Author Archives: Dani Toth

Black Male Body

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Originally aired on the highly successful British series Out on Tuesday, a weekly lesbian and gay news show appearing on commercial television, Looking for Langston weaves the poetry of Langston Hughes and contemporary black gay poet Essex Hemphill with pieces of Bruce Nugent’s Harlem Renaissance short story ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’ to effect what director Issac Julien has described as a ‘relational shift between the past and the present’.

 The film’s discontinuous non-linear visual style is a montage of archival footage of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes reciting poetry to a jazz accompaniment, and contemporary imagery including a focus on the photography of Mapplethrope. The non-linear narrative is particularly striking and demonstrates the relational shift between the past and the present. This artistic choice authorizes a rethinking of the question of the relationship between the present and historical representation.

 Looking for Langston challenges its viewers to investigate racial histories that are intricately and antagonistically intertwined with histories of (homo)sexuality. These challenges demand accounts differential places within the historical development of racism, racial stratification and racialized cultural.

Chic of Queer

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The broad reach and fast circulation of images and ideas in cyberspace accelerate and enable mobilizations of identity and politics in a larger scale; as such, during the  war of terror following the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, images of queer Iranians became more visible, but also were limited in their exposure of the queer experience.

In the case of Ayaz Marhouni and Mohamad Asgari, their arrest for the rape of a young boy was turned into a story of martyrdom of two gay individuals, despite a lack of evidence about their sexuality.

The visible gayness becomes a symbol for the oppression and backwardness of Iran. However, as discussed with Professor Sakhsari today, this oppression then becomes the excuse for sanctions and violent attacks without consideration of the effect that has on the very populations we try to “protect”.

Fraser

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Andrea Fraser radically performs the role of a museum docent to expose the discourse that defines entering an institutional sphere and address its limiting nature with regards to race and class.

I think it is interesting that Fraser decided her identification as a docent became problematic and obscured her authority as an artist and further obscured “the relations of domination of which museums are the sites and which its recognized agents produce and reproduce”.

I am curious as to the responsibility of the artist when performance pieces are received un-ironically. The same question holds for Coco Fusco’s piece, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. I would like to know the reception of Fraser’s Museum Highlights piece and if it accomplished her original goals.

Similarly, with the informal circulation of the Letter to Wadsworth Atheneum at the museum, I am curious what the audience reaction was. While the letter was addressed to the institution, the audience was in fact the very bourgeoisie population that the letter confronts.

I would also be curious to hear Fraser’s thoughts on what constitutes art. For me, her letter is more a promotion of social awareness.