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I love to answer these and commit to an answer before I reveal the course discussion, so here goes again:

. While reading, you should ask yourself:

·        What does Butt claim about gender and sexuality in this essay?

·        How does he characterise the sexuality of Rivers?

·        How does he find this sensibility in Rivers’s artworks?

·        What does this suggest about gendered identity?

Note: What Did I Do? is the title of Rivers’s autobiography from 1992

1.      I find this essay somewhat confusing and I would not wish to say that Butt commits to straightforward and univocal characterisations of either gender or sexuality. He appears to wish to characterise a socio-culturally determined set of subject positions and a discourse associated with those positions that in 1940s and 50s USA characterised a marginalised community and how those positions became equated with a statement of an artist’s wish to confront and challenge the norms of society. In a sense they seem to offer merely a means of characterising art and artist as denying any solidity to the objects it reproduces and produces and as, therefore both object and subject, understood both in terms of the ‘object’ represented and the subjects who both respond to culture through remaking its imagery.

Yet it is not so simple, since, Rivers also uses those subject to both play and enact sexual practices that those subject positions enable in a minority and oppressed community: the sexualisation of the male body as object of desire and appropriation, the valorisation of the penis and the deconstruction of masculine heterosexual hegemony over the realm of desire.

Problematically, the discourse of gay subjectivity already employs subject positions which both critique but also maintain the validity of binary gender discriminations, which can be experienced as oppressive by lesbians, some gay males and some women. Thus the issue of ‘gay subjectivity’ is far from simple. The ‘self-othering game’ (p. 89) may enact otherness in complex interacting forms that may undermine them. However, in as much as it remains play or game, it refuses to challenge essentialist notions of subjectivity that may be the real root of contradiction in subjects seen by themselves and others. Butt seems want to point out that Rivers preserves essentialist positions ('real' heterosexuals act out as gay and vice versa). The same might be said of the use of feminine subject positions – not only in painting but the art of Tennessee Williams – which retain some of non-playful power dynamics which contradistinguish binary power distictions like male & female.

I may not have read carefully enough but I am unsure where Butt stands (or sits to carry on the camp play) on this issue.

2.      Butt characterises Rivers as playing gay but also benefitting from that play by the appropriation of sexual pleasure possible when the sexual subject which is the other is hardened into sex object. He could be clearer about this if that is what he means. Tennessee Williams, for instance, shows that the appropriation of the sexual object through performance is both dangerous and a matter of real power – in Both Streetcar Named Desire and, my favourite, Suddenly Last Summer. He also suggests that Rivers uses sexuality and sexual pose as a means of characterising the challenge to conventional meaning posed by art and the artist. Images no longer mean what the prevailing power structures in society want them to mean and are therefore ‘queered’ by the legitimation of counter-cultural meanings.

3.      I am not sure that we are really looking for a reflection or mimetic representation of River’s own sexuality in these paintings but rather a performance of traditional subjects – both in the act of the painting and the representation of these subjects’ action. I’m quite happy to take on the reading Butt gives to the painting of the figure of Washington in the boat (see above). The emphasis on the stark outline of the naked leg and the phallus is taken as an enactment of painterly emphasis but also as an action in Washington that offers his sexualised body for some sort of appropriation.

However, I can’t stop where Butt does at camp fun. There is an abstraction in the use of white here (and potentially in the brushwork mentioned but I can’t see that) that does other than point out the joke of Washington’s ‘burgeoning basket’. Looked at in the context of the whole picture, that white patch is recalled in figure of Washington before embarkation (below) for instance as well as other abstractly white motifs. There is something of glory in Washington’s horse that defies outlined drawing. Now, this might be merely making an equivalence between stallion between the legs as phallus – the white makes his neck look like a phallic projection and it, as in the Washington in the boat, reflected by the horse’s strong white and painterly legs.

But return to the whole painting and we see a display of such stark whites throughout, not least in the characterisation of the water. These whites may or may not have meaning but they cannot be confined to a camp joke. I may therefore be wanting to see ‘more’ in the picture than a camp joke. I agree that in the 1950s camp and gay life seemed to heterosexual men to embody excess (p. 84) but the ‘excess’ in the white of this picture cannot be reduced to such stereotypical characterisations. It may have multiple meanings, not least in re-characterising light and notions of illumination and reflection. In a sense, it stops Washington being the iconic focus of the picture, replacing that figure by homage to spaces and spatial relations in time and space. At least I think it does.

4.      What Rivers does to David’s Napoleon (already quite a camp figure) is to reflect him, almost recessively in male shapes, which are beginning to lose their iconic ‘masculinity’ and are thus ‘queered’. I love how Napoleon’s constraining sleeve is mirrored in the subject/object to his left (our right). Here male bodies are subjected to cubist fragmentation. The sleeve can look like the camp red hat of a miniature figure with red epaulettes.  The men turned round, eventually running into each other. The link of military values to latent male homosexual bonding had already been made by Freud (in relation to both French and German militarism.  And Rivers appears here not only to allow male figures to reproduce each other but, in a cubist fashion, undress them, with suggestive emphasis on groin areas. I wonder if that too comments on neo-classical traditions in art, wherein, David, for instance, would first draw his figures unclothed in order to allow what parallel he then attaches to hang appropriately. Was David too willing to employ the ‘myth’ of Napoleon as well-hung man? Here again a joke has the capacity to undermine traditional values – of man as fighter, leader and so on. Hence I think, Rivers may be employing gay subjectivity as a subversive potential, but I can go no further and I’ll look at the discussion after mounting this reading.

All the best

Steve