The Art of the Haas Brothers

Photography by Sophy Holland. Gerard (left) and Kelly at The Glass House. Groomer: Evanie Frausto. Styling by Stacey Berman. Clothing by Vince. Shot on location at The Glass House, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation The Glass House, the iconic modernist building located in New Canaan, Conn., was part of the home of architect Philip Johnson and his partner, David Whitney, for more than 40 years until they died in 2005. Now, its intimate history has led performance duo Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly -- who themselves have been involved in each other's lives creatively and romantically for more than a decade -- to develop a series of site-specific performance pieces they've titled Modern Living."Johnson had been living there since 1949, two decades before Stonewall," Kelly explains. "He and Whitney eventually lived there in this sort of gay domestic partnership, and they gathered a community of mostly closeted gay people from the art world -- Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Warhol, Lincoln Kirstein -- for social events. It was very queer."Beginning in January 2016, the pair will begin to articulate the idea of "queered" spaces in West Hollywood's Schindler House, another modernist architectural touchstone (designed by Rudolph Schindler as an experiment in cooperative living between two families), and other key modernist homes, such as the Breuer House in the Hudson Valley, and the de Menil in Houston. So far, all of Gerard and Kelly's works have probed the idea of intimacy as a fluid concept that changes over time."That's part of the project of queerness -- questioning those narratives of how one should live one's life or spend one's time," Gerard says. "It's political for us. The model of marriage can be very constricting and cause a lot of problems for how one lives one's life. We think this alternate concept is a necessary story that needs to be told." Keep Reading →

Photography by Sophy Holland. Groomer: Angela Di Carlo. My first time visiting Fire Island -- Labor Day weekend, August 2014 -- I got lost. I'd been at a party for a resident artist and couldn't find my way back to the house I was staying in. Everything looked the same in the dark. After an hour circling the Pines, I gave up and crashed in a construction site near the ocean. A few hours later, I awoke with the sun, only to find the house just 20 feet away. The painter Nicole Eisenman, who spends much of her summer there, was having breakfast alone on the porch. "Oh, you look like shit!" she said, smiling. "Come on, let's go for a swim." We headed to the beach, stripped, and jumped into the cold water; the waves were huge, rolling, and speckled with harmless jellyfish. Eisenman never asked me to explain, and didn't need to. I felt cured.Eisenman has spent the last three summers in the Pines at a house she shares with many other artists, curators, and writers, an informal and not so clearly defined circle of friends (most of them from New York City). They call their tiny community the Tamplex, a name bequeathed by artist K8 Hardy, who acts as a housemother through the summer, alongside her partner, curator Pati Hertling. The house has changed a few times, but the residents and their steady rotation of guests have remained largely the same. A lot of people come through, fit in, make breakfast, stare at the water, and debate whether or not to go to the underwear party. "The play of the public and the private is so interesting there," Eisenman told me over lunch recently in Brooklyn, where she lives and works. "It's down to the wood. I was talking with Sam Ashby about this" -- Ashby is the editor of Little Joe, a London-based queer film magazine -- "and he mentioned that the dock you land on is made of the same wood as everyone's homes. The boardwalks turn into these private walkways that end at homes where the doors are usually unlocked and the windows are open. The public and the private become these overlapping spheres, and everyone lives in the middle."It's a social complexity reflected in her work, which also sits at the points where those spheres intersect. In her paintings, figures often seem as though they have struck a private pose in public, making a face they might make in a mirror except that they are making it for an audience, for "the viewer." Eisenman is perhaps best known for her portraiture, where multi-colored faces appear in the between-states of the various cycles of feisty emotions -- some of them big, some small, some devastated, some mournful, some grinning (stupidly), some neutral and contemplative. They are common expressions often made uncommon, squared in paint to curious effect. A woman sits with death. A woman performs oral sex on her lover, their bodies resting beside a stack of books and an Eve Fowler print ("It is so, / is it so, / is it so, / is it so / is it so / is it so," it reads, a quote from Gertrude Stein). Eisenman's work is big, gay, and funny, borrowing a humor that is often deeply New York, deeply lesbian, but also deeply none of this, or only ambivalently so. In her essay on Eisenman, the poet Eileen Myles writes: "Nicole has always had the gift of unselfconsciously converting her own self-consciousness into yours."[rebelmouse-image 32827872 expand=1 dam=1 alt="Sophy Holland" site_id=25879314 is_animated_gif=false original_size="750x500" 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Photography by Sophy Holland. When told repeatedly, by multiple publishers, that his manuscript was too far removed from acceptable portrayals of gay life, a lesser person might have bitten the bullet, surrendering to revisions or simply giving up. Christopher Stoddard, however, has always been resilient. Amid the frequent rejection of his novel White, Christian -- a bleak and raw account of a young gay man damaged by loss, then driven by drugs and sex -- Stoddard realized that it wasn't him, but the industry, that required change. "Several companies told me they really liked the book but that they didn't want to represent gay people in that way -- that they were trying to move forward," he recalls. "I found that disappointing, because these things still happen."Those early setbacks were eventually eclipsed by a book deal, but in the process, Stoddard, a Brooklyn-based advertising producer, saw that a platform was needed for alternative narratives. Life was improving for huge numbers of LGBT people, but it came at the price of conformity, with the experiences and lives of many swept out of sight. In 2013, he founded ITNA Press ("anti" spelled backward). The company focuses on publishing literature deemed too risque for mainstream readers, but even though its five authors are gay, ITNA is not exclusively LGBT."It just so happens," Stoddard says, "that a lot of gay people who find themselves outside of what is currently 'correct' in terms of being gay need this. Ultimately, I just want to find good, gritty books I'd want to read. It doesn't matter who's written them." Keep Reading →