Not the Usual Dirt

Between You and Me is Gavin Butt's lively investigation of the epistemological implications of gossip and rumor—particularly when they claim to reveal artists' homosexuality—as forms of evidence that "queer the very ways in which we think of the evidential" (7). We meet a self-sensationalizing Larry Rivers, nominally straight ("sleeping with a man was like a new position with a woman" [88]), entranced by the campy linguistic play of queers in the art world, who sees queer and artistic life as coterminous and embraces a subversive aesthetic irresolution in his work (a "visual gossip column" [76]), which eschews both "the earnest authority of 'serious' art and culture" and "the epistemology of a subject-given-to-know" (105). Andy Warhol, wounded by his rejection from the New York art world for being too obviously gay (wounded by being gossiped about [109]), hyperbolizes his "swishness" as an element of his artistic persona (118) and comes to be "inned" (110) as his self-performance is resignified (and desexualized) as a remote dandy; "his pop way of approaching mass culture doubles as a gay identification with the supposedly leveling powers of the commodity" (117). Jasper Johns, for whom, rather like Rivers, culture was an avenue that allowed difference (66), but who plays his sexuality closer to his chest, nonetheless generates in Target with Plaster Casts (1955; a "peep show" [140] of boxed plaster body fragments above an encaustic target), "a chimerical construction of a queer body" (153), cast penis displayed and—in Butt's account—anus erotically evoked (159).

Butt sets out to answer this question: "How do 'revelations' about homosexuality in the postwar New York art world, when passed around as gossip and rumor, come to affect the visibility of artists' bodies and the meanings that we might attach to their works?" (6). Butt answers in two contextual chapters and three on individual artists—Rivers, Warhol, and Johns—set in a period that runs from the publication of Alfred Kinsey's report on male sexuality, which introduced significant confusion into public debate about how homosexuals could be identified (at the same time that it suggested there were more of them), to a pre-Stonewall moment of heightened popular anxiety about "the growth of so-called overt homosexuality in America's cities" (9). Butt's book brings to mind Warhol protégé Lou Reed's catty "New York Telephone Conversation," from 1972's Transformer:

Just a New York conversation, gossip all of the time Did you hear who did what to whom, happens all the time Who has touched and who has dabbled here in the city of shows Openings, closings, bad repartee, everybody knows.¹

"Did you hear who did what to whom," which is to say, what "everybody knows," or thinks they know—and what to do with it—is at the heart of Butt's book, and Warhol is central because he "embraced the pleasures of everyday chatter at various levels of his public output" (107). Art historians are often confronted by gossip (there is probably an argument that says the discipline was founded on it, courtesy of Vasari's Lives), often of the who-was-sleeping-with-whom variety. Much of it may seem irrelevant to how we understand artists and their work: some of it, as Butt demonstrates, clearly is relevant—but either way, it is typically left out of our formal histories, because it can't be dealt with in terms of the normal academic rules of what counts as evidence. Grounded in careful reconstruction of suspicions, accusations, and declarations of homosexuality in the New York art world between 1948 and 1963, the great strength of Between You and Me is the challenge it poses to those rules.

Butt does the conventional historian's work of establishing a culture of sexual suspicion (to which artists were particularly subject) by reference to verifiable, popular, and academic archival sources (which bring us a conspiratorial belief...