast audience.
Cassandra Langer is the author of the forthcoming biography Romaine Brooks: A Life (Wisconsin).
