Nan Goldin and Lyle Ashton Harris

Perhaps, within the shade of a label, creation becomes a thing condensed by amplification, a shifting duplicity of convenience; perfection is but the spring of historic deference, expression but the ladder to climb with rigorous abandon. As photography has assumed an ever-expanding importance in the world of later twentieth-century art, more and more the artist has pulled closer and closer to the waning flame, the moribund theme, of identity and label: a theme masked as discovery, a theme as candle burned away to a puddle as steaming wax. Nan Goldin and Lyle Ashton Harris stand amidst their works like warriors bearing coats-of-arms; the arrangement of the majority of their photographs, as seen in Goldin’s recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Harris’s October photo installation at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, seems structured towards some daring defensive stance: the artist at odds with society. But it all seems like news on dry-yellow newsprint, pages crumbling to rice-size bits, their line of questioning ending with a song of longing for new stimuli.

Both Goldin and Harris have clearly recognizable styles, but both fail on the same level. Each has the ability to capture the figure, the hurricane, the foam from the lip of a dog, the ambition, the nervous anxiety for self-reference of our age; they demonstrate a feverish body of voyeur-friendly exhibitionism, their violence a wreath of need before a sliding glass door. Their appeal is to the already converted, to those who are in the know, and agree with them. The audience is comforted, its impressions validated, never challenged. But, as Yevtushenko wrote, “Gentleness is a posthumous honor.”

Creating a grim, all-encompassing milieu of death, degradation, and exploitation, Harris’s installation, The Watering Hole, caved in to the fully accepted, yet still rankling notion of the significance to be found in media representation and presentation, this usurping quite completely the potential of this talented young artist. Much of the space in the Tilton Gallery was given over to a series of ten duraflex prints, each forty inches by thirty inches (and each in a limited edition of six, the scarcity, of course, to artificially support the price). Every photograph was an assemblage of various media images, each juxtaposed with cameos of self-portraiture and violent, thoughtless abstractions.

Figure 1.

Ivy Wearing a Fall, Boston, 1973. Gelatin silver print; 12-3/40 x 8-5/80. Photo: Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Figure 2.

Joey at the Love Ball, NYC, 1991. Cibachrome; 200 x 240. Photo: Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Linking sex and identity (personal as well as cultural) with a childish, wholly unoriginal commentary on the consumption of mass media, Harris, whose self-portraits have achieved celebrity status in performance, art, photography, and queer studies discussions, has attempted to create a political metaphor out of personal obsession, the most bizarre—and emblematic—focus of content being the case of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer. The ten images, along with the floor-to-ceiling wall-covering Harris has created as backdrop or room divider, are meant to weave a scintillating biographical poem, along the lines of the modern sequence. The problematic shadow of politics and tendentiousness, however, along with a shameless dependence on the crutch of pop reference, drags the poetry of Harris’s work into far too linear a progression—a journey, if you will, with the covers of Newsweek and Sports Illustrated as roadsigns and lithe male models of Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren as erogenous landscape.

Sexuality (only a violent, abusive sexuality) is the fuel of the show’s propulsion. Sadly, Harris presents his sexuality and the sexuality of others as something indistinct, screaming through a veil of semen and blood to be recognized (by somebody, anybody . . .), screaming, in the end...