University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Disappearing in plain sight, or, How we used to have casual sex before craigslist

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Disappearing in plain sight, or, How we used to have casual sex before craigslist

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DISAPPEARING IN PLAIN SIGHT

OR

HOW WE USED TO HAVE CASUAL SEX BEFORE CRAIGSLIST

by

Kenneth Tam

________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Kenneth Tam
ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii
Four Men 1
Endnotes 17
Bibliography 18

iii

Abstract

This thesis attempts to trace influences upon my practice through the works of
four other men: two photographers, a performance artist, and a writer. The ideas and
works I present are not direct precursors to my own, but serve as various poles of
interest around which much of my work has either revolved around, or been attracted to.

1
Four Men
This paper attempts to analyze the specific works of four men who, despite their
very different social and cultural backgrounds, produced bodies of work that not only
overlap thematically, but also have come to influence the way I think about certain
aspects of my own art-making: The performances of Tehching Hsieh, Kobo Abe’s novel
The Box Man and the photographs of both Alvin Baltrop and Kohei Yoshiyuki. They
explored the presence of the body in derelict urban spaces at a time when anxieties over
inner-city decay, poverty and social alienation defined the experience of those who lived
in the cities of New York and Tokyo. In their work, which spanned roughly a decade
beginning in 1971, these four men collectively re-imagined the urban landscape as
various refuges for those whose desires compelled them to conduct their private lives
outdoors. What emerged from these escapes into the urban are various portraits and
documents (both real and imagined) of individuals who allowed themselves to inhabit
incredibly complicated and vulnerable positions amidst unforgiving and unpredictable
environments. The exposure encountered by these four artists not only placed their
bodies in possible physical danger, but allowed for a type of vulnerability brought on by
the gaze of others that was neither welcomed nor uninvited. By ignoring distinctions
between the public and private, the work of all four men use the body as a way to
express ideas about its compromised and fraught position with the modern world. Hsieh
and Abe’s “box man” protagonist used the street as a site for performative activity that
challenged conventions of public-space, and used themselves to highlight the social
conditions surrounding their voluntary exiles. Both figures used the street as a means
to disappear, and their performed invisibility estranged the very act of living through the
severity and absurdity of their actions. Baltrop and Yoshiyuki in turn found public spaces
that were erotically charged venues where gays and straights lived-out their sexual lives
and desires. The photographs they took of both these individuals and the places they
2

congregated blur the fine line between spectator, voyeur and participant. Baltrop’s and
Yoshiyuki’s images are not only documents of urban hangouts that were once saturated
with the libidinal, but are also evidence of their own complicity with those they were
observing. It is the tension of extreme intimacy and the contingent, performed or
enacted in the public realm, that becomes the foundation from which I set upon writing
this paper.

This is the story of a box man.
I am beginning this account in a box. A cardboard box that reaches just to my
hips when I put it on over my head.
That is to say, at this juncture the box man is me. A box man, in his box, is
recording the chronicle of a box man.

So begins Kobo Abe’s novel The Box Man. On its surface, the story is a series
of extended notes that are meant to read like a diary of the eponymous box man. It
recounts, in intentionally vague and elusive language, this man’s (and the box men are
always men) strange and marginal existence in modern Japan. Not content to reside
within the parameters of a normal life, the box man, and others like him, live on the
streets in modified cardboard boxes that they constantly wear over their heads. They
distinguish themselves from the conventional homeless because they choose to forsake
a life of middle-class comforts and security in order to purposefully live apart from
mainstream society. They are an absurd population compelled to a life of self-imposed
abjection and withdrawal.
The Box Man could easily be read as a metaphor for dispossession and
alienation, with a large dose of existentialism common in Abe’s writing. On its face, the
novel seems to offer a radical critique of the burgeoning middle-class society of Japan in
the 1970’s, when the trappings of materialism and rank began to play dominant roles in
daily life. The novel is filled with references to those whose existence in larger society
3

are marginalized to the point of invisibility, the homeless being one such group. In
photos introduced at various points (taken by Abe), images point to the derelict and
homeless of urban Japan, and captions implicitly compare them to the box men.
However, Abe presents a more complicated picture than such a metaphorical reading
would allow. The box men contest conventional ideas of dispossession through their
conscious decision to live the way they do. The homeless live on the street because
they ostensibly have no alternative; their lack of social and economic capital gives rise to
a life of destitution. Yet the box men disrupt this simple rationale and question the very
notion of homelessness when such a mode of existence is chosen rather than forced.
While the novel describes living in a cardboard box as undeniably austere, Abe makes
them suffer none of the complications and hardships they would be expected to endure,
and their disavowal of worldly possessions seems more liberating than punitive. More
importantly, it is the privileged of society, like salarymen and doctors, who have the
desire and means to become box men, and theirs ultimately is not so much a story of
hardship but of a need to not be seen.

The performance work of Tehching Hsieh bears a striking resemblance to the
figure of the box man, in particular the year Hsieh spent on the streets of New York. In
a legal document he had drawn up, Hsieh stipulated that beginning in September of
1981, he would spend exactly one year outside, never allowing himself to go into a
structure that provided him with shelter of any kind. These specifically prohibited him
from entering spaces as varied as subways, caves and even tents. He equipped himself
with a few provisions for his performance, including a camera, and kept fastidious maps
that detailed his wanderings throughout Manhattan (and the occasional sojourn into
Brooklyn). Hsieh also had a steady stream of funds to purchase supplies with during the
year, so his main challenge was not necessarily starvation but enduring the hardship of
4

constant exposure. With one notable exception
1
, Hsieh spent the year completely
outdoors and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of both nature and urban life.
While the box man’s unique existence was never so explicitly prescribed, the
actions of both men are similar responses to their specific social environments, ones that
were characterized by questions of position and invisibility. Hsieh was an illegal
immigrant from Taiwan at the time, and had used performance as a means to investigate
his liminal and often precarious social position. His time spent under self-incarceration
(One Year Performance 1978-1979) and his hourly punch-card documentation (One
Year Performance 1980-1981) were certainly influenced by his existence as a person of
non-legal status, and the paralyzing restrictions that designation had on the body. His
third performance would invert his previous explorations of being in arrested and
confined circumstances by thrusting himself into the world-at-large, where he attempted
to live under a completely uncontrollable set of conditions outdoors. Like that of the box
man, Hsieh’s actions upend straightforward notions of being homeless. Both men
complicate the act of being destitute in their own manner: Hsieh with his inability to step
indoors and the box man with the absurd enclosure he continuously hides under and
peers out of. The voluntary nature of their outdoor exiles do not so much emulate the
conditions of homelessness as much as they exaggerate them and make them
unfamiliar. Both figures take to the streets not because they are necessarily cast-offs
from society, but do so in order to use their bodies to highlight and question the very
conditions and circumstances of social isolation and estrangement. They are not passive
victims of circumstance but rather use passivity and vulnerability as tools for offering a

commentary on their respective social situations. As stated in an interview with Hsieh:
My illegal experiences in the States did make me consider those who live at the
bottom of society. I intended to transform this consideration into a philosophical
approach. A person living at the bottom might show his pains and his
5

resentments politically. But as an artist, he should have the ability to transform
the basic living conditions into art works in which to ponder life, art and being.
2

The photographs produced by Alvin Baltrop and Kohei Yoshiyuki explored a
more promiscuous aspect of urban-life characterized by both incredible vulnerability, and
a complicated relationship to public display. Both men were explicit in using their
camera to gaze upon those whose activities were paradoxically conducted in secret, but
within the full view of the public. Baltrop and Yoshiyuki were photographers who shared
very similar backgrounds: they were both men who worked in the 70’s and became
known for documenting the illicit sexual activity occurring in the public spaces of major
cities (the decrepit piers of New York and the parks of Tokyo respectively). They were
also largely forgotten after they created their main bodies of work (though Yoshiyuki had
his photos published and generated considerable attention at the time), and have only
recently been rediscovered and embraced by the art world. Besides documenting the
unique social situations that each man stumbled upon, their work continues to raise
questions about the boundaries between spectator, voyeur and participant. Looking at
their images, it becomes clear that Baltrop and Yoshiyuki often simultaneously occupied
all three roles; their black and white photographs serve as evidence of both their
passiveness and thinly-veiled complicity within the process of making these images.
However, it is important to remember that these similarities only serve to highlight and
foreground the unique relationships both men had with their subjects, and ultimately
offer quite different commentary on the lives of those they trained their attentions and
cameras on.
Kohei Yoshiyuki was born in 1946 in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, and worked
as a commercial photographer during the 70’s. During a walk in a park in Tokyo’s
Shinjuku district one night, he stumbled upon not only a couple having sex, but also
several groups of men who were slowly creeping up behind them. He quickly realized
6

the scope of the activity and attempted to document the bizarre yet compelling scene.
Of course, the overwhelming darkness protected those engaged in their furtive
encounters, and the scene proved too hard to penetrate with the simple camera he
carried at the time. Driven by his desire to photograph these nighttime trysts, Yoshiyuki
had to find not only the adequate technology, but also more importantly he had to gain
the social wherewithal to document these individuals. He researched nighttime shooting
technologies, and settled on infrared flashbulbs that produced little light when activated.
He then spent six-months visiting and befriending the voyeurs at the park, gaining both
their trust and their tacit permission to be photographed. After that, Yoshiyuki would
continue to shoot in various parks for two distinct periods: the images of heterosexuals
were made from 1971-1973, and the ones of gay men were done in 1979. As he puts it:
I just went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I
needed to be considered one of them. I behaved like I had the same interest as
the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera.
3

Indeed, Yoshiyuki’s photographs make the relationship between voyeurism and
the act of photography uncomfortably clear, and with them he immediately explodes any
imagined ethical line between what is deemed appropriate and exploitative within the act
of picture-taking. The apparatus of the camera finds and reveals that which was
heretofore invisible, as the flash-bulb literally exposes those in front of it, leaving the
trace of its use by way of each image’s consistently eerie nocturnal glow. The camera
(and by implication the photographer) is assumed to have clearly violated any sense of
privacy or social boundary these individuals in the park may have thought was theirs.
But it is this very perceived violation that makes these images so arresting and
unsettling, and that in spite of whatever sort of understanding Yoshiyuki may have come
to with the other voyeurs in the park, we as an audience still experience these photos as
much more of an intrusion than an invitation. Yet this violation becomes complicated
and less straightforward when we consider that everyone from the couples fucking, to
7

the men who come to stare or grope, and the others like Yoshiyuki who have come to
observe at a distance, was immediately aware of the roles they played within this
tableau. The thin cloak of protection granted by darkness was no guarantee of either
anonymity or invisibility, and we need to look no further than the images to understand
how exposed and on-display both lovers and their peepers were.
What becomes increasingly provocative about Yoshiyuki’s images then are the
unsettling relationships that result from the porous boundary between spectatorship and
engagement. Who is watching and who is performing? Everyone, it seems, including
Yoshiyuki. The lovers and their voyeurs perform for all parties involved: each other, the
photographer, and in turn us, the extended audience they will never meet. Their
complete lack of inhibition became a tacit invitation for the participation of all those who
were watching. This was certainly the case with Yoshiyuki, whose limited-range camera
necessitated the close proximity to his subjects. One shot seems to have been taken
while looking over a man’s shoulder; another had Yoshiyuki crawling on his hands and
knees straining to get a closer look. Sometimes the camera appeared to hover directly
over those fucking, floating mere feet away from the flesh so many lustful hands seemed
intent on touching.
4
While Yoshiyuki stated that the camera was what separated him
from his subjects, it actually functioned to highlight his involvement and lurid curiosity,
rather than acting as a pretense for his exclusion.

Tehching Hsieh had produced an artwork that was a poster of his name and
face, with the text “Wanted by US Immigration Service”. While it was shown in a group
show during his year outdoors, few of Hsieh’s close friends knew the truth of his
immigration problems. His illegal status was of such concern to him that he adopted a
pseudonym, “Sam Hsieh” for most of his early performances to avoid drawing attention
8

from the authorities, even as his reputation grew within art-circles. Even without such
knowledge, Hsieh’s year of exile-as-performance would certainly have been interpreted
as a political act, because it not only referenced his own legal uncertainties, but
highlighted the social invisibility of those less fortunate around him as well. New York in
1981 was a city with a highly visible homeless population, and it was a decade away
from the infamous quality-of-life policing that was meant to eradicate their presence from
the streets. Looking at pictures taken during his itinerant year outside, one sees Hsieh
sleeping in cardboard boxes, showering on the edge of a pier and huddling besides
heating vents. Through this documentation, we not only witness the hardships Hsieh
endured, but are inadvertently allowed an intimate and voyeuristic examination of the
conditions of homeless living. His performance provides an uneasy pretext from which
to ponder the lives of the dispossessed, but without Hsieh ever explicitly pointing to
them. This occurs most clearly within the images themselves, which look like they could
be either performance-documents or socially-minded journalistic photography. Indeed,
they are reminiscent of Jacob Riis’s images of the urban poor from the turn of the
century, with the major difference that these photographers never had a person of
Chinese descent as their subject. But even without knowing who Hsieh is, his ethnic
background or the performance he has undertaken, images of a park bench, a
disintegrating pier or an empty lot filled with rubble speak as much to the formidable
challenges Hsieh encountered as they do the public spaces that define homelessness in
New York and elsewhere. By following Hsieh, we are presented with a grim but familiar
documentary of how the dispossessed lived in 1981, a way-of-life that arguably has not
changed much in thirty years.
Hsieh’s performance drew art provocatively close to a realm where art did not
usually belong, or a place where life and art overlapped, as understood by Allan Kaprow.
The strain of the avant-garde Kaprow championed was what he termed ‘lifelike art’,
9

which he defined as “art in the service of life”.
5
Besides being a way to undermine the
serious pretenses of art and its hierarchies and institutions, Kaprow saw likelike art as a
means to confuse and ultimately collapse the various metaphysical and ontological
boundaries erected between art and life. For Kaprow, the individual and minute
characteristics of everyday life were as profound and ‘art-like’ to him as any
institutionalized piece of painting or sculpture. Even the very act of breathing held such
potential:
Today, in 1979, I’m paying attention to breathing. I’ve held my breath for years-
held it for dear life. And I might have suffocated if (in spite of myself) I hadn’t had
to let go of it periodically. Was it mine, after all? Letting it go, did I lose it? Was
(is) exhaling simply a stream of speeded up molecules squirting out of my nose…
These are thoughts about consciousness of breathing. Such consciousness of
what we do and feel each day, its relation to others’ experience and to nature
around us, becomes in a real way the performance of living. And the very
process of paying attention to this continuum is posed on the threshold of art
performance.
6

One need only pay close attention to these nearly ineffable qualities of life in order for
the enormity of their significance to appear. This ultimately meant that art, instead of
being a socially-produced phenomenon, could be created and experienced solely in the
mind’s-eye, and didn’t need to be reproduced, documented or even announced for art to
be validated. The frame of the institution was replaced by the internal bracketing of
mere individual consciousness, and life itself could become indistinguishable from a
‘performance of living’. Hsieh’s performances are clear inheritors of Kaprow’s ideas,
and he acknowledges as much when he now calls his performances ‘lifeworks’. The
substitution of the word ‘art’ for ‘life’ is an indication that one has been subsumed by the
other, and so much of what Hsieh did during his performances was the unambiguous act
of living, even if under profoundly circumscribed conditions.
7
In One Year Performance
1981-1982, Hsieh essentially appropriates homelessness itself and transforms it into a
creative act, pushing Kaprow’s idea of the contemplative estrangement of the everyday
to a near breaking-point. Hsieh raises the question of what it means to willingly perform
10

(if perform is even the right word) something that others have no choice but to endure
and suffer through. Hidden from view for most of a year, Hsieh’s artwork then was
produced completely in the mind, a continuous year-long experience that required his
own steadfast refusal to capitulate and seek shelter, and to continually ponder the
dialectic between art and life he thrust himself within. While all of Hsieh’s performances
share a similarity to real-world activities characterized by intense struggle, physical
restraint and mental fortitude, (incarceration, chain-gang, menial-laborer), none
reproduced and ultimately inhabited the tremendous challenges of everyday-life as
closely as One Year Performance 1981-1982 did.

If Hsieh and the box men both share characteristics of the ascetic, then it is
interesting to consider their decision to withdraw from society by immersing themselves
fully within it. Hsieh’s year outdoors, though performed completely in view of the public,
and entirely dependent upon the accessibility of public space, was nonetheless never
performed for the public. His endless wandering was conducted while cloaked under
the anonymity of crowds and crevices, and the entire experience can be read as an
analog to his own social invisibility as an illegal immigrant. Abe’s box men also
remained unseen, albeit under their found cardboard enclosures. In contrast to their
behavior, one can look at the hikkikomori, who are mostly male Japanese youth who
suffer from acute social-withdrawal and reside for years locked away in their parents’
home. They are a subculture of recluses who disappear for periods ranging from a few
years to decades, and without proper counseling, may spend the rest of their lives
withdrawn from the world. While the entirely fictional box men should not be seen as
precursors to the symptoms displayed by the hikkikomori, they do serve as interesting
examples of a type of mass social-disaffection uniquely Japanese in their desire to resist
the demands of contemporary life by quietly disappearing, and how this occurs
11

individually rather than communally. But unlike these Japanese youth, the box men see
themselves as liberated, free to roam about the outside world, un-tethered to any social
and personal responsibility like a home or job. Their form of self-marginalization permits
even greater movement, as their physical emancipation comes as a direct result of their
social erasure. Through the course of the novel and understanding the box man’s
activity, we realize that the cardboard box over his head functions as both shelter and as
a form of urban camouflage, allowing him to blend in with the general homeless
population
8
, and the everyday detritus of the street. His exposed covertness is essential
to his livelihood, because he lives in a box not as a refuge for want of shelter; what he
really seeks is a means for inconspicuous observation.
In the novel, the box men are always looking at the world, particularly other
individuals, while no one else can see the man hidden inside the box. Unfettered by the
demands and expectations of modern life, they are able to live as liberated voyeurs,
watching the world from the safety of their cardboard enclosures without the self-
conscious fear of being watched themselves. The box man abandons the comforts of
home not to escape from his urban environment, but to fully immerse himself in it for the
purpose of voyeuristic spectatorship. His voyeurism becomes particularly eroticized with
the introduction of the character of the female nurse, whom he routinely spies on while
she changes at home. The box man comes to occupy a slippery position between the
historical figure of the flâneur and the more contemporary peeping-tom. Like Walter
Benjamin’s iconic city-stroller, or Baudelaire’s dandy, the box man has a constant
observational eye that he deploys amidst the urban phenomena of the crowd, but he
remains always at arm’s length from his subjects. He is propelled by his own curiosity,
and functions like a ‘detective without a lead’
9
. But like the peeping-tom, the box man’s
identity is hidden and suppressed, which allows his own voyeuristic activities to go
unnoticed and therefore heightened. The opening he looks out of is really just a peep-
12

hole, and he spends much of the novel staring into the homes of others. Like the flâneur
and the peeper, the box man’s participation with the world around him is marked by
passivity and a need for anonymity in their constant pursuit of visual stimulation, and
both characteristics are taken to a hyperbolic level by the box men’s absurd enclosure.
Through the course of the novel the box, as a mechanism enabling scopophilia, comes
to resemble a type of camera-obscura: the cut-out slit for viewing is the aperture, and the
novel itself, a product of the box man’s endless observational note-taking, is the image
that becomes projected on the screen (the many black & white photographs in the novel
attest to this analogy of book as photographic record). The camera is also a staple of
both the peeping-tom and the flâneur , and it serves as a device that both compliments
and makes material the act of looking.

As Susan Sontag pointed out in On Photography, the street-photographer is
really a contemporary version of the flâneur, as both are figures always looking for the
picturesque amidst the cacophony of urban space.
10
Alvin Baltrop certainly functioned
within that description, and in much the same way that Kohei Yoshiyuki unintentionally
stumbled upon his subject matter in the park, Baltrop came to his subject matter while
ostensibly cruising through Manhattan . Born in the Bronx in1948, he was a 26 year-old
taxi-driver when he first started documenting the decrepit pier of New York’s West Side
Highway, which was bordered roughly by the Meatpacking District and Christopher
Street to the south. The area was filled with empty warehouses and disintegrating
industrial piers, and its abandoned nature made it a site ripe for illicit activity. Within this
post-industrial waterfront, Baltrop discovered a large community of gay males, populated
by teenage runaways, hustlers, and average working-class men looking for a casual
encounter. His extended periods of observation led to him witnessing all manner of
activity, from public sex, drug use, muggings, rapes and even suicides and murders.
13

Nothing escaped his camera’s eye, and Baltrop shot thousands of negatives during the
period of 1975 to 1986, and the images he printed came to be collectively known as his
‘Pier Photographs’. His voyeurism was matched only by the great lengths he went to
satisfy it. Baltrop eventually quit his job and became an independent mover, often living
out of his moving van for days while he stalked his subjects. He would even deploy
extreme and dangerous methods such as hanging from makeshift harnesses from the
tops of warehouses, where he remained perched and silent for hours at a time. In his
words, Baltrop was “watching and waiting…to record the lives that these people led
(friends, acquaintances, and strangers), and the unfortunate ends that they sometimes
met.”
11

Baltrop’s relationship with those on the pier was certainly more complicated than
that of a mere voyeur. Many of the men were transients and vagabonds with little
money, but there were also bankers, ministers and working-actors. What they shared in
common was their inability to exercise their sexual identity within the context of their
regular lives, and they came to the pier to do so. It was important that Baltrop was an
African-American from the Bronx, and while he maintained long relationships with both
men and women throughout his life, he disliked the term bisexual and preferred to keep
his sexuality unlabeled. Baltrop was able to identify with his subjects, and in doing so
was saved him from being seen as an outsider. He was able to earn their trust and
confidence over the decade he spent engrossed in their documentation, and in many
ways Baltrop became one of them.
Like Yoshiyuki, the pictures Baltrop took revealed an ambiguous relationship to
those he was photographing. Certain images and their subjects display a candor and
vulnerability that necessitated a level of intimacy between Baltrop and those he shot.
Many of them stare directly at the camera, almost in a confrontational way, while others
are at close range but act as if Baltrop were not there. The most evocative and poignant
14

images are almost always ones that lack any indication of Baltrop’s presence, and
instead leave us contemplating his subjects through his distanced, voyeuristic gaze. In
pictures of men fucking surreptitiously, or groups of them lounging blithely on a pier at a
distance, Baltrop’s subjects were more than likely unaware that they were being
photographed, and the camera takes on the intrusive but revelatory eye characteristic of
Yoshiyuki’s images in the park.
But unlike Yoshiyuki, Baltrop’s work as a whole functions more like the loving
documentation of a subculture and way-of-life that was destined to disappear.
While they certainly speak to the sexual or voyeuristic desires of the photographer,
Baltrop’s photos seem to have an urgency marked by a need to preserve by way of
images. Seeing the photos of naked, solitary men roaming through massive,
deteriorating spaces heightened both their vulnerability and sense of social isolation.
The crumbling structures and rubble that loom in the backgrounds serve as constant
visual reminders of the precarious, risk-filled private-lives these men were leading.
Indeed, the Gordon Matta-Clark piece ‘Day’s End’, which can be seen prominently in
some of Baltrop’s photos, seem more than coincidentally appropriate. While Matta-
Clark’s famous ocular-cut into the side of a warehouse was intended to create a ‘joyous
situation’
12
, one can also see his piece providing a sense of impending doom for the
entire community. As much as the presence of the men eroticizes Matta-Clark’s work in
unexpected ways, the cut seems to allegorize the social position of those who became
its main audience: it is illuminating, but is also a melancholic sign alluding to neglect and
failure. The environment these men chose to congregate in seemed to portend an end
to a gay lifestyle (indeed the era of AIDS would soon frustrate such promiscuity and
casual-sex), and Baltrop’s images serve as a tragic
13
reminder of a way-of-life that
blossomed and took hold amidst social and environmental adversity.

15

In this way, the images of both photographers function not only as voyeuristic
documents of sexual activities in public urban spaces, but are also physical
manifestations of Baltrop and Yoshiyuki’s own complicated desires and involvement with
their subjects. The images aren’t pornographic or intended to arouse our libido, rather
they are images that excite because they mirror and transmit so directly each man’s own
yearnings; the affect produced is really the awareness of their arousal, as each man
meticulously composed his subjects and integrated himself with their respective
communities. Yoshiyuki and his camera draws us titillatingly close to the carnality at
hand, and we become the final link in a chain of voyeurism when we realize how our
gaze so closely duplicates the photographer’s own. While Baltrop’s photos give us
access to a largely unknown haven of gay men, we also become complicit with and
aware of photography’s natural inclination to make its audience take pleasure in
watching. Like the 1960 Michael Powell film Peeping Tom
14
, where the voyeurism
inherent to watching a film was made explicitly clear, we too become voyeurs as we
observe and scrutinize both Baltrop’s and Yoshiyuki’s work with curiosity and
amazement. In Peeping Tom, we watch the film’s protagonist murder his victims and
realize that even though he never touches them, what he desires is the filmic record of
his transgression. In much the same way, Baltrop and Yoshiyuki were involved in
intimate relationships with their subjects that were never (at least to my knowledge)
based on physical consummation, but one where the recorded image was the goal. In
other words, their desires were always mediated, promoted and made-possible by the
camera. We participate in the revelation/violation of these peoples’ secrets, and find
pleasure (be it contemplative or aesthetic) in doing so while within the safe remove of
the gallery or our living-room. Yoshiyuki was certainly aware of this when he first
installed his suite of images. The photos were printed life size, the lights were turned-off
16

in the gallery and visitors were given flashlights with the hope that they would slowly
explore (and even touch!) the images.
15
Indeed, the photos themselves became fetish
objects, and their secrets could only be revealed as a response to our own desire to see
them.

Endnotes

1. On May 3
rd
, 1982, Hsieh encountered a man who had accosted him with a stick a few months prior.
Hsieh was forced to defend himself with the pair of nunchaku he carried with him as protection during his
itinerant year. This second encounter resulted in Hsieh’s arrest, and he was dragged into a police building
despite Hsieh’s vociferous pleading. He was later released after fifteen hours in jail, and charged with
disorderly conduct. However, his sentence was given as merely ‘time served’, due to judges who were both
familiar and sympathetic with Hsieh’s performance.

2. Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh. (p.326)
3. Gefter, Philip. “Sex in the Park, and its Sneaky Spectators.” The New York Times, September 23,
2007

4. It is interesting to note that Yoshiyuki only shot the heterosexual couples from close-range. The
images of the gay men were always made from a safe, consistent distance, and explicitly marked his
outsider status in relation to his subjects.

5. Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2003 (The Real Experiment, p. 201)

6. Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2003 (Performing Life, p. 196)

7. This was made exceedingly clear in his final two lifeworks, which slowly removed all preconditions
for the ‘art’ to happen until Hsieh was merely living.

17

8. The box men are homeless-imposters, and are looked upon with suspicion and animosity by real
street-dwellers. In the social hierarchy of Abe’s novel, the box men exist below the homeless.

9. Crickenberger, Heather Marcelle. “The Flaneur – The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of
Hypertext” June, 2007. http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html

10. Sontag, Susan, On Photography. New York, Picador, 2001
11. Crimp, Douglas. “Alvin Baltrop: pier photographs, 1975-1986”. Artforum, February, 2008

12. Crimp, Douglas. “Alvin Baltrop: pier photographs, 1975-1986”. Artforum, February, 2008

13. This tragedy also alludes to Baltrop’s inability to be taken seriously as a photographer and artist
during his lifetime. A combination of homophobia and racism marked hostile reactions to his work, even by
gays, in the art-world. As a result, Baltrop received little artistic attention prior to his death in 2004.

14. The film follows a serial killer, Mark Lewis, who murders his victims with a blade that extends from
the tripod of a camera. This device enables him to film the expressions of his victims immediately before he
murders them. The audience is not only witness to his crimes, but is made to share in his activities with the
many shots that occur from the perspective of his camera/weapon. There is even a scene of Lewis watching
one of his own snuff films. Thus we are not only voyeurs to the murders, but voyeurs of Lewis’s own
experience of voyeurism as well.

15. Yoshiyuki, Kohei, The Park. New York: Hatje Cantz/Yossi Milo, 2007 (p. 122)

Bibliography

Abe, Kobo, The Box Man. New York: Vintage, 2001

Crickenberger, Heather Marcelle. “The Flaneur – The Arcades Project Project or The
Rhetoric of Hypertext” June, 2007. http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-
web/home/flaneur.html

Crimp, Douglas. “Alvin Baltrop: pier photographs, 1975-1986”. Artforum, February, 2008
Gefter, Philip. “Sex in the Park, and its Sneaky Spectators.” The New York Times,
September 23, 2007

Heathfield, Adrian, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh. New York: The MIT
Press, 2009

Kaprow, Allan, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2003

Sontag, Susan, On Photography. New York, Picador, 2001

Yoshiyuki, Kohei, The Park. New York: Hatje Cantz/Yossi Milo, 2007

18

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis attempts to trace influences upon my practice through the works of four other men: two photographers, a performance artist, and a writer. The ideas and works I present are not direct precursors to my own, but serve as various poles of interest around which much of my work has either revolved around, or been attracted to.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Tam, Kenneth (author)

Core Title Disappearing in plain sight, or, How we used to have casual sex before craigslist

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Degree Conferral Date 2010-08

Publication Date 08/10/2010

Defense Date 09/11/2001

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cleveland steamer,Colon,coprophilia,Dennis Cooper,Faith Hill,gapers,Grain,Harvesting machinery,incest,Nuts,OAI-PMH Harvest,Oprah,orifice,poop,Rice,stump-humping

Place Name Japan (countries), New York (states), New York City (city or populated place), Tokyo (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Fine, Jud (committee chair), Hainley, Bruce (committee member), Stark, Frances (committee member)

Creator Email kenntam@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3387

Unique identifier UC180504

Identifier etd-Tam-3948 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-381591 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3387 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Tam-3948.pdf

Dmrecord 381591

Document Type Thesis

Rights Tam, Kenneth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu