Shani Mootoo
Deborah Root’s portrait of well-known Canadian queer rights and AIDS activist Tim McCaskell and his partner, Trinidadian-Canadian filmmaker Richard Fung, attests to much more than the simple fact of two lives that have survived four decades together in a city, country, world, which have been, to varying degrees, hostile to same-sex relationships.
The choice of the tondo as the framing device for this particular theme immediately suggests a marriage of harmony and contradiction — the tondo’s shape is both a container and a refusal of containment, and contributes to the global, narrative nature of the portrait. The direct gaze of the two men who occupy the painting’s center suggests a contemporary and queer replacement of the man-woman dichotomy of the iconic painting American Gothic, which represents the tillers and toilers of the land. In Root’s image, McCaskell and Fung express desire for and actual participation in a larger world — the expected backdrop of portraiture is replaced by suggestions of world travel and adventure. McCaskell has taken a moment to look up at us from reading his newspaper. Shirtless, with the paper spread on a table, one can imagine that this inquiry into the state of the world is part of his early and daily routine. Next to him, seated, Fung easily cradles in his lap the strange, flamboyantly vermillion Andean bird, the male cock-of-the-rock, bringing to mind images of Madonnas and the infant Jesus, such as Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo of Jesus and his family.
Here, the protective cradling of the bird not only flies in the face of the notion of ‘wild,’ which supposedly distinguishes and separates what is human from what is animal — and what is homosexual and therefore deviant from what is heterosexual and proscriptive of societal norms — but disavows the dangerous notion, seen in the dire state of the environment today, of a hierarchy that puts humans above animals and pits us against each other and nature. In Divine Idyll (Richard and Tim), Root counters this false hierarchy, and any related notion of heterosexual stewardship of land and culture, by simultaneously challenging the still dominant Christian-mimicking notions of traditional marriage, family, and domesticity.
Divine Idyll (Richard and Tim). Deborah Root.
Root’s tondo is the container for this couple’s place in the world, and the choice of images within are both a record and an attestation of two lives fully lived, actively engaged with the world of which they are both a part, two cultural icons refusing marginalization. Rendered in Root’s luminous, highly-colored palette the subjects are ennobled — there are no shadowed faces here, no one looking off into darkened spaces, all is light, bright, lending an air of both celebration and comfortable ordinariness. McCaskell and Fung are besotted with the world in which they live, with long-distance, cross-ocean travel, and with their love of nature and wild spaces. Their connection to the tropics, woven into their experience of home, is represented by the array of house plants that climb the trellis and populate the deck of the subjects’ house, reminding us that plants require the kind of tending that can only be provided by stability, regular scheduling, and the hope of certainty. Fung and McCaskell have managed to create their lives in a way where they are in charge of their own identities, living life to their fullest capabilities, as queer men, and as humans entitled to all the pleasures, responsibilities, and entitlements of any human being living in an enlightened society.
In the introductory essay to his book Nature’s Wild, curator Andil Gosine speaks of Lorraine O’Grady’s work showing “lines drawn by sexual engagement as floating markers at a range of simultaneous levels — multiple horizontal axes, in physical contests where the stakes are entitlement to acknowledgment, presence and representation, and humanity.” Root’s choices are in the employ of these very streams; she, too, uses multiple axes; although, given the narrative of the specific lives at the painting’s center, her axes necessarily veer off, are not quite horizontal, and yet — or perhaps, therefore — are not contesting. They are, rather, embracing of other axes, managing — again, because of the specificity of Root’s subjects — to display those desired and necessary effects of presence, representation, and humanity — for example, the banners of ocean and sky, neither of which conforms to gravity as befits horizons, and punctuated by airplanes in flight, speak of desire and desire for participation; the one at the center, woven behind the two men and running uphill the width of the tondo, represent the seventies era of kiss-ins, recording not only desire, but a necessary protest by a generation of same-sex activists, including the painting’s subjects, for social change and acknowledgment; while a cameo-like image of McCaskell, who has used his voice for societal change from as early as the seventies and continuing to the present as an activist and speaker, is itself an affirmation of a life’s vital presence and humanity.
Root’s painting records these particular subjects’ versions of insistence on acknowledgment, representation, and humanity, not only for themselves, but for all who find themselves pitted in the foolish but dangerously real contest between what is seen and condemned as wild, what is natural, and what it means to insist on one’s full participation in the citizenship of a place.
