Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture,
at the Art Institute of Chicago,
May 13, 2023–Oct 9, 2023.
They fit well here, shunted to the side, placed underground in the Art Institute’s basement, next to the men’s bathroom. Hujar did his best work in places like this. When he made his portraits of New York’s downtown scene, in the 1970s and 1980s, he shot his subjects in dressing rooms and theater basements, on abandoned piers and in his run-down loft. He liked to photograph dancers and actors not mid-performance, in front of an audience, but in the intimate space backstage. Portraiture would cut deepest, he seemed to feel, if it could show people in transit between their bare selves and their most theatrical faces.
The photos in Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture snake around the room in an evenly spaced line of black-and-white prints. During his career, Hujar assembled a gallery of misfits and cross-dressers, former runaways and future stars, almost all of them friends. They sparkle with irony and camp. Look at Larry Ree, who patched sequins onto his eyebrows, and look at Ethyl Eichelberger, posing as Queen Nefertiti, flattening himself into an Egyptian profile. Behold two “angels of light,” coming down from their psychedelic drag shows, glitter still caught in their beards. Other subjects are nude, except for their make-up, and they sit or recline surrounded by the detritus of their dressing rooms: Dr Pepper cans, loose shopping bags, teapots, and eyeliner pens. Is it so strange that these figures should be more interesting, and more beautiful, when halfway undone?
There is a handsome, almost ravishing portrait titled Charles Ludlam as Camille. Ludlam created the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which staged elaborate Hollywood-style shows with mashed-up genders. For this role, a mockery of The Lady of the Camellias, he wore a stack of bright necklaces and a dark veil, dramatic as a Spanish mantilla. He has long black gloves, a black fan, and a black dress, and between the sparkling necklaces and the low cut of the bust lies an expanse of chest hair. There are technical labels for Ludlam’s shows—“adjacent to drag, or an exploration of non-binary identity”—but in the end one defers to his own words: “a synthesis of the sexes.” Only that phrase, in its openness, its androgyny, seems not to reduce the portrait.
Critics have long associated Hujar’s work with that of Diane Arbus, for obvious reasons: both photographers loved the people whom Arbus affectionately called “freaks.” She ranks as perhaps the most copied and fêted art photographer today, with her famous pictures of contortionists, impersonators, and all manner of outcasts. What has enticed so many (and appalled a few) about Arbus is her invitation to gawk, to marvel at how strange these people are. Hujar has none of that. The mood he creates is more contemplative. Arbus so often insinuates a hint of menace: she takes a kid holding a toy grenade, playing around in Central Park, and he comes out looking like a terrorist. Hujar takes a man in chintzy clothes and thick powder and reveals him to be faintly classical.
Dignity in art is conferred by form. The tilt of a camera can do more to threaten the viewer, as in a low-angle shot, than anything about the subject’s look or demeanor. It matters that Hujar’s photographs are almost all square, medium-sized, and in black and white. His subjects face the camera, centered. They are cast in a distinctive light that Hujar, who trained as a commercial photographer, masterfully conjured in the darkroom. His pictures leave, in fact, the impression of something finer than grayscale, a medium ethereal and metallic, almost argentine—as if he coaxed silver from his light. The prints measure about fourteen inches square, some a bit smaller or larger, almost all of them around the size of a vinyl record cover. These are reliable dimensions. They feel intimate, while still showing detail. It was Hujar’s artistic discipline that forged this neutral ground upon which he could portray the character of his sitters, and where we can now meet them.
There are other series in this exhibition, besides the backstage portraits. Some of them are well known, like Hujar’s photographs of the catacombs at Palermo, his series of men in orgasm, and his studio portraits of downtown celebrities like Iggy Pop and John Waters. The Palermo pictures, with skeletons in full sets of clothes, show the dead all dolled up, looking fabulous, as outrageously costumed as the drag performers backstage. They suggest a continuous line in Hujar’s work, a concern with the body, the mortal outfit, and with the space between our everyday being and the selves we invent through performance.
Most of the sitters in this show are either nude or elaborately covered—there is the plain body, or else a profusion of plastic and textile. Gary Indiana’s head is wrapped up, almost to asphyxiation, in cheap bedazzled fabric. Sheryl Sutton, a dancer, is covered in a brown velvet bodysuit that runs to her ankles and wrists. Hujar’s interest in clothing is not much different from his interest in skin: he revels in tracing the folds of these surfaces, which bring forth his control of volume and light. The nudes, in any case, are what writers have found most beguiling in his catalog. One famous photograph, not in the show, pictures a man on a chair, with his right hand around his erection, masturbating. It is an oddly pensive, even melancholic work, with the chair and subject isolated by the studio background.
Much thought has been spent in art history on the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic, and between the naked and the nude—lines that get freighted with meaning, though vaguely drawn. It is enough to say that Hujar’s portraits are truthful, specific, and never prurient. He distinguishes each body with carefulness: here is the circumcision scar, the thick follicles on the chin, hair at the base of the back. No odalisque, and no Greek statue. Hujar does not smooth out the flesh; he does not pose his models to accentuate the musculature. He seems to delight in nostrils, veins, and Cupid’s bows. What can be claimed for his portraits is perhaps the highest compliment: that they are not lies.
Sometimes a placard with the artist’s name and two dates tells you the core of their story: Peter Hujar, 1934–1987. A downtown artist with a death in the late 1980s is sufficient data to identify the relevant apocalypse. They form a generation, these victims of AIDS, not by the year of their birth but by the overwhelming experience they had at the end. One groups them like wartime poets. Everything is seen from that final point, as the disease casts its shadow on the work that came before. When A Little Life, one of the most widely read gay novels of our time, used a Hujar picture on its cover, it added to his work’s anachronistic force. The photo is from the 1970s, before the epidemic, and it shows a face in orgasm. The height of this man’s pleasure, his ecstasy, appears as its cognate: agonizing pain. All Hujar’s art is in the crop of the picture, the compression which makes the subject’s face appear to burst at the seams—the lines bunched up at the man’s eyes, the head thrown back, infinite pleasure in the curled fingertips. Funny that it should now be a picture of death.
Another photo, Candy Darling on Her Death Bed, is the more accurate harbinger. A transgender actress, Darling lies prone on a hospital bed, with flowers in the background, great thick blooms, as in a French still life. She wears her hospital bracelet like jewelry, shown off in a model pose, one last defiance. She is dying of leukemia, but she puts on a good face for death. She puts on a show. One ostentatious rose lies on the white sheets before her, like the flowers thrown at the end of a play. Though we may not think of Hujar as a political artist, this image of Darling—this dignifying of strange subjects, of men who were not always men, of artists who synthesized the sexes—in the end has its point.
Matthew Zipf is a PhD student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
