(a young Tress, as Bradley Cooper in ‘The Maestro’)
I had never heard of the photographer Arthur Tress until a year ago or so, when I started work on my current research project on Christopher Street magazine and Michael Denneny (whom I’ve written about, in connection with his PhD advisor Arendt, here and here and here—and soon I’ll be writing more about Denneny in relation to another member of his dissertation committee, the art critic Harold Rosenberg. These chartings of a genealogy of contemporary gay culture and identity, as an alternative to genealogies I find stupid and constraining—which I’ve also been doing over the course of some 50+ posts on this Substack over the past year documenting my archival tour—will hopefully somehow cohere into an irresistibly visible, culture-defining project, make me a lot of money, and fix America and the world by disclosing at last the right kind of identity politics. But in the meantime…).
Photography was an important part of CS, and of the gay male scene in which the magazine participated. We remember best, I think, Mapplethorpe—although he was in the late 70s and 80s by no means universally or even maybe mostly in the favor of the magazine’s reviewers. Critics often saw him as exploiting gay sex to shock and titillate rich straight collectors (there’s a scene—ineptly written, of course—in Rechy’s leather bar novel from 1979, Rushes, in which a jaded jet set lady goes slumming among the fisters and whippers), and/or as bringing unwelcome public attention to unsavory aspects of gay life. Personally, I must admit, I find him totally boring—the whips in the butthole, the orchids, the black guys, meh, wake me for dinner (although I am a big fan of Dave Hickey’s defense of Mapplethorpe’s work and criticism of its other defenders—as was also the case with his defense of Rechy, Hickey sometimes made actually rather boring art seem incandescently fascinating through his talk about it, which I’m not sure is a good quality in a critic!)
Athough in a future post about Denneny’s decades-long relation as editor and BFF of Ntozake Shange, I’ll write at greater length about the one element of Mapplethorpiana I do find interesting—which is Mapplethorpe’s Black Book (1986) of mostly boring and occasionally hilariously racist pics of hot black guys, published by Denneny at St Martin’s with a preface by Shange, presumably written at Denneny’s request (maybe in order to make the book seem totally not racist—look my black friend says it’s fine!) in which the author of For Colored Girls who no one has time for that whole title muses, first in prose and then in an extended poem, about how she and Mapplethorpe have the same taste in men. I want to be as free as she is!
Lots of other gay photographers—this was an age of gay photography—got more positive attention in CS, including Stanley Stellar (who since has had a revival) and David LaChappelle. Maybe the most touching photos are those of Philip Gefter and Neil Alan Marks, who in the 70s documented their three-year relation in a photo-interview-essay for CS that eventually became a book, Lovers, which is really still worth reading and one of the best things that Denneny published in his other work of running the gay publishing operation of St Martin’s Press.
I’m getting, finally, to Arthur Tress! I think I mentioned in a post sometime last year being totally icked out by his weirdo pics that appeared in the magazine in the late 70s and early 80s, and were the core of his 1980 show “Facing Up.” I was not ready for what Sontag might call their homosexual baroque neo-kitsch style—inherited, I think I better see now, from older generations of stagey, silly-horny gay photography like the pics of F. Holland Day, George Platt Lynes, and Paul Cadmus with Jared and Margaret French—or to go outside America, Herbert List (I have no idea, btw, what Tress’ actual influences and references were; as Malibu Stacy once said…). Anyway, point is, I didn’t like them:
Like, we get it, double double, mirror mirror, boyfriend twins, gay narcissism! It felt so corny, so didactic, so art school senior show—indeed like a dumb young gay guy’s idea ‘let’s put on a show!’ where the show is baroque allegory or masque (the sort of things that Allen Ansen was writing for James Merrill to perform in the Venitian court of Peggy Guggenheim in the late 50s, or in the 70s Merrill was funding Bernard de Zoghreb to direct in his puppet operettas… or at the same time Charles Ludlam and Alan Semok were doing in their own puppet theater… or again at the same time classic gaysian Winston Tong was doing in his puppet theater—gay men love puppets, and that’s baroque, is what I’m saying [Bowen Yang as Truman Capote says, I can’t hate women, they’re what dolls are based on!]) His take in the same series on sexual fantasies was even more, to me at the time, annoying:
Now I’ve come to enjoy how absurd they are—how they fly so far from anything like what the fantasy of the boot, or trade, or being meat might be—and invent entirely new fantasies like the drill lol. There’s a fun tension here between on the one hand the gritty urban decay Piers setting and the campy, cartoony, dreamy quality—and maybe after all that does get at something about what erotic life is really like, in that it’s a kind of ridiculous pageantry (which is what Fran Lebowitz said, in the late 70s, about why gay men are so funny and why she wanted to be funny about/through/with gay men).
I didn’t come around to this point of view, however, until I went back to his earlier work from his 20s, in which he already moving from cheeky urban photography to playing around with luridly staged scenes and Metaphorical Images:
This last is part of a run of photos Tress did throughout the 70s of kids, like this cute one from 1972:
This was I guess what got him the attention of Michel Tournier, the French novelist who praised him many times—the following are from 1974, 1976 and 1993:
All press is good press, but it also happens that Tournier has a section on his Wikipedia about being a “pedocriminal,” so perhaps his raptures about Tress’ children (and the sadism children invite!!!) are to be taken with a grain of salt, or rather pepper spray…
Incidentally, you know I have tried in my way to be French—did a PhD in French history and in France, loved a Frenchman, ate the stinky cheese, cultivated what I hope on my good days is the lucid passion, cynical joy, fault-finding hedonism, and careless erudition of my personal frog pantheon, how I imagine the French to be—but I never understood the whole pedo thing. Not that you have to be French, or even a good photographer, to be a pedo, as Larry Clark proves.
Well, I’m going to choose to believe that the pedophilia is in Tournier’s eye and not in Tress’, because the gay community has trouble enough with Thomas Mann and Puff Daddy.
Not that his pics of children aren’t often creepy, in a sort of Grand Guignol, Shining way, as this from the 1976 book Theater of the Mind (which the Chinatown kid also appeared in):
There’s lots of similar Vincent Price’s Home Movies Stuff in that book, and by now I’m getting really sold on it:
Look, it’s Wayland Flowers and Madame!
Tress’ brand of goofy oneiric eroticism is becoming itself:
Consider that lobster!
So now maybe just through the force of accumulation, or from being compared to each other in their own world rather than to the work of other photographers appearing in CS whose work relied on the conventions of pornography and/or academicist ‘fine art’, I’ve come around to the dramatized—diorama-like—qualities of Tress’ baroque, so I’m ready (aren’t you?) for another look at some photos from Facing Up (1980):
She was safe sex before safe sex…
Heavy words are so lightly thrown
But still I'd leap in front of a flying bullet for you
Feasting with Panthers
‘You’ve heard of Swamp Thing? Well this is Miss Swamp Thing’—RuPaul
I’ll be Your Mirror
Beating the allegations? I’m sure they’re of age!
Finally, my favorite of the series:
In the mid-80s Tress took the staginess of his photos to a new level, creating a series of neo-expressionist day-glo dioramas in a ruined hospital. There’s a similar series from the same time in an abandoned factory, and of course it’s obvious—but not therefore wrong!—to see both as a commentary on the devastations of AIDS and deindustrialization (or as Simon Wu would say, it’s giving “body party”):
Melted-crayon political statements are also at work in his series from the same time of Cabinet portraits—take that, Reagan!
Can’t not think of AIDS either looking at this Oscar-type idol of good health from slightly later, as Tress moved into the neon 90s:
This stuff hurts my eyes…
I’m not sure the transition to color or to political statement did his art much good—although I do find genuinely eerie and moving and very interwar German painterly the hospital tableaux!
There’s a lot more Tress—I particularly love the Teapot Opera which is absolutely Exhibit A in any future essay on the Homosexual Baroque! But I’ll leave you with:
