David Joselit on Tom Burr

WITH THE PASSAGE of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and with the recent wave of extremely transphobic legislation across the United States, one would be justified in conclude that a vocal subset of American politicians are busy building a new closet for LGBTQ+ citizens. How is that possible, given the advances in rights and public acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships over the past few decades? How can gay marriage be the law of the land when talking about sexual orientation is criminalized in schools? Use of the extraordinary book by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from 1990, Epistemology of the closet, offers valuable tools to untangle this paradox. First, Sedgwick establishes the long-standing relationship between sexuality and knowledge. She writes: “At the end of the nineteenth century, when it had become fully common – as obvious to Queen Victoria as to Freud – that knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets meant sexual secrets, there was in fact developed a particular sexuality that was distinctly constituted as secret.”¹ This epistemic figure of secrecy was homosexuality. It is certainly worth following Sedgwick’s example to understand homophobia not only as the hatred and oppression of queer people, but also as a strategy for restricting what constitutes knowledge – a strategy whose other front , advanced vehemently by Republicans, is the criminalization of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at American colleges and universities. Homophobes and white supremacists may be ignorant, but, as Sedgwick teaches us, ignorance is not the antithesis of knowledge. On the contrary, ignorance is another format of knowledge, its dark matter. The closet functions as a open secret. It allows the weaponization of knowledge disguised as ignorance. The closet is therefore not a physical space but a dynamic set of relationships between knowledge and (feigned) ignorance – which can create a protected enclosure for queer self-expression, as it has done in some eras. , while simultaneously oppressing LGBTQ+ people in public.

This most erotic closet will not cover its occupant with shame.

The dynamism of the dressing room as defined by Sedgwick came to mind when visiting the extraordinary exhibition “Tom Burr”, at the Bortolami gallery in New York, by the artist Tom Burr. (Even the doubling of the exhibition title and the artist’s name inscribes the duality of public and private that animates the epistemology of the closet.) This exhibition was structured as an interlocking set of exploded boxes – or cupboards. The innermost enclosure was defined by four freestanding walls that bounded a room with open corners in the center of the gallery. On the face of each of these walls were mounted wooden panels resembling the walls of boxes but installed like paintings. Some of the triangular and rectangular panels bounded by orthogonal or angled mullions on these reliefs were painted, or in one case mirrored, while others left the wood grain exposed. Photographic images transferred to stainless steel were affixed to some of the panels – most depicting the forearms and hands of men in various states of relaxation (or, in one case, a partial image of the back of a man’s head in profile, centered on his ear). These wrists and hands were metonyms for a vulnerable and sensual male body, even suggesting the phallus itself (in one photograph, a middle finger was extended downward from a vertically positioned arm). Burr calls this his “faggy gestures.”² The central space of “Tom Burr” thus creates a box within a box which establishes a succession of open cupboards: the walls form an airtight enclosure which contains the elements of what could have been a deconstructed box, which frame fleshy hieroglyphs of queerness, presumably derived from Tom Burr’s own body.

The three partitions parallel to the gallery walls created another order of splintered closet, partially hidden behind them: a set of compressed, hallway-like spaces that offered viewers an oblique look at three sculptural vignettes made in 2023 (as all the works mentioned below). For me, these sculptures roughly correspond to distinct modalities of gay sociality or its genesis. First of all, Johns (my father’s chest)as the double or triple meaning of the title suggests, is an erotic tableau of oedipal desire, evoked in part by a chest of drawers (that of Burr’s father) from which a pair of vintage long underwear emerges. A pair of black chairs establishes a side-by-side space for a couple: in one chair the cushion is knocked over, as if its occupant had left hastily or angry, and on the arm of the other is a splayed copy of Leo Bersani and Ulysses The Book of Dutoit from 1998, The secrets of Caravaggio. Finally, Impulse, which includes a black leatherette sofa supporting an elongated chrome lamp, a blue wool blanket and a disco ball, suggests a social space for celebration and fun. In other words, these three sculptures respectively allegorize an eroticized love of the father; the sexual or amorous dyad (its form of knowledge represented by the two-author text on Caravaggio); and a community of friends represented by the disco ball and the couch. This latter association was made explicit in an adjacent text by the artist applied directly to a wall riddled with glitter of light projected by the disco ball:

the regular beating of the arteries, caused by the successive contractions of the heart,
especially as one can feel it at an artery, as at the wrist;
a single pulsation, or beat or beat of the arteries or heart;
the rhythmic recurrence of blows, vibrations or undulations;
a single stroke, vibration or ripple;
a momentary and sudden fluctuation in an electrical quantity, such as voltage or current;
a single and sudden emission of particles or radiation;
a beat of life, emotion, etc.;
vitality;
the general attitude, sentiment, preference, etc., of the public;
a nightclub, Orlando, Florida.

It was in 2016, at the Pulse, “a nightclub [in] Orlando, Florida,” that forty-nine people were killed in a mass shooting, turning a site of pleasure into a bloody closet. But impulse also denotes life – it is the blood that pumps through the wrists that are organized in “fag gestures” on the neighboring panels; it is the beating that causes the erections and the sudden release of energy that triggers the gunshots.

The outer ring of Burr’s Centrifugal Closet at Bortolami was established by four two-dimensional works, titled Capricorn I through IV, and all but one comprised of nine snapshot-sized black-and-white photos arranged horizontally in a line, inevitably suggesting storytelling and documenting Burr performing in and around bathroom stalls, doors, and spaces. adjacent. There were evocations of the most notorious closet of all, the tea room, a quiet room where men seek anonymous sex with other men, suggesting that such activity should and can only be hidden. But anyone who has ever visited one of these establishments knows that their choreographies require enormous insider knowledge (not to mention the ingenuity to find them in the first place and to evade both straight customers and the police a times on site). The status of the closet as a form of knowledge – particularly gay knowledge – was cheerfully affirmed in many of these photographs, including one in Capricorn III where Burr is shown reading about Pier Paolo Pasolini. This most erotic closet will not cover its occupant with shame.

Do LGBTQ+ people now inhabit a centrifugal closet as Burr’s interlocking enclosures indicate, a whirlwind of advances and retreats whose metaphorical figure is less that of an architectural space than an “impulse”, a percussive alternation of pleasure and pain, of freedom and oppression? If so, it is a space composed not only of weaponized ignorance, but also of erotic forms of gay knowing – a site of their negotiation, as Sedgwick argues. There is, however, another kind of closet I often feel locked in as a gay man of my generation: one created by a largely salubrious forgetfulness of what AIDS meant and did to us in the 1980s and 1990s. is that Burr could sometimes feel that closet closing around him too. But instead of lapsing into morbid nostalgia or intergenerational resentment, he subtly resuscitates the legacy of AIDS in “Tom Burr” by demonstrating that the queer worlds produced in and against the closet over time don’t vanish in headwinds. vicious recalibrations of homophobia and transphobia. The cupboard built by Burr is both a labyrinth and an open work, even sometimes a dance floor. As much a bulwark against ignorance as its target, it do say gay.

David Joselit is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor and Chair of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. His most recent book is Art Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).

REMARKS

1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 73.

2. This sentence is attributed to Burr in the press release of “Tom Burr”, from March 10 to May 4, 2023, to Bortolami. It is accessible online here: bortolamigallery.com/exhibitions/tom-burr-2023.