Interesting find. Against the conclusion, if I get it right, I'd say that Rauschenberg and Johns were having their paternal battles with, and moving away from, Abstract Expressionism rather than hiding in its "fog and field." Another Artforum writer, Benjamin Buchloh, characterizes their project in these terms:
"the sheer flamboyant violence of Rauschenberg’s assault on pictorial and painterly conventions [of Abstract Expressionism] and the extreme subtlety of Johns’s ironic and melancholic mourning of the loss of modernism’s abstract morphologies."
Buchloh sees them as intermediaries between Ab/Ex and Frank Stella's "scriptural" black paintings. And however they might seem to hide their homosexuality in their post Abstract Expressionist strategies, it was all really an open secret in the 1960s art world.
Regarding Twombly, who was also saying goodbye to Abstract Expressionism, you can say he was simply transcribing and transmuting what he saw on bathroom walls and on pylons under bridges, which in the fifties were quite shocking even if in an ultimately pleasing way. People forget graffiti was often scratched on walls with the points of knives (as Tw's early work was) and whose "font sizes" seemed to get larger the closer they got to corners.
well right those guys were not in the AbEx group that Byerley is talking about… for him, the straight macho pose of the hetero AbExers is a mask, but by extension we might say there’s also something pretty ‘hiding’ about the poses struck by the homos of the following generation…
And precisely what I’m interested in is the idea of a gay art, literature, etc., as distinct from the ‘open secret’ model that Johns, Sontag, Ashbery, and so on were practicing well after Stonewall… nowadays their coyness or cowardice can be recuperated as queer, oblique, interesting, but it’s just the sort of stance of irresponsibility vis-a-vis a gay community that I’m against…
Interesting find. Against the conclusion, if I get it right, I'd say that Rauschenberg and Johns were having their paternal battles with, and moving away from, Abstract Expressionism rather than hiding in its "fog and field." Another Artforum writer, Benjamin Buchloh, characterizes their project in these terms:
"the sheer flamboyant violence of Rauschenberg’s assault on pictorial and painterly conventions [of Abstract Expressionism] and the extreme subtlety of Johns’s ironic and melancholic mourning of the loss of modernism’s abstract morphologies."
Buchloh sees them as intermediaries between Ab/Ex and Frank Stella's "scriptural" black paintings. And however they might seem to hide their homosexuality in their post Abstract Expressionist strategies, it was all really an open secret in the 1960s art world.
Regarding Twombly, who was also saying goodbye to Abstract Expressionism, you can say he was simply transcribing and transmuting what he saw on bathroom walls and on pylons under bridges, which in the fifties were quite shocking even if in an ultimately pleasing way. People forget graffiti was often scratched on walls with the points of knives (as Tw's early work was) and whose "font sizes" seemed to get larger the closer they got to corners.
well right those guys were not in the AbEx group that Byerley is talking about… for him, the straight macho pose of the hetero AbExers is a mask, but by extension we might say there’s also something pretty ‘hiding’ about the poses struck by the homos of the following generation…
And precisely what I’m interested in is the idea of a gay art, literature, etc., as distinct from the ‘open secret’ model that Johns, Sontag, Ashbery, and so on were practicing well after Stonewall… nowadays their coyness or cowardice can be recuperated as queer, oblique, interesting, but it’s just the sort of stance of irresponsibility vis-a-vis a gay community that I’m against…