Jonathan Katz, co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery’s hot-button show, responds to “Hide/Seek” Flap: “Silence = Death (but so does intemperate rhetoric):
While I can in no way object to your excoriating me for
my rhetoric, I can and will object to your sly rhetorical shift
from critiquing my passion to insinuating that I did a kind of
curatorial violence to David Wojnarowicz‘s work. The film existed
in a 13-minute version and a 7-minute version–neither definitive.
In short, I edited an unfinished piece, one that might have
assumed a very different form had Wojnarowicz been able to
complete it.As it was, the four-minute version was merely a condensation of
the seven-minute version. I had the permission of the estate and
to my knowledge no one who knows Wojnarowicz’s work well has
objected to the shortening, agreeing that it was more important to
represent his films in the exhibition than to leave them pure,
untouched and unseen.
Todd, a CultureGrrl reader who works for an art museum and declined to give his last name, (and who published a previous “Hide/Seek” BlogBack) says this in response to prior comments made by Katz:
The fact that Jonathan Katz tried for 15 years to place this
exhibition could be the result of museums’ shying away from
controversial content and/or being homophobic, as he suggests.Another possible reason for the years of rejection is that curators and
museum directors did not think that his proposal was strong enough.
Hundreds of proposals are rejected every year by museums and they are
frequently from scholars, like Katz, who are often more
interested in their thesis than giving visitors a curated experience
that is aesthetically charged or even visually revelatory.While I agree with Katz on some points, I take issue with his
point about homophobia in museums. From working in a number of
contemporary museums and frequently visiting a wide variety of them, I
have found that most of them do not shy away from material with
homosexual or even homoerotic content.
Speaking of which, Ruben Cordova, an art historian, curator and CultureGrrl reader, directed my attention to Because We Are, a recent 10-artist exhibition (that included Wojnarovicz) at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston. It explored “issues
regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual civil rights. Fundamental concerns include
gay marriage, the AIDS crisis, religious and legislative persecution, hate crimes and gay
sexuality,” according to the show’s description.