Tag Archives: I have too many thoughts and not enough red string

Conversation starter, feb 12: Drum-taps

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IN 1996, the year Felix Gonzalez-Torres died, I made a version of his “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–90, by hanging two identical battery-operated clocks side by side on my living-room wall. I had always admired his work, and, like friends who had foil-wrapped candies sitting on their bookshelves or a sheet of paper from one his stacks pinned to their walls, I too wanted to live with a Felix. –Glenn Ligon, “My Felix”

When I first read My Felix, I already had my own Felix hanging for a year and a half. Much of Felix’s work relies on ready-made objects like clocks, or endlessly replenishable piles of materials (candies, prints, papers, etc.) which viewers are encouraged to take home with them, as they interact with his work. Whether we take candy from an art gallery, or hang our own clocks just-so, anyone can have their own Felix—this rides the line between democratic access and entitlement. Felix is all of ours, but Ligon’s Felix is his—my Felix is mine.

When we first discussed a distinction between Walt Whitman and “my Whitman / our Whitman / each’s-own Whitman,” I thought of this essay. Not only because the language is so similar, but because Felix and Walt have instilled the same instinct in those who respond to their work: to claim and construct a personal relationship, beyond the work, with the artist as a force.

Working through the height of the AIDS crisis, and himself HIV positive, Felix’s work is both sharply political and deeply personal. His work encompasses sculpture, printmaking, public installation, viewer participation… it can be hard to tell where any specific Felix piece starts or ends. For example, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a work of art that consists of “just” a pile of candy placed on the floor. The work is specifically noted as having an “ideal weight” of 175 pounds, the weight of Felix’s partner, Ross Laycock, at the time of his own HIV diagnosis. Viewers are encouraged to take a piece of the candy, which represents the weight loss Ross experienced due to AIDS complications, while making literal the metaphor of the “sweet taste he would leave in your mouth” after meeting him. Does the “artwork” start with the gallery purchasing the candy? Putting it into the pile? With a viewer taking a piece? Does the work end when the candy is eaten or thrown away? Is each wrapper in a landfill still part of the work?

In 2010, Ross was displayed at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide/Seek, along alongside an 1891 portrait of Walt Whitman by Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins.

In tribute to the response by volunteers and caregivers to the needs of people living with HIV and AIDS in DC, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities collaborated to engrave an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s poem “The Dresser” on the north granite circular entrance to the Dupont Circle Metrorail station. –WMATA Art in Transit, 2007

The exclusion of the last two lines of Wound-dresser by WMATA in its Dupont Circle installation is widely considered to be an overt act of queer erasure. 

…Ross 1983 (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.) 1865 Dupont Circle Metro Station 2007… “Untitled” 1989, Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Untitled, 1989 is the first in a series of text-based works by Felix. Described as portraits, the works were commissioned by collectors or institutions, with “short-phrase year-date” lists of events and objects, ranging in scale from global political moments to indecipherable personal sentiments. These works are mutable; collectors and curators are given the power to change the whole text of the work, adding and removing new dates and phrases at their own discretion with each new installation. For the retrospective Always to Return at Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, curators Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco chose to include the final two lines of Wound-dresser, to (even if temporarily) complete the poem for DC’s public.

In another room of the exhibition, (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) and the Eakins portrait of Whitman were reunited, alongside another work by Felix: Untitled (Leaves of Grass), a string of lights.

Part of my reading to prepare for this conversation starter was supposed to be Michael Moon’s paper Memorial Rags. This work seems to have kicked off an entire sub-genre of Whitman criticism which reframes Drum-taps through perspectives of the AIDS crisis. I first saw it referenced in Russell Ferguson’s Out There: Marginalization and contemporary cultures,a book I got only for a series of photo essays by Felix. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to source the full Moon paper in time for this post. It’s obvious, though, that the construction of Walt Whitman as a forefather in both the stylistic development of “an American art” and as a figure in “an American queer canon” would suggest evidence of a lineage to follow him. Who gets to follow Walt? So much of his poetry demands that we follow him, that the reader of our time is as present as the reader of his time. As Whitman demands, we touch him through his books, Felix demands we take him, taste him through his:

People don’t realize how strange it is when you make your work, and you put it out to be seen and say, simply, “take me.” –Felix Gonzalez-Torres as quoted in his 1995 monograph by Nancy Spector

Whitman’s depiction of the Civil War throughout drum taps focuses on small interpersonal relationships, moments shared between him and soldiers, both living and dead. Out There summarizes Memorial Rags’s analysis of grief thusly: “Rather than looking beyond [Freud’s] ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ for other possibilities—Moon proposes fetishism, but a fetishism rescued from Freud’s 1927 account by making it a conscious means of extending our homoerotic relations, even with the dead…” Both Felix and Walt demand that we engage with their bodies in some physical way, even after their death. Felix does this through his candy portraits, Walt stresses this at the end of Song of Myself. 

To boil this down into more specific discussion questions (although I would also love to talk about this big nebula of connection between Felix and Walt, especially site-specific to DC):

  1. How does the construction of Whitman as a canonical/spiritual/mythological object affect the construction of a queer lineage or tradition in American art?
  2. How does homoerotic relation in Drum-taps color Whitman’s own beliefs around death, and the connections fraternal and/or erotic made at the brink of or across opposite sides of death?
  3. What does it mean to construct a “my Felix”, or a “my Walt”? Is artist-as-force or artist-as-ghost a metaphor? A physical interaction? A spiritual event? Especially for those of us who recreated Whitman’s voice for response 1, how did you view the process of channeling Whitman?

And this threat of what’s call’s hell is little or nothing to me,
and the lure of what’s called heaven is little or nothing to me;
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge                                                                            you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.
–As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado, Walt Whitman

although they were still planning on going to that exotic paradise, it was hard to forget about those images of the night before: all those bodies left by the death squads.
–Fetishism, Felix Gonzalez Torres

From “A Sunset” by Robert Hass (1941-)

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Here’s another hard right turn. Think
Of how Walt Whitman loved this country,
Loved the President who died. Imagined
Himself as a hand brushing a fly from the brow
Of a sleeping child. In the dark
I thought of a radiant ordinariness
That burned, that burned and burned.

Luca’s CS for February 5th

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So sorry I’m posting these so late, I was planning to write them yesterday but then I saw Iron Lung and it was all I could think about for the rest of the day…. anyway. Fun fact – did you know the acorus calamus plant, which this collection of poems is named for, contains psychoactive chemicals? Now you do! I wonder if Walt did…

Throughout these poems, Walt seems to be exploring a number of underlying themes. Something I picked up immediately in “Scented Herbage of My Breast” is the body-soul-nature collective we briefly talked about in class today, or rather the blurring of lines between each. What exactly are the plants Whitman is writing about here? What do they represent? They’re linked to his body, particularly his heart, in the title of the poem itself and in lines like “…O blossoms of my blood! I permit you to tell in your own way of the heart that is under you” (line 7). The body as nature, and nature as the body. “Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone” repeats this theme, but on a universal rather than personal scale – “Roots and leaves themselves alone are these/Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods and pond-side/Breast-sorrel and pinks of love, fingers that wind around tighter than vines” (lines 1 – 3). Here, the language used to describe the plants in line 3 clearly associates them with the body, but rather than being part of “the men and women,” they are brought to the people.

In “Scented Herbage of My Breast,” these plants are also connected to both cyclical renewal – “Every year you shall bloom again…” (line 5) – and death – “…you make me think of death,/Death is beautiful from you…” (lines 8 – 9).

Speaking of death, the way Whitman talks about it in these poems is really interesting. In “Scented Herbage of My Breast, the lines “…it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death” (line 10) and “Through me shall the words be said to make death exhilarating” (line 25). The Great Poet speaks not only for America, nature, and whatever other conventions we’ve come to expect from Whitman – here, he explicitly establishes himself as speaking for death. Again I wonder, what exactly is this death? Is it literal, or representative of something more complex? The unique kind of love Calamus centers on has a surprising amount to do with this mysterious death. In “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” Whitman says that “thus touching you [a lover, presumably] would I silently sleep and be carried eternally” (line 26). Silently sleeping eternally certainly sounds like death, but what kind of death is inspired by the touch of a lover, and why? There are a couple other unusual death-related things I noticed throughout these poems but they may be more of a stretch, so I’ll leave them out of this particular post.

I could probably go on a lot longer about Calamus, but for now I’ll just briefly mention a few other repeated themes I noticed in case you want more to discuss or think about:

  • Society, and what exists outside of it – particularly in the context of the homosocial (?) love these poems are about
  • In a related vein, society/heteronormativity as a false reality or illusion, versus homosocial love as the true or transcendent reality (this one really interests me but I can’t quite wrap my head around it enough to write a constructive paragraph about it)
  • American identity and the so-called “robust love”
  • The juxtaposition of homosocial-ity and heteronormativity