An Erotics of Failure
BED: THE BED IN LESBIAN ART
To trace the asexual resonances of lesbian bed death, I will now unpack one of the key coordinating elements of lesbian bed death’s phraseology: namely, the bed. The bed is a key site for an analysis of lesbian bed death not only because it becomes the living memorial for the anxiety of sex’s failure but also because it can be read as indexing lesbian potentiality for asexuality. In turning to the bed as a figure central in lesbian art, I hope to read the bed asexually, expand-ing the archive of asexual figures, tropes, representations, and moments. By referring to “lesbian art,” I have in mind a genre of art that is created either by or for communities of lesbian-identified folk of various genders that touches on topics, desires, and politics of relevance to lesbianism.51 In distinction to the mainstreamed representations of lesbianism explored in the previous sec-tion, lesbian art tends to speak to communities that are more deeply invested in questions of lesbianism and more attuned to the shifting debates and poli-tics within. In other words, lesbian art is countercultural art directed at queer, lesbian, and feminist counterpublics and goes against the social norms and taken-for-granted ideas of the mainstream.52 As such, lesbian art is distinct from mainstreamed representations of lesbianism.
The bed has long played a pivotal role in both art and lesbian art. We can think of the lineage of the bed in art as spanning Frida Kahlo’s bed paintings and bed-based painting practice, Robert Rauschenberg’s canonized Bed (1955) and Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998), Félix González-Torres’s empty beds (1991) featured on New York’s billboards as a response to the AIDS epidemic, Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s bed-in during their honeymoon in 1969 at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam in response to the Vietnam War, Diane Arbus’s photo-graph Two Friends at Home, N. Y. C. (1965), and more recently the activist art project by student Emma Sulkowicz, who after not having her sexual assault
taken seriously by Columbia University, took to carrying her mattress around with her on campus in the endurance piece Mattress Performance (2015).53 Notably, the bed, while referential of our most private moments—sleep, rest, pain, death, sex—has been a politically astute symbol in feminist and queer art especially. It often provides a comment on the refusal to keep trauma hid-den behind four walls, making arguments for the politically and socially rel-evant content of what would otherwise be understood as personal misfortune.
Featuring the bed in artwork has functioned for artists as a challenge to the domestic containment, invisibility, and depoliticization of illness, disability, sexual assault, trauma, and homophobia. Kahlo’s paintings affectively map out her experiences with disability, Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) is remembered for speaking to his gay identity, Emin’s My Bed (1998) is a refusal to keep feminin-ity contained and sanitized, González-Torres’s billboards (1991) hold society responsible for homophobia and the mistreatment of people with HIV/AIDS, and Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (2015) holds her rapist and university publically accountable while bringing sexual trauma into the public sphere.
The bed, in short, is intimately entangled with not only sex but also a host of other life events and day-to-day practices as well as their political contexts.
It serves as a symbolic site through which to navigate questions of identity and trauma. The two bed series I will consider, Tammy Rae Carland’s Lesbian Beds (2002) and Lesbian Bedrooms II (2011) by Kyle Lasky, adapt the focus on the bed in art to think through questions of lesbian identity as they pertain to visibility, desexualization, and the category of “lesbianism” itself. They both, in different and overlapping ways, provide a narrative of lesbian entanglement with the bed, an entanglement that is both sexual and asexual at once.
Tammy Rae Carland’s Lesbian Beds from 2002, speaking directly against claims to lesbian bed death, is a series of thirteen full-color aerial photos of beds left in disarray after their inhabitants have departed for the day (see fig-ure 2.3).54 Carland indicates that they draw on modernist styles and are refer-ential in particular of Rauschenberg’s canonized piece Bed (1955), a combine of pillow, quilt, and sheets covered with oil paint, hung on the wall like a painting.55 While Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) is commonly said to speak to his love affair with equally canonized artist Jasper Johns, it has an asexual node, since as a single, abandoned bed “it is unclear . . . whether this particular bed points to the renunciation of sex or its exhibition.”56 Kenneth Silver argues that it can be read both asexually and sexually, since it speaks to a “monk’s asceticism” as a form of devotion to art making while also being potentially suggestive of the “sexual writhings appearing indexically in the wild paint splattered.”57 This ambiguity over the sexualness of Rauschenberg’s Bed points to the ways in which beds can be polyvocal erotic symbols of a/sexual expres-sion and identity.
the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, with grateful acknowledgment to Beryl Bevilacque from the gallery.
Lesbian Beds (2002) also draws on a history of feminist art making, which likewise focalized the bed as a site of interrogating gendered public and pri-vate lifescapes. Specifically, Emin’s art installation My Bed (1998), featured in the Saatchi Gallery, was of an unmade bed covered in the detritus of daily life during her “complete absolute breakdown.”58 It featured the unrest and unwell-ness characterizing her life and was marked by cigarette butts, alcohol bottles, used stockings, condoms, a used tampon, and contraceptive pills.59 Referenc-ing Rauschenberg explicitly and Emin’s work implicitly, Carland’s Lesbian Beds speaks against both the invisibility of lesbianism and its desexualization, seek-ing to, in Carland’s own words, “reinsert a non-heteronormative women’s sex-uality into and onto photographic discourse, art history and domestic sites of pleasure and intimacy.”60 Creating a symbology that is not heteronormatively bound, Carland’s work puts forward the bed as a site of erotic investment for lesbian intimacy.
Similarly, Lesbian Bedrooms II (2011) by Kyle Lasky provides a full-color photographic archive of lesbians in situ in their bedrooms (see figure 2.4).
Lesbianism here is deliberately expanded to broaden understandings of who might “count” or “pass” under its identity.61 Lasky undertook the series as a male and trans-masculine person with continued investments in lesbian com-munities and butch lesbianism and with an interest in complexifying lesbian identity. Lasky’s photographs challenge biologically determinist understand-ings of lesbianism and dismantle lesbianism’s investment in a gender binary.
The goal for Lasky is thus not merely to “normalize the intimacy that passed between lesbians” in the sense of speaking against both their invisibilization and desexualization, but also to combat “a traditional notion of lesbian iden-tity . . . so rooted in this idea of ‘women-born-women-loving-women.’”62 The series both celebrates and reworks lesbian identification, suggesting, as Lasky frames it, that “lesbian identity is not so much a sexual orientation, but a political orientation” drawn out of a history of feminist work and antisexist and antihomophobic cultures.63 Lesbianism emerges as something that is less about the gender of one’s object choice and sexual orientation than about the networks, communities, and friendships one forms, and how one is formed by these. In Lesbian Bedrooms II the bed emerges as a key platform for expand-ing the possibilities of lesbian erotics and identity and navigatexpand-ing community.
Carland’s and Lasky’s photographic series share many formal elements in common. Not only do they both make use of the bed as a referent for lesbi-anism, they also both consist of carefully composed and contained tableaus, animated by objects, fabrics, textures, and colors. Both Carland and Lasky complicate the clarity and expand the visuality of the category of “lesbian-ism”—Lasky through a deliberate inclusion of varying queer embodiments
vate lifescapes. Specifically, Emin’s art installation My Bed (1998), featured in the Saatchi Gallery, was of an unmade bed covered in the detritus of daily life during her “complete absolute breakdown.”58 It featured the unrest and unwell-ness characterizing her life and was marked by cigarette butts, alcohol bottles, used stockings, condoms, a used tampon, and contraceptive pills.59 Referenc-ing Rauschenberg explicitly and Emin’s work implicitly, Carland’s Lesbian Beds speaks against both the invisibility of lesbianism and its desexualization, seek-ing to, in Carland’s own words, “reinsert a non-heteronormative women’s sex-uality into and onto photographic discourse, art history and domestic sites of pleasure and intimacy.”60 Creating a symbology that is not heteronormatively bound, Carland’s work puts forward the bed as a site of erotic investment for lesbian intimacy.
Similarly, Lesbian Bedrooms II (2011) by Kyle Lasky provides a full-color photographic archive of lesbians in situ in their bedrooms (see figure 2.4).
Lesbianism here is deliberately expanded to broaden understandings of who might “count” or “pass” under its identity.61 Lasky undertook the series as a male and trans-masculine person with continued investments in lesbian com-munities and butch lesbianism and with an interest in complexifying lesbian identity. Lasky’s photographs challenge biologically determinist understand-ings of lesbianism and dismantle lesbianism’s investment in a gender binary.
The goal for Lasky is thus not merely to “normalize the intimacy that passed between lesbians” in the sense of speaking against both their invisibilization and desexualization, but also to combat “a traditional notion of lesbian iden-tity . . . so rooted in this idea of ‘women-born-women-loving-women.’”62 The series both celebrates and reworks lesbian identification, suggesting, as Lasky frames it, that “lesbian identity is not so much a sexual orientation, but a political orientation” drawn out of a history of feminist work and antisexist and antihomophobic cultures.63 Lesbianism emerges as something that is less about the gender of one’s object choice and sexual orientation than about the networks, communities, and friendships one forms, and how one is formed by these. In Lesbian Bedrooms II the bed emerges as a key platform for expand-ing the possibilities of lesbian erotics and identity and navigatexpand-ing community.
Carland’s and Lasky’s photographic series share many formal elements in common. Not only do they both make use of the bed as a referent for lesbi-anism, they also both consist of carefully composed and contained tableaus, animated by objects, fabrics, textures, and colors. Both Carland and Lasky complicate the clarity and expand the visuality of the category of “lesbian-ism”—Lasky through a deliberate inclusion of varying queer embodiments
FIGURE 2.4. Kyle Lasky, Lesbian Bedrooms II, 2011. Copyright and courtesy of the artist.
under the politicized terrain of “the lesbian,” and Carland through an absent-ing of the person from her beds, leavabsent-ing us to guess who the beds’ lesbians are, complicating lesbian identity (who gets to count as a “lesbian”) and practice (what acts constitute lesbianism). Both series also form a sense of community through a consistent and repeating framing of the bed and bedroom, respec-tively, that creates linkages and connections between lesbians and their beds.
Both Carland’s and Lasky’s photographs balance a deliberation between lesbianism as both private and public, sexual and asexual, formulating an ambiguous lesbian erotics. Engaging with the trope of lesbian bed death, they both respond to the desexualization of lesbianism through situating it squarely at the site of domesticity and bedroom intimacy. In Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (2009), Lee Wallace argues that while lesbianism used to be representationally situated in the narrative space of the bar, the schoolroom, the prison, and the college, the second half of the twen-tieth century saw the shift to the apartment “as the privileged spatial marker of lesbian possibility.”64 The apartment straddles personal privacy and public engagement, serving also as a marker of lesbian domesticity and as a “sexual space.”65 While queer theory has tended to overprioritize public sex as a site of transgression and domestic sex as a repository of conservative intimacy, representational practices such as Carland’s and Lasky’s photo series reference lesbianism through the domestic space.66 Wallace argues that enshrining les-bianism in domestic spaces “risks [it] being considered asexual,” and I would like to agree: Carland’s and Lasky’s photographs, while ardently working to disprove lesbian bed death, actually also reference lesbian bed death, as well as the ambivalent asexual resonances within lesbianism.67
Further, Carland’s and Lasky’s photographs are potent with asexual erot-ics. As I have been exploring, the beds in Carland’s and Lasky’s series function both as a celebration and as a memorial to sex. On the one hand, they speak visually to the desexualization of lesbianism and try to combat lesbian bed death through an explicit link between the bed and the lesbian. For Carland, the bed in its dynamic unmadeness references perhaps a sex act (or sleep act) completed, speaking with vibrancy and texture to the erotic quality of lesbian quotidian life. Carland’s beds are suggestive of erotic worlds left behind when one exits the bed. They are brightly lit, as a bed might be upon morning ris-ing, and contain a light celebration of lesbian erotics. While mostly featuring tangles of pillows, blankets, and duvets, there are also other signs of life: a sock, a cat, a book, a stuffed animal.
In Lasky’s Lesbian Bedrooms II (2011), the photographs’ subjects, in either solitary or coupled formations, sit or lie on the bed, looking solemnly at the viewer while resting on mostly neatly made beds in well-organized bedrooms.
With solemn facial expressions and relaxed body postures, the photos’ sub-jects look back at the viewer who might want to intrusively enter their space.
While nonhuman friends and couples are included in the series, many of the photographs feature solitary subjects. At the same time, community is implied through the consistent framing of the bedrooms, suggesting continu-ity between bedrooms, a lesbian erotics that connects lesbians to each other across their homes.
Dana Seitler, in her exploration of Carland’s Lesbian Beds (2002), asks,
“Can aesthetics be queer?” and this similar question can also be posed in regard to asexuality: Can aesthetics be asexual, or perhaps more to the point, what is asexual in Carland’s and Lasky’s photographs?68 First, Lesbian Beds (2002) offers a celebration of lesbian eroticism that is not strictly sexual, in that the images are not strictly about sex or sexual desire. Because the lesbian referent is absent, we are left to infer what the bed offers in each of these pho-tos—and the answer is not self-evidently sexual. While colorful and textured, the beds are also abandoned, vacated, posited as a memorial to sex, or at least the residue of a night. There is a mark of loss and departure on the beds. The asexual resonance of these photographs lies in their ambivalence around sex, their indeterminacy as to what role sex plays in regard to the bed, and their deferral of an explicit link between bodies-at-sex and the bed.
In Lasky’s Lesbian Bedrooms II (2011), asexuality, and arguably aroman-tic asexuality, takes on a formal element. While peopled, these photographs, like Carland’s, for the most part do not contain explicit sexual content. Even more so, in most cases the subjects are cool and collected, alone or, if coupled, barely touching. Yet the photos are highly erotic. In one, the subject holds a bitten banana; in another, a dog’s face is obscured as its attention is channeled toward the person. In all the photos, the subjects stare coolly and confidently at the camera, the photographer, and the viewer. I read the photographs as charged with an eroticism that is in part asexual, an invitation not to touch necessarily, but to occupy a zone of lesbian identification that is pliable, that is unconstricted, and that tingles across time and context. I read the photo-graphs as an invitation to capacious lesbianism, one that is both inclusive of asexuality and charged with eroticism.
While Carland’s series is perhaps more easily read as a celebration of sex in its unkempt and dynamic rendition of the bed, suggestive of a site on which some event took place (be it sleep, or sex, or otherwise), neither series is strictly about sex or about demonstrating that lesbians need sex as part of their erotic practice. Even compared to Emin’s My Bed (1998), which central-ized bodily fluids and carnal urges through the presence of condoms, tam-pons, and contraceptive pills, Lasky’s and Carland’s series are by comparison
fairly sanitized, exempt of sex toys or explicitly sexual content. In this sense, both series obliquely reference a certain relation to sex that is fueled by the continued presence of lesbian bed death.
Also, both series draw on the genre of lesbian art and reference a sense of community and erotics found among lesbians and queers even as they do not include signs and symbols that are usually held as representative of “com-munity,” such as holding hands, embracing, or being clustered in groups. The sense of community rests instead on the consistent and repeating composition sequence of each series and the erotic conversation formed between the pho-tographs and the viewer. In the consistent framing of the beds and bedrooms, respectively, a lesbian erotics takes shape that connects lesbians to each other across their homes. This erotics is markedly not only about sexual desire but also an erotic longing for community that is in part asexual. Even while beds are so central to both series, both artists implicitly reference lesbian bed death without passing any judgment on the level of sexual desire or sex within each lesbian bed. With a hesitant rejection of lesbian bed death as a representational trope and practice, both series, in unique ways, are resonant with the asexual content and erotics of lesbian day-to-day life. While perhaps rejecting lesbian bed death, neither Lesbian Bedrooms II (2011) nor Lesbian Beds (2002) draws on the pernicious implications for asexuality that queer critiques of LBD usu-ally imply, such as that to not have sex or desire sex is to be a failed lesbian or to do damage to the queer community as a whole.69 The lesbian communities in both series, and especially in Lasky’s, survive and flourish despite no clear indi-cation of sex or sexual desire or even of “coming together.” Instead a deeper, broader, more gender-inclusive, and asexually inclusive erotics is formulated visually—one that is neither compulsively happy nor compulsively sexual.