Portrait of Artists as Companions

On Friday, 20 June 2008 a documentary opened in one New York cinema house. Called "Chris and Don: A Love Story" the documentary charts the relationship between the novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) and Don Bachardy (1934 - ) from the time they met in early 1953 to Isherwood's death on 4 January 1986. (In a sense the relationship continues to this day.) The documentary also sketches in Isherwood's life in England before he came to America to permanently settle there in January 1939. As I am in Calcutta, India, I do not when I will get to see this documentary, but seeing the two trailers now available on youtube it felt weird. As the camera followed Don Bachardy around the Santa Monica house where he and Isherwood lived from 30 September 1959 and where Bachardy continues to live I found myself revisiting my memories of interviewing Bachardy there in April 1997. I remembered being shown around the house by Don, being struck by the amount of light that bathes the house and, next day, sitting for two portraits by him. I shall soon upload images of those two portraits on this blog.

Also in the trailers, it is fascinating to see artistes like Tennessee Williams (third picture from the top in this post) and Igor Stravinsky in living colour. So far I had only seen black and white still images of the playwright. I had only seen Don in person in 1997, but it gives one a strange feeling to see him as a teenager, posing on the Santa Monica beach for Isherwood's movie camera . Seeing the moving images (moving both in the sense that they are mobile and that they are touching) one begins to understand the helpless love Isherwood must have felt for this teenager.

As of the 17th of this month, gays and lesbians in California have been able to marry. Don told me that because there was no such provision in the days when Isherwood was alive, the writer had to adopt Don as his son so that everything could be left to him when Isherwood died. I haven't been in touch with Don for almost nine years now. I hope he is healthy.

I subsequently published my interview with Don in a book and titled it "Portrait of the Artist as Companion". What the makers of this documentary gives us is a movie version of David Hockney's iconic double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy: a portrait of two artists as each other's companion.

The Male Body in Bengal Art

Ever since the new building of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations opened in Calcutta on 1 June I've been waiting for an opportunity to go there and check out the five inaugural exhibitions they have organised in different floors of the same building. Today I finally got the time to check out the exhibitions. Plenty of goodies to feast your eyes on, but my attention was monopolised to a large extent by an oil that I found in one of exhibitions. Since I am always intrigued by the lack of male bodies in Indian art (boobies, boobies wherever you look!) I was struck my Rathin Moitra's undated "Nulia" (the first two pictures in this post). This painting reminded me of the pictures of Bruce Weber, somehow. Weber's subjects are mostly well-built young men, mostly on the beach, mostly in swimwear. By strange coincidence, Weber appeared on BBC World hours after I returned home. He was being interviewed by Stephen Sackur on Hardtalk. During the interview Sackur tried to out Weber but the photographer was defensive. He thought what he did in his bedroom was irrelevant. The fact that his images are often described as homoerotic does not, apparently, put him under any pressure to come out. I know nothing about Rathin Moitra apart from the fact that he was part of the Calcutta Group formed in 1942, a group which emphasized colour over form. But what can see in the painting is an awareness of the young male form like it is seldom seen in Indian art.

Asian Identity Formation in a Western Hothouse

In the Mandarin-English film The Map of Sex and Love (blogged about earlier) the long-haired Hong Kong dancer - who has never set foot outside Hong Kong - asks the bespectacled Chinese American man he is looking to pick up, "Do you go to Christopher Street often?" Behind them, across the waters, glow signs of multinational companies such as Hitachi and Siemens. It is interesting that two Chinese individuals are establishing contact with each other in Chinese-administered Hong Kong and the event is framed by the presence of globalisation, be it in the form of glow signs declaring the omnipresence of Japanese and German companies or be it in the mention of Christopher Street, an address of mythical significance to American gay identity formation. That a Chinese gay man is aware of the presence of Christopher Street is an indication of the fact that Western - especially American - gay culture, as has been shown by Dennis Altman in his work, can and often does serve as a template on which Asian, non-Western gay identities are formed. In the Israeli film The Bubble (blogged about earlier) there is a scene in which a group of gay Israeli men discuss gay male British pop stars. Names such as George Michael, Morrissey and Stephen Gately (of Boyzone fame) are mentioned. The camera also focusses on a wall covered with pictures of gay British singers cut out of magazines.

In the Indonesian film Arisan! (2003), similar influences are seen in the identity formation of gay Indonesians. The two gay men in the film, Sakti (Tora Sudiro) and Nino (Surya Saputra) first meet and greet each other (although they had earlier discreetly eyed each other up at the gym) in a restaurant that can only be described as a square mile of intensified America in Jakarta. As the middle image shows, when Nino (in a white shirt) and Sakti (in black) leave the restaurant, the camera follows them, taking in an arrangement of small American flags and a Coca Cola sign on the wall. When the two men leave the place, the camera stays inside but turns its gaze on a huge poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. This is what Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse (1980) calls an "advance mention". The significance of the Marilyn Monroe poster would become clear at the end of the film when one of the lady friends of Sakti declares that not diamonds, but "a gay man is a girl's best friend" referring to Monroe's song in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). The fact the film seems bracketed by the Monroe motif is yet another example of the hothouse Western environment in which global gay identities take shape in Asian countries.

When we first see Sakti he is just finishing his daily workout. He stands in front of the mirror and beams, joyfully, at his reflection in the mirror. Here is the joyful acceptance of one's identity as theorised by Lacan when he speaks of the "mirror stage". What has to be remembered is that the beam on Sakti's face is an affirmation of the fact that he has been able to conform to the imaginary of the global, ergo Western, gay man - toned body, flawless skin, perfect teeth, straight-acting.

It is not my job to judge this teleology of Asian gay self-fashioning, but merely to say that such processes of identity-formation are being cinematically represented with greater and greater frequency. And in a way this is rather appropriate, isn't it? What better medium than cinema to exemplify a kind of identity formation which depends on the visual? After all it is called the imaginary!