It’s complicated

Apart from the cadence of their voices, {{more velvet than denim}}, neither Jasper Johns nor Robert Rauschenberg lived {{flamboyantly}} out, queer lives. Generally {{speaking}}, they remained tacit in the distinction they made between the disclosed and obscured. Exemplary of ambivalent detachment, this seemed {{to be}} evidence of {{a rigorous}} self-discipline, and their resolve to not {{explicitly}} cite the personal was {{enormously}} influential on me. It has become more so {{recently}}, as the rise of social media and the focus on {{preferencing}} individual experience {{tellingly}} corresponds to the decline of sociability and an {{accelerating}} shrinkage of context.

Heterosexuality is {{pretty}} straightforward. Queerness, by way of contrast, is complicated even when it is not legislatively {{or otherwise}} proscribed. I {{often}} wonder whether the {{elaborately}} encoded way in which {{multiple}} meanings were embedded in Rauschenberg and Johns’s works was an expression {{or consequence}} of a sexuality hobbled by circumstance. Or was it just {{preter}}naturally confounding? {{Irrespectively,}} I have come to regard complexity {{and elision}} as integral to my understanding of what it is to be queer and by extension {{intrinsic}} to queer expressiveness. Curiously, this predisposition {{or proclivity}} has caused more difficulties than my {{continuing}} passion for my own gender. I blame it on my early {{unrequited}} love for Robert Rauschenberg, who had {{assiduously}} developed a {{convoluted}} pictorial language shaped by erudition, {{arcane}} knowledge and historicism, which he enfolded within {{deeply}} elegant discourses. The {{contrived}} density of his work had an {{exquisite}} impact on me then, which continues unabated.

Rauschenberg’s and John’s {{frequent}} use of indexes for the body—chairs and skeletons, for example, rather than photographs of {{identifiable}} people—inculcated in me a preference for oblique {{above direct}} citation. As is obvious from Johns’s Drawing after the painting ‘Watchman’ 1964 for the lithograph ‘Fragments—according to what—leg and chair’ 1971 that a chair indicates a seated person and infers {{a common}} humanity. In the works of the series Fragments—according to what, race, gender and age {{along with their attributes and legacies}} remain undeclared. A chair or skeleton is {{much}} less delimited by the specificities of the body {{that it signifies}}, which Rauschenberg makes apparent when he juxtaposes these two forms in Booster from Booster and 7 studies 1967. In my work I {{also}} substitute chairs for {{human}} protagonists, as in Purple reign 2017–20 and On the wallaby track (sub-dub) 2014–20. In these and other works produced by co-mingling quotidian elements with landscape, my use of IKEA furniture expands upon Rauschenberg and John’s {{earlier}} use of objects {{and subjects}} originating in daily life.

The cyanotypes or ‘blueprints’ by Rauschenberg and Johns {{similarly}} articulate{{d}} the body as a shared {{not singular}} site. To me, the characteristic {{inverted}} silhouettes generated by the cyanotype process link the hand stencils of Maltravieso {{in Spain}} with those of the Kimberley. I {{continue to}} reference Rauschenberg and Johns’s cyanotypes in a {{kindred}} narrative about negative space in life-sized wallpaper and metal cut-outs, such as (the) Laocoön 1991–. Rauschenberg and Johns’s encryption of the body {{as a narrative vessel}} in silhouettes {{among other emblematica}} enabled a nuanced acknowledgement of the intricate relationship of their work to the traumatic {{political,}} social {{and cultural}} realignments that transformed their time {{than would otherwise have been the case}}.

Queer folk {{must}} regularly obfuscate their speech {{in order}} to cloak their thoughts. Rauschenberg and Johns’s {{pictorial}} language was {{necessarily}} equivocal and opaque, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish representational acts in their oeuvre from {{ordinary}} objects in the real world. I too deploy such a strategy frequently {{in my artworks}}, using camouflage and applying images over furniture, cut-outs and other shapes to render them indistinguishable from their backgrounds. Invisibility has a {{unique}} rhetorical agency, and I am {{constantly}} alert to the capacity of the unseen to problematise power. Cicero in the shrubbery 2017 and other {{similar}} works use imperceptibility to contest the {{automatic}} correlation between visibility and influence that traditionally conditions how authority is accessed and exercised.

Mr Brewster, my {{grade-eleven}} art teacher at school, introduced me to Rauschenberg, Johns and Warhol, at the same time as he began to reflect on the slippage between photography, printmaking, sculpture and painting. He did not evoke ‘alluvium’ or ‘aggregation’ {{as terms}}, but he did imply that setting down layers {{of references}} could be understood as {{simultaneously}} a formal and a conceptual act. He knew that things {{yarns, stories}} could be more than {{just}} one thing at a time, that composition was {{concurrently}} physical and reflective. In those days you had to study a second {{European}} language to enter university and there was a {{greater}} focus on {{comprehending}} grammar and morphology, and {{subsequently}} it was natural to understand the ‘picture’ as a mode of speech, a view I have not {{yet}} relinquished. Knowledge as an expression of networked reading is something I still believe to be valid, and I interpret the {{progressive}} collapse of literacy as the {{fossil}} record of exploitative capital’s {{incremental}} effacement of the citizen by the consumer as the primary framework for {{personal}} identity. Works like Johns’s Figure 1 1969 from the series Color numerals, with the ink bleed{{ing}} to the right of the numeral, suggest an outward-looking, participatory person, {{from my perspective}} not a shopper but an activist. Meaning can be {{more}} effective in circumventing power {{and producing change}} when it is a lurking presence, {{not least}} because conspicuousness is {{invariably}} a blunt instrument. As a queer man I {{have come to}} elevate {{and appreciate}} the covert above the overt because the literary is more inherent than the literal to my being in {{and of}} the world.

Fudging the distinction between a salient discourse and an occluded one was {{a consideration}} relevant to Rauschenberg’s formulation of himself and his art. He {{also}} destabilised the {{hitherto}} fixed relationship between foreground and background {{elements}} in his work{{s}}, which I have found to be a fruitful approach to spatialising the planar in my own. His Combines are the models for works from my series Conflated, and they remain influential, as does his {{multivalent}} work with printmaking. I continue to explore the photocopy as a {{dual-pass}} printing process, applying it to diverse surfaces and shaped objects in a manner that borrows {{candidly}} from Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s experimentation with printmaking across various {{non-traditional}} substrates. In Rauschenberg’s close working relationship with Johns, {{however, particularly}} when they created under the pseudonym Matson Jones,¹ I detect {{or perhaps insinuate}} a mode of {{co}}operating {{intimately}} that approximates collusion and imparts something of the precarity {{and vulnerability}} of new modes of authorship—especially those involving {{queer}} folk when they work {{closely}}, as I {{often}} do, with{{in}} institutions.

Epigraph: Jasper Johns, quoted in Vivien Raynor, ‘Jasper Johns: I have attempted to develop my thinking in such a way that the work I’ve done is not me’, Artnews, vol 72, no. 3, March 1973, p 21

1. During the 1950s Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns worked closely using the pseudonym Matson Jones. Matson was Rauschenberg’s mother’s maiden name and Jones approximates the typographical and phonic qualities of Johns.