Chance Operations in History and Hierarchy

“The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” 

Audre Lorde

What is it about the legacy and history of Black Mountain College that draws so many queer people to take up the task of writing about it? 

This visual essay meanders along the research tributaries of Stella Douglass, an undergraduate Art History student interested in queer theory and registration^[1] as their research intersects with their faculty mentor, lydia see, a curator and artist for whom Black Mountain College has been a permanent fixture in their practice. 

What follows is a co-creative and ongoing documentation focused on the complication and liberation of addressing archival silences relating to queer identity—within Black Mountain College history, in museum registration methods and archival description, and in intangible and intersecting histories.

Stella

My dive into the process of data collection and database input started with a small query: I inserted the term ‘queer’ into the search bar for the University of Arizona’s Museum of Art (UAMA) collections. I was hoping for some ease of access into a plethora of new and familiar queer artists and artworks.  I had expected John Cage and Robert Rauschsenberg to be no-brainers on this list.

Of the six works which populate under the search term “queer” within the UAMA database, four belong to Patrick Hughes’ The Domestic Life of a Rainbow series. Per Hughes’ website biography, “for Hughes the rainbow represented a solid experience.” There has been no categorical differentiation between the rainbow as a queer symbol from the artist’s intention of using the rainbow as a spatial motif. In my research, there is no indication that Patrick Hughes identifies as queer or within the LGBTQIA spectrum, or that he intended the series as any homage or symbolic support for queer/gay pride. The remaining two works which populated the search were Andy Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross) and Nahum Zenil’s De La Serpiente (Triptych). The subject of Warhol’s portrait, Wilhelmina Ross, is a transgender woman, and Zenil has a long history of using self-portraiture to contemplate his own homosexuality. Here, the content is explicitly “queer” irrespective of artist identity. My confusion at the results, as well as in the lack of results, spurred me to further research some of the ethical questions associated with the inclusion/erasure of queerness within archival spaces. If a rainbow is flagged as queer/gay/homosexual subject matter, why can’t the work of queer artists be? Must queer art have an explicit representation of  queer identity to be considered queer subject matter?

 This research is important to me as a young queer person. While my musings may present as naive compared to the Black Mountain College experts, this process highlighted to me that an exploration into queer life must be approached using queer methodologies and historiographies, rather than frameworks which uphold hetero-patriarchal structures.

The UAMA uses Chenhall’s Nomenclature as a basis for the classification of objects in the database. The terms included in the nomenclature refer entirely to human-made artifacts and do not include or make reference to style, geographic origins, or identifying information about the creator. This makes the nomenclature lacking when it comes to a collection of artwork, whose keyword and search terminology needs additional identification of style and subject matter to be relevant and accessible to database users.

It is also important to note that the UAMA does not lack queer art in its collection, it lacks the framework for users and researchers to discover the (queer?) art. Among the UAMA collection are three pieces of work by John Cage including 9 Stones, Score Without Parts (40 Drawings by Thoreau): Twelve Haiku, and Where There is Where There—Urban Landscape; nine pieces by Robert Rauschenberg, and another three from Jasper Johns. None of these descriptions reference the fact that these artists were queer (either self-identified as such or posthumously). While the UAMA is far from a vast source of Black Mountain College material and ephemera, it reveals the silences and concealments that exist in our database, keeping us a step removed from finding queer artists within the collection, as well as establishing them within a legacy and canon of queer art. 

A question I got from lydia was: “Who are you to say that? Well, who are any of us to name anything?” Are art historians granted naming rights by a higher power? I didn’t think so. Our want to classify is not ordained by a higher authority but by our own, and perhaps, generalized desire for categorization. I should also point out that I am not the one doing the queering; the queering has already been done.

This is the difficulty with attempting to heuristically approach the questions surrounding the Queer Effect: there is no answer, let alone a quick, efficient, or simple answer. For the purposes of investigating this queer life of BMC, all we can do is restate the necessity of subjective, non-academic sources in reanimating this history. Gossip, rumor, hearsay, scuttlebutt, whichever form you prefer, form the basis for an outsider understanding of what it meant to be queer at BMC. It is also necessary to reconcile the gathered body of reminiscence and collateral information as formative to our process of categorization and recognition. For members of the queer community who were relegated to silence-either as a means of survival or as a means of resistance—utilizing gossip in an archival context allows for a history that is “open to indefinite suggestion” and therefore speculative.^[2] 

Constructing a picture of queer life at Black Mountain College requires imagination and speculation, not only because we know that queerness was not entirely accepted as much as it was tolerated, but also because ideas about BMC itself can be contradictory; seen by some to have operated as atemporal, insular, and non-normative—a premise rejected by others. This is why I believe that so many of the defining works written about BMC are done so by queer writers, whose framework and writing styles lean into the use of gossip, imagination, narrative, and contradiction to give a picture of that place and time.

lydia

A question that comes up often in my praxis is: “who gets to _____.” Meaning, who has the right—access, privilege, agency, power—to claim knowledge or assign meaning? And then, “on whose authority?” When we look to readily available narratives and historical accounts without questioning the positionality of their creator, and see those in power as the only source of rhetorical authority, we unconsciously absorb bias, or at the very least, an incomplete account.

Throughout the research for this piece, and in our conversations with the editors of JBMCS, Stella and I have been introduced to additional ways of thinking, knowing, and being in relationship with queerness as it pertains to archival and museum collections, such as The Homosaurus, and Emily Drabinski’s Queering the Catalog. What this brings forward for me, then, is how difficult it can be to find and engage with materials which support active interrogation of dominant information infrastructures, even for those who have institutional access and general research fluency. If it’s this hard to find ourselves and our community within these structures, how do we expect those from outside of higher ed/academia/the institution to do so?

And yet, perhaps any history, but certainly a history of Black Mountain College, will always be incomplete for the same reasons Josef Albers taught color theory by focusing on perception. The thing changes depending on its proximity to another thing. The context is always changing, so perhaps queering a history is merely a subversion of our perception of it—both/and, rather than either/or.

[1] Registration is the process by which records relating to objects held in a collection are described for the purposes of context, preservation, organization, and location. There are many digital and analog tools for registration and collections management.
[2] Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology for Queer and Feminist Historiography, Rhetoric Review, 35:2, 136.

Works Cited

Bernstein, David W., Christopher Hatch, and Jonathan D. Katz. Essay. In Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, 42–61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Clark, Tom. Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2000.

Dawson, Fielding. The Black Mountain Book. Rocky Mount, NC: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1991. 

Duberman, Martin B. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Ezell, Jason. “Martin Duberman’s Queer Historiography and Pedagogy by Jason Ezell.” Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Journal of Black Mountain College Studies Volume 1 (Spring 2011), June 16, 2014. http://www.blackmountainstudiesjournal.org/volume1/1-4-jason-ezell/.

Hafen, Susan. “Organizational gossip: A revolving door of regulation and resistance,” Southern Communication Journal, 69:3, 223-240, 2004. DOI: 10.1080/10417940409373294

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 

Lane, Mervin. Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds: An Anthology of Personal Accounts. University of Tennessee Press, 1990. 

Leibowitz, Herbert. “Like a Who’s Who of the Avant‐Garde.” The New York Times. The New York Times, October 29, 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/29/archives/black-mountain-an-exploration-in-community-by-martin-duberman.html.

Rumaker, Michael. Black Mountain Days A Memoir. Asheville, NC: Black Mountain Press, 2003. 

Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt7dz.

Taylor, Mabel Capability. “‘It Wouldn’t Have Been Like a History’: M.C. Richards’s Black Mountain.” Black Mountain College Studies Museum + Arts Center . Journal of Black Mountain College Studies Volume 9: Archives and Histories, April 13, 2022. http://www.blackmountainstudiesjournal.org/wouldnt-like-history-m-c-richardss-black-mountain-mabel-taylor/. 

VanHaitsma, Pamela. Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology for Queer and Feminist Historiography, Rhetoric Review, 35:2, 135-147, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2016.1142845

lydia see (she/they/y’all) is a multiform artist, educator, and curator of art and archives from New England, tied to Appalachia, and residing in Tucson, AZ. lydia is a serial collaborator and a firm believer in art as a catalyst for social justice + civic engagement. lydiasee.com / @lydiasee.studio

Stella Douglass (she/her/hers) was born in Blacksburg, Virginia and raised in Tucson, Arizona. Stella graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelors in Art History in 2023. She plans to continue her education at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.