the best books of the year

Linda Nochlin

Two books very different in approach and subject matter stand out this year: Richard Meyer’s Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford University Press) and Georges Didi-Huberman’s L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Editions de Minuit). Meyer deftly combines a close reading of individual works and intelligent social and political synthesis. Outlaw Representation not only sheds light on such important figures as Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe but demonstrates the remarkable

books April 2002

Outlaw Representation

“CENSORSHIP AND HOMOSEXUALITY”—merely to name the topic suggests a heroic narrative. Most of time we think of censorship as an extraordinary intervention. The censor arrives, like the angel of the law after the Fall, or like Edwin Meese, standing with a fiery sword between us and some purer, freer form of expression, some barely imaginable possibility of direct representation, or in the case of homosexuality, of unstigmatized identity.

But do these good things exist? Should we wish for them? Can art avoid censorship? Can homosexuality ever stop being queer?

In Richard Meyer's subtle and