“Food to Vision Hungry Children”: Art and Fragments from Steven Arnold’s Mouth

In Cocktails in Heaven, Arnold narrates his life like a fairy tale whose plot and mythology intimately weave biography with banquets, lovers, artistic creativity, and spiritual revelations. His manuscript and, I argue, his photographs are speckled with Oralia. Oralia rewrites creativity within the oral traditions of food and fairy tales, highlighting the golden creative pleasures associated with the mouth. “[Creativity],” Arnold wrote, “enlightens all who fall within its golden beams.”² Arnold’s Oralia is showered in gold: bearing the same name of “Aurelia” (from “Aurum,” gold), Oralia “speaks in gold and has much to do with eating,” as artist historian Carol Mavor has remarked.³

In this gallery, I position Arnold’s photographic tableaux as the organising principle and curatorial rationale for my cruising of the Visual AIDS Artist Registry. Arnold’s tableaux seem to vibrate in their affinities with the works of art collected in the Registry. I juxtapose the works in this web gallery with fragments of text, by both Arnold and others, as morsels of Oralia to emphasise a constant return to the mouth as an aesthetic and political figure of pleasure, melancholia, and resistance in AIDS culture. Employing cruising, oral sex, and Oralia as the driving forces behind my endeavour, I start fleshing out an understanding of Arnold’s creativity, erotics, his queer politics of salvation, and most importantly, his unwavering generosity.

It starts with a glob, a globe, a circular opening onto the surface. Arnold’s central glob in Ballet Boys (Yin Enters Yang) is the creation of the world and of photography. In a 1982 draft for his introduction to first published collection of tableaux, Reliquaries, Arnold writes about the exuberant thrill of finding a medium in which he could “reinvent the world on [his] own terms”: “I have turned to the quiet beauty of still forms because here I can ejaculate my imagry [sic.] without compromise.”⁴

The glob hangs in the centre of Arnold’s ejaculated imagery, both overlapped onto the black background of the photograph and drilled into it like a glory hole or camera obscura. The ballet boy on the left arches his back to peer into (or at?) it as the light of an anonymous other which we can only fantasise about illuminates his face. This other remains at once a luminous blur whose head remain frozen on the other side of the opening like Luna Luis Ortiz’s The Light at the End (2002), and the anonymous shadow in J Hartz’s From the Forgotten Body series, #5 (2018).

“its [sic.] the moment that the shutter clicks when my eyes fill with tears for the glory of creation – I light a thousand candles in gratitude for that precious second. […]."⁶

Steven Arnold, “Obsessed by a Photograph—For Jamie”

In Angel of Night (1981), Arnold lights a thousand candles like a row of teeth at the feet of his angel. On his stage, Arnold’s angel stands on a tongue of frothy plastic, prepared to take flight or bow to his audience before the curtains of veil and frayed paper close and swallow him whole as the shutter clicks.

Arnold’s photography is shooting in the mouth, catching white light in the maw of the camera. Arnold came to photography through the dark room of the cinema. He loved photography; he often spoke of the glory and beauty of freezing images of light, and painstakingly constructed these images with found materials in his home studio, Zanzibar, set up in a disused Pretzel factory. In his autobiography, tableaux photography comes to him as a revelation after his short and feature-length films — a revelation to spiritually “write his bible of images” and erotically swallow his images as communion.

“Behind my mask are rivers of tears for the beauty I find in this form — to freeze it into potient [sic] swallowable tableux [sic.] is my goal and with the angels [sic.] guidance I hope to write my bible of images.”

Steven Arnold, Sketchbook, 1983, n.p⁷

Taste and oral sexuality participate in “the utopian exemplarity of ‘excessive’ pleasure,” which literary scholar Joseph Litvak juxtaposes to “a cultural order intensely involved […] in making sure that no one, not even the rich and famous, takes more pleasure than he or she ‘deserves.’”¹⁰ Starved and barren, Arnold’s tableaux are excessively pleasurable.

In the Visual AIDS Registry, Arnold’s figures of light and gratitude feed us with dance, play music, riot in the “dark interior of love.” Darkness, like taste, is resistant, desiring, excessive—it barges in like Arnold’s Angel of Night. “Darkness,” Barthes tells us, “is transluminous:” it envelops and passes through figures of light like naked bodies performing in theatres, bathhouses, clubs, toilets, living between blows.¹¹

With his tableaux, Arnold luxuriates and masturbates all over us. In his analysis of masturbation as a form of cultural production and artistic self-discovery, literary scholar Thomas W. Laqueur argues that “[Masturbation] is that part of human sexual life […] where the autonomous self escapes from the erotically barren here and now into a luxuriant world of its own creation.”¹³

Starved of erotic nutrition in the present, masturbation, like Arnold’s photographic practice, appears dreamy, spiritual, generous. Masturbation is a mouthful of Oralia: its structure of escape from erotic meagreness to excessive, gilded, luxuriation speaks the language of the heroic fairy tale; it produces food through “secret visions.” For Arnold, these visions are imbued with the golden glory of artistic creativity and frozen on photographic paper for us to eat, taste, swallow, digest.

Arnold’s photography provides theatrical places for us to taste globs of erotic unravelling, heartbreak, swathed black in mourning, melancholia, and pleasure. Arnold’s black fairy tales are here lined with the (Oral-ian) gilded-sepia tones of Chris-Robin Dohse’s The Kiss (detail) and Anthony Viti’s Spank Bank Drawing: In deep.

“We have to be as queer as possible darling if the planet is to be saved. More nail polish! More eyelash curlers! More cocksucking and pussy eating! Let's scream it from the rooftops, darlings: Suck cock! Eat pussy! The poor dying earth needs our overview, and sex on earth needs our experienced input.”

Steven Arnold, Cocktails in Heaven¹⁵

“The photograph is violent,” Barthes notes in his Camera Lucida, “because in its occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”¹⁶The photograph “fills the sight” but might also fill, even overload, the plate: vision and mouth operate concomitantly in their fantasised and real orality.

In his autobiography and with his photographs, Arnold eschewed a queer politics of salvation. He wrote: “I've come to believe that I can heal with art.” And for us “vision hungry children” this healing may take the shape of eating, sucking, swallowing, tasting, ingesting, digesting, and licking images-bodies-food-meds.

“Time touches my tongue,” posits Núñez Saavedra in their Prospectos (2021). This story is a rhythmical march, course after course, sweet after sweet, pill after pill, body after body. Orality, sometimes pleasurably, melancholically, and even violently, inescapably beats the passing of time. And as time passes, Arnold — like Mark Morrisroe, like Dee Stoicescu, like Constantine Jones — constantly and generously offers us filled up platters to lick clean.

“Barthes’s ô is held there in a bluesy song: its little mouth, too, is wide open. The reader cannot help but stumble and fall into the little song hole, into that little tear hole.”

Carol Mavor, Black and Blue.

It ends with a glob, a globe, the end of the world, and a spiritual “light at the end of the tunnel” as Arnold’s soulmate and muse Pandora, with whom he shot Ballet Boys (Yin Enters Yang), described the photograph. At the very end of his autobiography, Arnold writes a hopeful, spiritual happy ending: “My sweet angel sisters, listen to my song and open your heart. Allow the goddess to enter you and manifest her light. Be the goddess and manifest your bliss.” Arnold’s glob opens its mouth, blissful song and open hole both, waiting to enter and manifest light.

This web gallery a circular fairy tale, round as a platter; round as Barthes’s ô, held there in Arnold’s song.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr James Boaden for his constant support, comments, and insights on my writing of this web gallery and for his guidance throughout my doctoral research. This web gallery is based on a chapter of my doctoral thesis, and I would like to thank Prof. Jason Edwards for his notes, support, and kind words on an earlier draft of this chapter. I would like to thank Vishnu Dass, the director of the Steven Arnold Museum and Archive, for sharing his knowledge, time, thoughts, and support with me as I researched Steven Arnold and as I worked on this web gallery. Finally, I would like to thank Visual AIDS for giving me the opportunity to write and curate this web gallery.

This web gallery has been realised with the support of the White Rose Council of the Arts and Humanities.