Dirty Librarian Thoughts

Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1961

On the first day of my gender and visual culture class, my professor showed the class a few slides of various images. One of these slides was a work by Agnes Martin. While I don’t quite recall the work in question, I vividly recall everyone’s bewilderment—including my own. As she passed through each slide the professor would ask us what we saw and thought about the image. Most of us had no idea how to formulate our thoughts around this work that wasn’t remotely figurative. My professor went on to talk about the ways in which gender and the body are imposed on modern and contemporary art, that is the manner in which gender is read in art without having any indication that a coherent body is present in the work itself.

I keep thinking back to this moment because I’m currently working on a paper about gender and the body in contemporary art, or at least I thought I was. It wasn’t until today that I began to think about queer bodies and sexualities in photography. Specifically, it’s queer masculinity and people of color in contemporary art that have begun to interest me. I’m not quite sure where this will be going, that is if it goes anywhere, but it’s interesting how a work by Martin somehow got me to this place in my studies.