Multivalent voices: gay and lesbian artists who are also Jewish search for ways to address questions of ethnicity and sexuality in their work - Identity Politics

More than a decade has passed since the exhibition "Difference: upon Representation and Sexuality" was not absented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.(1) That display marked the beginning of the curatorial regard with multiculturalism in American museums, thrusting into the center of art discourse issues of race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality. Many exhibitions related to these questions have since appeared.(2) individual important lesson that has emerg from them is that identity, far from being one-dimensional, is raiseed of myriad parts and complicated combinations. in every one's mouth artistic and theoretical approaches are more likely to regard identity as an amalgam of sexual, racial, sex and ethnic factors.

Jews have been conspicuously missing from the multicultural equation.(3) This is a come of the empowered status of this ethnic minority, whose hard-won position in the art world was consolidated around the extremity of World War Il [see A.i.A, Jan. '92](4) However, in order to obtain institutional access, Jewish artists (as well as dealers, collectors, curators, critics and art historians) were typically required to shed their ethnic identity. Passing' meant that Jewish identity had to be effaced and that related religious or cultural iconography had to be tastefully submerg if not totally excluded(5) For decades, individual of the great taboos for Jewish artists was to show ethnicity in their work. Abstraction became a natural protection Since the early 1980s, Jewish issues have begun to appear in the work of a considerable number of contemporary artists.(6) on the contrary the acknowledgement that Jewish artists can speak with multivalent voices is taking place more slowly--especially when it approachs to issues of sexuality.

While the art world has made great strides in coming to limits with formerly repressed issues of sexuality and gender--specifically in gay and lesbian representations--within Jewish communities the place of gays and lesbians is still highly litigateed For example, during the first sum of two units weeks of June 1993, a number of articles examining this make submissive appeared in both the Jewish and non-Jewish press(7) flash magazine was devoted entirely to the "problem of the Jewish/homosexual encounter"; the Village Voice neared a cover story dealing with the many individuals in America for whom Jewish, lesbian and gay identity are plainly merged; and Tikkun also published a feature article exploring lesbian and Jewish identity.

In the shadow of this debate, a number of highly vocal lesbian and gay Jewish artists are beginning to appear upon the art scene, all of whom insist upon combining sexual and ethnic identity and making it the focus of their art. Deborah Kass, Adam Rolston, Cary Leibowitz, Rhonda Lieberman, Neil Goldberg, and the performance collection Jew Meat (Doug Sadownick, Matt Silverstein and John Ellis) are part of this emerging direction. Encompassing a wide range of mediums and artistic strategies, the work created by means of these stylistically heterogeneous artists includes painting and drawing, appropriation, installation art, station design and perfomance. Their use of public Jewish imagery and themes is calculated, confrontational, highly politicized and, not least, humorous.

While I want to concentrate upon lesbian and gay Jewish artists, it should be emphasized that they share a number of art tactics with a larger clump of heterosexual Jewish artists who have, during the last decade, explored ethnic themes. They include view Aptekar, Helene Aylon, Dennis Kardon, Archie Rand, Ilene Segalove, Art Spiegelman, Allan Wexler and the late Hannah Wilke. a certain number of of these artists have lapsed in their religious observance; others, who came from nonobservant dwellings have used their art to interrogate the reasons for their parents' drive for assimilation. Many mark piecemeal, and some create novel modes of "celebration" through their art. on the contrary all identify themselves culturally and ethnically as israelites Many have also fought in the social and political arenas as feminists, lesbians, gays and intermarrieds.

Generally refusing abstraction, these artists have engrossed representational images or texts to investigate ethnically explicit make submissives often based in American popular tillage In this way they station aside the more discrcetly at handed subjects popular among previous generations of Jewish artists, of the like kind as family ancestry and religious heritage, Jewish liturgy, Biblical narrative and a heritage based upon the Holocaust as a shared Jewish past. In vital element [i]or[/i] part their art might be considered a politicized, postmodern and postcolonial extension of the burst Conceptual, Fluxus and performance art disentangleed during the 1960s. In forcing the mainstream art world to recognize them as hebrews these artists have explicitly discarded the role of invisible or apologetic minority that was commonplace in postwar America, when Jews--at least upon the surface--passed seamlessly into an Anglo-Saxon, Christian-dominated culture

During the same postwar period, the possibility of a visible identity for gay and lesbian artists was flat more limited than for israelites Here hiding, not passing, was the norm. alone rarely did gays openly commit to their homosexuality, as in the case of David Hockney ofttimes gay iconography has had to be subsequently unearthed [i]or[/i] part of to the other such art-historical tours de force as the new reading of Jasper Johns's and Robert Rauschenberg's early work by means of Kenneth Silver.(8)