Close to the Knives (16 page)

The nature of the camera's mechanisms makes it possible to never take a “bad” photograph. You can always get
something
on film and if it is blurry and out of focus or “badly” lit you only have to claim INTENT and the art world will consider it. Photography is one of the most misunderstood mediums because no one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good or bad photograph other than the artist's intent. This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium. You can do anything or everything you want and there is no precise criteria with which the art world can dismiss it or kill it.

I used to wonder where the urge to photograph came from. I mean, there are literally billions of photographs of the eiffel tower spread all over the world by tourists with cameras. I imagine people sleep better at night having these tiny
proofs
of the existence of the eiffel tower in boxes underneath their beds.

My first camera was a stolen camera. I was living on the streets of new york city and a street buddy and I were staying at some guy's house for a while. This guy was a forty-eight-year-old acid head who'd been doing the drug for five years on a daily basis. He lived on a stipend from his rich dad. He was part hippie, and he let us stay with him and didn't ask for rent. One day his dad cut off his stipend and he went into withdrawal from all the acid he'd been consuming. My buddy and I carried him to a hospital and while he was recuperating, we decided to clean his house for him. His house was a horrifying mess: ceiling to floor piles of brown newspapers and sacks of garbage and what appeared to be useless pieces of cardboard. We threw out anything that appeared to be without value or sentiment. When the guy came home from the hospital he went into a fit screaming that we had robbed him. He called the police and asked them to come and arrest us for theft. We had to run out the door before the cops got there. My buddy stole the guy's small thirty-five millimeter camera because he figured if the guy was going to call us thieves, we might as well steal something. My buddy gave the camera to me and for months afterward I'd steal rolls of film from drugstores and take photographs of the gang of ex-con transvestites we hung around with on West Street. I never had any money so I couldn't get the photographs developed. I'd put all the rolls of film in whatever bus station locker we left our meager belongings in and the first day that we forgot to put in the daily-required quarter, all our belongings were confiscated and taken to a lost and found in the outer reaches of brooklyn.

I try to think of what it meant to be engaged in the act of picture-taking. I thought at the time that it would be making pictures of the world I lived in. One that was never seen on the television sets behind the windows of electronic shops or in the pages of newspapers floating around the 5:00
A.M.
streets. Or it was possibly an act of validation of our lives, something of value being implied in the preservation of our bodies.

After getting off the streets at age eighteen, I began taking pictures with that same camera and for the first time I was able to see what the camera saw when I pointed it at something and snapped the shutter. I began to learn something about representation and what that meant to me. I learned something about defining ones impulses and desires and ideas about the world. If you look at newspapers you rarely see a representation of anything you believe to be the world you inhabit. This is called information control. This is distortion by unseen hands belonging to faceless people. As a person who owns a camera, I am in direct competition with the owners of television stations and newspapers; though my gestures of communication have less of a reverberation than a newspaper photograph has because of the amount of copies the newspaper owner can circulate among the populations coast to coast. The only difference between a newspaper owner and myself is that I believe I represent a different intention in what I point my camera toward. I have a desire to open up certain boundaries and release information that unties the psychic ropes that bind the ONE-TRIBE NATION. I can speak with photographs about many different things that the newspaper owner is afraid to address because of agenda or political pressure, or because of the power of advertisers dollars. I can make photographs dealing with my sexuality and I do because I know my sexuality is purposefully made invisible by the owners of various media.

Are photographs just tiny windows looking onto the world, frozen moments of it that lie flat and quiet without sound or smell or movement? Susan Whatsername said something about photographs being like small deaths which is maybe true. Maybe not. Maybe such a statement reflects that person's fear of being photographed. Certain people in certain places for ages have felt that a photograph steals a part of your soul, so when someone aimed a camera at them they were likely to throw a spear or cut the photographers throat or shoot them, or slug the photographer on the chin and demand a fifteen percent cut of the royalties. To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness. History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history.

Not long ago, I had a retrospective of my paintings, photographs and sculptures in the midwest. A university professor who teaches a class on “pornography” brought his students to view my work and ask me questions. A student raised his hand and stated that he had learned from his teacher the difference between pornography and erotica but wanted to know what I considered some of my work which contained explicit sexual images. I told him that I don't think there is a separation in images of sexuality such as pornography and erotica. Some images are capable of being insulting to me because they underscore the acceptance and maintenance of straight white male fantasies, of which our museums contain many examples, while excluding the diversity of sexual possibilities. Also, what may be considered erotica by me because of its familiarity and reflection of my desire may be considered
pornography
by someone who still considers the human body a taboo subject. Consider this: as a society we had to endure the media spectacle surrounding the polyps in Ronald Reagan's asshole found during a routine examination and subsequently removed, and yet for the eight years during his presidency, he was completely silent about the AIDS epidemic. In those eight years we were denied access to any real information concerning our own bodies in the midst of this crisis. We still are. The Health and Human Services Department in 1990 finally has gotten around to printing a pamphlet explaining how to use a condom but will only release it to people who call an AIDS hotline and to some health professionals. James Brown, a department spokesperson defended this murderous decision by saying, “Obviously the federal government does not tell local communities what to teach their children. We're telling them it's available. It's up to them to decide to use it.” But if you were to substitute any other disease for AIDS in this situation, do you think it would be so socially acceptable for government to just leave it up to a handful of individuals to decide whether they educate anyone about a deadly epidemic or not.

At the moment, we have more of these bozos in the senate, such as Jesse Helms and William Dannemayer, who are trying to dismantle the NEA because a few public coins have supported images of diverse sexuality, as well as examinations of organized religion. Their hysteria gives the impression that these few images will cause the foundations of civilization to crumble and family structures to implode. The reality is that the NEA already has a terrible track record in funding minorities' expressions. It also ignores the fact that our tax dollars are paying for bigots in the churches to open their quivering yaps and get their agendas spread all over the media. These are agendas which adversely affect all people of all religions and nonreligions in this time of the AIDS epidemic. Our tax monies are being used to support the catholic church in its hiring of lobbyists to intimidate politicians on issues such as condom use and abortion.

Helms is the man who introduced and helped pass legislation that cut all federal funding for safer-sex information and AIDS education designed for lesbians and homosexuals. Why doesn't any reporter or colleague ask Helms whether he believes in capital punishment for homosexuality? His actions amount to the same thing where death is delivered in a crap-shoot created by state-enforced ignorance. Why don't they ask him why he is obsessed with homosexuality? Why don't they ask him at what age he might have first experienced same-sex attractions and what in his environment caused such a strong, murderous reaction?

In early January of 1990 I heard a story from a journalist concerning a bunch of videotapes that were seized by american troops during the invasion of panama. Apparently Noriega had been secretly videotaping visiting politicians and north american public figures who made trips down to panama over the years for what they may have considered fun, rest and relaxation, away from the eyes of the u.s.a. The journalist thought that Helms' name had surfaced among those rumored to be implicated on the tapes. In researching this story, the rumor that his name was connected to others on the tapes proved to be unfounded. He may not have ever gone to panama. What a pity.

The tapes were discovered in the ransacking of one of Noriega's houses. They were quickly cataloged by members of the C.I.A. along with slathers of other videos, sculptures, baggies of suspicious white powder, and photographs and then were “disappeared” into government top-secret archives where the tools that could topple governments and regimes and political careers usually find their dark sleeping finales. At the time every major news station carried stories of PORNOGRAPHY and COCAINE and STATUES OF HITLER found in Noriega's house. This information was bandied about on our television sets as if this were the moral excuse for invading and ransacking a foreign country and killing hundreds of poor people who happened to live in the vicinity of one of the Noriega strongholds. The cocaine turned out to be flour or plaster dust; dummy coke props. The laughability of using pornography as a moral reason for invading panama can only be measured against the fact that pornography is a multi-billion-dollar industry in the cornfields and alleyways of america. The reporters who stared at the studio cameras and gave horrified accounts of statues of Hitler being found in Noriega's house forgot to tell you that they also found statues of american presidents as well. Or maybe the C.I.A. just “forgot” to include these facts on their log-in sheets.

But what if Mr. Helms had been to panama and he were included on one of the surreptitious videotapes documenting the desires of visiting politicians—what could his desire possibly consist of? I spent long afternoons reading copies of the congressional record and could only surmise one thing—Giant Roosters. I could imagine him somewhere in the rolling hills of summertime panama, inside a specially constructed sanitized chicken coop, naked with a hen's feather Scotch-taped to his ass, wearing giant red plastic chicken's feet and hopping around in a room full of roosters making gobble gobble noises.

Someday our curiosity may quenched and we'll actually find out what Mr. Helms' desires consist of. Until then, Helms joins the ranks of characters sliming around the contours of the great petri-dish of washington, William Buckley, William Dannemayer, and John Cardinal O'Connor: Sexually insecure men who make it their lives' work to create policies that contribute heavily to the state-condoned violence and murder toward Lesbians and Gays.

What exactly is Helms afraid of? What image of sexuality can be so disturbing in the tail end of the twentieth century? How do you consider the images of death and murder on the evening news in comparison to an image of someone's desire or sexuality? Why are paintings of rape any more or any less scandalous compared to an image of two men kissing or fucking? Helms, by the way, had more of a problem with the fact that the two men on “a marble tabletop” happened to be a black man and a white man than with the idea that they were engaged in an act of sexuality. What is that all about? Another crackerjack racist is going to legislate what our desires should be?

What some people call “pornography” is simply a rich historical record of sexual diversity that has been made invisible in this world for centuries by organized religions. Control their bodies and you can control their minds. The u.s. supreme court has decided that the state can determine who you can make love with and how. They may soon determine whether women can decide for themselves whether or not to give birth to a baby. If Helms can make a determination on whether or not I can make love to the person who has consented to make love with me, then
I DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF WHAT I CALL THE PANAMANIAN ROOSTER VIDEO SO WE CAN DETERMINE WHETHER HE HAS A RIGHT TO HIS SEXUALITY.

Bottom line, only a person with a twisted and repressed sexuality would think it
their right
to tell consenting adults that they cannot explore their own bodies. Boneheads such as Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan have represented Helms in the media, whining that public funds should not be used for art or educational materials that reflect the true diversity of sexuality in this country. If they truly believe this then I propose we change the electoral process—put
everything
on the ballot—make election day into election week. Make the voting process a three-hour process for each person with information printed in every language, as well as having interpreters on hand. Make it a paid holiday as well. Let us all decide how and where and for whom and for what our tax dollars are spent. Let us truly decide without the bogus representation we are presently stuck with in our antiquated electoral process. Let us decide, in our communities, in our cities, in our states how our taxes will be spent. Of course this has little chance of ever taking place because the government will not have enough to buy the left wing of a stealth bomber.