The Tradition of Male Homoerotic Art at Central Connecticut State University
Hartford, Connecticut – A new exhibit at a university gallery in New Britain brings to mind that the subject of male eroticism was once a police-busting taboo in America.
On April 7, 1990, uniformed city and county lawmen entered the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati to halt the opening of the touring photography exhibit, ” Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” charging the museum and its director with presenting obscene works.
Things went more smoothly at the show in Hartford six months earlier. When the retrospective of the photographer was presented at the Wadsworth Atheneum, it was met with a small group of protesters as the show broke records as the most popular exhibit in the Atheneum’s history.
Although a subsequent trial in Cincinnati acquitted the museum and director, the exhibit — which featured explicit sexual images of males — energized conservative attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts, which dramatically diminished the federal agency. Only in the last few years has funding for the agency inched back to levels it received in the late 1980s.
Twenty years after that flashpoint between art and politics, an exhibit of photographs, prints and original drawings is on view at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain showing that homoerotic art is still a sensitive subject.
“Revealed: The Tradition of Male Homoerotic Art” opened Thursday at the university’s gallery and continues through April 22. The exhibit, created by guest curator Robert Diamond, features six images by Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in March 1989. They are among the more than 100 works ranging from the late 19th century to present day. The show features Andy Warhol’s “Sex Parts” series (the most sexually graphic of his career) and works by Herb Ritts, Horst P. Horst, Duane Michals, Robert Rauschenberg, Minor White, Jean Cocteau, Keith Haring, Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Charles Demuth, David LaChapelle and Tom of Finland. (Specially authorized reproductions of drawings from Michelangelo, Pontormo and John Singer Sargent from the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Mass., also are on display.)
One of Diamond’s intentions with the broad historic survey is to show “the tradition of male homoerotic intent” over the years from “something that was secretive and suppressed … to something public, accessible and explicit.
“I think the show is groundbreaking, not in an academic sense, but because of the context these works are placed with each other,” says Diamond, who also is an artist and art historian. The show, he says, depicts a homosexual presence in Western art by showing “unambiguous images of same-sex desire” and the need to express it in art.
Putting together the exhibit was not easy, says Diamond, because male nudity and homosexuality are greater taboos in art than female nudity and heterosexual images.
He also says it’s time for academia and arts institutions to address homosexual and homoerotic art in a forthright way, “otherwise we’re re-enforcing the message that it’s wrong. We’re still not ready to address it, though it’s all right there. It’s like the elephant in the room.”
Diamond says his proposal for the show “was tentatively embraced … and there were at times I didn’t think the exhibit was going to happen. There was constant anxiety.”
Funding for the show is modest — in the four figures, he says — and private donations helped supplement the university funding . Diamond met with the Mapplethorpe Foundation to get approval for the loans of art works for the show.
“But the fact that I can do this exhibition shows that a lot has changed,” he says. “I don’t think any state university would have brought Mapplethorpe and these works here 20 years ago.
“This show is ‘The Revelatory Moment,’” says Diamond. “It’s time to be revealed. I keep using that word over and over again. This is not something that isn’t there [in art]. The research has been done. The art work is there. It’s just time to uncover it and reveal something it to the public that’s already been going on.”
The exhibit has a personal element for Diamond.
“Two years ago there was a gay slur painted on right out here on the hallway of the arts building,” he says. “It was left there for six months. If it was any other kind of slur it would have been gone in a day. I’m not going to be happy until I know that freshmen and sophomores coming into this art building are learning about the entire art history, including homoerotic art.”
A Different World “The world is a very different now than during the culture wars,” says Susan Talbott, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
Talbott, director of visual arts programs from 1989 to 1992 at the NEA, says “it was a very dark time.”
She called it a “stratifying” period, which pitted “colleague against colleague,” some supporting community standards in determining grants and others wanting to fund art in the broadest way. One result of the controversy was that grants to individual artists were eliminated.
From her perspective in Washington at the time, Talbott says she felt heartened when the show was presented so successfully in Hartford and by “the sophistication and open-mindedness of what I had thought of as the insurance capital of America.”
Says Patrick McCaughey, who was director of the Wadsworth Atheneum during the Hartford exhibit: “‘The Perfect Moment’ was a perfect storm of art and politics.”
The context of the times have changed, he says, with the political right shifting away from the culture wars in the last 10 years. There’s also a greater openness and acceptance of homosexuals, including same-sex marriage in some states, including Connecticut. Also, AIDS is not the terrifying scourge that it was in 1990.
Is homoerotic art still a taboo? Could “The Perfect Moment” happen in 2010?
“I don’t think you can make a blanket statement,” says Talbott. “I think it depends on the community and how it is presented.” She says there was a period of self-censorship after the Mapplethorpe controversy, “but I can’t say how widespread it was.”
Says McCaughey: “Twenty years ago the NEA and the arts community were cowed [by the attacks]. I don’t think people will be cowed any more.”
A spokesman for Rocco Landesman, chairman of the NEA, declined an interview on the topic, citing his need to testify before Congress in mid-April. A spokesman for the Mapplethorpe Foundation was also unavailable for comment.
Revealed: The Tradition of Male Homoerotic Art is now on exhibit at Central Connecticut State University Art Galleries, Maloney Hall, Second Floor, 1615 Stanley St. in New Britain. The hours of the exhibit, which runs through April 22, are Monday through Fridays from 1 to 4 p.m,. and by appointment. (The gallery is closed during spring break from this Monday to Friday.) Free admission and parking. Information: 860-832-2633 and art.ccsu.edu/ Gallery.html.
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