Lara Bullock on Joe Yorty
Joe Yorty, Stage, 2020, mixed media. Photo: Stacy Keck
[Image description: A gallery space with white walls and a wood floor. In the foreground stands a modular sculpture displaying various collections of objects and potted plants.]
My mom had a coffee cup when I was a kid that featured a hippo with eyelashes, lying on a divan, covered by a white blanket with purple, white, red, and pink hearts on it. I remember the cup said something about chocolate, and that I found it somehow glamorous, which is also how I felt about my mom. My mom drank a lot of coffee, as I do now. I distinctly remember picking up coffee cups that she left around the house so that I could drink the dregs that remained at the bottom, cold and highlighted by dirty haloes of evaporation rings. I am not sure I was aware of it then, but this surely was some kind of act of adoration or, at the very least, emulation. I wanted to be like her. My memory is so vivid when it comes to this particular cup that I was able to Google it and found it right away on a resale site. It reads,“I love you more than chocolate itself.” A sweet sentiment that, as a little girl who loved chocolate, must have also had something to do with why I was so enamored with it. I would like to think that the caustically comical implication of a hippo saying this, and not, say, a giraffe, was lost on me... but in reality, this was probably the subconscious beginnings of a formational journey that led to a second grade “diet” of grapes and no bagel at lunch to Slim Fast for dinner in college...
[Image description: Five individual images of thrifted coffee cups with a white person’s hand holding them. They are decorated with illustrations and the texts listed below.]
Who would’ve guessed I’d look this great at 50?
Faxed myself to Hawaii. (A secretary’s dream)
My husky makes me happy. You, not so much.
Don’t let the turkeys get you down
Ever have one of those days?
These are some of the kitschy quips I encountered looking through a bin of coffee cups during a studio visit with Joe Yorty—each one potentially holding the sentimentality that the hippo cup has for me, but for someone unknowable. This bin of cups is one of Yorty’s many “studio collections,” which often figure in his work. He procures these items at thrift stores, last-minute estate sales, flea markets, and on dumpster-diving excursions. Joe has said that he is drawn to certain objects because of their “cheapness,” their polished secondhand display, their last hope at another life before reckoning with the garbage bin. Many of these objects are kitsch, that is to say they appeal to popular taste and if subjected to artworld critique, are worthless (in German, the word means literal trash). However, ironically, they have their own value as sentimental talismans, their ubiquity evidence of a capitalist pathology rooted in longing. The kitsch object, often with the aid of humor, serves as an entry point into Yorty’s works. It is through this trope of consumerist longing that Yorty’s collections expose the gimmick of the “collector’s item,” which is that it exploits and “leans-in” to this generalized, cultural and socio-economic desire to possess, which is at its root, a desire to be or a desire for something other.
When displayed as a collection, each object loses its individualized history and even use value in favor of a collective meaning. In the words of theorist Susan Stewart, objects in a collection have become a transcendent “aestheticization of use value.” [1] That is to say, a collection figures its own microcosmic universe out of individual objects. And it is through this aestheticization that the hermetic worlds represented by Yorty’s modular sculpture, Stage, which features several collections of kitsch objects, opens up a queer politics of space. It does this by allowing multitudinous realities to exist simultaneously. [2]
As its title suggests, Stage is the most theatrical and performative of all of Yorty’s works. The primary sculptural elements are geometric forms, hand-built by Yorty, that reference Minimalism, arguably the most “high-art” art movement. Yet, while these forms recall Minimalist sculpture in shape and scale, their surfaces and function within Stage betray this association. Here they are covered or “dressed-up” in opulent yet quotidian surfaces, such as Formica meant to resemble granite, while others are plain wood, and some look Pop-y as if an homage to Richard Artschwager or Memphis Design Group. The faux surfaces are often a way to signify status and taste for those who cannot afford marble, granite, oak, or designer furniture, but desire the “real” thing.
Cheekily, Yorty has placed five disparate, found kitsch collections upon these “high-art” geometric forms, all of which are reconfigured throughout the duration of its exhibition. The continual reconfiguration of Stage serves as a metaphor for a generalized anxiety in identity formation that is relatable to everyone on some level. However, Stage speaks to the restrictive patriarchal and preconceived limits of the queer, or specifically gay, experience within certain social confines, metaphorically represented by the finite groupings of objects.
Stage (detail), 2020, mixed media. Photo: Stacy Keck
[Image description: A detail of Stage featuring varied masculine figures, including a large wrestler doll, and smaller, muscular action figures—one wears an eye patch, one has his arm around another, and one masked figure is posed as if joyfully kicking his legs.]
I.Masculine
The first of these kitsch collections is that of hypermasculine, figurative children’s toys and disembodied fists. We see wrestlers, Ken dolls, and other action figures that are muscular, macho, and oddly erotic for children’s toys. Their muscular bodies rival Greek statuary and indicate that they were meant to be seen in a state of undress. The faux-Hulk fists double as a symbol of machismo and, in the context of the artwork, can be read as a sexual reference. It becomes evident how overt eroticism and a certain idealistic, hyper-masculine conception of the male body is instilled in us as children. The wrestlers literally perform a camp version of cliched masculinity. Theorist Ramzi Fawaz speaks to the internalization of this bodily “ideal” as:
“… a sort of melancholic attachment that both gay men and the society at large have to the figure of hyper-masculinity … We (both the particular subculture of gay men, but also a patriarchal culture as a whole) ‘love’ men—some of us pursue them erotically, others symbolically or behaviourally worship at their imputed power—but that love is often exactly what undermines our own self-image, promotes rigid gender norms, and reproduces patriarchy.” [3]
This collection is fun, nostalgic, and comically absurd both in itself, but also as a patriarchal, masculine norm of the ideal man and queer body.
Stage (detail), 2020, mixed media. Photo: Stacy Keck
[Image description: A view of Stage featuring sheet-ghost figures as the predominant collection facing the viewer.]
II. Sheet Ghost
Yorty is interested in the porcelain sheet-ghost figure, the second collection, because someone or something must be concealed in order for it to be revealed. He is also interested in porcelain and ceramics as mediums that have not changed much since their development in antiquity. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the reference to billowing fabric seen in the sheet-ghost figurines is an ancient trope that was employed most notoriously in Greco-Roman sculpture, renown for its idealization of male bodies, particularly. Here we see the same billowing fabric, sculptural element featured on the hems of cheap thrift store and dollar-store ceramic ghosts. This interplay between high and low is emphasized through ironic, campy, performative materiality. In art history, fabric and drapery have been used to conceal and reveal furtive pleasures. There is an eroticism bound up in the notion of revealing and concealing.
Though there is no skin involved in sheet ghosthood, there is the anticipation of metaphorical reveal suggested in the notion of “coming out” (of the sheet). Couched in this language of concealing and revealing is a political move against tacit norms, in that when you conceal and reveal there is an implication that you are revealing to or concealing from an “other,” and thus claiming agency.
Stage (detail), 2020, mixed media. Photo: Stacy Keck
[Image description: A detail of Stage featuring five blue boy figurines of slightly different sizes. They assume identical postures, but it is apparent that they are hand-painted, as their clothes are various shades of blue and they have different skin tones.]
III. Blue Boy
The third collection features the Blue Boy from Thomas Gainsborough’s painting of the same name from 1770, which depicts a young boy in ornate rococo costume. This is perhaps the most layered of the collections in Stage. The sitter for Blue Boy is generally believed to be Jonathan Buttall, a working class ironmonger, but is most likely Gainborough’s nephew, posing as an aristocrat, dressed in an outdated 17th-century costume that, at the time when it was current, signified status, power, and masculinity.
The Blue Boy collection featured in Stage is made up of hobby-craft ceramic figurines that have been hand painted. These figures are different than the other figural collections in that Yorty sought these out on Ebay. There is a pathos in the fact that these figurines, which required such care to paint, were given up to a stranger over the internet. Surprisingly, the Blue Boy had wide appeal from its inception and continued to have a presence in popular culture that extends into present day. [4] Perhaps these figures were originally purchased because their owners recognized Gainsborough’s painting through its representation in popular culture and, therefore, their display would have communicated an awareness of fine art, resulting in a feeling of sophistication.
Figurines such as these began to emerge as part of the post-war hobbycraft movement, which was led by women as they began to return to the domestic space from the workforce, and contributed to the Blue Boy’s associations with effeminacy and homosexuality. [5] Eventually, Blue Boy figurines became associated with a larger movement of cultural and domestic feminization. And subsequently the Blue Boy was adopted by leaders of gay liberation, becoming a symbol of gender fluidity and alterity. The undulating history of Blue Boy’s masculinity and femininity suggests how the young, feminized male ingenue is a trope loaded with a history that implies that he is much more knowing than he seems. Nevertheless, in Stage, the Blue Boy provides a contrast to the muscled action figures which, together, appear as campy, stock characters in the performance of queerness.
Stage, 2020, mixed media. Photo: Stacy Keck
[Image description: A view of Stage with potted pothos plants, flameless plastic candles, and Blue Boys in the foreground.]
IV. Flameless Candles and V. Plants
Two important final aspects of Stage are the remaining collections of battery-operated, flameless candles juxtaposed against a collection of live plants. The pun of the flame in relation to homosexuality is intentional, as is the fact that it is artificial. Once again, we encounter a campy caricature of queerness. The plants, by contrast, are very much alive and thus in a continual state of transformation.
Amidst the inherent binaries in Stage, albeit mostly performative and ironic, the plants are a hopeful element that alludes to artifice of the binary through actual, real growth. [6]
CONCLUSION
It is important that three of the five collections of kitsch objects are figural. Scholar David Getsy relates that:
“Figural representation brings with it the cultural marking of bodies in relation to ideologies and power, so one means of resistance is to refuse to render the human form and to demand an open range of potential identifications.” [7]
To represent an actual body is an ideological move. By visualizing certain stereotypes and tropes of the queer body, dominant ideologies of sexuality and gender are problematized through the collections included in Stage. Together, they speak to themes of taste, class, gender, and queerness, to get at the overall performative nature of identity.
Additionally, the figural collections in Stage lend themselves to empathy and pathos. The sheer number of figures offered up to, and positioned to look out toward the viewer, to use the words of Ramzi Fawaz, “reminds us that masculinity is shot through with vulnerability, violence, sweetness, aggression, eroticism, innocence, and that we may also be responsible for producing its many variations by the way we look at and attach ourselves to it.” [8] Through the act of reconfiguration, Yorty is reinventing displays of masculinity within a finite lexicon of heteronormativity, thereby exposing the anxieties and pressures bound up in queerness.
Stage both emphasizes and exploits apparent binaries through performative modalities of display and configuration to the point of dismantling them altogether. We recognize the tension between high/low, new/old, familiar/strange, masculine/feminine, fabricated/found, and then we realize that often they are quite similar to each other.
It is through this dismantling that we encounter the “third space” or “queer space.” As Getsy explains:
“… queer is no one thing—nor is it easily recognized. It is an operation in which norms are called into question, ‘common’ sense is challenged, unnaturalness is upheld, and castigation is rebuffed through its embrace… it’s important to keep it mobile, tactical, and immoderate.” [9]
It is through playful engagement with Stage that we encounter the freedom offered up by a “queer space” that exists in the present and that allows us to move past fixed notions.
All the world’s a stage… And one man in his time plays many parts.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Shakespeare’s most famous line suggests that in life, we are all on a stage, performing. Our ‘set’ is filled with various objects and situations that, in many ways, make us. Objects, and especially sentimental or love objects, put us in touch with our past selves, which we often feel are our most real selves; the further back, the more real. We attach to objects in our performance of fixed-selves and our ever-evolving identities, both of which can exist simultaneously.
Lara Bullock is a San Diego-based contemporary art historian, writer, curator, and educator.
Notes:
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 151-152.
I am calling the opening up of this third space “queer,” though the argument utilizing the term “transgendered” space could be used as well. There are some arguments that the term queer reinforces the hetero/homo binary. David Getsy explains: “A critique of queer politics and queer theory has been that both largely seek to trouble sexuality while leaving binary and deterministic models for gender largely intact. By contrast, transgender, as Stryker has argued, disrupts this homonormativity just as much as it does heteronormativity, and sexualities become widened and remapped when genders are understood as mutable and multiple.” This is a point well taken, but in this instance, I am using the term queer as a mutable and open term that allows for this same ideology of gender and sexuality. David J. Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 119.
“Here you Come Again: Repetition and Fidelity in Erik Hanson’s Bluto Paintings: Ramzi Fawaz and David Getsy in Conversation,” in Erik Hanson: Two Years of Bluto (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 2019), 9-10.
In her book on Blue Boy, Valerie Hedquist writes that: “The reception of Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy from its origins to its appearances in contemporary visual culture reveals how its popularity was achieved and maintained by diverse audiences and in varied venues. Performative manifestations resulted in contradictory characterizations of the painted youth as an aristocrat or a ‘regular fellow,’ as masculine or feminine, or as heterosexual or gay. In private and public spaces where viewers saw the actual painting and where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough’s painting was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed.” Valerie Hedquist, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (New York: Routledge, 2020), np.
Ibid., 141.
High/low, hyper-masculine/feminine, authentic/artificial, trash/treasure, fabricated/found, etc.
David Getsy in Conversation with William J. Simmons, “Appearing Differently: Abstraction’s Queer and Transgender Capacities,” in Pink Labour on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices, eds. Christiane Erharter, Dietmar Schwärzler, Ruby Sircar, and Hans Scheirl (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 48.
“Here you Come Again,” 11.
“Appearing Differently.”