Because of the car’s insertion in everyday life, its naturalized necessity produces specific spaces for sexual representations. With the rapid urban sprawl in many North American cities, the car not only becomes a mode of transportation, but also a sign of financial status and sexual identity. The car’s early inceptions as a family-oriented object and, consequently, into a sexual explorative entity for youths remains only within a heterosexual construct or at least limits space for queer inclusion. Even in its radical stages where the car was used to represent sexual liberty in opposition to 1950s North American idealization of the family, the car seems to cater to a heterosexual male convention. For example, in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the car is clearly legitimated for a heterosexual male and a gay man attempting to conquer this manly endeavour is always doomed to be impotent and proscribed:
The car belonged to a tall, thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas and wore dark glasses and drove with extreme care; the car was what Dean called a “fag Plymouth”; it had no pickup and no real power. “Effeminate car!” whispered Dean in my ear [….] he [Dean] had sufficiently conquered the owner of the Plymouth to take over the wheel without remonstrance, and now we really traveled.[1] [My italics]
This passage positions the gay man as pathetic and lacking skills to maneuver the car and, evidently, his sexuality because the heterosexual male is the only one that can control both the car and the homosexual. The car and the homosexual are both feminized, but the former is desired and the latter denied. In this passage, Kerouac’s character, as an early example, assumes that car culture is a space reserved only for heterosexual men to dominate the road.
Even if the queer culture is included into this custom, does a gay man want the same rights as his straight brother? Does this desire means a surrendering of oneself to mirror the oppressor? In this paper, I will be tackling the issue of heterosexist projections by establishing the inception of the car as a metonymy for the nuclear family in the 1950s American culture. Subsequently, I will complicate this historical inquiry by interposing the space of gay culture within the space of car culture. I will explore the representation or lack thereof of the gay body and the car in works such as those of Felix Gonzales-Torres and Dean Sameshima in contrast with Robert Bechtle’s hyperrealist paintings of the family and the car. I am going to question whether or not this very absence is either a resistance to the spectacle of the car or a symbol of a sublimated queer culture.
Family + car – homosexual = fraught beginnings
In North America, the car started its ascent in everyday life just after World War II as a sign of financial optimism. Congruently, this affiliation to the automobile parallels the expansion of suburbs and, accordingly, the highway as an umbilical cord to the city centre. In “Men, Women, and Urban Travel,” Martin Wachs outlines the car’s rise in relation to suburbanization:
after the war [WWII] Americans resumed the previous pattern of suburbanization with renewed commitment, as if to make up for lost time. Suburbs grew more rapidly than ever and autos became the nation’s primary mode of commuting as highway building and single-family housing subsidy programs reinforced our shared commitment to this pattern.[2]
The government, so as to implement a narrow family model, sanctions these subsidy programs for single-family housing: “In addition to road-building dollars, the U.S. government gave inadvertent dowries to cars in the form of guaranteed loans for suburban homes, starting under Roosevelt’s New Deal. This, too, wedded us more tightly to driving.”[3] Needless to say, the family is a heterosexual one. At that time it was man and woman bound in civil and/or holy matrimony with children (as an extension of this legally recognized relationship). Therefore, the homosexual/the illegitimate is cast out of this sphere earlier on as he/she is forced to find a different space to inhabit. The car becomes an appendage of the family; this naturalized entity becomes the emblem of an idealized existence. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani exemplifies this impulsion of the family archetype, on American television, as actively erasing other relationship models,
the definition of the family as an identity is, inherently, an exclusionary process, and the cultural product has no obligation whatsoever to coincide exactly with its natural referent. Thus the family identity produced in American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.[4]
I would incorporate the car as well into this equation as it maps out restricted gendered sites: where the husband drives to work in the city, while the wife tends her domestic duties in her suburban home (or at least uses her car to go shopping and pick up the kids and groceries). Wachs explains these specific heterosexual sites,
For a hundred years we have associated the city with male characteristics. Cities epitomize assertiveness through their economic activity, intellectual creativity, and centrality in world affairs. Simultaneously, we have associated the suburbs with woman’s sphere. We have thought of the suburbs as places of domesticity, passivity, repose, closeness to nature, and spiritual values.[5]
In other words, the space for queers is very limited at best. The identity of a gay man or a lesbian is constantly threatened by this sanctioned relationship and the spheres they occupy. The queer culture may exist as a parallel to this norm or live within these gendered sites. Can a homosexual ever exist without constantly being a periphery, a difference to the mainstream heterosexual?
Robert Becthle’s family portrait
In ’61 Pontiac (Fig. 1), 1968-1969, Robert Bechtle illustrates this bond between the car and the family. Bechtle is one of the founding members of hyperrealists or Photo-Realist painters in the United States during the 1960s.[6] This technique of appropriating photographs and reworking them through painterly techniques (with restraint) give Bechtle’s banal scenes an uncanny and hyperreal sensation. The image, in this case a family portrait derived from a photograph, becomes impartial because there is lack of painterly technique, the artist’s hand and acumen if you will. To reiterate, Karlstrom mentions, “The straightforward, photographic representation provides no guidance as to how we are to understand the picture as a work of art [….] In an underhand and somewhat unexpected way, the Photo-Realists demand active viewer participation.”[7] However, this almost nondescript and neutral manner of painting does not deny Bechtle’s position completely because there was a change in scale and a deliberation involved in choosing the right photograph; a photograph of his own family. In an interview with Bechtle, he was asked about this so-called neutrality in his work and he responded,
I think that the artist tends to remove himself from an editorializing position and lets things speak for themselves, but it’s never totally neutral—it can’t be. The choices that are made maybe tend to lead the viewer in a more subtle way [….] We can think about them in any way we want, rather than having the artist tell us how we are supposed to be responding.[8]
To recapitulate, Bechtle indicated that this technique might seem neutral so as to allow accessibility by the viewer, but there is a selective process implicated. Even with the assumption that the photo-realist style demands active participation and has the ability to have some form of neutrality, I argue that this style is completely the opposite because it depends on the existing language of the “real” to incite the viewer. Therefore, not only is the viewer active, but the image in the painting as well. But, is this exchange between the viewer and the painting equal?
The ’61 Pontiac (Fig. 1) may then have the masquerade of neutrality by depending on a banal photograph, but the painting refuses to be dismissed as a mere derivative. There is a reason why Bechtle chose to paint his family and the family car,
The automobile is a very important part of our life, probably the most important single object…especially here in California [….] the cars that I’ve included in paintings almost without exception have been American cars of recent but not totally new vintage, cars which obviously have been used as family cars and so on [….] there is a basically middle-class attitude towards the automobile as opposed to being interested in racing cars, sports cars, British cars, or anything which smacked too much of the exotic.[9]
I decipher this statement as his way of commenting on the banality of the everyday and the triteness of the family model as a product of suburbanization.
Fig. 1: Robert Bechtle, '61 Pontiac, 1968-1969. Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in.
This painting was created between 1968-1969, which is a time of cultural chaos in the American psyche: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968; Stonewall Riots in New York and Richard Nixon as president in 1969. Bechtle mentions that he only chose American cars, which by this point in the late 1960s, becomes a nostalgic artifact of what was once an American dream a decade ago with the promise of a good life: a family, a house, and a car. Speaking of nostalgia, movies like George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973) for example illustrates this remembering of the past, but with a foreboding recollection. At the end of the movie’s credits, for example, the main characters’ fates are futile. In ’61 Pontiac (Fig. 1) the car becomes an everyday sine qua non and without it the family foundation is in danger. In “Girls and the Getaway,” Carol Sanger positions the necessity of the car in the 1960s within a family structure (specifically the duties of a wife/mother):
Accordingly, by the 1960s, a second car had become less a status symbol than a necessity. Yet it was not the car itself but rather its use that provided status. Driving provided evidence of good parenting and mileage the measure of maternal contribution to familial welfare.[10]
Consequently, upon looking at the ’61 Pontiac (Fig. 1), the only thing grand about it is the scale, but the subject matter is anti-heroic and uninteresting. In the same way Lucas’ characters’ wasted destinies, this family is a cultural effect of the optimism of the 1950s. This melancholic tone in the painting is a conscious resonance of the middle-class’ constant upkeep to remain within the ideals of the family model. And because of the size of the painting, the viewer is asked to contemplate on this dismal and paltry life. This painting astutely challenges the family ideal and the specific gendered roles championed. Moreover, if this heterosexual space is distressed, what is a queer space like? Or what is this queer space like within a heteronormative world?
Queer Space
If the suburbs are primarily a space for a heterosexual family, the queer’s sense of home is displaced elsewhere. The queer community (‘gay village’) in most North American cities is clearly mapped out and labeled as a queer space. There is a notion of awareness not only amongst queers, but also to the straight world that this community exists. These spaces are a constant reminder of the presence and difference towards the heteronormative world. For example, in “Community and its Discontents,” Nikki Sullivan indicates this queer community as a possible form of resistance, “one could claim that this notion of community as a fracturing or undoing shares resonances with the way we have been thinking about queer as a deconstructive strategy that denaturalises heteronormative identities, relations, and institutions.”[11] However, this intentional visibility of space and of difference still exist within a heteronormative world and therefore segregate the gay community under a microscope. This community becomes a twofold security for both heterosexuals and queers. To a queer, this community becomes a relative refuge against a heteronormative world that only rejects her/his existence; and to heterosexists, this queer community becomes a tolerable space, just as long as this boundary is clearly laid out. This form of visibility conjures up the word ‘tolerance,’ which is a popular word used as a euphemism to say, ‘I can allow you to exist, but only in a safe distance.’ In “Imminent Domain,” Christopher Reed mentions this visibility: “I am willing to cede the constitutive potential of queer space, especially at a time when some spaces—gay neighborhoods and lesbian communes, for instance—signify queerness clearly enough to come under homophobic attack.”[12] But what is the solution if visibility is not the answer? Nikki Sullivan mentions that many theorists,
have suggested that community as it is commonly imagined is, first, not available to us since it does not and cannot exist, and, second, is an idealized image of a state we desire to inhabit or to posses precisely because we cannot inhabit or possess it.[13] [14]
The queer space seems to be doomed in its onset as it tries to create a separate, yet secluded space. Could this be a community that is equivalent to a glass “closet”? Being visually confrontational may only perpetuate this binary trope; therefore, rather than going to the periphery, why not attack the existing core?
Resisting through infiltration: Felix Gonzales-Torres’ billboards
This sense of community should not be taken as a permanent or static place, but something that is in flux. Hence, the queer community exists everywhere and not only in the ‘gay village.’ This fluidity then becomes a new form of resistance. Reed calls this ever-shifting state of resistance, as “queer space is space in the process of, literally, taking place, of claiming territory.”[15]
In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ billboard works, Untitled, 1991 (Fig. 2) and Untitled (Strange Bird), 1993 (Fig. 3), he used two existing modes in representing an image: Conceptual Art aesthetic and the billboard format. For example, in Untitled (1991) (Fig. 2), Gonzalez-Torres represented the indentation of bodies
Fig. 2: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991. Billboard, as installed for MOMA, NY.
on a white bed. This piece was placed at twenty-four sites within the public sphere of New York City. In addition, this project started just after the repercussions of the Robert Mapplethorpe affair[16] and now there is an absence of the gay body, leaving only a trace in Gonzalez-Torres’ work. In Untitled, 1991 (Fig. 2), the image is subtle and does not have an immediate visual confrontation because Gonzalez-Torres used a specific Conceptual aesthetic. And because of this intentional appropriation the image becomes more that just an untidy bed, but a proliferation of an invisible community, a quiet sedition. In “Within and Beyond,” Christopher Ho compares and contrasts Gonzalez-Torres’ aesthetic to that of Conceptual Art,
The difference between conceptual artists and Gonzales-Torres is that although both take the strategy of subversion within, the former turns the language of the institution against itself while the latter adds another layer to that language (that of allegory, the result of montage and appropriation), this unraveling the paradox between imbrication and masterly overview that emerges with Conceptual Art’s attempt to both involve itself and retain a critical voice.[17]
The ambiguity of the bed billboard is imperative because it welcomes the viewer into the image (into the bed) without concern on sexual preference. Even if the MOMA brochure that installed these billboards indicates a specific narrative of Gonzalez-Torres’ partner, Ross Laycock who died of AIDS (the same year this billboard was created), the viewer’s (driver and pedestrian alike) access and fantasy to this image is limitless. This image may not be as loud as Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochist photographs, but it is provocative nonetheless because of its openness: “The proliferation of the billboard opened up multiple spaces of private loss within the public sphere of New York City.”[18] In an interview, Gonzales-Torres presents a new strategical offense of claiming queer space by having a masquerade rather than making yourself vulnerable by being obviously visible,
go to a meeting and infiltrate and then once you are inside, try to have an effect. I want to be a spy, too. I do want to be the one who resembles something else [….] We have to restructure our strategies [….] I don’t want to be the enemy anymore. The enemy is too easy to dismiss and to attack.[19]
In Untitled (Strange Bird), 1993 (Fig. 3), we see this strategy sustained by placing
Fig. 3: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1993. Billboard, as installed for Travelling, MOCA, LA, 1994.
it in different locations in Los Angeles. In this photograph, the billboard is placed within a suburban setting. The image is stark: a black and white photograph of a solitary bird amid a dreary sky. The word ‘bird’ when translated in Spanish is called pájaro, which is also a derogatory term to point out a gay man.[20] Here Gonzalez-Torres reclaims that term and disseminates the image in Los Angeles: the epicenter of car culture and the birthplace of the nuclear family.
Even if Gonzales-Torres himself professed infiltrating within and not being obviously the enemy, are these indexical and alluded images enough because it does not read as obviously gay? His works have been criticized as assimilating to a formal aesthetics and more significantly to suppression and a denial of the gay body:
The absence that structures […] the bed billboard […] is not only that of the human figure but also that of any content that might arouse censorship. Such strategies of erasure may, however, court a different kind of danger, namely, that they mimic invisibility so well as to enact the very suppressions they seek to elude.[21]
This assumption is too simplistic and superficial in deciphering Gonzalez-Torres’ tactics. I do not think he emulated invisibility to conform to the heterosexist prohibition of what is decent art, put in place by conservatives. Instead, he employed the artistic method, popularized by the Situationist International, of détournement: where he faithfully borrowed popular aesthetics and terms and recontextualized them so as to turn the original meaning against itself.[22] These billboards are crucial in terms of not being read as intrinsically gay because it demands more reading from the viewer and questions their perceptions of what a gay image is supposed to be.
Dean Sameshima’s Wonderland series: an extension of Gonzalez-Torres’ infiltration of public space
In the Wonderland series, Dean Sameshima disavows the car and relies on the gay flâneur to explore and appropriate public spaces for sexual (private) use. Similar to Gonzalez-Torres’ tactic of infiltrating the public sphere with a private narrative, these works extends the indexical marks left by the gay body. Instead of taking pictures of the carnal act, Sameshima pragmatically photographs spaces for ‘gay cruising’. This term is very important as a form of subversion because it takes up the term of ‘car cruising,’ which is specific in the heterosexual context of the backseat sexual rendezvous. In the case of ‘gay cruising’ the car is absent and the way of navigating these spaces is by walking, often times in secluded areas of the city. In “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau designates walking as a political act of reworking within an administered urban space,
They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city [….] These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen [….] The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility [….] The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.[23]
For example, in Untitled (15 rooms, 1 locker room, 3 bathtubs, 2 leather slings 1995) (Fig. 4), Sameshima photographs what looks like a deserted building.
Fig. 4: Dean Sameshima, Untitled (15 rooms, 1 locker room, 3 bathtubs, 2 leather slings 1995), 1995-1996. C-Print, 6.5 x14 in
Like Gonzalez-Torres, Sameshima uses the aesthetic of conceptual photography with its document and straightforward style. The photograph itself does not give any indication of its gay content: only a boring building somewhere in sunny Los Angeles. The image is only activated by way of the descriptive title that enumerates what is inside the building, which connotes to sexual usage. Therefore, Untitled (15 rooms…) becomes subverted into a site of sexual pleasure and undermines the original use of this space. In “Dean Sameshima: Conceptualism with a Splash of Cranberry,” Martin Prinzhorn describes the lack of the gay body in this series,
These semi-legal spots [in Los Angeles], scattered around the city, are not indicated in any way, and only exist as points on a map in visitors’ memories. Sameshima had gone back there during the day when they were deserted, just locked doors and empty rooms [….] there is something perfectly natural, almost affirmative about non-existence in this case, something that yields no space for any legend.[24]
These spaces then become traces of gay happenings. Certeau mentions that a walker exists within an administered spatial order, but this order is not fixed because the walker activates the space. In other words, when looking at an aerial plan of a city, we see a very strict formula (a grid) of roads and sites, but the view (and hence the experience) walking in the city is very different because the walker can choose not to follow a given path, but creates their own (shortcuts).[25] [26] Certeau describes the walker’s function in three ways or what he calls “triple ‘enunciative’ function”: “it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian […]; it is a spatial acting-out of the place […]; and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements […].”[27] [28] In Untitled (Harbor City Recreational Park) (Fig. 5), we see Certeau’s “triple ‘enunciative’ function” illustrated.
Fig. 5: Dean Sameshima, Untitled (Harbor City Recreational Park), 1996/97. C-Print, 6.5 x 4 in
This image imitates document photographs of public space, as seen here (Fig. 6) in the County of Los Angeles: Department of Public Works website.[29]
Fig. 6: Harbor Park, Los Angeles, CA
Accordingly, this public photograph relates to Certeau’s aerial perspective. Even if it is not actually aerial, there is a distant perspective in comparison to the appropriated space (the ground perspective) of Untitled (Harbour…); in Sameshima’s image we see a more sentimental and intimate space. The gay walker subverts and perverts a public park, which in turn nominalizes a public space into a private gay boudoir. Two things are absent in this image (and in all of the photographs of Wonderland series): the gay body and the car. The gay figure and narrative are subtly suggested and the car is resisted because the tryst occurred outside (or inside a building), rather than in the backseat. Gonzalez-Torres and Sameshima intentionally capture the mise en scène without the actors, to allow the audience to affix their own desires or anxieties towards a queer space.
Roadblock/wedlock: indexical resistance or sign of defeat
The billboards and the Wonderland series’ absence of the gay body are disconcerting. As much as these works promote a sense of openness and subtlety to the gay narrative, I question whether this quiet strategy is enough. And the notion of invisibility incites the viewer to accept the faith of the gay community as always absent, a mere footprint. Is a ruffled bed, a picture of a building, and a subdued disavowal of car culture enough to elevate the viewer to respond and to take action? Moreover, who is this viewer that Gonzalez-Torres and Sameshima are provoking or pleasing? To a gay viewer it seems pessimistic to see that your options are very limited: either to accept invisibility by means of hiding around the bushes for sex or to simply eat the same wedding cake as everyone else. To a heterosexist, these works satisfy the denial of the gay body as always absent or at least conveniently cordoned off to specific queer sites.
The absence of the gay body is critical in deciphering how the gay community has responded. In “What is Political Art?”, Susan Buck-Morss signifies the use of the body as a source of medium: “[c]ontemporary artists have gone to great lengths to explore their own bodies as artwork […] they do introduce a topic that seems unavoidably present in any discussion of political art, and that is physical violence.”[30] In “Variations on Sex and Gender,” Judith Butler too exemplifies the body (specifically the queer body) as the source of social contention:
The body becomes a peculiar nexus of culture and choice, and “existing” one’s body becomes a personal way of taking up and reinterpreting received gender norms. To the extent that gender norms function under the aegis of social constraints, the reinterpretation of those norms through the proliferation and variation of corporeal styles becomes a very concrete and accessible way of politicizing personal life.[31]
Gay man’s body, specifically, are harassed literally and figuratively. Literally, gay-bashing is a violent form of homophobia that simply manifest “the construction of others as ‘unnatural’ or aberrant functions to reaffirm the identity of the one who cringes, complains, protests, or attacks the other, as ‘normal’ or ‘natural.’”[32] By being visible a queer person has to be constantly aware of her/his surroundings or is made aware of it through the heterosexist gaze. Figuratively, the gay man’s body is linked with AIDS as axiomatic to his sexual identity. Because of this condemnation of gay men’s sexuality, especially their promiscuous practice, the heterosexual hegemony tries to regulate our praxis through some type of bureaucratic means (as was the case with the Mapplethorpe affair). The root of all this administration (either through censorship or marriage) stems from the odium of the gay body. Leo Bersani in Homos points out this notion of the gay body regarding to gay absence,
For, our projects and our energies notwithstanding, others may think of themselves as watching us disappear. The heightened visibility conferred on gay men by AIDS is the visibility of imminent death, of a promised invisibility. Straight America can rest its gaze on us, let us do our thing over and over in the media, because what our attentive fellow citizens see is the pathos and impotence of a doomed species.[33]
Going back to Gonzalez-Torres’ interview about infiltration, could this strategy be then read as a form of acquiescence? Because at one hand, he was reworking a different method of attacking the oppressor, but on the other hand he may have fallen too short because he somehow satisfied the heterosexist’s desire for us to disappear or at least remain invisible. Also, for viewers who do not know Gonzalez-Torres’ sexuality, can the bed billboard or a picture of a bird be enough to infiltrate the heterosexist norm he wished to debunk? Even if this work was read in a gay context, by way of a museum brochure, what type of gay context is it? Possibly a gay conservatism, for example gay marriage (subsequently, monogamy), that is reworking the system, but is still somehow acknowledging heteronormative praxis of union between two people. Bechtle saw the force of marriage earlier on as hard to maintain, but the queer community still desires this wedlock. Moreover, Sameshima’s Wonderland series could also be read as a form of failed resistance because even if a space is queered it delimits the gay man to desire pleasure in incognito. The gay man seems to be either hiding his desire or flaunting it through the act of holy matrimony. Either way both these actions reveal a psyche of shame because we are either secretive or want to be legitimated as long as we comply with the same custom as heterosexists. In “Sex and Sensibility, or Sense and Sexuality,” Douglas Crimp articulates this conservative reformist action of the queer community:
those who call for a complete reconstruction of gay culture seem to forget that the social norms they consider responsible and civilized are the very norms that have always stigmatized and shunned us, and against which we had to find an alternative. Why should we adopt them now? Why should we abandon the life-affirming and pleasure-filled world that we have created, where we have learned genuine responsibility to one another, for a world that only grudgingly tolerates us? Whether or not it is important for gay people to gain the right to marry […] it is dangerous to assume that marriage would make us safe from AIDS.[34]
This passage is curious, on one hand Crimp acknowledges the direction that queer politics are heading in terms of seeing marriage as a setback, on the other hand, he only perpetuates the lack of options queer people face by championing ‘gay cruising’ and promiscuity (what he calls “life affirming and pleasure-filled world”) as the only way of being. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler has a better perspective on gay marriage:
Gay marriage obviously draws upon profound and abiding investments not only in the heterosexual couple per se but also in the question of what forms of relationship ought to be legitimated by the state [….] This means that the sexual field is circumscribed in such a way that sexuality is already thought of in terms of marriage and marriage is already thought of as the purchase on legitimacy.[35]
The key word in this statement is legitimacy because Butler questions the existing social construct of marriage and how this myth is endorsed towards the gay community and also to heterosexuals. Moreover, the queer becomes bound to this myth as she or he follows the same path laid out by her or his straight sibling. This desire to become legitimated by your oppressor can be translated in terms of the limits queers face in acquiring the same civil rights. Consequently, rather than revolt, the queer community has to reform their practices so as to get these same rights that were once denied to them. Butler points this desire by way of marriage,
marriage compels, at least logically, universal recognition: everyone must let you into the door of the hospital; everyone must honor your claim to grief; everyone will assume your natural rights to a child; everyone will regard your relationship as elevated into eternity.[36]
I am not against gay marriage per se or campaigning the promiscuous nature of ‘gay cruising’ because to do that only perpetuates the “us versus them” fiasco. Rather, I am questioning how our options are limited. In relation to the car, I argue that this object, which is interconnected with marriage and family, is a lucid model that creates a narrow space for queer culture to exist. In order for the queer community to wake up from this terrible slumber, they need to be aware of their subject position in relation to this binary. But the next question is, when she or he awakes, what world is in front of them?
Conclusion: checking your blind spot
We go back to the backseat of that “fag Plymouth,” in On the Road. If a queer is denied to drive and forced to wander, as is the case of the absent gay cruiser in Sameshima’s photographs, where does all this action end up? Works by Gonzalez-Torres and Sameshima only hints on the gay body, by mere trace, which assumes that the gay body will never appear again in fear of being suppressed. Or do they only appear by way of marriage, of family? Even the heterosexual world is having a hard time with the myth of the family, how now can a gay or lesbian couple endure such a final destination? We all know that what leads to it is not necessarily pretty (Fig. 1) and even the “pleasure-filled world” that Crimp idealizes is also dismal (Fig. 5). There does not seem to be a clear solution to this problem as we are still in the cusp of figuring out what is really best for the queer world. Maybe we need to go through the same mistakes as our heterosexual siblings in terms of marriage as an end all and be all of existence. Moreover, we need to question ‘gay cruising’ as an effect of how we are forced to seek sexual pleasure in these so-called “alternative” spaces. Marriage, family, and heterosexual manhood are all conflated into a tangible four-wheeled object. We cannot just queer this ideal; we must demolish it in order to start seeing a new direction. We need to bring the gay body back in some shape or form before it becomes just a residue.
Illustrations
Fig. 1: Robert Bechtle, ’61 Pontiac, 1968-1969.A 5
Fig. 2: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991.B 8
Fig. 3: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Strange Bird), 1993.C 10
Fig. 4: Dean Sameshima, Untitled (15 rooms, 1 locker room,
3 bathtubs, 2 leather slings 1995), 1995-1996.D 12
Fig. 5: Dean Sameshima, Untitled (Harbor City Recreational Park), 1996/97.E 14
Fig. 6: Harbor Park, Los Angeles, CA.F 14
A Paul J. Karlstrom, “Reflections on the Automobile in American Art,” Archives of American Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1980): 24.
B http://media.photobucket.com/image/felix%20gonzalez-torres%20billboard/jpthrasher/Picture547.png
C Robert Atkins, “Goodbye Lesbian/Gay History, Hello Queer Sensibility: Meditating on Curatorial Practice,” Art Journal 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 81.
D Dean Sameshima, “Wonderland,” Dean Sameshima http://deansameshima.com/ (accessed November 7, 2007).
F LA County, “Virtual Tour of Dominguez Watershed,” County of Los Angeles: Department of Public Works, http://ladpw.org/wmd/watershed/dc/photos/watershed.cfm (accessed November 15, 2007).
Citations
[1] Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 206-209.
[2] Martin Wachs, “Men, Women, and Urban Travel: The Persistence of Separate Spheres,” in The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life, ed. Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford with assistance of Susan Marie Wirka and Taina Marjatta Rikala (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 97.
[3] Katie Alvord, Divorce Your Car!: Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2000), 38.
[4] Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987): 203.
[5] Wachs, “Men, Women, and Urban Travel,” 98.
[6] Paul J. Karlstrom, “Reflections on the Automobile in American Art,” Archives of American Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1980): 20.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Robert Bechtle and Paul J. Karlstrom, “An Interview with Robert Bechtle,” Archives of American Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1980): 16.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Carol Sanger, “Girls and the Getaway Cars: Cars, Culture, and the Predicament of Gendered Space,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144, no. 2 (December 1995): 719.
[11] Nikki Sullivan, “Community and its Discontents,” in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 148.
[12] Christopher Reed, “Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment,” Art Journal 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 64.
[13] Sullivan, “Community and its Discontents,” 143.
[14] Sullivan mainly quotes Zygmunt Bauman’s Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World.
[15] Reed, “Imminent Domain,” 64.
[16] This event started to escalate when Mapplethorpe’s retrospective, The Perfect Moment, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art was canceled on 13 June 1989 due to pressures from Republican politicians and other conservative and Christian groups led primarily by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.
[17] Christopher Ho, “Within and Beyond: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s ‘Crowd’” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23, no. 1 (January 2001): 8.
[18] Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 267.
[19] Robert Storr, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” interview, ArtPress (Jan. 1995), http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixInterv.html (accessed November 7, 2007).
[20] This term is specific to the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
[21] Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 268.
[22] Guy Debord, “Writings from the Situationist International,” in Art in Theory 1900 – 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 704-705.
[23] Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 93.
[24] Martin Prinzhorn, “Conceptualism with a Splash of Cranberry”, Camera Austria 71 (2000): 27.
[25] Certeau calls the aerial perspective as belonging to the voyeur, while the ground perspective belonging to the walker.
[26] Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 92-97.
[27] Ibid., 97-98.
[28] Certeau alludes to Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of a social system that is defined in terms of language: la langue in relation to the grid pattern of the city and la parôle in relation to the walker.
[29] LA County, “Virtual Tour of Dominguez Watershed,” County of Los Angeles: Department of Public Works, http://ladpw.org/wmd/watershed/dc/photos/watershed.cfm (accessed November 15, 2007).
[30] Susan Buck-Morss, “What is Political Art?” in Insite97: Private Time in Public Space (San Diego: InSite, 1997), 24.
[31] Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault,” in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sarah Salih with Judith Butler (Malden, Ma.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 28-29.
[32] Nikki Sullivan, “Performance, Performativity, Parody, and Politics,” in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York Press, 2003), 84.
[33] Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 21.
[34] Douglas Crimp, “Sex and Sensibility, or Sense and Sexuality,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 297-298.
[35] Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 105-107.
[36] Ibid., 111.
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