Julia Bryan-Wilson

LO-B

Art history has changed for the better since we last spoke on the record—for instance, the fact that you hold a position as LGBTQ+ professor is great but also complicated in terms of the watering-down or mainstreaming that can sometimes happen when the academy embraces structurally marginalized discourse. What are the rewards and challenges of being a queer art historian now?

JB-W

It is indeed great, and it is indeed complicated! For one thing, of course there have been queer art historians for as long as the discipline has existed (think of Johann Joachim Winckelmann) and artists we could classify as homosexual (albeit ahistorically, like Michelangelo) are at the very heart of the Western canon. These figures are so core to the formation of normative Eurocentric male art history that in my mind there is nothing subversive or progressive about naming such sexualities or pointing to same-sex iconography on Hellenistic vases. One version of “gay and lesbian art history” that I came of age with really emphasized visibility and outing: “the museum wall label should say that Jasper Johns was gay!” What does that information do for our complex understanding of images or objects, or our narratives about institutional accommodation? Maybe thirty years ago, that was a decent starting point, but I find it grossly insufficient for attacking and undoing the many hierarchies that are still everywhere in force in this category we call “art.”

A different version of queer art history was found for me in the works of Alice Walker and bell hooks, which provided Black lesbian feminist understandings of art by Judy Chicago as well as of a grandmother’s quilt. I was not reading those authors in my art history classes, but rather in English literature courses where I gravitated always to feminist theory. I should also honor the fact that my mother, a white feminist who when I was young did not have a college degree, was doing her best with no money in nowhere Texas to support me, her dyke teenager. She was the one who first gave me The Color Purple—a book that concludes with the reparative labor of textiles. When I think back to that, I can catch a glimmer of how my own eccentric trajectory was shaped.

My position in LGBTQ+ art history is part of an initiative at Columbia to create a cluster of hires in queer theory, and I am hugely grateful about this level of academic support. However, I am keenly aware that a private, privileged East Coast university is a far cry from colleges in Florida and Texas where curricula and hiring practices are being subject to scrutiny and legislative attacks. These battles are being waged locally and there are real stakes regarding the erosion of democracy, the war on female/queer/trans bodily autonomy, and the rise of fascism. In this moment of the cruel weaponization of homophobia and transphobia, it is still vital to discuss how queer practices have been depicted in cultural production all over the world, across many temporalities. And to amplify queer practices that are anti-capitalist and anti-racist. Let’s use the many tools of art history to discuss how artistic works (by any type of maker) might generate queer meanings—by which I mean hold contradictions, foster discomfort, and propel new structures of desire. I feel a real political expediency to this project.

LO-B

Amen to that, and writing seems like a good way to propel some of those new structures! I have a basic question that might get to some more on that: what is your writing process like?

JB-W

It’s funny how difficult this question is to answer for me. I have been writing professionally for more than twenty years but I still don’t have much of a system. Maybe five percent of the time a text comes out in a big rush after I feel I’ve read and seen and researched all that I can, but often I agonize. Some days I feel like I’m quarrying heavy stones, and it takes all my strength to lift each word up from the depths. I try to think with and alongside the images, which means that my process can be very stuttering. I was late on a recent essay because I had not seen the embroideries in person, and it took months to coordinate a trip to the family’s storage unit. All that said, I am not a particularly fussy writer who is constantly poring over my thesaurus. And the only way I can ever turn something in is to trust that there will be an editorial process—revising is the best part, where I can fine-tune alongside editors whose work I value endlessly.

In terms of my writerly habits, I am a morning person and can really only think clearly between 6 am and 1 pm. After that, I let the world distract me. I love to have a schedule, and thrive on regularity and consistency. Settling into a long-term project is cozy to me, since I know I’ll be chewing on ideas for a while and give myself the luxury of returning to problems again and again. My first intellectual love was literature and I used to identify as a poet; now, if I get stuck or blocked, I read poetry or fiction for inspiration.

I like to think that I have a light touch and I try not to let my voice crowd out the art—maybe I’m fooling myself there? Definitely I have been criticized by some who find my arguments “too modest” and “too subtle”—I should perhaps take that as a compliment, because I consider nuance an asset. I aim for clarity and readability—as a result, I have been viciously dragged for being descriptive or anthropological. But I am not aiming to create sweeping, universalizing theories about abstraction or craft or sculpture. I didn’t write my first book, Art Workers, aiming to produce a comprehensive global theory of artistic labor, but rather to account for the unevenness of how art was mobilized as labor in a specific historical time and place. To me, the critique about modesty is gendered. When that book was published 15 years ago, some of the harshest criticism (from white British Marxist men) gave off a bit of a how dare you, little girl vibe. Anyway, to return to questions of process, I try not to let those negative voices fuck me up or shame me for my goal of keeping my writing open to a capacious, non-academic public. And I doubt people will consider my Nevelson book too subtle—it is intentionally willful and strident. Probably this time I’ll be slammed for that instead.

LO-B

I agree that the critique about subtlety is gendered, and often sadly it's misogynist, too. Some of your essays have interwoven aspects of your life, perhaps as a way of “doing” queer art history. For example, I’m thinking of your essay “No, We Are Not Sisters,” from the exhibition catalog for “The Double.” In it, you talk about the landmark exhibition “In a Different Light,” which was curated by Nayland Blake and Lawrence Rinder in 1995. I wondered if you had seen this show and if it made an impression—or perhaps if there was another formative exhibition for you from the time that you might want to address?

JB-W

Alas, I did not see that show. How I wish I had! But I have a copy of the catalog that I can see from the price tag I purchased at Half Price Books (a place I worked one sweltering Houston summer—I have had many bookstore jobs). That exhibition was so forward-thinking in terms of categories of identity. By 1995 there had been a few landmark queer shows in the US, at A.I.R. (Harmony Hammond’s “A Lesbian Show”) and at the New Museum (Dan Cameron’s “Extended Sensibilities”), but Blake and Rinder moved away from biographical assertions into questions of marginalized selfhood, alternative kinship, and collaboration. In terms of other shows that make an impression on me from around then, I return time and again to a 1990 Ida Applebroog solo show at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston that stunned me—her interrogation of the gendering of medicalization and the inherent terror of the conventional family unit still strikes me as prescient. I was a junior at the time at a public arts high school and did an embarrassing performance homage to Applebroog (thank god, no pictures or video of that event survives). Doing queer art history can definitely be embarrassing.

LO-B

Yes, agree, so thankful to have finished schooling before “pics or it didn’t happen.” I would love to hear more about how embarrassment figures into your writing practice, if it does at all? Or more on the more emotional side of writing perhaps?

JB-W

Shame and embarrassment are all over my writing. At times I’ve even thematized my own embarrassment, as in an article I wrote on learning Trio A from Yvonne Rainer and how I was really bad at it. I relate to what Clarice Lispector reportedly said about how reading your own writing is like swallowing your own vomit. Though I just said I’m not a super precious writer, I am intensely, even scarily, serious about having my voice heard. I am always raging to do that, and when I sit down with a blank screen and try to formulate my first sentences, my words feel inadequate to the task. So, I type with a sense of resolve but simultaneously with a sense of impossibility and loss and unworthiness and failure.

Sometimes I reflect upon the sheer volume of everything I’ve ever published with a detached eye and think, this maniacally productive woman is clearly battling a fraud complex. Which I am. I did not come from the monied privilege that is so often associated with art history as a type of finishing school for the rich. Some part of me thinks I have to prove myself with every new text. It is exhausting. And I make mistakes. I have regrets and defeats. I wish I could redo much of it or strike certain things from the record. That lingering imposter syndrome motors me and it hinders me; it drives me because it shames me. It is unseemly and wildly embarrassing to bring this up, given that I have secure employment and so on; that’s the bitter paradox, the more success you have, the farther you feel you have to fall.

LO-B

What led you to art history grad school at UC Berkeley in 1997, and specifically to the study of the politics of art, activist collectives, and alternative practices within the art world?

JB-W

Yeah, I ask myself this a lot! After college, I lived a sort of loose riot grrl existence in Portland, Oregon, surviving with super cheap rent in a collective house, making zines, working on the feminist video chainletter Joanie 4 Jackie, and organizing ad-hoc punk art shows with friends. One show I organized, called Dysappear, was about art inflected by the HIV/AIDS crisis, and I received a very small grant from the Portland Regional Arts and Culture Council. I realized that I might be good at something besides school, which was helping support my friends who were artists. But I craved more exposure to longer histories of interventionist art.

Graduate school seemed logical—more time to read, more time to discuss what I’d been reading—but I was not hugely focused on what the outcomes might be. I did not enter into it with the goal of having an overtly professionalizing experience. In fact, I was very clueless when I applied and fantasized that grad school would be this exciting swirl of ideas into which I could freely swim. In some ways, UC Berkeley in the late 1990s was a genuine hotbed of intellectual activity, specifically around social history, queer theory, and the formation of Afro-pessimism (in fact I collaborated on a video project with Frank Wilderson III; we made a piece about amnesia). I also pursued a life outside the classroom—I was active in the grad student union, was involved in the collective Bad Subjects and explored the queer scene of the Bay Area as it was just starting to rebound, because of the introduction of antiretrovirals in 1996, after the devastations of the AIDS crisis.

But the function of academic disciplines is to cultivate specialization, and because I had not majored in it in college, I had to truly focus on the history of art. What I wanted to learn more about at Berkeley were the things I have always cared about—oppositional cultures, visuality in the nuclear age, DIY feminisms, etc. Instead, I had to take classes on northern Renaissance art and Roman statuary. They were fascinating, and I am glad I did, but as with all grad students, I had to forge my own course of study while navigating the many rules and regulations of the university. Moreover, I did not anticipate that when you get a PhD in art history, you aren’t equipped to jump into some other field. I had thought maybe I was going to be a leftie lawyer? Or an activist around abortion policies? Well, that’s possible but it is not what you’re being trained for. The second I decided to get such a degree, I was being placed on one set of tracks related to the art world.

LO-B

Right. Well, though you didn’t become those things I see threads of them throughout your work! For instance, I’m thinking of “Dissident Bodies”—a great conversation that I love to assign in classes—that you had with Miguel A. López for Artforum in 2019 that surveyed activist queer, feminist, and indigenous practices. What makes for effective art activism now?

JB-W

I applaud anyone who is trying to confront our unjust economy, racism, misogyny, and anti-trans liberation, and I don’t think efficacy can be easily measured. I feel excited by the tactics being used by many groups—those focused on the artworld and those who are not—including Ni Una Menos, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil, PAIN, and of course all the unionization efforts happening across every sector of work.

LO-B

I’m also curious to hear more about the distinctions between these DIY/counter-cultural spaces as they existed in the Pacific Northwest and the Bay respectively—especially since in that moment the PNW was so much more provincial than now, whereas the Bay was starting to go through the tech cultural boom that would hit the northwest later and already had a much longer standing history of countercultural spaces and activism (particularly of various Gay Lib adjacent varieties), etc.

JB-W

What an interesting question and you seem to have more of a coherent sense of the differences than I did at the time . . . Portland is much smaller, for one thing, than greater San Francisco, and in the mid-1990s did not have much of a tech economy yet. Rent was so cheap in these group houses that you didn’t necessarily have to work full time to support yourself, though I had some hefty student debt to pay off so I was always scraping together jobs. The smallness of Portland meant that me and my friends with our naïvité and restless energy staged things that managed to generate real, if local, attention—that show I mentioned, Dysappear, was featured on the cover of the arts section of The Oregonian (Portland’s daily newspaper of record). I was 22 years old with zero credentials and the show was in a shitty rogue space! Amazing in retrospect that anyone took me seriously at all—not that I was aiming for mainstream coverage since I was really speaking to my own scene. Spending those formative years in Portland allowed me see that a person could start their own independent magazine, create their own alternative video distribution network from scratch, or make a feature length movie using rented cable access equipment, the way my friends were doing.

LO-B

I was surprised to discover that you hadn’t written a monographic book—a sustained and close study of a single artist—before, given your extensive writing output. But I was not surprised that your latest book, on Louise Nevelson, is almost like an anti-monograph—resisting the typical format through four individual books (Drag, Color, Join, and Face) in a slipcase. Can you give us an overview of how you came to settle on these titles, and how they relate to the basic sequence of her practice?

JB-W

Anti-monograph is a great phrase for it, thank you! And you are right: I wanted to splinter apart the foundations of the monograph, even if the result is that the readerly satisfactions that come from adhering to the artist’s life story are thwarted. After I completed Fray, I wrestled with what I’d do next, and two directions emerged. One would be a book about radioactivity that emerges from me growing up near the Pantex nuclear plant in Amarillo, Texas—I hope to still write that. The other was a shift in my usual methodology, which up until then involved case studies precisely to avoid the sole-author-worship that I find regressive. The idea was to dedicate a project to Nevelson, whose work had long interested and frankly vexed me. Ultimately, it was a fortuitous trip I took to the Noah Purifoy retrospective at LACMA that was the deciding factor for me. I was in the midst of formulating a keynote talk for a conference on domesticity and feminism, and putting Purifoy’s art next to Nevelson’s felt like a way to think about the gendered and raced politics of scavenging.

So, I settled on Nevelson—but had to figure out how exactly to write a book that doesn’t rehearse a hagiographic version that centers genius or originality. I kept researching, reading, viewing the works, consulting her papers in the Archives of American Art, all the while worried that finishing the book would not be possible until I came up with a way to contest the very definitions of a monograph. Finally, I had an insight to comprise the book of four separate volumes, like the sides of a rectangle. The guiding principle was to echo the seriality and modularity of Nevelson’s artistic process. In the volume Drag, I mention two other touchstones: a slipcased book by El Lissitzky, and a gathered collection of chapbooks by the poet Anne Carson. Both of those were crucial for me, and I had long conversations with my wonderful editor Amy Canonico about how to make this work logistically.

In the contemporary art context, boxsets are usually these massive hardcover coffee table “definitive editions”—like the expensive, heavy catalog raisonné of Jasper Johns (to go back to this somewhat arbitrary example). Those tomes are aimed at institutions, not at readers. But because each volume in my book is paperback, thin, and small, it feels way less precious or rarified than that. My little volumes are meant to defy the myth of the definitive account and are meant to be portable, polemical, and suggestive. In fact, I kept mentioning to Amy an inspiration far removed from the high art world: boxsets of children’s books like The Chronicles of Narnia. Who doesn’t love moving volumes around inside a container? Actually, an aunt of mine from Houston just referred to the book as a “four-pack” which is so great—like wine coolers or a bargain from Costco.

The order listed in the title follows the sequence by which Nevelson made her sculpture, first by hauling wood off the street (drag), then by painting those individual bits (color), then by affixing pieces together (join), then lastly by circulating the completed work out into the world (face). I did write them to be read in any order, though when I really think that through it scares me half to death. The ideal reader will take my title as a guide.

LO-B

In terms of process, did you feel like you were writing within a framework of restraint? Or striving to write a book that is explicitly not a monograph and intended to be easy to carry around?

JB-W

Both. I always knew I wanted the book to address big meaty issues but to be handle-able in an accessible way. I find intense pleasure in limits. I do a lot of short-form criticism and journal article writing alongside the books I’ve published, and I enjoy testing what can happen within the constraints of 1000 words, as compared to 8000 words, as compared to 95,000. Each of these lends itself to certain kinds of argumentation and honestly, I like them equally for different reasons. Sometimes I only have an article’s worth to say on a subject—like my article on what I term Bruce Nauman’s “queer homophobia”—that could not have been compressed down, nor would I want to expand it further. And the 1000-word review is just exactly the right container for having one strong idea about something.

After I drafted the first volume of Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture, I realized that length was going to have to be my template, more or less, for the other three, so that they would remain roughly equivalent.It was a big relief, because then I knew what I was aiming for as opposed to that free-fall sensation when you’re not yet sure how long you’re going to need to get where you want to go.

LO-B

I loved reading about Nevelson’s role as the president of the Artists Equity Association in 1963 and of her involvement as a behind the scenes participant in the Art Strike in 1970 and other protests. I understand she wasn’t an activist per se, but she certainly seemed interested in direct action. Why do you think that was the case?

JB-W

Looking over some of the archival documents I had xeroxed during my research for Art Workers, I was somewhat surprised to be reminded that Nevelson’s name is listed on attendance sheets for meetings with the director of MoMA during the 1970 Art Strike. I had absorbed so many false ideas about her as a kind of old, irrelevant, peripheral aesthete by that time, when in fact she was this vital and engaged person. She had a lot of anger about injustice—and anger, to quote Jenny Holzer, along with hate, “can be a powerful motivating force.” She struggled for decades to be taken seriously as an artist and she was also completely assured that she belonged with the big boys. She had found her footing in New York City—which she loved and was endlessly inspired by—and New York was central to many activist efforts around artistic organizing. Nevelson was of the generation that benefitted first-hand from the state-sponsored activities of the WPA, and then she witnessed the transition away from that support towards the whims of a totally sexist art market that to this day seriously undervalues the work of women. So, while she gave money to various causes, donated her art to benefit exhibitions, signed petitions, etc., I wanted to focus on the moments when she showed up in person and lent her gravitas to efforts for artist’s rights. Because she always and above all identified as an artist.

LO-B

You highlight some of her anti-racist efforts in the art world in the book. I wondered if you could pinpoint one for us and relate it to her work?

JB-W

I was intrigued by the fact that the Studio Museum in Harlem owns a Nevelson piece, her Homage to Martin Luther King Jr. What conditions made this acquisition possible? I talked at length with Thomas T. Jean Lax about how the mission of the museum was rewritten to accommodate work made in alignment with African diasporic practices. I am not sure I consider the production of this sculpture and her donation of it to the Studio Museum anti-racist exactly—I believe I use the phrase paternalistic liberalism in the book. As always such liberalism is full of blindspots, like when she gave work to a benefit show at MoMA in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. that did not include any Black artists. However, I believe Nevelson’s sculpture itself presents blackness with dignity—and I argue that her theories of blackness register as racialized in the context of the US at mid-century. And while her complicated statements, sculptures, and gestures do not necessarily cohere into a single stance, that doesn’t mean they should be taken as apolitical. As I discuss, her status as an immigrant Jew also inflected her art.

LO-B

Right. Nevelson may not have been a feminist in her own words, but in practice, was she?

JB-W

Totally. Ideas about feminized materiality are everywhere in her sculpture as well as in her own stated theories about her work. And she lived her life completely on her own terms, which is a feminist move for sure.

LO-B

One of the methodological questions you ask in the book is, “Whose story is included when we write art histories in the plural?” Can you speak more about that? I know you’re also pushing at the limits of her work’s sole authorship throughout the book…

JB-W

Well, I include research about her assistants, for instance, and I discuss her turn to outsourcing at Lippincott, Inc. And as I mentioned, the format of the book with its splintered volumes is supposed to challenge the overwhelming drive to unify an artist’s oeuvre through lens of chronology. I also create a wide-ranging constellation of comparators for Nevelson that is somewhat unbound by time and space, including sculptors like Brazilian carver Conceição Freitas da Silva (otherwise known as Conceição dos Bugres) and Lebanese artist Salaoua Raouda Choucair. I visited Lebanon a few years ago and saw a lot of Choucair’s work—it was evident that she and Nevelson had some rhyming interests related to modularity and how units interface. I could have written so much more about just that comparison, but I wanted to also expand beyond the fine art world. Even though the book is ultimately about one subject, it’s an attempt to place that subject within multiple frameworks that include so-called “low” audiences like children’s crafts projects and fan art.

LO-B

In the book you maintain that pottery and textiles are the kinds of monochromes—often made by Indigenous women—that are the antecedents to Nevelson’s art (instead of canonical modernist artists, such as Picasso and Malevich). Can you speak a little more about this double move of expanding definitions of art and gender and how that plays out throughout the book? As you note, the white avant-garde owes a massive debt to the innovations of Black and Indigenous cultures.

JB-W

I turn to what I call the “material monochrome” as precedents for Nevelson’s sculpture, most specifically Ukrainian whitework embroidery and the blackware of Maria Martinez. My speculation is that Nevelson would have been familiar with both of these forms of monochromatic objects given that she was very interested in textiles and also collected Native pottery of the US southwest. The literature around Ukrainian embroidery is quite extensive so I had to really reign myself in there. Ever since my book Fray, I have aimed to place forms of gendered and racialized making, including objects designated women’s work and Indigenous craft, alongside so-called fine art as a way to create more feminist art histories. Art is a limiting and classed category; lineages that focus only on proper-named artists are not only Eurocentric and masculinist but plain boring. 

LO-B

It was refreshing to read your persistent focus on her process and material choices, as historically so much (too much) attention has been paid to her self-fashioning and biography. That’s not to say you left bio out completely—you even traveled to rural Ukraine to see the trees of her childhood. What was that experience like and when did you go?

JB-W

I spent time in Ukraine in the summer of 2019 with my partner Mel Y. Chen, and we were warmly embraced as an interracial queer couple everywhere we went, including in the town of Pereiaslav where Nevelson spent her early years. I was so keen to see the trees and the wood-based architecture around there that on the bus from Kyiv that I was vibrating in my seat with anticipation. Because of my interest in nuclear culture, we also went to visit stuff around Chernobyl: intense. And Mel and I met with Vasyl Cherepanyn, an important Ukrainian arts writer who has organized the Kyiv Biennial—then less than one year later, he started sending these urgent emails with updates about Putin’s invasion. I curated a collateral event focused on Nevelson at the Venice Biennale that opened in April 2022, just after the invasion—it was the 60th anniversary of her presentation at the Biennale in 1962—and suddenly my inclusion of her sculpture using ammunition boxes was unexpectedly timely.

LO-B

It’s so inspiring to hear about your first-hand experiences and travels to see as much as you could. I would also love to hear more about your decision to include many of your own pictures in the book. You also write about what it’s like to take photos of her works and to have your phone’s camera misread them as QR codes.

JB-W

Thank you for noticing! That process that felt so important and even ethical, but I recognize that some of the images are not pro quality. Actually, my difficulty taking pictures of Nevelson’s work became an area of analysis: how resistant the sculpture is to photography, how elusive its blackness can be. I put that in conversation with Black theorists of photography who talk about the technology’s historical bias towards white skin. And the fact that my phone camera often wants to register her grid-based sculptures as a QR code demonstrates how Nevelson’s work can feel mechanical or computational—Cecilia Alemani brilliantly understood that when she included a huge Nevelson wall in a section about the seduction of the cyborg in her Venice show “The Milk of Dreams.”

LO-B

The word ethical just struck me in your response—could you speak more about how that might inform your work? As in, do you think about any kind of code of ethics or how a responsibility to the material might enter your research processes?

JB-W

Yes: to who or to what am I responsible as an art historian? To the historical record? To the artist? To the materials the art is made of? To the readers of my work? To all of these. This came up sharply for me around my contention that Nevelson can be understood as a queer figure. I do not say that she had sex with women, but rather that she styled herself as a kind of drag version and that her sculpture has queer properties. These are hardly earth-shattering propositions. Still, my assertion has caused considerable consternation among some homophobic audiences who feel I am violating some bedrock truth about her apparently sacrosanct heterosexuality because Nevelson constantly bragged about her large sexual appetite for men. Ok! Point taken! She liked men! So what: I don’t care who she slept with. First of all, it’s not an insult to call someone or something queer. Second, she inhabited a non-normative way of living and her art trafficked in unconventional gender codes, and these are also the stories we need to tell. From my perspective, I am responsible for trying to create new histories that can be vivid for all the freaks whose freakiness has been so methodically contained. 

LO-B

Obviously, the book was written against a backdrop of severe climate catastrophe—with fires pretty much at your backdoor in Oakland while you were working over several years. You aptly argue that her wooden work elicits a sense of shared ethical responsibility. Can we close with more of your thoughts on that?

JB-W

It’s true. I wrote the book feeling haunted by fire and there were long spells when I could not write it because of fire. Some years ago, I co-taught a seminar with my colleague Anneka Lenssen called “Ethics of Abstraction.” We started with Levinas, attempting to create a shared vocabulary around ethics, especially around what he calls the face and responsibility to the other. I realized that Levinas was a near contemporary of Nevelson’s, and thinking about the two of them together was enormously fruitful, particularly regarding her materials and color choices. Blackened wood became hugely resonant as my favorite forests across California were ablaze. How do we face climate change? How can we not face it? We have to be present for it; this goes back to my understanding that I needed, as much as possible, to take photos of Nevelson’s sculptures myself and stand in front of them with my own body. I am aware of the total insufficiency and insignificance of this project as the world literally burns. What are the ethics of practicing an art history that embraces the simultaneous irrelevance of art in a moment of crisis, and its potential meaningfulness as an affective aid to dealing with disaster?