In the late 1920th, Giorgio de Chirico was commissioned to create a series of gladiator paintings for Léonce Rosenberg, an art dealer. One of these pieces ‘gladiators au repos’, designed for Rosenberg’s apartment in Paris, is the last but not least piece of the Guggenheim exhibition ”Chaos and Classicism”. Hang next to a grim painting depicting a military figure on horse, de Chirico’s gladiators at first glance give the impression of pseudo-classical Fascist art.

Looking more closely at de Chirico’s painting replaced my dark thoughts about fascist terror with amusement. The muscle-rippling gladiators look deliciously bored. It appears that de Chirico was blessed with a sense of humor.

In Wikipedia, as of today, one learns that Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter who founded the scuola metafisica art movement. Wikipedia defines scuola metafisica by stating that de Chirico’s dream-like paintings of squares typical of idealized Italian cities, as well as apparently casual juxtapositions of objects, represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind, beyond physical reality, hence the name. Likewise, from Wikipedia we learn that Léonce Rosenberg is an early advocate of abstract art and cubism who provided moral and financial support for these (its) artists. It appears that people’s activity during the early to mid twentieth century are more complex than it is often represented.

It took some more googling to learn of the later activity of Giorgio de Chirico that could be interpreted as ‘intellectual romance with fascism’ or as a good joke on the politics in Italy between World War I and II.

(A) Art inspired by Barack Obama.

(B) Will the 2009 Economic Stimulus Package address unemployment among artists in analogy to the Federal Art Project, part of the Work Project Administration (WPA) created by Roosevelt?

(A) Quoting Rob Walker, New York Times:

Whether or not Barack Obama would make a good president, it’s clear that he makes an excellent muse. It’s hard to think of a political candidate in recent memory who has, in real time, inspired so much creativity, exercised free of charge and for the campaign’s benefit. Perhaps this suggests something about Obama — or maybe it suggests something about his supporters.

Shepard Fairey created this limited edition print of Barack Obama in an effort to fund a larger street poster campaign, January 2008. Fairey is one of today’s best known and most influential street artists. He sits on the advisory board of Reaching to Embrace the Arts, a not-for-profit organization that provides art supplies to disadvantaged schools and students.

A painting “Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, August 2008” by Elizabeth Peyton, another contemporary artist, was exhibited in the The New Museum in New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood.

Another manifestation of the enthusiasm for Obama within the art community was an auction that brought together the work of more than 100 contemporary artists enabling artObama raised over $46,000 for Obama’s presidential campaign.

(B) Will the 2009 Economic Stimulus Package provide employment for artists?

“Sparty” at Michigan State University provides an example of the impact of a work of art funded by the 20th century Economic Stimulus Package, the Federal Art Project. MSU’s icon is much photographed at different times of day and seasons of the year (montage from pictures on the web).

With an economic stimulus package, Barack Obama has proposed to “put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels,” by adding 2.5 million jobs.

An analogy is provided by the Works Project Administration (WPA) that was created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to deal with the Great Depression. More than 8,500,000 Americans were hired to build roads, public buildings and parks and do other infrastructure work around the country. Unemployed artists were hired through the Federal Art Project, part of the WPA.

The lasting legacy of art, funded by the Federal Art Project, can still be seen and enjoyed throughout USA.

Regarding homosexuality, the world seems focused on two very queer questions.

The first question suggests that homosexuals differ from heterosexuals in no other way than the sex act.  Are we just like everybody else, differing only in our choice of sex partner?  Or does sexual orientation, like gender, cause us to think and feel differently in many ways other than just sexual attraction?  And is this particularly obvious when it comes to the visual and performing arts?  Is there, in fact, a Queer Eye?

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The second question, of course, is the raging controversy: nature vs. nurture?

But there is a third “elephant in the room” question that is mostly ignored;  Are gay men generally more creative than everyone else or is this one big fat whopping stereotype?

The compelling implication of the creativity question is that if the answer is yes and we are generally more creative and more sensitive to our environment, than the first two questions make no sense–unless you actually believe that talent is a chosen and subsequently learned skill.

Does Bravo Television’s Queer Eye For The Straight Guy play to an offensive Jim Crow kind of stereotype or do queer men bring a greater sense of style and taste to the physical world?

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Do gay men naturally dominate the creative arts or are we simply more comfortable being out and loud in this more permissive and expressive environment?  Have anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and homo-ologists built a house of cards on a very false premise?  What is the queer eye?  Is the queer eye born of and nurtured by the closet?  Obviously, our sexual tastes coupled with the repressed and confined boundaries of the closet drive a much keener awareness and sensitivity to human behavior and the environment in general.  Visual details from color to hand gestures become much more important to the queer boy than to the straight boy.  And survival is the driving force.  The wrong hand gesture in an ordinary school yard can earn you a bloody nose.   A pink shirt in high school announces “fag” to some, “pride” to others.

During very early stages of childhood development, queer boys necessarily become superior observers, consummate actors and very creative creatures.  Even within your own family, you catch on quickly to the fact that you are seeing the world through different eyes than almost everyone else around you.  Many artists will tell you that pain and “experience” are the greatest muses–and who feels more pain and has more “life experience” than a queer?

img src=”http://rjr10036.typepad.com/proceed_at_your_own_risk/images/2007/12/31/survivor.jpg” align=”left” />Obviously, the same cannot be said for other minorities–persecuted or otherwise.  We are unique in that we are born a minority even within our own ethnic, cultural or religious minorities.  While any queer Jew or African American will tell you that he or she acquired useful survival tools as a Jew or African-American that apply to queer survival, the queer needed to take those survival tactics and strategies to an entirely new level not even remotely imagined by his or her immediate blood family.

So let us ask another obvious question.  In order to survive, the queer must call upon inner resources and behavioral skills not even remotely part of the lives of most heterosexuals.  Survival compels the queer to hone senses and sensitivities far beyond the needs of the average mainstream heterosexual.  Is that the fuel behind enhanced creativity and sensitivity?  Is that the origin of the Queer Eye?

So here we are circling back to nature vs nurture.

And the debate rages on.  One prominent thinker attributes queer creativity to a form of impaired maturation.  Another suggests that homosexuality forges a stronger relationship between mother and infant, which some science now suggests may be the evolutionary basis of art.  Does the disproportionate number of gay men in the arts suggest an unusual and extraordinary capacity to speak the language of maternal love?

Are we retarded (but in a loving way)?

Internationally respected scientist, artist and author (The Naked Ape) Desmond Morris, who became a bestselling author by applying zoology to explain human behavior, has now utilized the same techniques to put forward an explanation for homosexuality.

In his latest book, The Naked Man, Morris theorizes that men are “made gay” because they retain infantile or juvenile characteristics into adulthood – a phenomenon known as neoteny. img src=”http://rjr10036.typepad.com/proceed_at_your_own_risk/images/2007/12/31/desmond_morris_2.jpg” align=”right” />

According to this theory, gay men also tend to be more inventive and creative than heterosexuals because they are more likely to retain the mental agility and playfulness of childhood.  Intuitively, that sounds  and feels “right”. 

“Gays have in general made a disproportionately greater contribution to life than non-gays,” said Morris, who is also a noted artist. “The creative gay has very much advanced Planet Earth.”

“The playfulness of childhood is continued with certain people into adulthood. This is very much a positive. Adult playfulness means that certain people, often a fairly large proportion of them gay, are more inventive and curious than heterosexuals.”

This new Morris theory has been attacked by Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London. “It’s arts faculty science to say that gays are neotenous,” he said. “It’s a stupid idea. Where is the real evidence?”

img height=”300″ alt=”Infantile” src=”http://rjr10036.typepad.com/proceed_at_your_own_risk/images/2007/12/31/infantile.jpg” width=”450″ />

Morris points to work done by Clive Bromhall, who produced some of his television programs. “Gays do infantile behavior in the extreme,” said Bromhall, who after gaining a PhD in zoology from Oxford, left academia to form a company making educational films.

Morris, who is 80 in January, long thought that absent fathers led to boys and young male adults becoming gay. “[It is] the dominant and ever-present mother theory,” he said. “But now I’m convinced that is wrong, and that it is neoteny which makes people gay.  Gays are using what is reproductive or creatively constructive to non-reproductive ends.  This is very much a positive.”

But his argument that gays are more creative than heterosexuals also has its flaws. Steve Jones said: “What of somebody like Pablo Picasso who was a hugely creative man and yet was obviously decidedly heterosexual?” Many other creative individuals such as Vivienne Westwood and Mary Quant, the fashion designers, are also clearly heterosexual.

Morris’ point is proved by gays like Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter and Oscar Wilde and TE Lawrence.

img height=”300″ alt=”Socrates” src=”http://rjr10036.typepad.com/proceed_at_your_own_risk/images/2007/12/31/socrates.jpg” width=”450″ />

Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, agrees that many gays are unusually creative, although he suggests they are also characterized by being closely in touch with their emotions.

He added: “I would also think that being gay is very much a mix of genetic factors and hormonal influence in the womb.  I don’t really know about this playfulness idea being carried from childhood to gay adulthood.”

Most commentators though, including Morris, Tatchell and Glenn Wilson – co-author of the book Born Gay, published in 2005 – believe that the so-called “gay gene” theory is discredited.

“I argued that sexual orientation is two-thirds prenatal and one-third environmental,” said Wilson, who works at London University’s Institute of Psychiatry. “I suppose the neoteny argument is not incompatible, but I haven’t heard it advanced before.

“I would also say that gays certainly tend to gravitate towards expressive or service occupations, but I have never heard or seen evidence that they are academically better.”

The Language of Maternal Love

The New York Times recently examined the relationship between art, the origins or evolution of art, and the mother-infant interaction.  The theory is that the “potential space” or the “dyadic dance” between mother and infant forms the groundwork for the creative play of childhood and, ultimately, for the creative activities of adulthood.

Nothing in the article and subsequent related readings discussed the logical connection between the high percentage of gay men in the creative arts and how that might relate on some level to the nature of the mother-infant relationship of a gay child vs a straight child.  But from a queer perspective, it is an irresistible discussion.

img height=”315″ alt=”Gay_baby” src=”http://rjr10036.typepad.com/proceed_at_your_own_risk/images/2007/12/31/gay_baby.jpg” width=”450″ />

At a recent University of Michigan symposium on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a University of Washington scholar, Ellen Dissanayake offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art. 

By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate.  But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own.  The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought.  Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.

What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes.  Considering the heightened sexuality of an all male gay world, this theory would suggest that enhanced sexuality would logically translate into enhanced creativity.

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But Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas.  To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes.  But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.

Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade.   Through singing, dancing, painting and story telling and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin.  Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

This theory suggests that gay man are more drawn to the creative and performing arts as a means of achieving acceptance, status and success.

As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.

And in that theory, one could find the beginning of a new perspective on the war between religion and art and between religion and homosexuality.  To cut to the chase:  Competition on a grand pan-social and pan-cultural scale.

img height=”266″ alt=”Sistine” src=”http://rjr10036.typepad.com/proceed_at_your_own_risk/images/2007/12/31/sistine.jpg” width=”450″ />

Ms. Dissanayake has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.

Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.

After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.

To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliate signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.  You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.”

In my view, there are only two certainties in this discussion.  The first is that the human thing is a very complex question and the simple-minded and divisive answers posed by the religious right are simply as stupid as the belief that dinosaurs co-existed with man as recently as 6,000 years ago.

Secondly, a disproportionate percentage of mankind’s greatest creative achievements have been produced by gay men.  Socrates, da Vinci, Alexander The Great, Michaelangelo, Tchaikovsky and Sondheim to name but a few.  If this is due to a gay gene or some kind of nurturing divergence then these are clearly very good things and worth understanding and encouraging.  Human civilization owes a great debt to the Queer Eye and if this be abomination, then I for one stand proud as such.

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Eric Gill, ‘The Plait’, Wood Engraving, 1929, 6″ x 3″

Eric Gill (1882-1940) was born in Brighton, England, to a minister of a small Protestant sect. He eventually became an artist, who created some of the most popular devotional art of his era, such as the Stations of the Cross, where worshippers pray at each panel that depict the suffering of Jesus. He would receive many important and prestigious commissions, including works for the League of Nations, the BBC, and the London Transport. Fiona MacCarthy wrote a biography of him in 1989 (details on Google) that dropped a bombshell. MacCarthy’s book revealed that he regularly had sex with two of his daughters, his sisters and even the family dog. These encounters he recorded in his diary and have since been proven to be true.

There are also similar stories about Wagner (antiSemitic), Caravaggio (killer) and Larkin (supposed racist and sexist), Schubert (paedophile) and Richard Strauss (member of the Nazi party).

The question to you is simple: Would you value works of art done by someone whose acts committed in private are reprehensible while their art done in public is exulted?

The Kenyan chain reminded me of the Shona-like head of a stainless steel/bronze sculpture ‘FROM MOLECULE TO MAN’ created by Jim Cunningham, Michigan, for a physiology department. The shape of the head can be attributed to the fact that, 20 yrs ago, the artist had apprenticed to a sculptor in Zimbabwe.

Jim’s sculpture is an embodiment of the departmental logo invented by Bill, its chairperson – a decoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Proportions of the Human Figure’ with DNA.

As seen below, Sanford, maker of sharpies (left insert) and Bill (right insert) as well as Jim, above, hide human genitalia.

To the mixture of associations of the sculpture shown here – Renaissance and African Art and Molecular Biology – I add one more, North American Modesty.

Remember, another example of contemporary gender-free art, was Eric’s homunculus (2003).

Title: Give Peace a Chance

Size: 170 x 78 cm

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Description: Art that changes the World!

Are the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge queer?

In response to my “tribute” to the Empire State Building, Karl asked a simple question that caused me to do an extraordinary amount of thinking.  This post is the answer and it’s hardly a simple one.

I was gushing over my life-long fascination and love affair with the Empire State Building and its powerful iconic nature. Karl asked: “How much of your attraction to the building has to do with the architectural style itself? At first I couldn’t’ see how to separate the two but after a while it dawned on me that there was much more to the question than was immediately apparent.