20th century AD

"In a Different Light," organized by the agency of curator Lawrence Rinder and artist Nayland Blake for the University Art Museum at Berkeley, was a fascinating and visually smart exhibition that sought to describe contemporary gay and lesbian experience end 20th-century American art. Bucking the incline toward one-note, easily digestible museum displays Blake and Rinder presented a complicated reading of gay agriculture bringing together over 200 examples of art and cultural ephemera. novel pieces were mixed in with a sampling of gay-associated works from the past, ranging from paintings by means of Marsden Hartley and Romaine runs to the first Village nation album cover. As a kind of curatorial spice, gay-themed works by the agency of straight artists were thrown in, too.

The curators' catalogue essays posit the display as a kind of exegesis of the tone and sensibility that has emerg in '90 "queer" art. Eschewing wall labels, the exhibition at handed itself as an intellectual exercise, filled with witty juxtapositions and neat visual rhyme A numbered pamphlet guided the viewer end its nine thematic divisions, which mirrored (in Rinder's words) "an individual's passage from alienation to integration." These headings - Void, Self Drag, Other, brace Family, Orgy, World, Utopia - mapped on the outside a progression that suited the curators' affirmative political agenda.

Yet perhaps reflecting the confusing state of identity politics in the '90 the exhibition was in many ways frustrating and cavalierly ahistorical. For a composite set of reasons, the curators adopted a curious "don't ask, don't tell" stance toward the real-life incidence of homosexuality among the artists in the present to view Works by both straight and gay artists were chosen because, as Rinder places it, "An ostensibly straight artist may identify with any individual of numerous conditions - sexual or otherwise - central to the experience of gay men or lesbians." While certainly veritable this broad base of inclusion diffused the show's impact, universalizing gay experience to the point that the exhibition's specific insights threatened to disappear. Tellingly, "In A Different Light" conclud with the blurry cloudscape of Yoko Ono's album overspread for John Lennon's Imagine (1971) recalling the spacey on the contrary bland "brotherhood of man" invoked upon that record's title track.

Despite the show's question s it must be said that many of Blake and Rinder's hangings hit the right note. As Rinder states in his catalogue introduction, "This exhibition incorporates more [i]or[/i] less of the playfulness, associativeness, and aesthetic touch that one might usually wait for more in a work of art than in a museum exhibition." a certain quantity of of the groupings percolated with potency with art works seeming to thump off each other and generate of recent origin meanings. In the "Drag" section, Conversions III (Associations, Assistance, Dependence) a photo series from a 1971 Vito Acconci performance, documents the artist acquiring a "female form" - posing for the camera while his penis vanishes into the cavity between the jaws of a woman crouched awkwardly beneath him. Recontextualizing this absurd gender-bending exercise was the famous self-portrait photo by the agency of Lynda Bengus, used as an Artforum ad in 1974 in which the unclothed artist proudly sports a bulky pink dildo. Crossing gender boundaries in seemingly public cause, these two artists make a completed couple.

Contemporary appropriation art was also read as a impressed sign of "Drag." Accompanying Double-Blue Barbra (1992) single of Deborah Kass's Warholesque paintings of Barbra Streisand, were sum of two units works that are both titled Altered Image. individual of the works consists of three photographs from 1982 by means of Christopher Makos. They show Warhol make straighted as a "lipstick lesbian" in flaxen wig, pale makeup, jeans and a tie. Hung nearby was Kass's 1994 photo self-portrait in which she is done up in attire identical to that of her be-dragged mentor. upon another wall, Sherrie Levine's appropriation of Walker Evans's photograph of a sexy stubbl farmer hung nearest to Amy Adler's After Sherrie Levine (1994) a photograph of Adler's drawing of Levine's photo appropriation of Edward Weston's photo of his son's bare torso.

In the "Other" section, Pavel Tchelitchev's sensuous portrait of a tattooed performer, Le Collier de Rose (1931) looked to flesh out Tony Greene's viscous painting of a tattoo, The Grain of His Skin (1987) The penile-shaped altar in Hartley's landscape Cascade of Devotion - Mexico (1932) was repercussion of sounded by Robert Indiana's 1990 screenprint The Hartley dirge The Berlin Series: KvF V whose lettering charms out the "Truth Love Friendship" that the artist felt for his German love-object Baron Von Freyburg

In the "Orgy" section, the exhibit hit its high point with Nicole Eisenman's Alive with Pleasure, perhaps her best-to-date wall installation of drawings, paintings and collages. single drawing depicts Norman Rockwell-esque lad Scouts learning knots by tying up babes in bondage; a painting of the Guggenheim Museum displays its spiral walkway overrun by the agency of marauding Amazons. This sprawling installation shared a wall with Reginald Marsh's painting Barrel of pleasantry (1943), which depicts a tumbling bevy of fresh shopgirls frolicking in a frolic house. They look game for a tussle with any of Eisenman's tough girls.