Targeted

by Scott Valentine

My work interrogates the proliferation of technologic innovation encompassing social, political, and voyeuristic realms.  I see a direct correlation between digital technologies and the capacities of human memory—both take stock in identifying conceptual space to catalog and archive lived (physical) experience. The reception of fine art photography, too, has been a subject with which I survey in my work. Rather than making series and editions, I choose to work project-based, prescribing each an unique print by the destruction of the negative, or by compromising each photograph’s surface.  

My current project Targeted,  began my descent into examining the voyeuristic flanuery that technology possesses—fallacies in the assignment of a queer masculine stereotype and cultural amnesia of hate crimes. To briefly roadmap, I will quickly give a brief overview of Targeted, and then further explain the conceptual components to this project.  Targeted is a body of work I began as a reaction to national gay bashings, including the tragic story of Tyler Clementi, and the Don’t ask Don’t Tell Policy. My inquiry resides in the American belief of wanting to codify and sandbag queer peoples, equating queers to non-citizens unworthy of political rights. 

Through my project and its exhibition, my goal is to disarm social, mass media, and normative impressions of gay men in America. This project remains significant to the current politics encasing queer identity: DADT, DoMA, queer post-AIDS, and the ongoing battle for queer acceptance in our nation.  Time is of the essence for ensuring queer rights, yet there is a constant struggle for queers to be equated to their heteronormative equivalent.  I have made the conscious choice to use only gay men for this project, as I am a gay man, and feel I would misrepresent queer women when discussing strictly masculinity.  

The smart phone application Grindr is the vehicle through which I have been meeting gay men in order to take their photograph with my Yashica Mat Twin Lens Camera. After collecting and printing 106 portraits, I will take the photographs to a shooting range where I will video and individually shoot at each photograph. This project enlists many components of contemporary fine art practices: performance, social sculpture, video, and photography. The final product will be an installation of the maimed photographs suspended and configured in rows throughout a gallery space, engaging the viewer with a 360-degree vantage point.  The video will be playing on a two-channel loop, and the sounds of each gun firing will be heard throughout the space. Now to unpack the conceptual underpinning present in Targeted I will discuss: Queer Politics and violence, Grindr, and Ending Notes.

 QUEER MALE STEREOTYPES

Our society looks to physical appearance to categorize and construct borders of differences among ourselves.  This constant compartmentalizing has left some embarrassing moments throughout our history: the Native American Reservation System, Affirmative Action, the Japanese Internment camps, Women’s suffrage, and the Chinese Exclusion act, among other instances. Masculine Identity has often plagued our society as we often force ourselves to include and exclude others from the ‘man club’ of our forefathers. Queer men have become the latest to be dislocated from a normative definition of masculine identity. Throughout history, however, queer men have stood as warriors and powerful defenders, pillars in the community and government. 

The Greek and Roman armies, for example, often comprised of platoons of queer men who fought furiously to defend their towns, protecting their heterosexual counterparts. Around the Culture Turn in America (Post World War II), Americas began viewing gay peoples as delinquents who would tear apart the moral fabric of our nation.  The climate of the late 1960s and 1970s became, according to queer historians like Leona Sandercock, Lee Edelman and Eva Sedgwick, the breaching of the closet, where gay men could begin asserting themselves as equals.  Quickly, queers began to prove they were not unethical specifically queer men, but rather worthy of equal treatment. Unpredictably, the AIDS-crisis thwarted any hope of gaining mass acceptance, and the stigma of a threat to society, became the unfounded normative belief once again.

To disarm this preconceived threat to society, gay men had to be un-threatening.   Contemporary mass media has played a major role in propagating a stereotypic gay man as effeminate, flamboyant, and lacking any protective qualities.  I am seeking to disarm the residual stereotype of gay men in American society by photographically showing the large, diverse population of men who orient themselves as queer—from young fashionistas to retired ex-marines.  Each participant understands his photograph will be used as a target. The symbolic nature to shoot each print becomes a summation and fictitious future of queer peoples in our nation.    

VIOLENCE

In George Moses Book, The Image of Man, he discusses the rites boys must undergo on the path to manhood.  Proving you through physical strength and endurance becoming the cornerstone of such acts. American gun culture has remained a breeding ground to collectively symbolize this single concept: manhood.  Firing the weapon parodies the social and political want extending equal rights to queer peoples. .  The shooting opens a dialogue into the history of queer hate crimes. Myself, being queer challenges the heteronormative masculine construction

Each portrait denotes the remerging of hetero- and queer masculine identities. The concept of heroism–the fight for injustice—contradicts the belief in queer men as inferior, weak, and cowardly. Yet, these men’s willingness to participate parallels one’s willingness to enter the armed forces.  And like the armed forces throughout the world, dissolution of one’s self for a greater good, is precisely what is present with the 106 nameless faces.

 As previously mentioned, AIDS played a pivotal role in casting queer men as viral to the social order.  This dehumanization has become a psychological tactic shrouding the truth about HIV and AIDS. (Can’t figure out if I should integrate this)

 GRINDR

  The avatar of technological Social Science Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 Essay, The Social Impact of the Telephone, describes the evolution of the phone as a device supplanting and becoming are sole approach to pleasure (Pool 33-65).  We have been seduced by digital social networks uncanny removal of ourselves from the social equation. Pool’s eerie premonition for the future of technology has taken hold, Instant gratification predominates our psyche catalyzed by the Internet.  Social media sites for dating began superseding the dating rituals of the past.  With sites like Match.com, Singles, Okcupid, and Chemistry.com, we continue to isolate ourselves, filtering reality via digital devises.  

Grindr is a free, downloadable application where you upload your picture and can attach a brief biography.  When you sign on, the interface is a screen filled with individual windows, each housing photographs of other users, and as you scroll through the other men, you can anomalously view their profiles. Using your phone’s built-in GPS, one is told the other users proximity +/- 100 feet away from yourself.  Yet, you can also say hello by using Grindr’s instant messaging feature, which is identical to text messaging on a cell phone. Grindr servers two purposes for gay men and has revolutionized gay male culture.  First, to chat with other gay men for friends, and second, but by and large far more common, is its ability to conjure causal sexual encounters at work, home, or vacation.

Grindr intrigued me as an anthropological tool. I found the sociological undercurrents of Grindr fascinating because the small windows of half-naked men provided as personal icons give an excellent, diverse cross sectioning of the queer male community. The initial feedback was positive from men I contacted, as its GPS feature constantly connected myself to other gay men online throughout New York City and the United States.  Without Grindr, I would have fallen into a physical profiling trap—approaching men for portraits based on appearance—thus contradicting my very purpose.  I use it democratically and send an identical message to all users I see online, explaining my purpose and giving them the option to contact me to participate in Targeted.

FINAL NOTES

  Photography has gifted us with a sense of civic duty and humanity.  When the photograph is a document, it lives in the past, prescribing our knowledge of misery and injustice.  My own travels in Southeast Asia, study of German, and interest in military photography focused my attention on the ubiquitous nature photographic documentation dual use in military identification and as means to catalog a minority sentence to death.  

Each portrait echoes these two branches of photography, mug shots, and encompasses the great minimal portraitists like Penn, Avedon and Ritts—whose harsh lighting became their signatures.  I am using a Yashica-Mat twin-lens portrait camera and using strictly natural light for each portrait.   I have set my goal to collect a 106 subjects as this number hold various superstitious points of origin in religion, math, and the American military. Religion origins exist both in Islamic and Christian text where 106 are attributed to signify redemption.  

These 106 men are stung together by their sexual preferences and the political stigmas currently attached to this act, approaching redemptive qualities by obtaining mass acceptance of queer in America.  Contextualizing further, when looking at statistics of queers in the military, it is estimated that 1.4 % of actively serving duty men are queer.  When you apply this percentage to the number of casualties since our occupation in the Middle East, 53 queer men have died in combat.  I have just doubled the number. 

Exhibition of the photographs will take on an orderly grid rubbing up against the use of units in the military. A grid of portraits resonates to that of cadets standing at ease, waiting for their drill sergeant to command them. When a patron enters the room, one is confronted with the backs of all the photographs visible.  Through this white wall of paper, one will see the constellations of bullet holes, as one moves to the rear of the room, one must face a company of men, whose chiseled faces, cold stares, and emotionless expressions stare back.

Conclusion

My aim with Targeted is to be a litmus test defining the current domestic politics within the United States of America and help catalyze the dissolution of queer verses straight discourse.  I hope Targeted will further help question the more universal role of violence and physical profiling our society implements that is so often an unproductive and a negative solution.

  Here, I am uncoding a very complex topic, where my aim has become the disassembling of one particular stereotype: homosexuality.  The generosity and participation by these men make this project possible, and  further instills my want to continue work on Targeted to its competition. I hope to impact society and further educate the harm in propagating hate against ‘the other’.