Resurrection

An artist's iconography embraces AIDS,
drag culture, and the Catholic Church

by Fred Turner

JEROME: AFTER THE PAGEANT, by Thomas Avena and Adam Klein. Foreword by Klaus Kertess. With 32 color and 64 black-and-white photographs. Bastard Books, 96 pages, $32.95.

A year and a half ago, just before he died of AIDS, Jerome Caja painted a self-portrait on a scrap of paper. In it he stands at the edge of a lawn, his hand on his hip, staring into the distance. Laundry waves in the wind behind him -- yellow and pink dresses, several pairs of white men's briefs. But this is no typical AIDS-era aubade: the nearly naked Caja sports spangled purple stockings and a glittering brassiere, above-the-elbow gloves, and a yellow smiley-face pendant dangling beneath a death's-head choker. His penis protrudes from his G-string like a giggling stagehand peering out from the wings. What should be a tragedy has become a farce.

But then, with a little more study, the farce reverts to tragedy. Painter, performance artist, and well-known San Francisco drag queen Caja was a master of transgression. Yet, as this retrospective collection of 46 of his paintings reveals, he was also a man of enormous sweetness and longing. Like other contemporary artists such as Nan Goldin and Joel-Peter Witkin, Caja turned to the realm of the perverse not in order to attack outmoded conventions, but in order to borrow the artifacts and attitudes he would need to survive in the realm of the everyday. Caja's paintings are fragments of a private allegory -- often dizzyingly grotesque, but also glorious, gentle and sad.

As short-story writer Adam Klein points out in his sympathetic biographical essay, Caja made no distinctions between his life and his art. Each was a comment on the other; both were cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other people's stories. In high school, for example, Caja was such a devout Catholic that he spent his spare time teaching arts and crafts to retired nuns. At the same time, he had a terrible crush on his own father, spied regularly on his brother in the shower, and led a wildly homoerotic fantasy life.

Those worlds collide and recombine in Caja's imagery. In Bozo Venus Peeing on a Burning Bush, for example, Caja has painted what looks like a small tin tray with an elaborate and quite beautiful image of a hermaphroditic Bozo the Clown. Fondling his female left breast, Bozo aims a stream of piss from his erect penis onto a burning bush. Goofy masculine angels hover at his shoulders, while daisies as white as stars pepper the sky around Bozo's bald and grease-painted head. Having borrowed the burning bush from the Old Testament of his childhood and the structure of the portrait from Renaissance religious art, Caja has infused the sublime with his own ridiculously private longings. The painting is sacrilegious and obscene, but also inviting: in the alien language of his perverse collage, we can hear Caja asking us to listen in as he tells himself who he is.

Borrowed as they are from so many other narratives, Caja's symbols can be hard to decipher. In a long critical essay, Thomas Avena works painting-by-painting, translating Caja's references into rich, intelligible prose. But even without such a guide, Caja's work manages to reach beyond its parts and to achieve a powerful coherence. Like Goldin's photographs, his paintings are acts of recollection, eulogies for moments that have passed. By speaking of those moments in a borrowed language -- in drag, as it were -- Caja articulates them all the more clearly.

"For Jerome," writes Adam Klein, "remembrance . . . is cannibalism." At their best, Caja's paintings do not simply describe his memories -- they become shards of his experience. Made from Wite-Out, lipstick, used condoms, his own toenail clippings, they become emotionally supercharged souvenirs. For instance, when his companion, Charles, died of AIDS, Caja took handfuls of his cremated remains, mixed them with resin, and created a surface on which he painted exquisite locket-sized portraits of Charles himself. Caja's medium became his message, a miniature chronicle of his affection for Charles.

In most parts of modern America, to paint over a loved one's ashes is to desecrate the memory of the dead. But in the world of Jerome Caja, it is to drag the dead back to life, to hold them close, to love them in spirit as they were once loved in life. On page after page of Jerome: After the Pageant, we see how Caja has transformed the most extreme materials and the most perverse images into emblems of the affections all of us share. Caja left the Catholic Church years before he died, and he made paintings riddled with anti-clerical iconography. Yet he also left behind evidence of a truly Catholic vision -- the vision of a fallen world, but one held together by love.

Fred Turner's Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory has recently been published by Anchor Books.