McCormick, Neo-Dada 1951-1954

SETH MCCORMICK

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Neo-Dada 1951–54 BETWEEN THE AESTHETICS OF PERSECUTION AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTIT Y

Ever since Moira Roth’s essay ‘‘The Aesthetic of Indifference’’ was published in 1977, the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg has been criticized for conforming to the repressive conditions of political censorship that dominated the context of their early work’s production and reception under McCarthyism. Roth’s polemical intervention in the formalist ethos of seventies art criticism represented the first attempt at a sociopolitical critique of Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s art, and it has served as a point of departure for more recent interpretations that focus on issues of sexual identity, uncovering encoded signifiers of a nominally censored or closeted homosexuality within these artists’ works.∞ In more recent years, Roth has proceeded to enlarge and expand upon her critique of the postwar avant-garde, motivated, in part, by her opposition to the canonization and contemporary influence of artists whose work she regarded as apolitical, from Marcel Duchamp and John Cage to Rauschenberg and Johns. Against the coolly cerebral, detached, and depersonalized ‘‘aesthetic of indifference’’ embraced by the followers of Cage and Duchamp, Roth champions examples of contemporary art that based themselves upon an identity politics of gender and sexuality, including the work of performance artists Shigeko Kubota and Rachel Rosenthal.

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Interestingly, although this connection is not emphasized by Roth, in the early fifties Rosenthal herself had been a close friend and associate of Johns and Rauschenberg. At the time, her artistic production was largely divided between her involvement with the experimental theater and dance of Erwin Piscator and Merce Cunningham, and her work in sculpture, which she would later describe as heavily indebted to Rauschenberg’s work of this period.≤ In 1954, moreover, Rosenthal commissioned a work from Johns, Star, that marked a crucial transition in both artists’ careers (fig. 1). Immediately after his execution of the commission, Johns destroyed all his previous work that was still in his possession and initiated a mode of painterly production, famously inaugurated in his work Flag (1954–55), that clearly differentiated his work from Rauschenberg’s and that subsequently came to define his identity as an artist. By contrast, after 1954 Rosenthal’s own interests shifted entirely away from studio art, toward the improvisational mode of theater that would establish the basis of her later work in performance.≥ Star thus represents a peculiarly hybrid object, whose authorship remains open to interpretation and debate. Conceived by Rosenthal as a painting in the shape of a Jewish star, the work’s construction was executed by Jasper Johns.∂ In this sense, it is the product of a collaboration between two artists. On the other hand, Star is also the product of a commission, in which Rosenthal played the part of creative director and patron while Johns assumed the role of the craftsman: in this respect it was not so different from the department store window-display commissions Johns and Rauschenberg received from Gene Moore in this period, which remained their principal source of income between 1954 and 1958.∑ Finally, the work belongs to a phase of Johns’s and Rosenthal’s careers in which their work was dominated by Rauschenberg’s influence, even as they struggled to develop independent artistic identities of their own. Viewed in these terms, Star is a product of contract, collaboration, and polemics, a site of disputation between the artists most closely involved in its making and the art historians who argue over their respective legacies. A close analysis of this work and the context of its production, therefore, may serve to demonstrate the complexities in these artists’ production at a moment when it was not yet possible to clearly differentiate between the two artistic trajectories outlined by Roth. Indeed, in this

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PROOF 1. Jasper Johns, Star, 1954. Oil, beeswax, and house paint on newspaper, canvas, and wood with tinted glass, nails, and fabric tape. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo by HickeyRobertson, Houston.

moment, the opposition between a politicized thematic of identity and a depersonalizing aesthetic of political persecution becomes a structuring element of Star. At the same time, both artistic projects are coimplicated in larger historical formations of power and prejudice, whose unity is given only in the confluence of personal and political circumstances which led to the production of Star. A closer study of this work may shed light on the ways in which the seemingly opposed models of identity politics and avant-garde aesthetics remain mutually imbricated even today, not only in their theoretical and methodological applications but at the level of political praxis, in the form of a romanticization and aestheticization of persecution. The supposedly repressive blanks and anti-expressive silences of the works that Johns, Rauschenberg, and Rosenthal produced prior to Star did not conform to the imperatives of homosexual closeting and political censorship; rather, their highly determinate content reveals the limitations of these concepts’ applicability to the economy of homosexual visibility in the United States of the fifties. This content is neither

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representational nor formal but rather literal and material, consisting of the collage incorporation of found papers and other detritus into the work’s surface or ground. Deriving from the work of the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, the aesthetics of this mode of collage were shaped by medical, sociological, and ethnographic constructions of pathology and health that mediated between avant-garde art and the norms of ethnic, sexual, and social identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the concept of degeneracy. These constructions haunted Schwitters’s reception in his own time, when his work was branded ‘‘degenerate’’ by the Nazis and ‘‘garbage art’’ by fellow Dadaists, as well as in the first decades after the Second World War, when a new generation of artists discovered the history and legacy of Dada through the writings of Schwitters’s severest critics within the Dada movement. As a hypothetical condition of biological decline afflicting individuals, races, populations, and societies, ‘‘degeneracy’’ was pseudoscience, pure and simple; as a set of disciplinary and aesthetic discourses and practices, however, it was possessed of a materiality capable of producing very real political effects, both lethal (at the limit, the authorization and organization of genocide on a historically unprecedented scale) and insurrectionary (the consolidation of oppositional identities and crossidentifications among a heterogeneous range of persecuted classes, ethnicities, and sexualities).∏ In some cases, these discourses and practices outlived the productivity of the biological theory of degeneracy, as witnessed by their persistence within psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality and in the government purges of homosexual employees that accompanied McCarthyism.π For homosexuals in the postwar United States, identification with the persecutory category of degeneracy, like silence, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was immediately implicated within Nazi-era medical and juridical techniques of ethnic and sexual persecution that continued to inform policies of homosexual persecution in the postwar United States. Both in its historical origins and its ongoing biopolitical deployment in the postwar context, the identification of sexual minorities as degenerate remained a powerful technique for criminalizing and pathologizing homosexuality. This technique simultaneously denied homosexuality the distinctiveness of an identity or essence that would distinguish it from other criminalized groups. On a rhetorical or performative level, however, the foregrounding of

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this identification brought to light the hidden continuity from the system of concentration camps to McCarthyism. By showing that the juridical status assigned to homosexuals in American society differed only in degree from the total expropriation visited upon Jews, homosexuals, and Communists by Nazism, this identification challenged the postwar consensus that the political systems of totalitarianism and Western liberal democracy were diametrically opposed. I therefore argue that these three artists’ strategic embrace of a Schwittersian aesthetic of degeneracy, despite its collusion with a typically McCarthyist conflation of Communists, homosexuals, and criminals, was at the same time the condition of possibility for a new form of political subjectivation, based on a performative misidentification of homosexuals with the Jewish victims and survivors of Nazism. This misidentification revealed the hidden continuity of McCarthyism with totalitarianism and thereby demonstrated the necessity of breaking with that double bind of invisibility and exposure, secrecy and confession, that even today, in the ever-widening zone of indistinction between public and private life, governs the extent and limits of political rights. In seeking to complicate received notions of the relationship between art, censorship, and identification in the McCarthy era (the so-called age of conformity), I refer to Jacques Rancière’s critique of essentialist identity politics. Rancière argues for a practice of political subjectivation that does not depend on the assumption of a preconstituted community of political interests or on a mimetic or romantic identification with the mechanisms of political persecution and exclusion. Rancière discusses the exemplary case of Auguste Blanqui, the nineteenth-century French revolutionary leader prosecuted for rebellion. Questioned by the prosecutor as to his profession, Blanqui answered, ‘‘Proletarian.’’ On being informed by the prosecutor that this was not a profession, Blanqui responded, ‘‘It is the profession of the majority of our people who are deprived of political rights.’’ Rancière notes that Blanqui, although not a worker, was correct in arguing that proletarian was not a name belonging to any identifiable social group in the given political order but was instead the site of what he terms an ‘‘impossible identification’’: Proletarians was the name given to people who are together inasmuch as they are between: between several names, statuses and identities; between humanity and inhumanity, citizenship and its denial. . . . Political subjectivization is

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the enactment of equality . . . by people who are together to the extent that they are between. It is a crossing of identities, relying on a crossing of names: names that link the name of a group or class to the name of no group or class, a being to a nonbeing or a not-yet-being. . . . In the demonstration of equality, the syllogistic logic of the either/or (are we or are we not citizens or human beings?) is intertwined with the paratactic logic of a ‘‘we are and are not.’’∫

Taking my cue from Rancière’s concept of subjectivation, I argue that Star’s iconographic investment in Judaism as the model for a politicized homosexual identity represents an attempt to break with a persecutory aesthetic of degeneracy. Star’s crossing of identities links the name of a recognized group (Jewish citizens) to the name of no group (homosexuals denied the rights and visibility of citizenship under McCarthyism). This misidentification is the performative enactment of an equality. Within the visual economy sketched by Star, however, it is an equality that remains forever deferred by the association of the signifiers of ethnic identity and nationality (the Star of David) with historical techniques of political persecution (the Judenstern of the concentration camps). Such associations transform a revolutionary contestation of the existing distribution of roles, meanings, and appearances into what Rancière terms the handling of a ‘‘wrong,’’ a matter of policy or policing. In this way, the aesthetic operations of Star expose the trap of an ethnicized model of identity politics, a trap from which the work of equality is unable to wholly release itself.Ω

A Metaphorics of Secrecy: Between Passivity and Politics The immediate artistic context in which Rosenthal and Johns collaborated on Star was dominated by the powerful examples set by their friends, the artist Robert Rauschenberg and the composer John Cage. ‘‘In 1950, John Cage made a major leap of imagination by entering into his experiments with chance,’’ Moira Roth recalls; ‘‘although the Zen-like chance operations of Cage were exciting to invent, they also exhibited an extreme passivity: a decision not to assert but rather to let happen what may. . . . A similar theme of emptiness and passivity resided in Rauschenberg’s white paintings of a year or so earlier. The large all-white canvases contained no image except the fleeting shadows of passers-by.’’∞≠

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Roth quotes a poem Cage wrote for the occasion of the White Paintings’ first exhibition in 1953, ‘‘To whom / No subject / No image / No taste / No object / No beauty / No message / No talent / No technique (no why) / No idea / No intention / No art / No feeling.’’ She calls this ‘‘a poetic manifesto of the Aesthetic of Indifference,’’ noting, In the spring of 1953, McCarthy’s henchmen Roy M. Cohn and G. David Schine made a lightning censorship tour of the American overseas information program in Europe. Their search for ‘subversive’ Communist literature led to a monstrous ‘cleaning up’ of libraries and, literally, to bookburning. In the political ambience of hysterical anti-Communism and right-wing action, the Cage poem reads like an unconscious tragic acknowledgment of total paralysis. The Aesthetic of Indifference had literally gone ‘blank.’ There are no messages, no feelings and no ideas. Only emptiness.∞∞

Roth goes on, however, to distinguish Johns’s works, with their ostensibly more specifically McCarthyist themes, from the White Paintings’ passive acceptance of conditions of political censorship: ‘‘What emerges out of a collective examination of his work is a dense concentration of metaphors dealing with spying, conspiracy, secrecy and concealment, misleading information, coded messages and clues.’’∞≤ In differentiating Johns’s inauguration of this ‘‘second and more poignant phase of the Aesthetic of Indifference’’ from the earlier art of Cage and Rauschenberg, Roth accords Johns’s work a more particularized treatment than many of the social art historians who studied this period in subsequent decades, most of whom have focused on the sexual identity politics of these artists’ works. Both Kenneth Silver’s 1993 ‘‘Modes of Disclosure’’ and Jonathan D. Katz’s more recent studies of the Cagean milieu, for instance, locate the artist’s work within the context of an emergent postwar homosexual aesthetic.∞≥ Their interpretations inevitably accentuate the commonalities between Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns as representatives of an ostensibly closeted, pre-Stonewall homosexual subjectivity. Viewed through the lens of identity, the artists’ works are simultaneously linked and contrasted with later, more overt artistic expressions of homosexuality, as in the case of Andy Warhol’s life and art. These shifts in interpretation have obscured the distinction, which Roth originally wanted to underscore, between the coolly impersonal aesthetic of Johns and Rauschenberg and the sexual identity politics of seventies art. By defining the former as a developmental stage of the

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latter, Silver and Katz implicitly conflate these two models of artistic practice. Restoring attention to the points of divergence between Rauschenberg’s ostensible passivity and Rosenthal’s interrogation of the performativity of gender is not just a matter of salvaging the uniqueness and originality of each artist: as Roth’s argument clearly shows, it is a question of the political differences that separate these two formations. The importance of these differences would seem to be borne out by an analysis of the traces of these artists’ respective influences on the production of Star. On Rosenthal’s side, the commissioning of Star could be read as a kind of performance of her self-identification as a Jew, constituting the earliest example of the artist’s subsequent lifelong engagement with the aesthetic expression of personal identity. At the same time, it seems to announce a shift in Johns’s artistic practice as well, in the way that it anticipates certain key elements of what Roth identifies, in Flag and later works, as a thematics of secrecy and concealment. On the level of the work’s physical structure, for instance, the two interlocking triangles of the Jewish star are transformed into the forms of a shallow triangular box with a triangular lid that has been rotated 180 degrees, obscuring part of the box’s interior and concealing its contents. In the tension established between these elements, the work bears the marks of a struggle between the representational and political content of the Jewish star and the modernist formal strategies of monochrome and collage, a struggle that could be understood in terms of the conflicting imperatives of Rosenthal’s iconographic program and Johns’s aesthetic sensibility. Thus, the work seems to embody the simultaneous emergence and divergence of two models of artistic production polemically contrasted by Roth: Johns’s elaboration of a ‘‘metaphorics of secrecy’’ against the historical backdrop of government persecution and censorship of modern artists, Communists, and homosexuals, versus Rosenthal’s performative engagement with the politics of identity. At the same time, by situating Johns’s work within the broader context of McCarthyism, Roth’s analysis of its ‘‘metaphorics of secrecy’’ is more open ended than the interpretations developed by Silver and Katz. In Roth’s 1977 essay, the metaphorical content of Johns’s work has a political valence that cannot be confined to homosexual closeting alone, but has equal relevance to the situation of other individuals and groups in a time of espionage trials and Communist purges. For Silver and Katz, these metaphors refer to the ground of an essential authorial identity

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provided by Johns’s homosexuality.∞∂ In this way, something of the commonalities that unite Rosenthal and Johns at this particular moment in time, and that allowed them to collaborate on Star, falls outside discussion; so too does the possibility of connecting Star’s borrowings from the aesthetic strategies of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings with the politics of Rosenthal’s self-identification as a Jew. What is precisely so remarkable about this work, in fact, is the relationship it establishes between the Jewish star, as an ambiguous emblem of Jewish sovereignty and vicitimization, and the work’s concretization of a Johnsian metaphorics of secrecy. The work is governed by an absolute spatial and semantic proximity between the forms of specifically Jewish identification embodied in the work’s physical structure and the zone of this identity’s submersion in, or indistinction from, a shared and nonspecific thematic of secrecy, concealment, and silence. This is perhaps most evident in the difficulty of distinguishing between the work’s putative metaphorics of the homosexual closet and its recourse to a figural language of Jewish and homosexual persecution under Nazism that was specific to the literature and journalism of this period, ranging from the use of the Jewish star and pink triangle as identifying insignia in Nazi concentration camps (described in Eugen Kogon’s widely read report on the camps, The Theory and Practice of Hell) to the ‘‘secret annex’’ made famous by the 1952 English publication of The Diary of Anne Frank.∞∑ This proximity between visual structures of Jewish identification and political structures of homosexual persecution, moreover, is not unique to this particular work. Rather, as I will attempt to show, it is rooted in the conditions of contemporary social and political discourse and in the aesthetics of so-called neo-Dada art of the early fifties. Such indistinctions were governed and granted consistency by formations of power and knowledge that gave a very concrete form to the visibility of homosexuality in the United States of the fifties, a form that does not correspond to contemporary notions of the homosexual closet. Restrictions upon homosexual action and speech were not, in fact, the principal mode by which these conditions exercised their effects, as the hypothesis of censorship implies. Instead of limiting the field of what was visible, sayable, and knowable about homosexuals, I argue, these formations saturated knowledge, speech, and sight, making it impossible to

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identify a domain of homosexual identity that was not overcoded by other identifications: criminal, Communist, subversive, spy. Attention to the historical factors that connected the emergence of the homosexual rights movement to postwar constructions of Jewish identity may clarify the relationship between the activities of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Rosenthal in the broader political and historical context of McCarthyism. Where Roth ties her interpretation to political events that are specific to the artists’ chronological development but arguably remote from their personal concerns, Silver and Katz associate the works with social and psychological conditions of homosexual invisibility that are germane to the artist’s biographies. This, however, dehistoricizes their work by measuring it against post-Stonewall discourses and practices. The task, therefore, is to connect these two perspectives in a way that does not take the relationship between aesthetics and politics for granted and which remains sensitive to the particular historical context of these artists’ production. By conflating legal and political developments with ahistorical factors of social or psychological prejudice, sociological analyses of homophobia and closeting deflect attention from the specificity of homosexual persecution in the United States of the fifties. This persecution consisted not so much in the concealment or censorship of homosexual identity as in its obsessive disquisition within literary, scientific, and political discourse and in the forcible identification and elimination of homosexuals from government and private employment. To those homosexuals who first recognized the need to organize politically in the early fifties, these bureaucratically administered and highly visible mechanisms of identification appeared to have more in common with the political persecution that had confronted Jews under Nazism than with the haphazard forms of police harassment and homophobic violence to which homosexuals had been routinely subjected in the past. The purges of homosexual ‘‘security risks’’ from public and private employment did not merely represent a threat to free expression and self-identification, as the diagnosis of censorship would suggest: rather, they uncannily echoed the situation of Jews in France in the years of the Dreyfus Affair, a situation whose essential continuity with Nazi persecutions of both homosexuals and Jews was analyzed in Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous The Origins of Totalitarianism.∞∏

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The Specter of Nazi Germany

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In a July 1950 document titled ‘‘Preliminary Concepts,’’ a draft proposal for the formation of an organization to defend the civil rights of homosexuals, Harry Hay defined the homosexual citizen of the United States as the contemporary juridical equivalent of the Jew in Nazi Germany. In this document, Hay asserted that ‘‘the government indictment against Androgynous Civil Servants’’ offered evidence of an ‘‘encroaching American Fascism.’’ He pointed out that homosexuals were being targeted in the same manner as Communists and argued that ‘‘the Government’s announced plans for eventual 100% war production mobilization’’ would also exclude homosexuals from employment in the private sector. Finally, he evoked the possibility that if McCarthyism triumphed, homosexuals could one day be interned in ‘‘concentration camps’’ similar to those used to exterminate the Jews.∞π The organization Hay proposed in 1950 would eventually be named the Mattachine Foundation; it became the first national organization to fight for homosexual rights in the United States. The beginnings of the homosexual civil rights struggle in this country can therefore be traced directly to this founding document, in which the subjectivation of homosexuals as United States citizens is effected in the form of their identification with persecuted Jews. Through this identification, homosexual activists implicitly linked the criminal inhumanity of the Nazi’s Jewish genocide with the political and juridical persecution of homosexuals under McCarthyism. Provisions for the investigation and termination of homosexual government employees originated in the language of a 1947 rider to the House appropriations bill for the State Department. The McCarran rider stipulated that any State Department employee regarded as a ‘‘security risk’’ could be investigated and terminated at the ‘‘absolute discretion’’ of the secretary of state. According to historian David K. Johnson, the rider’s language had been composed with the express intent of targeting homosexuals.∞∫ Over the course of the fifties and sixties, approximately one thousand State Department employees were removed from their jobs on suspicion of homosexuality; furthermore, statistics indicate that these firings represent only about 20 percent of the total number of government workers who were either fired or resigned in the course of the widening investigation.∞Ω

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Meanwhile, in 1950 Congress passed the Internal Security Act, also known as the McCarran Act or the Subversive Activities Control Act, requiring the registration of Communist organizations and authorizing the establishment of the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate ‘‘loyalty risks’’ and persons accused of ‘‘un-American’’ activities. Immigrants who fell under the provisions of the act could be barred from United States citizenship, while citizens could be denaturalized within five years. Title II of the Act, called the ‘‘Emergency Detention Act,’’ made provisions for the detention of any person whom the administration judged likely to commit acts of sabotage or espionage in the event of an ‘‘internal security emergency.’’ Passage of the bill led to the establishment of six ‘‘detention camps,’’ which were never used, although their very existence served as a reminder of the executive’s emergency powers and as a continual threat to political dissidents.≤≠ The transition from the firing of homosexuals under the McCarran rider of 1947 to their complete expropriation under the Internal Security Act of 1950 was a leap, but McCarthy’s supporters in Congress actively contrived to blur the distinction between security risks and loyalty risks in order to expand their own claim on executive powers. The more interchangeably the terms were used, the greater the threat that homosexuals would, like suspected Communists, be defined as ‘‘subversives’’ and subjected to denaturalization and internment.≤∞ Hay’s reference to ‘‘concentration camps’’ therefore offered an accurate description of one possible interpretation of the newly introduced internal security measures. In its juridical-political structure, the government purge of homosexuals was virtually indistinguishable from the administrative mechanisms that were used to identify spies and Communists, and it was distinctly similar in logic and structure to the laws which had condemned large numbers of homosexuals and Communists, as well as millions of Jews, to the Nazi concentration camps. These circumstances may serve to explain why, in what was arguably the first effective articulation of a discourse of homosexual civil rights in postwar society, the possibility of a homosexual politics was made contingent upon acceptance of the historical parallel with the Jewish victims of Nazism. Hay did anticipate a positive alternative to this fate, which required that American homosexuals organize politically to demand their civil rights. In drawing a parallel between Jews and homosexuals, he did not

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simply draw attention to their shared history of victimization; he also evoked the possibility that homosexuals could one day win the same degree of respect and recognition now accorded to the Jews, who could now no longer be politically scapegoated without public protest.≤≤ At the same time, however, it may be argued that Hay’s analogy revealed the extent to which a nascent politics of positive homosexual identity was circumscribed by an assumption of victimhood that was predicated upon, and might even have served to reinforce, persecutory constructions of homosexuality. But what about modes of homosexual identification that were not strictly political or not framed in the representational language of Hay’s prospectus? What about identifications established on the level of aesthetic experience, social praxis, or psychological expression? How was the fate of homosexuals in government service, or even in the private sector, related to the material conditions of avant-garde artistic production, or was it even related at all? What exactly was the nature of the relationship (if any) between the juridical-political structure of homosexual visibility under McCarthyism and the structures of visibility and identification afforded to homosexual artists by the strategies of modernist abstraction: grid, monochrome, ready-made, collage?

Kurt Schwitters’s ‘‘Degenerate’’ Aesthetic The political threat posed by McCarthyism in the postwar United States exercised a controlling influence over avant-garde artists’ ability to connect with the sources of a Western artistic tradition irreparably compromised by its continuity with fascism. Just as the contemporary discourse of homosexual rights can be traced back to Hay’s reference to Nazi precedents for the State Department purges, it could be argued that abstract painting in the early fifties could present contemporary conditions of homosexual persecution only through an engagement with the aesthetic modes that were historically associated with persecutory constructions of deviance and degeneracy. Homosexuals’ exclusion from a specifically political identity, and their unlimited exposure to expropriation and death, could thus be directly represented through an identification with aesthetic practices that were designated as ‘‘degenerate art’’ (entartete Kunst) under Nazism. In particular, I would argue, it was

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through an engagement with the work of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, whose death in 1948 occasioned renewed and widespread attention to his life and art, that Johns and his fellow artists Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were able to broach the relationship between McCarthyist persecution and a longer history of totalitarian constructions of identity. According to Calvin Tomkins, ‘‘Rauschenberg had often been told, since his Betty Parsons show [of 1951], that his work resembled that of the German artist Kurt Schwitters.’’≤≥ Certainly Rauschenberg’s production of 1953–54 recalled Schwitters’s collage aesthetic: densely layered, heteroclite in its juxtaposition of imagery and materials, delighting in the poetry of discarded pieces of paper, cloth, and other refuse. The influence is particularly marked in Rauschenberg’s Red Paintings (his first to incorporate collaged objects) and the early Combines and Combine paintings. Rauschenberg is known to have visited the important Sidney Janis show, ‘‘Dada 1916–1923,’’ which ran from September 29 through October 31, 1953, and which included several of Schwitters’s Merz collages. He may have been introduced the artist’s work even prior to this by his fellow artist and Black Mountain College alumnus Cy Twombly, who began producing collages under the direct inspiration of Schwitters while still a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in 1948.≤∂ Meanwhile Leo Steinberg, in his 1963 monograph on Jasper Johns, notes that Johns was also told early on that his ‘‘small abstract collages from paper scraps . . . looked like those of Kurt Schwitters’’ and that he subsequently ‘‘veered away—to be different.’’≤∑ It is possible that Johns would have encountered Schwitters’s work prior to meeting Rauschenberg or being exposed to his production. I would argue, however, that the works Johns produced shortly before or after his move to Pearl Street with Rauchenberg in the summer of 1954, following the start of their professional collaboration on window-display commissions, are the first to show any influence of Schwitters’s model of collage and are most likely the ones which triggered the comparisons mentioned in Steinberg’s anecdote.≤∏ This strongly suggests that the influence of Schwitters on Johns’s work was primarily mediated by Rauschenberg’s example, and that his mobilization of a Merz aesthetic demands to be read in terms of the dialogical relationship between the two homosexual artists’ works.

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Schwitters’s Merz cannot be regarded simply as one example among others of ‘‘degenerate art.’’ A close reading of the documentation available in the early fifties would have shown that at the time of its production, the materials and compositional principles of Schwitters’s art were understood to bear an ambiguous relationship to the popular notions of degeneracy that influenced Nazi ideology. Robert Motherwell’s anthology The Dada Painters and Poets, published in 1951, featured anecdotes about Schwitters and accounts of his works that emphasized the ambiguous relation between Schwitters’s art and certain reactionary strains in modernist German culture. One of the most powerful portraits of Schwitters found in Motherwell’s anthology was authored by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, wife of the Bauhaus artist and American émigré Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Motherwell quotes an anecdote from her previously published biography of her husband, recounting an event that took place in the immediate aftermath of the fascist seizure of power in Berlin. The account reveals with particular poignancy both the dangers in which Schwitters was placed by the Nazi campaign against ‘‘degenerate art’’ and the ways in which the artist’s overidentification with his art reinforced the ambiguity of his work’s ideological commitments. Sibyl and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had received an invitation to a German press association from the poet and author of the ‘‘Futurist Manifesto,’’ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an early supporter of the Italian Fascist Party and a sometime fellow traveler of Dada. Laszlo MoholyNagy had no interest in going. Having been threatened with arrest for refusing to accept censorship of his paintings, he had already made preparations to leave Germany. Schwitters, who was staying with them at the time, was also ‘‘profoundly worried about the political tide’’ but had no plans to leave Germany: ‘‘There was nothing he dreaded more than emigration.’’ He finally convinced his hosts that they should attend, ‘‘to honor the revolutionary in Marinetti.’’ Short of Hitler, all the Nazis were present: Goebbels and Goring, August Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, the president of the Berlin University, Gerhart Hauptmann . . . Moholy, Schwitters, and I were sandwiched between the head of the National Socialist Organization for Folk Culture, and the leader of the ‘‘Strength Through Joy’’ movement. . . . The more Schwitters drank, the more fondly he regarded his neighbor.

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‘‘I love you, you Cultural Folk and Joy,’’ he said. ‘‘Honestly, I love you. You think I’m not worthy of sharing your chamber, your art chamber for strength and folk, ha? I’m an idiot too, and I can prove it.’’ Moholy put his hand firmly on Schwitters’s arm and for a few minutes he was silent, drinking rapidly and searching the blank face of his neighbor with wild blue eyes. ‘‘You think I’m a Dadaist, don’t you,’’ he suddenly started again. ‘‘That’s where you’re wrong, brother. I’m merz.’’ He thumped his wrinkled dress shirt near his heart. ‘‘I’m Aryan—the great Aryan merz. I can think Aryan, paint Aryan, spit Aryan.’’ He held an unsteady fist before the man’s nose. ‘‘With this Aryan fist I shall destroy the mistakes of my youth’’—‘‘If you want me to,’’ he added in a whisper after a long sip.≤π

The portrait of Schwitters presented by this exchange touches on one of the central problems of his reception by his fellow Dadaists. In his intoxication and desperation, Schwitters puts on a performance that is neither pure parody of his Nazi hosts nor sincere schwarmerei, but rather an unstable compound of the two. The thematic of this ambiguity is taken up in several places in Motherwell’s anthology. George Grosz, Motherwell reports, was among the most unsympathetic to Schwitters’s work. Grosz described Schwitters’s Merz paintings and Merz poems in terms not unrelated to those applied to ‘‘degenerate art’’ by the Nazis, as ‘‘garbage’’ pictures and ‘‘garbage’’ poems.≤∫ Like Grosz, the Berlin Dadaists Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Haussmann also criticized Schwitters for the ambiguity of his work’s aesthetic politics. The paradoxical alliance Schwitters forged between revolutionary negation and a conciliatory modernist aesthetic of ‘‘harmony and form,’’ they felt, traced its roots to the same source that nourished Nazi ideology, namely, German romanticism.≤Ω As George Hugnet noted in his essay ‘‘The Dada Spirit in Painting,’’ included in Motherwell’s anthology, impurity and corruption furnished both the thematic material and the modus operandi of Schwitters’s art: ‘‘At home, heaps of wooden junk, tufts of horsehair, old rags, broken and unrecognizable objects, provided him with clippings from life and poetry, and constituted his reserves. . . . To the principle of the object, he added a respect for life in the form of dirt and putrefaction.’’≥≠ Entformeln (deformation) and Entmaterialisierung (dematerialization) were princi-

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ples that Schwitters continually stressed in his writings about his work, employing a rhetoric that possessed uncanny echoes of the term Entartung, or ‘‘degeneracy.’’≥∞ Like the latter concept, ‘‘Merz’’ was constituted as an overarching category that both culminated and dissolved all typological categories—racial, social, and psychological. In a time obsessed with purity, Schwitters confronted constructions of impurity and hybridization as both a limit case and an enabling condition of his work. Viewed in this light, Schwitters’s self-identification as ‘‘the great Aryan merz‘‘ in the Moholy-Nagy anecdote strikes a disquieting note, for it suggests that Schwitters alone among the German Dadaists was aware of the extent to which avant-garde artists had already implicated themselves in popular and propagandistic constructions of degeneracy. In distancing themselves from Schwitters’s dependence upon romanticnationalist models of cultural production, the Berlin Dadaists may have sought to deny their own culpability in fulfilling Nazi prophesies of decline in the cultural sphere. The description Schwitters gave of his work in his 1920 Merz essay, reprinted in Motherwell, gave credence to the notion that art could be identified in terms of pathology and health, deformation and the harmony of form. In this Schwitters was quite unlike his ostensibly more politicized colleagues within the Dada movement, who, trusting in the patent absurdity of such denominations, never recognized the logical consistency that led from an aesthetics of nonsense and feigned insanity to a medical, juridical, and political apparatus of human liquidation.≥≤ Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s narrative concludes with the dramatic events that followed upon Schwitters’s drunken provocation of the ‘‘Strength through Joy’’ man. Leaping to the rescue of his beleaguered friend, Marinetti jumped to his feet and launched into a recitation of his sound poem ‘‘The Raid on Adrianople,’’ complete with spoken sound effects of bombings, trains suicides, and telegraphic communications from America. At the poem’s climax, Marinetti threw himself upon the table, and as he whispered its concluding line, ‘‘Vanitéeeeee, viande congeléeeeeeee— veilleuse de La Madone,’’ he dragged the tablecloth with him onto to the floor, spilling food, wine, and tableware onto the lap of Cultural Folk and Joy. Meanwhile, Schwitters had jumped up at the first sound of the poem. Like a horse at a familiar sound the Dadaist in him responded to the signal. His face flushed,

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his mouth open, he followed each of Marinetti’s moves with his own body. In the momentary silence that followed the climax his eyes met Moholy’s. ‘‘Oh, Anna Blume,’’ he whispered, and suddenly breaking out into a roar that drowned the din of protesting voices and scraping chair legs, he thundered: ‘‘Oh, Anna Blume, Du bist von hinten wie von vorn [You are the same from behind as from the front], A-n-n-a.’’≥≥

In this linkage of sentimental German love poetry with a perverse, even scatological mixture of aesthetics and tastes—modernist and romantic, materialist and lyrical, working class and bourgeois—Schwitters’s Merz stood for the principle of an impure federation of mobile and decentering sexualities, races, and classes. At the same time, and by the same token, it consolidated and spectacularized the terms under which degenerate art was made useful to Nazi propaganda, most famously in the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich, in which Schwitters’s work was included.≥∂

Between ‘‘Bare Life’’ and Disagreement The two examples given above—Hay’s ‘‘Preliminary Concepts’’ and the recovery of Schwitters’s Merz aesthetic in the early work of Rauschenberg, Twombly, and Johns—suggest some of the ways in which homosexuals in the fifties could and did identify with the situation of various other groups persecuted under Nazism, including Jews and modern artists. But there was a very considerable difference between the two different poles of this identification. This difference can be described, somewhat cursorily, in terms of the opposition between a politics of victimhood and a politics of responsibility. The first conforms to a mode of political romanticism that in some respects actually reproduces the logic of Nazi persecution. By identifying with the complete expropriation and powerlessness of the Nazis’ victims, the politics of victimhood perpetuates those forms of depersonalization by which Nazism stripped its victims of the essentially human qualities of agency and responsibility. The politics of responsibility, by contrast, emphasizes precisely these qualities in its identification of the victims of political persecution. Hay, although motivated by the real conditions of victimization which

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he and other homosexuals faced, proposed a model of homosexual identity that was oriented toward activism and political agency: this was the model of the homosexual as citizen. Hay did not conflate the distinct identities of Jews and homosexuals by attempting to explain (and implicitly, to naturalize) the reasons for their similar treatment under Nazism and McCarthyism. Most importantly, his comparison of Jews with homosexuals did not seek some basis for their victimization on the level of common sociological or psychological characteristics, or shared aesthetic sensibility. Arguably, however, it was only within the confines of such an aesthetic of victimhood that the foundations of a political identity for homosexuals could be represented in the early fifties, although necessarily in an apolitical form, or at most in a form whose politics could as yet be dimly perceived. By the same token, this identity was given in a form that was not yet a distinctly or specifically homosexual politics, or whose homosexuality was not yet specifically political; a form that accorded political identity to homosexuals only insofar as they were subjected to the same forms of political expropriation as other victims of Nazism: paradigmatically, the Jews of the concentration camps. In this form, homosexuality is political only insofar as it is denied a distinct identity of its own. Instead it is identified, immediately and without reserve, with the generic condition identified by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as ‘‘bare life.’’ Agamben uses the term bare life to refer to the inclusion of zoe—a term the ancient Greeks used to refer to ‘‘simple fact of living common to all living beings’’—within political life, bios politikos. He takes as his point of departure Michel Foucault’s studies of the historical shift from the ‘‘territorial state’’ to the ‘‘state of population,’’ in which the biological health of the populace becomes the central problem of state power. The development of eugenics was a crucial factor in the consolidation of what Foucault terms ‘‘biopower,’’ the transferal of political power from the feudal sovereign’s right over his subjects’ life and death to the ‘‘exigencies of a life-administering power’’ that functions ‘‘to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it.’’≥∑ According to Agamben, the limitation of Foucault’s analysis of modern political power is to be found in the historical and theoretical distinction Foucault draws between the juridical-political institutions of sovereignty and the social and scientific techniques of biopower. In fact, Foucault did recognize that there were intersections between these two

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modes of operation of power, as exemplified by Nazism, ‘‘doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power.’’ Under Nazism, ‘‘a eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the way of extension and intensification of micro-powers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control, was accompanied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood: the latter implied both the systematic genocide of others and the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice.’’≥∏ The problem with Foucault’s analysis, in Agamben’s view, is that this ‘‘unrestricted state control’’ over biological life does not represent a transitional or accidental admixture of two historical epochs or dimensions of power, one ruled by law and the other by the domination of nature; rather, biopolitics is the very paradigm of sovereign power, establishing a direct continuity between the Hobbesian ‘‘state of nature’’ and the modern ‘‘state of exception,’’ codified in executive privilege or martial law. Under Nazism, biological life was politicized: that is, subjected to the direct exercise of state power precisely through the constitution of the biological health of the Volk as the sole political value. Agamben claims that this determination of the proper object of politics as the ‘‘good life,’’ understood as biological health and happiness, has gone hand in hand with sovereign power’s recourse to an unlimited monopoly over violence since the dawn of Western history. The only distinction that Agamben admits between premodern forms of sovereignty and modern biopolitics is that the historical ‘‘state of exception,’’ whether referring to martial law, the spaces of the concentration camp, or the bare life of those stripped of their membership in the human community, has now become the rule. Agamben’s concept of bare life shows how forms of identification grounded in political expropriation (in this case, the identification of postwar artists with Schwitters’s degenerate art) could be articulated under McCarthyist conditions of censorship and persecution, even as the artistic presentation of a specifically political homosexual identity remained foreclosed. I have argued that in the work of artists who faced persecution as homosexuals under McCarthyism in the fifties, and whose inability to articulate a politics of positive homosexual identity paradoxically enabled a more generic identification with the expropriation of so-called degenerate individuals under Nazism, the recuperation

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of a Merz aesthetic served to mediate their work’s relationship to the political and social conditions of its production. But while an aesthetic politics of degeneracy may have offered the possibility of collectivist identification among diverse groups targeted by biopolitical persecution (including Jews, homosexuals, and Communists), it also carried the risk of complicity in the very techniques of visual identification and control by which these same groups were reduced to bare life. Neo-Dadaist artists ran the risk of reinforcing the very stereotypes whose political effects were imprinted upon their work. This would be born out in the critical reception accorded Johns’s and (especially) Rauschenberg’s artistic use of found objects and waste matter during this decade, from Hilton Kramer’s archly homophobic jibe of 1959, ‘‘Like Narcissus at the pool, they see only the gutter,’’ to Newsweek’s deadpan observation that Rauschenberg’s 1955 Bed ‘‘recalls a police photo of the murder bed after the corpse has been removed.’’≥π Meanwhile, the early fifties saw the publication of several historical studies of the mésalliance between aesthetic romanticism and stereotypes of sexual deviance, from Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt’s critical history of Nazi cultural policy, Art under a Dictatorship, to literary critic Mario Praz’s pathologizing investigations of the erotic sensibilities of romanticism.≥∫ Such histories would have indicated, either by argument (Lehmann-Haupt) or by example (Praz), how identification with an aesthetics of decadence and degeneracy might perpetuate stereotypes of biological and psychological deviance still disseminated by a supposedly liberal postwar social science.≥Ω Whether triggered by a reaction against homophobic criticism or by greater awareness of the relationship between a romantic aesthetic of degeneracy and the historical persecution of ‘‘exotic’’ races and sexualities, the work of all three artists seems to shift away from the techniques of Merz collage after 1954. In my view, it is implausible to attribute this shift solely to the desire, as Steinberg puts it, ‘‘to be different.’’ Rather, I would suggest that it was the dialogic and collaborative context of Star’s production that threw the political and historical limitations of this aesthetic into stark relief. In its formal structure, Star combined a hybrid mode of painterlysculptural relief with a monochromatic overlay of overpainted collage. In the use of these techniques, Star maintained the continuity of Johns’s and Rosenthal’s dialogue with Rauschenberg’s previous work, from his Black

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Paintings (initiated in 1951) to his early Combine paintings and freestanding Combines of 1954, all works shaped by the legacy of Kurt Schwitters. Yet in Star, the double-edged character of this recuperation was first made fully visible in its identification with the ambiguous significance of the Jewish star. Like the history of political expropriation embedded in neo-Dada aesthetics, this icon symbolized both the politics of Jewish nationalism and, in the forms of the Judenstern, the enforced visibility of Jewish and homosexual identity in the concentration camps. Conversely, the enunciation of a positive Jewish identity in Star was itself overshadowed by, or mixed up with, forms of identification and separation that had administered the bare life of Jews and homosexuals under Nazism. In the interlocking forms of the Jewish star and the inverted triangle, the identifying symbols of the Jewish and non-Jewish inmates of the camps, Star made recourse to their common victimization under Nazism in a way that prevented the possibility of distinguishing in any absolute way between particular groups.∂≠ The conflict between the articulation of political identity and its submersion into bare life is played out on a level where it is not possible to discriminate rigorously between them: where identity politics remains lodged in the aestheticization of victimhood and where a metaphorics of political censorship or secrecy is seen as containing a specific referential ground and ultimate horizon of significance, namely the bare life exemplified by the Jews under Nazism. As the model of a potential politics of homosexual subjectivation, Star thus highlighted the limitations of the aesthetic politics of Dadaist degeneracy while also showing that even a more particularized identity politics—so long as it remains based on the model of victimization exemplified by the logic of bare life—cannot fully extricate itself from these foundational limitations.∂∞ The complicity of these modes of identification with the logic of political persecution is made visible in the way in which the interlocking shapes of the Jewish star and the inverted triangle form a partially lidded, partially glassed-in space like that of a locked display case in a department store, a space in which privacy and concealment is not to be distinguished from incarceration and enforced visibility. Thus, if Star implicitly opposes two models of artistic practice or aesthetic politics, they are not the ones that Moira Roth had in mind when she contrasted the aesthetic of indifference with a politics of self-

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represented identity. Far from being simply indifferent to contemporary politics, the recuperation of a totalitarian paradigm of degenerate art aimed to reoccupy and reclaim persecutory modes of identification, transforming the aesthetic codes of degeneracy and subversion into practices of opposition. In so doing, however, it risked reinforcing the very structures of persecution which foreclosed the possibility of its own political subjectivation. To this model is opposed a second, the model of misidentification, in which a particular political identity is figured, but not for its own sake and not in order to abrogate for itself the status of a persecuted minority (a claim that would merely rehearse the risks attendant upon the first model). In Star, just as in Hay’s ‘‘Preliminary Concepts,’’ the founding document of the Mattachine Society, the figuration of a particularized Jewish identity serves primarily as a means to refuse totalizing structures of persecutory identification and domination. This refusal involves the staging of a disagreement, an event which becomes political, as Jacques Rancière has theorized, not due to the nature of the competing interests or claims at stake, but only insofar as the very identities of the two parties, and their acceptance or refusal of a common language, become the object of dispute. In explicating this concept of disagreement, Rancière refers to Livy’s story of the secession of the Roman plebeians on Aventine Hill, reinterpreted in 1829 by the nineteenth-century French philosopher and poet Pierre-Simon Ballanche. Following their uprising, the seceding plebs demanded a conference with the patricians. In Ballanche’s account, as Rancière describes, this request met with incredulity: The position of the intransigent patricians is straightforward: there is no place for discussion with the plebs for the simple reason that plebs do not speak. They do not speak because they are beings without a name, deprived of logos—meaning, of symbolic enrollment in the city. Plebs lead a purely individual life that passes on nothing to posterity except for life itself, reduced to its reproductive function. . . . Between the language of those who have a name and the lowing of nameless beings, no situation of linguistic exchange can possibly be set up, no rules or code of discussion. This verdict does not simply reflect the obstinacy of the dominant or their ideological blindness: it strictly expresses the sensory order that organizes their domination, which is that domination itself.∂≤

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As Rancière points out, what Ballanche emphasized in the story was that the plebeians were not motivated principally by poverty or the state of their living conditions, but by the inequality of the sensory order, in which they were allowed no name of their own and in which their speech could not be heard. When the plebeians begin acting like patricians—consulting their own oracles, naming their own representatives —this is not merely a dumb show of powerlessness: ‘‘In a word, they conduct themselves like beings with names. . . . They write, Ballanche tells us, ‘a name in the sky’: a place in the symbolic order of the community of speaking beings, in a community that does not yet have any effective power in the city of Rome.’’∂≥ In 1954, Rachel Rosenthal, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg did not yet have any power or influence, but they formed a community that changed the relationship between the sensory order and the politics of authorship. In revealing the limitations of the language then available for their articulation of their particular and collective identities, they wrote their own name in the sky.

Notes 1. See the essays by Moira Roth and commentary by Jonathan D. Katz collected in Ostrow, ed., Difference/Indifference, including Roth’s reprinted 1977 essay, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Indifference.’’ 2. Interview with Rachel Rosenthal conducted by Moira Roth, Los Angeles, California, September 2, 1989, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/rose nt89.htm. Accessed November 21. 2006. 3. Rosenthal’s work in performance art has been documented in a monograph by Moira Roth, Rachel Rosenthal, and in Chaudhuri, ed., Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms. 4. Rosenthal’s commission was inspired in part by an earlier work by Johns, a cross-shaped painting produced sometime in the summer of 1954, which is apparently no longer extant. See Bernstein, ‘‘Jasper Johns’ Paintings and Sculptures 1954–1974,’’ 217n20; Tone, ‘‘Chronology,’’ 124; and Crichton, Jasper Johns, 26, 76n4. 5. See Tone ‘‘Chronology.’’ 6. Something of these insurrectionary effects seems to be implied within the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille’s concepts of basesse and l’informe, especially as they are elaborated by Rosalind Krauss in her essay ‘‘No More Play,’’ in

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The Originality of the Avant-Garde, and in the exhibition catalogue she coauthored with Yve-Alain Bois, Formless. Neither Bataille nor Krauss, however, consider the ways in which these quasi-mythic, quasi-ontological concepts lend themselves to recuperation by totalitarian political romanticism. On the political usefulness and limitations of Bataille’s ‘‘sur-fascism’’ in thinking contemporary problems of community and sovereignty, see Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community. Similar reservations could be leveled against Leo Bersani’s polemics against deconstructionist theories of sexual identity in Homos, in which he argues for the potentially critical or politically subversive value of a homosexual aesthetic of the gay outlaw. 7. For the former, see note 34, below. On the persecution of homosexuals under McCarthyism and the birth of the homosexual rights movement, see Johnson, Lavender Scare; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 41–53, 63; Adam, Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, 60–65; and Terry, An American Obsession, chap. 11. 8. Rancière, ‘‘Politics, Identification, Subjectivization,’’ 66–67. 9. John D’Emilio contrasts the homosexual rights movement’s ‘‘retreat to respectability’’ in the mid-fifties, consisting of its acceptance of the medical establishment’s pathologization of homosexuality and its corresponding turn from political activism to social outreach, with the radicalization of the movement under the influence of the civil rights struggles of blacks and other racial minorities in the sixties (Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 75–91, 108–25, 166–68). Barry D. Adam and Paula C. Rust describe how radical feminism, itself influenced by ethnic politics, further ethnicized homosexual activism as lesbians in particular adopted the theoretical arguments and political strategies of what Adam terms ‘‘feminist nationalism.’’ See Adam, Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, 91–97; Rust, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, 171–83. As this paper will demonstrate, however, the ethnicization of homosexuality can be traced to early activists’ comparison of McCarthyist homosexual purges with the Nazi persecution of Jews (and possibly still earlier, to fascist and protofascist comparisons of Jewish and homosexual ‘‘vice’’: see note 16, below). This raises the question of whether the increased militancy of homosexual activism in the sixties should be attributed to the impetus of ethnicization or whether the self-pathologization of an earlier ‘‘retreat to respectability’’ was not itself the result of activists’ identification of homosexual politics with the needs and interests of a preconstituted (and thus, quasi-ethnic) community. 10. Roth, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Indifference,’’ 40. For a very different interpretation of the White Paintings that emphasizes their opposition to reified forms of experience under capitalism, see Joseph, Random Order, 25–71.

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11. Roth, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Indifference,’’ 41. 12. Ibid., 43. 13. Jonathan D. Katz has published numerous essays focusing on issues of homosexual identity in the work of Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns. See in particular ‘‘The Silent Camp’’; ‘‘John Cage’s Queer Silence ‘‘; and ‘‘Lovers and Divers.’’ Kenneth Silver’s essay ‘‘Modes of Disclosure’’ represents an important early contribution to queer theory and postwar art history. To my knowledge, Fred Orton has the distinction of having published the earliest critical analysis of homosexual self-censorship in Johns’s art: see his essay, ‘‘Present.’’ However, Orton’s focus is on the politics of representation, and he does not contextualize Johns’s work within the history of homosexual art or identity politics. 14. In fact, Katz devotes considerable attention to the Cold War cultural context in his essay ‘‘Passive Resistance,’’ but this analysis primarily addresses the ways in which the political and sociological discourse of the time was overdetermined by ‘‘the loss of faith in a coherent, masculinist oppositional posture,’’ to which he relates Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s gendered political passivity. 15. Silver attributes this thematic of the closet to similar boxed and lidded constructions created by Johns immediately after Star (see Silver, ‘‘Modes of Disclosure,’’ 188). Kogon’s book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, was closely studied in the literary-anarchist circles in which John Cage moved, having been reviewed in the Vanguard Group’s periodical Resistance (Katz and Wieck, ‘‘Political Behavior’’). As a political symbol of homosexual liberation, however, the pink triangle did not come into common use until considerably after 1954. 16. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl recounts how the writing and publication of this book was shaped by the author’s desire to intervene in contemporary polemics over McCarthyism in her biography Hannah Arendt, 211. Arendt’s historical argument drew directly upon Marcel Proust’s portrait of the milieu of the Dreyfus Affair in Sodome et Gomorrhe, the book which her friend Walter Benjamin had been laboring to translate into German in the early years of their acquaintance (ibid., 122, 142). According to Arendt, Proust’s sketches of the artistic salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain revealed the hidden logic which linked newfound social privilege of Jews and homosexuals in turn-of-thecentury France with their political and juridical expropriation. Such parallels would not have been lost on another avid reader of Proust, Rachel Rosenthal, whose identifications with the writer were personal as well as artistic: born to a life of privilege in aristocratic Parisian society before the war, Rosenthal was forced to flee Europe with her family in 1940. See Roth, ‘‘Rachel Rosenthal,’’ 92, and her interview with Roth, cited above. 17. Hay’s ‘‘Preliminary Concepts.’’ See also Johnson, Lavender Scare, 170. 18. In the convoluted logic of the national security state, homosexuals were

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identified as a security risk because it was assumed that they had something to hide: their susceptibility to blackmail, it was argued, made them probable targets of recruitment by foreign intelligence agencies. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 20–22. 19. Ibid., 166. 20. As late as 1968, three years before the Emergency Detention Act was repealed, the House Committee on Un-American Activities recommended their use for the detention of black nationalists and Communists. See Louis Fisher, ‘‘Detention of U.S. Citizens,’’ CRS Report for Congress, April 28, 2005, http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs//data/2005/upl-metacrs-6144/RS22130—2005Apr28.pdf. Accessed 11/8/2006. 21. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 25–38. 22. In an interview given in 1974, Hay noted that in the fifties, Jews could not be targeted for discrimination because of the ‘‘painful example of Germany.’’ Quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History, 408. (The author and interviewer, a noted historian of gender and sexuality, should not be confused with the art historian Jonathan D. Katz cited above.) 23. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 79. 24. See Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, 12 and 54n17. 25. Steinberg, ‘‘Jasper Johns,’’ 21, italics in original. Steinberg reports that Johns began to make these collages after his discharge from the army ‘‘in 1952.’’ Johns was not actually discharged from the army until 1953. 26. Prior to this point, it seems likely that Johns knew very little about Schwitters’ Schwitters’s art or life firsthand, and the works that appear to have been produced when Johns was still living at East 8th Street bear little resemblance either to Schwitters’s collages or to Rauschenberg’s more Schwittersian works (e.g., the Red Paintings, the Combine paintings, and the freestanding Combines). I present a more detailed version of this argument in my doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Jasper Johns,’’ 77–78. 27. Quoted in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxix. 28. Grosz, A Little Yes, cited in ibid., xxvii. 29. Something of these internal Dada politics is conveyed in Georges Hugnet’s ‘‘The Dada Spirit in Painting,’’ which was published in abbreviated form as the essay ‘‘Dada’’ in Barr’s Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, and later reprinted in full in the Motherwell anthology Dada Painters and Poets. See in particular Fantastic Art, 28, and The Dada Painters and Poets, 162–64. Huelsenbeck expressed his criticism of Schwitters clearly in his later writings, most succinctly in a letter to Werner Schmalenbach in which he stated, ‘‘Schwitters was in my eyes at that time a German Romantic.’’ See Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters, 366n6.

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30. Hugnet, ‘‘The Dada Spirit,’’ 163–64. 31. References to deformation are found in the Schwitters essay included in Motherwell’s anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets, 63. On the cover of Merz 2, no. 7, also reproduced in the Motherwell anthology, is inscribed, ‘‘Merz ist Form. Formen heiât entformeln.’’ The term entformeln is discussed in Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, 28. Gamard, however, sanitizes the problematic connotations of Schwitters’s rhetoric, anachronistically assimilating entformeln to the Wittgensteinian concept of a ‘‘form of life.’’ 32. Neil Levy explores the usefulness of certain tendencies within Dada and expressionism to Nazi propagandistic needs in his essay, ‘‘ ‘Judge for Yourselves’!’’ His conclusions indicate that the ostensibly oppositional works of Berlin Dadaists like George Grosz and Otto Dix were no more exempt from this ideological complicity than the art of the ‘‘romantic’’ Schwitters, who at least can be credited with some level of ironic self-awareness. (The significant exception, Levy argues, is John Heartfield: his photomontages could not be included in the Degenerate Art exhibition without implicitly demonstrating the ease with which images and documentation can be manipulated for propagandistic aims.) 33. Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxx, my translation. 34. See note 29. 35. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 136 36. Ibid., 149–50. 37. Kramer, ‘‘Month in Review,’’ 48–50; Newsweek, March 31, 1958, 94. Although Newsweek’s sensationalistic description of Bed was appended to an article that was, in the main, more circumspect about the artist’s private life, the anonymous author did not neglect to mention that Johns and Rauschenberg lived and worked in adjoining floors of the same building. For reference to this article and a discussion of bodily metaphors in Bed and other works by Rauschenberg, see Leggio, ‘‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed.’’ 38. Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse and Max Nordau’s linkage of romanticism with degeneracy and disease are discussed in Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 37–44. The book also contained one of the earliest and most comprehensive reports on the Degenerate Art exhibition (78–87). Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony, the English translation of his La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, enjoyed a certain cult appeal in its day and was even publicly criticized for popularity among ‘‘sexual delinquents.’’ 39. On the role of the American psychoanalytic establishment in the postwar stigmatization of homosexuality, see Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry, chap. 1; and Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality. The most infamous figures in this history were the psychoanalysts Edmund Bergler,

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Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides, all three of whom argued that homosexuality was a curable psychopathology. See Bergler, Homosexuality; Bieber, Homosexuality; and Socarides, The Overt Homosexual. Martin Duberman’s Cures offers a first-person account of author’s experiences in the pre-Stonewall era of homosexuality’s pathologization. In more recent years, the theories of Bergler, Socarides, and Bieber, long since discredited in mental-health circles, have been cited in support of the work of fundamentalist Christian organizations that claim to ‘‘convert’’ homosexuals to heterosexuality: in this way, the argument that homosexuality is curable continues to exert social and political effects. 40. See my comments on the relationship between the pathologization of homosexuality and the ‘‘ethnicization’’ of homosexual identity politics, note 9. 41. In later work of the fifties and sixties, all three artists would find ways of qualifying or circumscribing their identification with a neo-Dadaist aesthetics of degeneracy: as Rosenthal and Rauschenberg became increasingly involved with identity-based and Cagean modes of performance, respectively, Johns devoted increasing emphasis to the iconographic register of his work, which generally functioned to cancel out, rather than reinforce, any association between his use of collage and a Schwittersian aesthetic of degeneracy. 42. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 23–24. 43. Ibid., 24–25.