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Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema At the confluence of experimental art and the gay subculture of early 1960s New York, Juan Su rez discovers a postmodern, gay-influenced aesthetic that “recycles” popular culture. Filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol epitomize this sensibility, combining the influences of European avant-garde movements, comic books, rock “n” roll, camp, film cults, drag performance, fashion, and urban street cultures. Su rez contends that the avant-garde must be understood in relation to dominant modes of artistic and cultural production, including mass culture and the practices and varieties of community. Beginning with the intellectual and institutional history, and the cultural politics, of American underground cinema, Su rez moves to the filmmakers’ work - Anger’s taste for ornamentation, stylistic excess, and hot-rod and motor-cycle subcultures; Smith’s interest in 1920s and 40s movie glamour and decaying urban landscapes; and Warhol’s explorations of style, fashion, and superstardom.
Customer Review: Rebuttal to Kirkus review.
It is difficult to determine where to begin addressing a review as contradictory and pointless as the one offered by Kirkus of Suarez’s exciting new focus on kitsch, camp, and fetishism in the Gay Underground Cinema of the the 60’s.

To begin with, Kirkus misses or entirely avoids recognizing that this “slightly new conception” of the history of this cinema is an immanently Queer one, fixing as it does on those aesthetic elements which even most theorists of the avant-garde would have preferred not to let out of the closet. The Kirkus review fails to acknowledge how and why Saurez’s reassessment of this tradition bears upon the object of this inquiry– why Peter Burger’s notion of the avant-garde as a rejection of decadent aestheticism is particularly problematic for the queer underground– why Clement Greenberg’s derogation of kitsch cannot possibly account for this cinema– how Theodor Adorno’s strictly negative dialectic fails to record the more positive relations established between the avant-garde and mass culture.

Though Kirkus seems to regard the first fifty pages of Suarez’s book as pointless, I see them as absolutely essential. Without the context of these earlier notions of the avant-garde, Suarez’s formulations would seem to have come out of thin air– devoid of any relation to those earlier discourses formed and informed by particular socia land ideological circumstances. Instead, Suarez not only offers a new account, but also reveals how and why a number of elements particularly important to the study of Smith, Anger, and Warhol have been systematically overlooked in the theory which precedes him. Ideas never come out of thin air; it is difficult to understand how the detailed framing of a discursive context could be a waste of time.

This rebuttal itself would be meaningless if the Kirkus review hadn’t preceded it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.