Sexuality of Postmodernism

Catalog description

This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists and theorists of postmodernism were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism itself was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these queer figures raise the problem of the authorial as a defining issue. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of how and why so much post-war American art problematized the idea of the author, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing relevance of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. Why, at the very moment that questions of authorial difference, sexual and otherwise, emerged as important in American art did so much criticism deny the authorial role, and why did so many queer artists use that denial to camouflage their authorial voices? In other words, why does a closeted queer artist like John Cage make the performance of silence one of his calling cards? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis.