Richard Meyer

Outlaw Representation Richard Meyer

This text considers the relationship among homosexuality, censorship, and self-representation in American art from 1934-1990 by examining a series of historical episodes in which work by gay male artists was suppressed or censored. Beginning with Paul Cadmus's painting and ending with an exploration of the AIDS activist artwork by the collective Gran Fury, Meyer focuses particularly on the work of Cadmus, Andy Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe. In this well-illustrated book, Meyer documents how gay artists secured a visual language of self-representation and how that language was contested by the larger culture. Meyer reveals how the outlaw status of homosexuality itself constituted part of the pictorial languages by which gay artists signified their difference from and defiance of the mainstream.