Elementary,
My Dear

Ross Watson and
Queer Gloss/es

Dean Kiley

 

Ross Watson

Ross Watson, 1996
Reproduced by kind permission of Outrage

All art(/)text aspires to the condition of Art+Text

John Ruskin & Adrian Martin (sort of)



The image is re-invested with an esoteric ceremony. It laments a necessary admission of diminishment by reiteration in the mnemonic of cultural descent, a pedigree which mourns its provenance, but to which one may be resigned through a poetics of echo.

‘Breaking Light’, Edward Colless

OK. Let’s do some ratio rationalisation. Of the A is to B as C is to D kind. The per-version of the first quote is to its original as the second quotation is to the first as this article is to both epigraphs as The Essay is to the auto-historiographic citational imperative as this-text is to its art-subject as Watson’s Roberts-pietà portrait [refer figure above]1 is to its representational provenance (authority, authenticity-verification, legitimisation, symbolic referents, narrative-actantial siting, art-historical placement, technical credentialling).
  It’s not enough, nor - catalogue tonnage to the contrary - is it theoretically defensible to barcode-scan this site-specific and inextricably-contextual matrix of diacritical relations as appropriation or postmodern pastiche or camp or Popism (our Paul Taylor, who art in heaven, hollowed be thy name), however re- pseudo- neo- trans- or post-. Conflation inflation. Queer Theory, theorising and, more feasibly, readings, can at least begin the entrepreneurial project of disarticulating such typological escape clauses: process from form, performativity from theatricalisation, stylistics from stylisation, interpretation from endorsement, mode of address from sensibility. We need a focussed deSontagification of what a queer, queered, queer-able or queering art praxis could be.
If queer appropriative art is a con- (context, convention, conventionality), then a nexus at which the art is recontextualised and re-embedded in gay/queer con-texts (half-advertorial, half-analysis, wholly infrastructural) would offer maximal potential for theorising. So I want here to examine what happens when Watson’s work is transferred (translated, transformed) to the pages of OutRage, a glossy general-readership national gay magazine. Specifically, I want to analyse the multiple enframing procedures by which both the artist’s biomythography and the work’s narrativity become the completing (Derridean supplementary) other-two dimensions, and at the hermeneutic triage that filters readings down to the elementary via an unqueer gloss (patina and sketch-interpretation) and a brittle, transparent camp enamel. Watson’s hypermannerist play can thus, at one extreme, turn into (be snap-frozen into) a community-mascot hardmuscle phwaarghhh-lookit-that reflex, and at the other be fetishised (snap-shot photorealism) as subcultural Barthesian mythologies, with a stop-over at play-doh surrealism on the way.
  With all that intertextuality at play, you’d expect at least a line or two of the con-text to resonate with the eminently-paraphrasable and irritatingly ubiquitous Judith Butler’s work on work-cite performativity and the collaborative (collusive) fabrication of original and good copy (in all senses, from simulacra, simulation and dissimulation2 to tabloid-text) with no original. Only the barest hint - from a sort of Foucaultised constructivist idea - emerges. All that hard work by Paul Taylor, Judy Annear, Adrian Martin and Paul Foss,3 doing vanilla-Derrida deconstructions of the mimetic original/copy ratio logics ( A+:B-, A-:B-, A+B, A=B, A/B=C) during the eighties comes to nought. Their critiques of appropriation as illustration, their characterisation of quotation as an agglutination of surfaces, their emphasis on the artificial transformations of the original referent by displacement and recontextualisation, their narrativisation of the process as piratical transgression . . . none of it impacts here, though it all applies. But let’s tighten the critical aperture and focus more directly (yes, the OutRage piece plays with this set of photographic metaphors too) on the Roberts-pietà image and its con- textualisation.
  Marcus O’Donnell characterises the painting as a kitsch near-miss and sentimental near-hit, disingenuously activating PLWA narratives (without referencing the other well-known queer pietà of the Mother Inferior from Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence cradling a presumptively HIV-positive emaciated body, showcased at the 1994 Don’t leave me this way: art in the age of AIDS exhibition) and invoking Watson’s concurring with the AIDS reference to quarantine alternative interpretations. This is one of several appeals to Watson’s biomythography (biography, myth, mythology, CV, praxis historiography, etc.), a procedure which is overtly credentialling, a hermeneutic imprimatur, a marketing testimonial, a sales pitch and an aspirational romance-glamour gloss placing Watson and Roberts in the same flashbulb-studded firmament. By these means the uncritical de-theorised art-text motivates its defusion into diffusion by changing camps from queer to Pop, from performative rhetorics of discursive (politicised) value to transformational-generative grammars of aesthetic (commercialised) objects.
  So queer-identified camp quotationality moves from a figural gesture out towards an other figure/text elsewhere, to the figure of an original or preceding or authorising otherness elsewhere to the figure of an always-already evacuated irrecuperable originality (all senses), a faux-masochistic-nihilistic nostalgia for what never existed anyway. The basic original-copy working model of the relationship between a ‘quote’ and its referent is in no way disturbed by such a conceptualisation: no extrapolation to other theorisable metaphors like the WWW functions of hypertextuality. Another whole analytic axis is lost due to O’Donnell’s insistence upon delimiting allusion to specific reference, when in addition to a determinate origin, the Roberts-pietà cites art-history milieux, period/s, style/s and poetics. By the same token (and I mean token), it is gestural, but less Brechtian (Mother) or High Renaissance (madonna) than Vogue (Madonna).
The determined reductiveness of the con-text flattens out any Hutcheonesque4 parodic potentialities into the standard/ised mainstreamlined evacuated undifferentiated frangible figuration of camp,5 capitulating to the elision or occlusion or confusion between appropriation, travesty, parody, quotation, citation, allusion homage, pastiche, bricolage, cross-referencing and intertextuality the way Benjamin Buchloh did for Pop and Craig Owens didn’t for the Metro Pictures Collection. Given the interpretive and narrative productivity of the painting, the avoidance of a queer or queered reading6 is remarkable. O’Donnell points out the absurd collision of sports icon with renaissance image, the warmly-coloured texturality of paint with the precision of photography, the clean-edged forms in the blurred register of dreamscape, and all these are valid. But this is elementary. What about the traits of an icon (like discrimination, decorum, propriety and classical unities/harmonies) and the sliding-scale of declensions on conventionality? What about their evident deformation and abstraction, the overlap with several late renovations and reanalyses of hypermannerism7 as a referenced provenance, with its compellingly similar historiographical theatrics, iconoclastic iconography and auto-subverted classicisms?

Any opportunities for an art-text deontologisation of camp (pictorial and figural in its widest sense) discourse, let alone queer performative critical theorisation, are foreclosed in short smooth surfacial ice-skating arabesques over the hypostasised depths of allusively pressure- packed camp solvent. This is a formalist-flat and agentically-inert reading that takes no account of potential transgressive, Spivakal-strategic essentialising or contingent uses of heuristic encounters with the image that could deploy camp-as-tactic (rather than sensibility, subcultural competency, position, logic or object). Neither actantial positionality nor narrative-activation are considered, so all the rhizomic complications of gaze,8 identification, desire, psychoanalytical manoeuvres, sexualised/sexuality-predicated reception paradigms, interpellation, spectatorship, consumer semiosis, hegemonic co-option, transitive reproduction (This image is available to OutRage readers as a limited edition print hand signed and numbered and limited to an edition of 95), auteur/author/isation and community investment all remain unaddressed. The operative popcult (and Watson’s nothing if not a saleably- popular proprietorial proper noun Proper Name) citational medium and ethos and market are decorously unexamined, not to say unsaid.

  It is as banal but necessary for me as for O’Donnell (but for different reasons) to point out the painting’s placement of "the firm, sculpted, now very well known, body of the Rugby player" against "a variety of backgrounds"9: the phallocentric fetishisation of "real" straight(acting)- hardlined masculinity-template musculature - the iconography of the pin-up poofs-can-be-macho-too icon - can be assumed (darling, how else can you market a glossy fag-mag?). What is more intriguing, as O’Donnell notes, is the (ironic? ludic? tautological?) juxtaposition of the jutjawed-blank-faced "star", limp boyfriend in a tenderly-intimate maternal clasp, with the reflexively 2-D literalised stage, props, backdrop, theatrical crane and spotlight. O’Donnell records this without further comment but there are, at minimum, two subcultural narratives (part of Roberts’ rather than Watson’s biomythography) interpretively activated here: the protracted triumphalist media-furore saga of Roberts’ coming-out, culminating in a women’s magazine cover story on Roberts+boyfriend’s home life, and Roberts’ job as OutRage’s fitness columnist.
  Both are subtended by privileged discourses of sculptural-subject/artist’s-model/ photoshoot-object8 /TV-inhabitant, the-Nude-vs-the-naked, the (public figure) classical unities of universal formal perfection versus the (private man) entrepreneurial celebrity, domestic partner, ordinary (every)man and community role-model, both gender exemplars, both explicitly fabricated. These narrative goalposts bracket a phantasmatic level playing field on which Roberts is collectivised hero and victim, a suitably messianic figure (crucified by tabloid journalism, resurrected by queers’ faith) for a poignant pietà plonked like a demountable plaster copy of Michelangelo’s down amid the paraphernalia of theatricality.
  The satirical stylistics of the setting are aporetic (conveniently undecidable), detailed and distancing, generating an isolation of the main figures that induce a disjunctive fragility and an inversion of Davila’s motif of peripheral realistic landscape glimpses abutting garish central surrealism. With only the slightest focal shift, the work can be queered and read as critique rather than (as well as? from the inside of?) celebration, its cartoon Pop-up camp as screen for satire on its own pan-neo-expressionist emotive theatricalism and/or the (art) medium’s dramaturgy and/or the (cultural) media’s dramatisation of Roberts. Even queerer, maybe it’s a meditation on pose as position or imposture, or a condemnation of Koonsian cute-commodity-fetishes, or an experiment with Steinberg’s mise en scène approach to addressivity and the role of the viewer in pictorial narrative, or a commentary on queer exclusions or invisiblisation in the legitimising traditions of formal studio partnership portraiture.
Perhaps. Perhaps it's a cannily qualified uncommitted all-base-and-backside-covering exercise in slipperiness, the elusive not-quite-straight reterritorialising of the concentric marginality indistinguisable from the centre, a cross-section of sedimentary open-secret gay codes now so weathered they've become (well)mannered into 'passing'. Perhaps it's a Cassab send-up. Perhaps not. None of this is canvased in the con-text. I also write for OutRage magazine, and am fully aware of the spatial, epistemological, discursive and idiomatic limits (and limitations) of the venue, the textual-caliper effects of the projected constituency, but I’d nevertheless maintain that the analytical and particularly hermeneutic filtering and contraction verges on the arteriosclerotic. This is why biomythography needs to be wheeled in as artificial life-support system, hooked up to referentiality and sustained by thin solutions of narrativised community-mythology. It’s sad. Brain-death is never a pretty picture, even as limited edition print.

Appropriation is sub-textually figured here not as the modernist historical end of art, or the poststructuralist theoretical end-point of art, or even the postmodern end-game of art, but its messianic necrophilic camp resurrection. But that’s my opportunistic per-version of the OutRage con-text. Its own routinised Pop camp construction makes Watson’s piece lego- elementary, and is little deeper in its analysis than a high (camp) transparent (unqueer) gloss.

Dean Kiley
1996

Endnotes
1. M. O'Donnell, 'As if in a Dream', (article on the work of Ross Watson, including a painting featuring Ian Roberts, well-known Australian Rugby player) Outrage no.157, Feb. 1996, pp.26-29.
2. Just about anything bloody Baudrillard writes.
3. All in What is Appropriation?, ed. R. Butler, Sydney, 1996.
4. L. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, New York, 1985, esp. pp. 2-7.
5. M. Meyer, ‘Introduction’ to The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. M. Meyer, London, 1994, pp. 6- 17.
6. For a synoptic overview of such tactics: A. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, Minneapolis, 1993.
7. H. Miedema, ‘On Mannerism and Maniera’, Simiolus Vol. 10 No. 1, 1978-79, pp. 19-45; I. Tomassoni, Hypermannerism, Milan, 1985.
8. Well surveyed by C. Evans & L. Gamman, ‘The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing’ in P. Burston & C. Richardson, eds., A Queer Romance, London, 1995, pp. 13-56.
9. Directly referred to by O’Donnell.