Gallery
of Modern Art, Glasgow, November 15th-May 30th, 2020
Hal
Fischer didn’t realise he was making history when he took the pictures that
appear in Gay Semiotics and Other Works, which opens at the Gallery of Modern
Art in Glasgow next month. He was too busy living through it. As a gay man in
his twenties, who breezed into a post-hippy but still sexually liberated San
Francisco in 1975 to study photography, he embraced the scene he landed in with
relish.
This
comes across in the twenty-four photographs that make up Gay Semiotics, which,
on one level, capture an array of cock-sure young men who look like they’ve
stepped straight from the pages of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City stories
then being serialised in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
Taking
things further, as the title of the series hints at, each image is accompanied
by a text that explains its pictorial iconography with deadpan
pseudo-seriousness. The effect is of an in-crowd pastiche of some
socio-anthropological text-book that might just allow straight society to get a
handle on the signs and signifiers of wild life elsewhere.
This
includes identifying the meaning of how a set of keys or an ear-ring dangles,
or which denim butt-cheek pocket a particular coloured handkerchief should hang
from to indicate a sub/dom preference in a world of moustachioed clones. The
result is a gleeful portrait of what, in a post Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, was
both a more innocent and more liberated time for gay men.
“I
came out in a place and a time where it all felt very natural, and that comes
out in the work,” says Fischer today. “The pictures aren’t exploitation. This was
my world at the time, which I’m sharing, and that’s a kind of liberation in
itself, and it was without consequences. There may have been a naiveté there,
but the work reflects the world I was part of at that time, and I’m celebrating
that.”
Gay
Semiotics caused considerable waves when it first appeared in 1977, its
presentation of gay sub-culture in conceptual form giving the work a swagger
that broke the mould of mere documentation.
“It
came somewhere between photography and conceptual art,” says Fischer, “and that
made it unique. Robert Mapplethorpe was doing stuff, and right from the very
first review of my work Robert and I were being set up and spoken about
together. I knew Robert, but I was doing something different to him, and I
wasn’t trying to be voyeuristic.”
Also
included in the GOMA exhibition are Boyfriends and 18th Near Castro
St, two other series’ in which text and image co-exist on equal footing.
Boyfriends presents ten portraits of men of Fischer’s acquaintance, with a
paragraph on each outlining their usually short-lived liaison. Shot over
twenty-fours, 18th Near Castro St shows the life in a day of a bus
stop bench in the then thriving Castro district.
“Castro
was unique,” says Fischer. “I remember going there the first time, and I didn’t
know what was gay about it, but then you just had people hanging out on the
street in this gay village.”
Where
Gay Semiotics was gleefully of the moment when it first appeared, more than forty
years on it has become a period piece that looks like another world. Part of
the changes came following the murder in 1978 of politician and Castro resident,
Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay elected official in California. Once
AIDS arrived a couple of years later, the party was well and truly over.
Fischer
documents the changes in At the Centre of the Gay Universe, a new essay that
features in The Gay Seventies, a just published volume that features all the
images in the GOMA show and more. The essay also touches on a more complex and
diverse history than the very personal experience depicted in Fischer’s
photographs.
“I’ll
be honest,” he says, “one of the things that worried me, and discomforted me,
when all this started happening, was that I did this thing about white gay men.
Were all the politically correct gang going to come at me and start asking,
where are all the lesbians, trans people and people of colour? But you know
what? People didn’t care. They recognised that this was my experience, and in
that way it was auto-biographical. It’s definitely a portrait of me.”
As
the anything goes optimism of the 1970s moved into the 1980s, Fischer gave up
photography and journalism for a museum career.
“I was
an art writer at the time,” he says, “and I found myself doing more and more
writing. I was never really that prolific in my photography. The writing super-ceded
it, and I became less interested in photography. I also thought that after I’d
taken these photographs that I’d brought things to a kind of completion, and
realised, intuitively or not, that the instability of a freelance writer or
photographer wasn’t for me.”
Between
1985 and 2007, Fischer was director of exhibitions and publications at the Timken
Museum of Art, and directed special projects at the Asian Art Museum of San
Francisco.
“I
had always been fascinated by museums,’ he says, “and once I went into that
world, a lot of it was about how you explain art to people, and I was really
happy doing that. It was creative.
“I
look back now, and I think, what would I have done after taking these pictures?
It’s with a sense of relief as well that I wasn’t a photographer during the
AIDS crisis. The critic in me looked at my work and said, you’re never going to
do this again, so I’m glad I stopped when I stopped.
“In
the early 80s as well, there was a new way of doing things that became
incredibly bloated, and I’m just not a PR person. In the 70s, no-one had any
money, but people went to openings and discussed things. In the 80s it all
became much more calculated.”
This
hasn’t stopped the new wave of attention Gay Semiotics has had long before its
Glasgow showing, which began when Fischer’s images were included in Under the
Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-81 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles. The work was subsequently shown in several solo and group exhibitions,
including a London presentation in 2017.
“I
never saw any of this coming,” says Fischer. “All of these kids in their twenties
come up to me, and they know the work.”
What,
then, is the response to Gay Semiotics across the generational divide?
“People
of my generation who are still here look at it with a certain nostalgia,”
according to Fischer, “because that whole thing that was fun disappeared
completely. The kids in their twenties who see it, on the other hand, look at
it and think we were so lucky. But then, I remember when I was a young gay man
in my twenties, and that was the time when everyone came out, and a lot of
older gay men lost a lot of camaraderie because of that, and it became a whole
different thing. Certainly it was a very different sense of community, and that
was what I think they were responding to.
“But
I see people looking at those pictures now and they’re laughing at them. They
can see so much of the 70s in the work, but the fact that the humour in the
work is still there and still packs a punch, that means a lot. I think people
see an integrity and a certain authenticity there. In those pictures I’m
talking about me, and people see that.”
Hal
Fischer – Gay Semiotics and Other Works, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow,
November 15th-May 30th, 2020. Hal Fischer: The Gay Seventies is
published by Gallery 16 Editions.
The List, October 2019
ends
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