Art Review : Shining a ‘Different Light’ on Both Artist and Viewer

These days, museum exhibitions about identity are a dime a dozen. Whether the multicultural focus is on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or some combination, permutation or alternative thereof, identity shows are usually enough to bore you silly.

“In a Different Light,” a show considering the resonance of gay and lesbian experience in 20th-Century American art, which opened recently at the University Art Museum here, is a definitive exception that proves the glum rule. For rather than merely being about queer sensibility, this show is a convincing example of it. Your perception of works of art actually changes.

This clever, curatorially adept presentation is not concerned with assembling masterworks as putative role models. Everything from genius to junkiness will be encountered among some 200 objects by more than 100 artists, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, collages, prints, broadsheets, album covers and more.

The artists’ conceptual approaches are also diverse. Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) painted an ancient Meso-American pyramid as an altar on which to worship a flaming phallus. Deborah Kass remade Andy Warhol’s implicitly Catholic icons, wittily transforming multiple images of Barbra Streisand into a celebratory, Jewish lesbian’s pin-up queen.

By drawing a mustache on a reproduction of the “Mona Lisa,” Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) blurred the strict separation of the sexes, as well as the traditional identity of a work of art. David Tudor’s reconstruction of the score for John Cage’s famous “4 min., 33 sec.”--the duration of a completely silent piano concerto--becomes a poignant eulogy for the late artist and composer, and for our tragic age of AIDS.

The exhibition works because its co-organizers, artist Nayland Blake and UAM curator Lawrence Rinder, made the wise decision not to try to catalogue what “gay art” has looked like in the United States. That stultifying type of query sends many identity shows to their deserving doom.

To catalogue something termed “gay art” would require deciding, in advance, what the parameters of gay identity might be. Those conditions would then have to be reflected in works of art.

But what about, say, Jasper Johns’ popular 1964 lithograph “Ale Cans,” which atmospherically depicts his famous bronze sculpture of a pair of ordinary cans of Ballantine’s? The artist is gay, but beer cans don’t describe a recognizable aspect of gay identity. Should the print be included in a roster of gay art?

The curators decided to ask a more potent question than “What does gay art look like?” They inquired, in Blake’s words, “What do queer artists do?” Homosexual culture is thus not being considered as reflective of an essence that can be pinned down, labeled and displayed, like a butterfly on a velvet cushion.

Or, for that matter, like a stereotype enforced by thought-police, whose political agents lurk on both the right and the left. Instead, gay culture is rightly considered as a human existence with a range of possibilities, a range as unlimited as the number of people who create it.

Now, that ‘s gay liberation.

One of the curators’ smartest decisions was to include artists who are not gay. Then they refrained from identifying the sexuality of individual participants. (Notice that gay , queer or homosexual isn’t used in the show’s title, either.) Diane Arbus, Louise Bourgeois, Scott Burton, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Ree Morton, Man Ray, Andy Warhol--here, everyone has the capacity to be queer, to see things in a different light, including the audience.

In the exhibition, 20th-Century gay and lesbian artists are socially invisible the way they are in the world, an invisibility that distinguishes them from many other minorities. Meanwhile, straight artists are recognized as being multidimensional too, since all people, regardless of their sexuality, have thoughts and desires typically ascribed to homosexuals.

After all, camp sensibility may be a modern homosexual norm, but it’s not an exclusive prerogative. Just ask “High-Heel Neil” Cargile, a rich, heterosexual, staunchly conservative, miniskirt-wearing Republican cross-dresser, recently profiled in the New Yorker.

With gay identity posed by the show as a living, open-ended question, rather than a deadened, proscribed answer, you find yourself looking at art in ways you otherwise wouldn’t. The gritty urban painting by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) of busty young women wildly dancing in flirty skirts no longer looks like the wish-fulfillment of a heterosexual male’s cherished fantasy; it becomes, instead, an image of Saturday night at a raucous girl-bar.

You might also laugh out loud spontaneously when you round a corner and come upon--yes, Jasper Johns’ “Ale Cans.” The standard story is that Johns made the illusionistic, painted bronze sculpture on which he based the print in response to a jest that his dealer, Leo Castelli, could sell anything as art--even a beer can.

In a different light, however, this picture of two nearly identical male-identified objects suddenly looks to be a sly metaphor describing a queer couple. Maybe that explains why Johns made two cans, rather than the one that would have sufficed for the Castelli anecdote.

Did Johns intend his “Ale Cans” to be a sublimated queer couple? It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that the exhibition effortlessly coaxes the audience into seeing this worldly artifact in an unexpectedly gay way.

The show is structured like a Postmodern work of art (having an artist as co-curator has been plainly pivotal to how it operates). Existing art has undergone an illuminating process of appropriation: Claes Oldenburg’s 1969 “Soft Drum Set,” a sculpture paradoxically sewn from the kind of canvas usually reserved for paintings, now seems to be every bit as cross-gendered as Romaine Brooks’ 1923 oil portrait “Peter, a Young English Girl.” A promiscuity of meaning mingles with a bracing rigor of purpose.

“In a Different Light” succeeds where most identity shows fail, because polemics have been traded in for poetics. Polemics are useful, and some works on view do exhort and argue persuasively. Finally, though, this is one identity show that puts its faith squarely in the power of art--right where it belongs.

* University Art Museum, UC Berkeley, 2626 Bancroft Way, (510) 642-0808, through April 9. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.