Trying to See What Isn’t There

“Today, what unknown spaces are there? I believe that they are those of total intimacy.”1—Daniel BoudinetSoon after the end of a long-term relationship, I had dinner plans in my hometown of Montreal with Mark, an artist and art historian I had been told I should meet. At the restaurant we quickly bonded over a shared interest in queer forms of intimacy, kinship, and affect. He was beautiful, with sparkling eyes and a warm smile. Afterward, he invited me back to his place and we had a wonderful night together. The next morning, I was to take the bus to Ottawa to spend the day at the National Gallery of Canada. It was very difficult to pull myself away from Mark; our connection felt pregnant with possibility, and it was clear we would have a place in each other’s lives, even if the details remained fuzzy. In Ottawa, I made my way through the dazzling Moshe Safdie–designed museum, the sunlight streaming in through the glass atrium. I turned a corner into one of the cavernous contemporary galleries and saw an empty plywood stage towering above me with a microphone on a stand, two speakers, and a title printed on paper: LOVE EMPIRE. The wall label informed me that the work dated from 2005 and consisted of wood, a public address system, sleeping bags and pillows, and photocopies: “Love Empire is a public stage that audiences are invited to use to make declarations of love to something or someone. Beneath the stage is a crawlspace outfitted with a sleeping bag and pillows for more private realizations of those feelings.” I was shocked to discover that Mark, whose bed I had recently left, was the artist who made this work.Surely this must be a sign that we are destined to be together? All I have to do is climb up on the stage and declare my love for him, and it will come to pass. I do not get on the stage. A romantic relationship was not in the stars for us. While I was disappointed by this outcome, we decided to stay in touch and our friendship deepened.I quickly learned that not just Love Empire but all of Mark’s art is about love and desire. Where Love Empire is a platform for its public declaration and private consummation, much of his other work is, prophetically, about desire frustrated or longing unfulfilled, and, ever the romantic, I feel that it speaks to me directly. For example, in Frottage (2013), one of two cast-bronze plaques reads, “I have taken a rubbing of this and hung it in my window because I am still in love with you even though you have forgotten me.” Its companion reads, “I have taken a rubbing of this and hung it in my window because I have forgotten you, even though you are still in love with me” (italics mine). Over the past decade our friendship has grown, in part through a shared project of collaborative writing about queer collaborative art practices. We follow Mark’s—now August’s—concept of frottage, which refers to an individual’s intense attachments to a work of art. Frottage is the artistic technique of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface; the word also denotes sexual activity involving rubbing one’s body against a partner’s, though this usage grows increasingly antiquated. August writes of his frottage:First, when I encounter and research artworks, I effectively take a rubbing or impression of that practice, and there is a record—an interpretation—that is created.…My own subjective state is the surface material that receives the impression of the artwork in question.…rather than attempting to create an objectively accurate facsimile…The second, erotic component of frottage is equally important. When visiting museums and studios I often do find myself in states of excitement and attraction in response to the works I encounter.2We have both experienced feelings of love for artworks under our study, or for the artists as we imagine them via their work, and these feelings have fueled our intimate shared scholarship. ***Another of August’s artworks, Polaroid (2013–present), comprises a handwoven cotton curtain and an ongoing series of photographs he takes of it in order to restage the enigmatic 1979 Polaroid of a curtain simply titled Polaroid by French photographer Daniel Boudinet, who died of AIDS in 1990 at age forty-five. The image is best known as the frontispiece of Roland Barthes’s classic La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (1980).3 It is the only photograph reproduced in color in the book, and Boudinet’s original Polaroid is now considered lost. It is also the only photograph reproduced but not discussed (although it was apparently addressed in a section dealing with the Polaroid format in an earlier draft). With this status, it acts as the most striking complement to the famed “Winter Garden Photograph” of Barthes’s beloved mother Henriette that he describes but does not show to readers. Apparently, Barthes first saw Polaroid in an exhibition of Boudinet’s work in April 1979, while he was in the middle of writing the book.4 This photograph of light filtering into a dark room seems to illustrate the book’s title by simulating the technical process through which a photograph is exposed inside a camera.In this color photograph, the light washes through the translucent weave of a pair of curtains, more brightly through a few small rips in the fabric. A bed or divan with a thick pillow rests against the right curtain, dividing the pair to form a triangular aperture of light. The low-angle view captured in Polaroid suggests the optical perspective of someone looking from a bed out toward the window, perhaps a “morning after” where the bedroom is still dark but that intimate, womb-like space is about to be broken by the harsh light of day. Its cool tones evoke the feeling of not wanting to get out of a warm bed to face the brisk morning; getting up to open the curtains will declare an end to the night’s pleasures and signal the parting to come. This parting, like the day, is inevitable.I am not sure what August learns, precisely, from restaging Boudinet’s Polaroid, or if its mysteries remain intact. The curtain itself, as documented on August’s website, was initially hung in an institutional setting—what appears to be a poured concrete, white-walled contemporary art space. Its weave is loose enough to see the ghosts of objects behind it, but their identities remain obscure. A brilliant light comes through the parted curtain. My eye is also drawn to the narrow tears in the fabric and other seams where the light shines. August’s Polaroid photographs of his curtain are washed out and abstracted. His coupling of curtain and Polaroid is captivating, yes, but the work only reveals its further levels of signification if one follows the lineage from August’s photograph to Boudinet’s and from Boudinet to his friend Barthes. It whispers its secrets to those invested in a particular cultural lineage of queer feeling. Appropriately, it was first exhibited alongside the Frottage works discussed above in August’s 2013 show Do I still cross your mind? at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary.I do not remember the first time I encountered one of Boudinet’s photographs, which typically depict hauntingly quiet urban streets by night, but I understood immediately and intuitively that they were photographs of gay cruising, with men looking for casual sex just around the corner, out of frame. Take, for example, London (1977), where the bottom half of the image shows a textured city street and the upper half two adjoining buildings, one dark and one light. The architectural couple are fused by an archway under which shines an otherworldly light that seduces us forward to take refuge from the main street in an alcove. (The composition recalls that of Polaroid, with light spilling in from between two forms.) In other photographs such as Paris (1978), statues of male figures seem to stoically stand in for cruising men; here monuments to historical victors are reimagined, honoring erotic perambulators instead. ***When I seek a historical, critical literature for this interpretation, I find little in print before Andrew Ayers’s 2018 article, written on the occasion of Boudinet’s posthumous retrospective that year at the Jeu de Paume in Paris,5 which richly mines this vein. Years later, I finally dig into the French reception of the work: Élisabeth Lebovici helpfully assures me that, yes, Boudinet’s nocturnal exposures were always understood as cruising scenes, and points me toward the great Hervé Guibert’s writings on Boudinet (and Barthes) in Le Monde. There, in black and white in the February 1, 1978 issue, Guibert writes in an article titled “Un territoire fascinant,”A foot of the Eiffel Tower emerging from dense foliage, the esplanade of the Trocadero with its golden statues, a small fairground ride under the aerial Metro, a solitary street lamp planted along a railway track constitute an imaginary landscape, empty therefore open to the intrusion of the gaze or fantasy, possible theatre for a clandestine pickup.6Despite belatedly casting my eye on this contemporary textual source—by Guibert no less—I remain awed by the shared intelligence that understood this fact without evidence, the subcultural knowledge that allows us to see what isn’t there, that makes it “bloody obvious”—as Ayers plainly put it—that we can look at a gay man’s photographs of city streets and plazas by night and imaginatively populate them with men who are not visually present.7 It is a distinctly queer form of fantasy and projection to look beyond the surface of the visual to see all the erotic undercurrents that animate everyday life, particularly under the cover of night. Does the discipline of art history, for example, not remain limited if it sticks only to what is visible and does not try to see what isn’t there? ***Boudinet’s nocturnal scenes send me searching literary “cruising diaries” for historical examples of the problem that cruising—and sexual desire and physical pleasure more broadly—pose to visual representation, and what lessons writers might have to teach us about the power of ekphrasis to convey sensorial, intersubjective experiences. Similarly, the potential of narrative, of rhetoric, of gossip, exceeds the merely factual, allowing us not just to analyze but to bend and hew the visual according to our fantasies. Since cruising evades the scene of representation and perpetually slips away from the visual field, it offers valuable insights for a queer art history necessarily riddled with lacunae. The work of desire and fantasy is central to reimagining how art history can contend with these absences and account for queerness. I am driven by a fraught sense of nostalgia for an era when gay subcultural sexual practices took place underground, initiated through looks and gestures rather than algorithms.Prefaced with a short text by Barthes, French writer Renaud Camus’s book Tricks: 33 récits (1979, translated into English and reduced by eight to Tricks: 25 Encounters in 1981) chronicles sexual encounters with various men Camus met in his home city of Paris as well as while traveling in Europe and the United States from March to August 1978. Camus was writing a diary not just for himself but for publication to a literary audience, so the great challenge or “trick” of the genre would have been particularly pressing: how to capture the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches of fleeting, often anonymous sexual encounters solely through vivid recollection? In chapter X, “Alain,” Camus generates a complex mise-en-abîme when he is faced with his inability to get aroused. Alain “wasn’t thin or fat, but a little shapeless, especially around the chest, which showed no division from the stomach.” To get in the mood Camus begins “to tell myself a little story,” one “that had served in analogous circumstances.”8 Using his imagination to bring a (narrative) shape to bear on the shapeless fellow he is kissing, he transports us, the reader, from his cold Parisian flat into his fantasy world. The fantasy, however, is just as shapeless as Alain, shifting from a lieutenant-and-cabin boy scene on an eighteenth-century ship, to an encounter between a telegraph operator and a dandy in Victorian London, to one set in a contemporary American prep school. Camus’s mind lurches across history and the to find a that might in that His is in a way as he to on a of of his of sexual is by his to put them to use in the more in which he With this we are from a scene of into a of and with the writer his to try to in is Camus’s other than We now have an and from Barthes and Boudinet to with the photographer alongside and in for two writer that their lives, and an between two the curtain in Boudinet’s Polaroid of his as a between queer writer across time and August and me Boudinet’s Polaroid would very much be at home in Tricks: Camus’s for the most part in small Parisian typically after at his the The room where he is very and he the men of how the will can feel the of Camus’s room when at Boudinet’s The image is to Boudinet’s striking series which exposures to capture the dark of his by night. While it his own the is to an space as one’s eyes to the in a of a chapter Camus an that, as one of the book’s few to can be as a critical to the of Boudinet’s to capture the erotic that Camus He describes of an on the boy in black who was his he and his friend were to had his back to but was very in his is to capture the with his however, because the from the he is as his stage the Camus was the other in must of and of eyes and open on our In this desire to on to a as an from one’s into Camus scene of the in rather than on for over my of and the small color photograph on the now immediately as a I not it there it just seem to there on his It a here to the of Polaroid in La chambre in for all the book’s Paris on an at night by empty A light across the while in the a of or the one on the and with the light into as one looks from to than a it more an of cruising and desire. The here with the in Boudinet’s Jeu de Paume Le de la which to his of in the history of and the of color in The makes no of cruising, a fact that to the of the very problem this to visual representation and to an art history by to that see what isn’t Boudinet’s urban have a that allows them to just as be as of the city by night to than necessarily has a and encounters take place in public on the eyes of and of for their is The of cruising is Boudinet the city by night in his and of the photographs were taken with exposures as as the Boudinet for but for the image to Boudinet’s might have a of those but the of light the of all those who by more The very of in the of and that cruising and it its Ayers was only for that but also perhaps for the one must be just the the corner, behind the or in the of those city night are like stage for cruising, just for a to across the to imagine their own into the or more what of Boudinet himself would have to see the cruising, Boudinet’s photographs are He their by the of the “I like to the time in my be by someone the at Similarly, the physical of Boudinet’s the city as a even private of rather than a public of the were a in the of the city to a a are like that immediately is for it, I am to to the at to a The of these is no is the form there than it and way to a of the or the This fact the writer and the begins his on a of Boudinet photographs in of with this He on to that the shared of both the writer and photographer is to a between a work of and its of the Barthes to the scenes in these photographs, while that he writes is from the of an a city The cover of the and the first photograph that Barthes is the as a it me toward what I desire the to be In the or the frame. is a of light and as the the while a in the of the my desire for a cruising I immediately this as a private for sex such as those by and my fantasy perhaps by August’s public art project in a sign that to in the with of his this one is with a sign in the in the photograph us to the dark of this the rather than around at night. Barthes in by Daniel to getting inside of my of when to by this of that on my have The told by these begins with a of am to but what me isn’t a a scene or a but a weave of foliage, a is both and and this of both and as it is, me to it my we would have a though the is always the and I also to into the of the we have in is a of Barthes reveals that this photograph on his that it is enough to to while he is This the intimate between Barthes and the is a and not merely a of the The of in my mind a of gay men who would not only what such a might but such a photograph might to Barthes. He himself with them by in their of the out of He is that he to into the of the a few about a photograph of and a white Barthes photographs I work, at the space in which I to I believe the of Henriette to La chambre Barthes was initially to this text on his friend Boudinet because he was at his further the in chapter of Boudinet and Barthes’s of makes an in a in at their friend Camus and his have on a from who is over for Camus from the to find at the with the of The scene of the photograph on Barthes’s here with its not only on the here in over the also in the scene of a of men taking in the photographs in a potential of that very taken with Boudinet’s them and this to a about the of that the first Camus’s friend Boudinet’s photographs, the American on Barthes and his written It is to because not possible to still about like about the rather than the around Barthes’s of the and of pleasure is or if he is the from a that would the The with Camus that Barthes always was which had to be at all from the of always comes to the of the most the with to is the way we about the Camus himself getting at this and and tell it is perhaps time to on to more Camus to to and I was this they would from me about the and the men to a the is a night of and in of Camus I that he on to an of the that has In he a book the of the that white are as a a and a by and other via and by I of the love that white gay has in with the and, more the and practices of and white March at a in on queer in Europe titled the I that a had in a in and His the is in to Camus’s the of his in the casual and in and if what can we from do we frottage with figures who are both to queer and history, and also and of acts of writing queer cultural history writing for and against and always the toward While I in frottage with Camus up against his they must me was first from the of an in the My longing to physical with into my just as for museums and to in a to more be to get to a work of art in the or on the and other I to we are to get all we do now about the and of such intimate what and attachments will we I not have just how and it would feel to in world.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.