| I’m interested in exploring gay identity in relation to the conservative landscape that exists in the US today. I’ve been inspired by the political activism of the 80s: the art of David Wojnarowicz, “ACT UP” demonstrations and the defiant “fuck you” that angry queers gave mainstream society. So, I make work that hearkens back to that era’s activism, if not its aesthetic. Exhibiting highly sexualized art in traditional galleries and museums feels subversive to me, and also exactly right. |  |
Queer Subversion – Steven Miller
I’m interested in exploring gay identity in relation to the conservative landscape that exists in the US today. I’ve been inspired by the political activism of the 80s: the art of David Wojnarowicz, “ACT UP” demonstrations and the defiant “fuck you” that angry queers gave mainstream society. So, I make work that hearkens back to that era’s activism, if not its aesthetic. Exhibiting highly sexualized art in traditional galleries and museums feels subversive to me, and also exactly right.
My work is influenced by my former life as a punk musician and performance artist in the 90s. By creating staged environments that encourage people to abandon their social identity, my subjects reveal their “true” selves, or else they let some other, larger psychic force take over. They’re taken out of their everyday environment and thrust into a space where the rules of polite society can be cast aside.
With my 2004 series, “Milky,” my camera documented the immediate emotional reactions of 60 individuals being doused with cold milk. In the images, I considered the materiality of milk as a metaphor for the nature of sexuality—something that is fluid, tangible and ephemeral. Depicting friends, lovers and complete strangers coated in the fluids of another animal, the photographs are meant to suggest both the pleasures and risks associated with sexual exchange.
Most recently, I’ve been working on two series concurrently: “Bound” and “Wild Boys.” With “Bound,” I have returned to using a simple material to represent a larger issue: rope as a metaphor for the mental, physical and spiritual ties that bind people to one another as well as to the unknown. The process involves tying ropes around the subjects to mimic the connections and disconnections between them. The people are presented in a black void and read, to me, as psychological landscapes—a quiet counterpoint to the fictive narratives I set up in “Wild Boys.”
“Wild Boys” began as a way for me to create a parallel universe in which queers run rampant, reject mainstream society and make their own realities. The series title was taken from a William S. Burroughs book by the same name. In his story, a gang of thugs kidnaps and kills people to release their souls’ essences. This energy, in turn, leads to the boys having really hot sex. I created my own version of this in diptych format. In Wild Boys I, a figure in a nightgown is being held down by a boy in underwear while also being drowned in dirt and tormented by two other half-naked thugs. In Wild Boys II, two men are fucking by firelight to complete the ritual that Burroughs envisioned. Burroughs tapped into society’s fears surrounding sex and death, and these ideas seem especially relevant today since gays are often represented as purveyors of death through AIDS or gay marriage (an example of so-called “cultural death”).
Other work in the series includes a couple wrestling for dominance in a trashed hotel room (Consequences) and a naked man with his head buried in the middle of the desert (Searching for Clues). In Proof of Homosexuality in Nature, ten male, rabbit-costumed couples happily fornicate in a forest setting, oblivious to anything but their own pleasure. Aspects of the photograph were created with Robert Mapplethorpe’s work in mind, a man who presented his own sexual underworld with an impassive eye and who was deemed obscene by the conservative politicians of his time. A poignant question remains: Why are we still fighting over something as personal and intimate as sexual desire? The images of “Wild Boys” feel like chapters in a book that I’m still writing—I don’t know yet what the ending will be.
