Between the Two: Art and Sexuality in 1960s New York

Homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s U.S. could be discussed in public and in popular culture, but only if it was cast as a crime or as deviant. Whether as moralizing tales of social outcasts or as high-profile obscenity trials, queer themes filtered into public discourses through these negative stereotypes. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Anger, and Nancy Grossman appropriated such characters as the delinquent or the biker as a means to figure queerness. This talk will provide an overview of some key moments of queer visibility—in the form of the criminal—in art of the 1960s.

The scandal surrounding Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures (1963), with its overt display of naked bodies writhing in ecstasy and agony, marks a turning point in the history of 1960s sexual liberation—one that often overshadows the artistic experimentation at the core of Smith’s practice.  This talk will look to the live performance work that predates Smith’s renowned film (still banned in New York State) in order to consider the entanglements and abstractions between art, gender, and embodiment swirling in the early part of the 1960s.

Joshua Lubin-Levy is a scholar, dramaturg, and curator, currently working on a monograph on the photography and performance work of Jack Smith. He is the Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal, and a Curatorial Research Associate with the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received his doctorate from the Department of Performance Studies, New York University.

In 1960s New York, erotic art was a broad, popular category that included everything from Pop art to abstract sculpture. The elasticity of the term “erotic” created a space in which women, later associated with the feminist art movement of the 1970s, publicly confronted stereotypes of gender and expressed their ideas about sexuality. This talk will explore the sexual politics of erotic art across diverse media and the ways that women artists sought to reshape the sexist conventions of “the nude” and upend the presumed objectivity of formalism.

Rachel Middleman is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. She is the author of Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2018). She has published in Art Journal, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, and Woman’s Art Journal and contributed to edited volumes and exhibition catalogues, including Academics, Artists, and Museums: 21^st-Century Partnerships (2018), Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West (2019); In the Cut: The Male Body in Feminist Art (2019); Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (2021); Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game (2021);and Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021). She is executor of artist Anita Steckel’s estate and recently curated Anita Steckel: The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics (2022) with Richard Meyer at the Stanford Art Gallery.

As Minimalist sculptors in the 1960s encoded their references to the human form in an abstract language, Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016) used figurative Pop sculpture to treat with absurdity or skepticism the stability of signs by which people are seen as gendered. At the same time, her drawings of the 1960s and 1970s manifested wide-ranging and nonconforming body forms and gender expressions. Through an examination of works featuring in the upcoming exhibition and catalogue Marisol: A Retrospective, this talk contextualizes the artist’s disruptive approach to the figuration of subjectivity, sexuality, and gender.