The problem of involuntary politicization is one I’ve struggled with, too.
Catherine Opie says in an interview:
Opie: They’re definitely painterly. In fact, people sometimes come up to me and say, “I love your paintings.” Isn’t that funny? I want the sitters, and the S-M community, to be respected. My own experience of being bald, tattooed, and pierced was that people were scared of me. People still approach me and say, “God, you’re so nice,” as if they expect something else, as if they expect me to be hard.
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Opie: That’s an interesting point about the softness. I think I was looking for a vulnerability. That’s probably why some of my friends don’t like their portraits. Idexa has always disliked hers. She doesn’t recognize herself, she says. I must have captured something unusual at the moment when I snapped the shutter, or when I edited it and picked that one. Another thing about the portraits that always amazes me is the way people just obsess about whether the sitter is a boy, a girl, a M2F transsexual, or a drag queen! I don’t like to think about that body of work in terms of gender, or gender-bending. I was just documenting a community of people who happened, coincidentally, to be interested in those ideas.
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Opie: Yeah, that’s why I don’t title them, Justin Bond, Drag Queen or Mitch, Female-to-Male Transsexual, because that’s not important really. Besides, titles like that would succeed in pathologizing them, and I don’t want that.
If my subject matter were similar to Catherine Opie’s–ink-saturated trannies and drag royalty who might or might not shove various things into various orifices–I would be painting pictures of my friends, my neighborhood, and myself. (Opie’s stance, it seems, could be called partly documentarian. These were and were not her people.) While I can paint a bunch of violets as happily as the next artist, the serious work I do, the work meant to say something, will probably involve the people and issues important to my life. That means that I will probably be thinking and painting about transsexuality, and that I will therefore be thinking and painting about transsexuality as it is received. In other words, I will be interacting with an artistic environment in which a “lush, sympathetic” portrayal of a transsexual–you know, a portrait in the classical mode–is revolutionary.
That means that I run the risk of being approached and consumed as a transsexual painter, a token. My work will have value insofar as it provides a convenient scrim on which my audience can project their beliefs about transpeople. I don’t mean to be all, “Poor me, I’m a marketable artist!” If and when that happens, I hope I’ll know better. But it does raise some interesting questions about how I might manage to produce meaningful work.