Heteronormativity relies on compulsory links between sex, gender, and desire and this "cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of 'identities' cannot 'exist' – that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not 'follow' from either sex or gender" (Butler, Gender Trouble 17). Drawing on and extending Butler's discussion, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown how heteronormativity presumptively lines up a whole host of elements, including but not limited to: biological sex, gender assignment, gender assignment of a preferred partner, sexual fantasies, eroticized sexual organs, preferred sexual acts (7). This neat alignment of such disparate elements condenses sexuality into a unitary and monolithic whole that is conceived of as natural and inevitable. Sedgwick suggests, then, that "'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically" (8). Cinematic images help shape our understanding of whom and how we desire, and with whom and how we identify; they potentially open up spaces from which to develop erotic, sensual, multiple, and desirous subjectivities as they ‘trouble’ and ‘confuse’ the intelligibility of the sex/gender/desire matrix.

Scholars in film studies and queer/feminist theory have begun to offer more complicated modes for understanding the messy, contradictory nature of queer spectators of the spectacles of film. In her study of Hollywood film during the Motion Picture Production Code’s prohibition against ‘sex perversion,’ Patricia White argues that there is a visible lesbian presence in classic Hollywood as she explores the ways in which lesbians spectators are provided with pleasure from films even as Hollywood helps to construct the very parameters for lesbian psychosocial identity development during this era. In his introduction to OutTakes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, Ellis Hanson contends, “we are still in the throes of a lesbian and gay campaign for so-called positive images, representations of sexual minorities as normal, happy, intelligent, kind, sexually well-adjusted, professionally adept, politically correct ladies and gentleman” (7). Hanson contends that such calls for simple ‘positive’ representations of gay men and lesbians in film lead to a kind of bland romanticised sentimentality. The contributors to OutTakes all take a critical turn away from valorising or villianizing representations of gay men and lesbians in film in order to analyse and theorise the ways in which queer identities and desires are socially mediated by both Hollywood and independent cinema. José Esteban Muñoz in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics details strategies of performance and spectatorship used by queers of colour, naming the negotiation of ambivalence as a process of disidentification:

It is against this backdrop – interrogations of bifurcated readings of gays and lesbians in film as either positive or negative – that we read Lisa Cholodenko’s film, High Art, and the ways in which it re-deploys queer desire. High Art is a complex story about art, intimacy, and desire set in a bohemian community that refuses to be neatly articulated with a ‘lesbian’ identity or community.[1] Cholodenko suggests that she created the film to move beyond identity politics and the celebration of lesbian relationships; she explains, “there’s certainly a lesbian element to it, and there’s certainly a central lesbian relationship, but I specifically wrote it to be much more complex than that [...] Frankly I’m just tired of all that [films framed around identity politics]. I think its kind of time to go deeper and get into other areas” (qtd. in Earls 28). B. Ruby Rich contends that Cholodenko’s film exists on the outer cusp of New Queer Cinema[2], which Maria Pramaggiore suggests “rejects both ‘humanist’ and ‘identity politics’ in favour of a social constructionist view, implying that this cinema recoils from the sympathetic universalizing embrace of humanism but also flouts the subcultural exclusivity of identity politics and defies demands for ‘positive’ images” (60). Understanding that there are many ways of representing bodies, desires, and sexualities allows us to explore the contradictions embedded in visual culture and provides a means of complicating an uni-dimensional understanding of our ever-changing subjectivities, which is a critical element in altering the social conditions of our lives. Cholodenko’s film offers such a representation of desiring bodies as it challenges heteronormativity and identity-based representations of desire. Moreover, the film turns in on itself and brings to the forefront questions about spectatorship, pleasure, and desire such that spectators are brought into spaces of ‘disidentification.’ That is, High Art illustrates how film and the politics of representation are always fraught with contradictions and complexities. The self-referentiality of High Art draws spectators into spaces where easy consumption and the unambivalent, ‘positive’ pleasure of cinematic images are thrown into relief.

Refiguring Desire as Becomings

The political imperative to create images of lesbians as both desiring and desired subjects is addressed by Elizabeth Grosz, who insists that lesbian desires and sexual relations between women remain underrepresented. She argues that:

Grosz turns to the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to articulate fresh ways of rethinking lesbians and lesbian desire that move away from psychoanalytic models which reinstitute a bifurcation between objects and subjects, males and females, a model that renders lesbian sexuality unintelligible. Psychoanalytic conceptualisations typically organise our understanding of desire around the phallus and conceptualise sexuality in negative terms (impossible fulfilment through seeking/failing to find the lost phallus), which reduce female sexuality to lack, absence, and passivity. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomes[3], she calls upon feminists to theorise new understandings of desires as productive rather than reproductive, as intensities, flows, and “surface effects, between one thing and another – between a hand and a breast, a tongue and a cunt, a mouth and food, a nose and a rose” (Space, Time, and Perversion 182). Desire does not seek the lost object; it is a force of production, an energy that creates things, morphs entities, and forges alliances.

Grosz recognizes feminist critiques of Deleuze and Guattari’s work[4]; however, she finds their conception of desire useful in moving beyond the limitations of a psychoanalytic economy. Her re-figuration of desire refuses to subordinate it to consciousness or to biological organization and provides a means of eschewing an identity-based theoretical frame that adjudicates who is and is not lesbian, or what does or does not count as transgressive practice. Grosz suggests that we turn our attention to ways of imagining lesbianism and lesbian desire as processes of ‘becoming’ because there is no end in sight for this mode of desire; therefore, it would allow us to consider the effects of the intensities and energies that flow between desiring and desirous bodies and objects (Space, Time, and Perversion 184). Grosz does not advocate that we embrace a kind of liberal pluralism or become lost in a sea of permanent multiplicity and fragmentation; she emphasises that the movement of desire is productive, creating “ever-new alignments, linkages, and connections, making things” (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 168). That is, we need models of desire that dis-articulate the link between sexuality and some telos (a greater cause, freedom, reproduction, a social identity), as such models reduce bodies, sexuality, and desire into unity and singularity, foreclosing the creative and generative potentialities of lived bodies.

It is to a space of intensities, energies, and interconnections in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art that we turn our gaze, directing our attention to the kinds of queer lesbian connections that are rendered possible when we use a frame of ‘becomings’ to understand desire, which “is not a question of being […] of attaining a definite status as a thing, a permanent fixture, not of clinging to, having an identity, but of moving, changing, being swept beyond one singular position into a multiplicity of flows (Space, Time, and Perversion 184). Cholodenko’s film takes the visual erotic economy of film beyond a psychoanalytic frame and the limitations of identity politics and into spaces that complicate desire, visual consumption, and the politics of commodification. High Art challenges a psychoanalytic economy of lack and heteronormative ending for the spectator by representing queer lesbian sexuality (and the visual consumption of such representations) as contradictory, fraught with complexities and ambiguities.

Becomings, Desiring Bodies, and Addiction in High Art

High Art revolves around a world of art and addiction and Cholodenko utilizes numerous filmic techniques in an attempt to enhance “a sort of hazy, dreamlike, slightly drug-induced quality” (Cholodenko, “Commentary”).[5] The artistic loft of Lucy, an acclaimed photographer disaffected by the larger art scene a decade earlier, and Greta, a German actress,[6] serves as the centre that brings a bohemian community together and where numerous scenes of consumption, desire, and addiction are played out. Desiring bodies, bodies that seek ever-new linkages and assemblages are central to the film. We read the desire expressed by the drug-induced bodies in Lucy’s loft through Grosz’s reconfiguration of bodies and desires as productive, as ‘desiring machines.’ Resisting psychoanalytic readings of the body as a unified organism (either biologically or psychically) Grosz uses Deluze and Guattari’s rhizomatic notion of the “Body without Organs” (BwO) to denaturalise the body and conceive of it as desiring machine, as productive, “The body without organs is a not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization […] The full body without organs is a body populated by multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, qtd in Volatile Bodies 168). The drug-induced body is one example of a body that seeks ever-new linkages, assemblages, energies, flows, and intensities. Grosz invokes the BwO because it resists ontological questions about desire and reframes questions around productivity, “what it does, how it functions, what it affects, what it produces” (Volatile Bodies 170). These bodies and desires mark the context for High Art.

Heroin and Greta’s hunger for Lucy binds the characters in a tightly woven world of addicted desires and sexual engagement. Greta is often unable to engage intimately with Lucy as her body shuts down in response to her heroin intake, and we could read this as lack, as something lacking in Greta and Lucy’s relationships, which makes Syd all the more attractive. However this constructs a binary between the ‘dysfunctional,’ lacking relationship (Lucy and Greta) and a romanticized relationship (Lucy and Syd) that fills that void. Using the theory of becomings to attend to drug use and addiction we can situate the body as productive in a drug-induced state, not lacking. Drawing on Grosz’s work on becomings, Patricia MacCormack suggests that desire is not a matter of satisfying the body, “Rather than a body affected by desire, desire is effectuated through the flesh. Desire roams about the flesh, reorganising the stratification of the hermeneutic body” (32). When we enter Lucy’s New York apartment flat, we always see a multiplicity of heroin-induced bodies lying around, an assemblage of parts that morphs one person or thing into another. These scenes are sensual, abundant, erotic, and hypnotic, a form of desire that resists definition solely through a sex act or attainment of an object. Instead the drug-induced body seeks “line of flight,” which “does not fly off into the distance but rather flies inside our own bodies in transformation and redistribution of fleshly intensities, spatially static we fly from what we were before and become something otherwise” (MacCormack 39). Further, the space of the loft illustrates Grosz’s notion of becomings that is not only about two or more bodies coming together, but also about the interaction and intensities that are shared between bodies, objects, and spaces. High Art speaks to the ways in which a ‘high’ leads to ‘becomings,’ or lines of flight that create intensifying assemblages, desires, and intensities.

Importantly, Cholodenko resists romanticising this bohemian community. Although both the space of the loft and drug-induced bodies in High Art transform a psychoanalytic understanding of desire as lack, the addicted body can sometimes shut down the potential for desirous exchanges or modes of becoming. The creative line of the addicted body becomes stuck in a closed circuit that ultimately leads to the annihilation of itself. The addicted body “establishes a line of flight that is unable to free the circulation of intensities, making other, further connections […] impossible” (Volatile Bodies 171). Near the end of the film Lucy understands (through her becomings with Syd) that she needs to kick her heroin addiction and leaves for a week of rehab. Upon returning to the loft, it is once again filled with high bodies sprawled out and morphing into one another and she says to Greta, “one of us has to go.” The despair and hopelessness in this scene is quiet and devastating and Lucy appears ambivalent. This exchange is significant; it illuminates that although Lucy and Greta’s sexual intimacy had been interrupted by Greta’s inability to transmit the body’s intensities differently, the desires that moved between them are fraught with complexities. In Lucy there is recognition that the shared ‘high’ with Greta did allow for the creative and productive exchange of intensity; however, their addicted bodies became stuck in a kind of repetition that no longer allowed for the kind of connective energy where their bodies, ambitions, and passions were brought together in desirous ways. Seeking the creative line of flight, Lucy consents to Greta’s request to be with her for one last night and they both do a few lines of heroin. Ultimately this is Lucy’s demise; she overdoses on heroin and dies. Because desire is not just a “feeling or affect, but also a doing and making,” these scenes complicate an easy understanding of desire as lack. The drug-induced bodies and the space of the loft refigures desire as becomings, shifting our attention from ontological questions about identities, objects of desire, and lack and helping us think desire as that which produces ever-new configurations.

Becomings and Re-Direction of Desire in High Art

Becoming, according to MacCormack, “is not a metaphor of being or thinking differently, it is not a linear activity whereby one simply turns into an identifiable something else. […] Becoming is harnessing the instability of the body, so whatever causes instability could be a useful moment of entry into becoming. Desire causes instability” (31-33). Such an entry into becoming is produced through Syd and Lucy’s interactions. Syd is Lucy and Greta’s downstairs neighbour and assistant editor of Frame magazine. She has great ambition to move up the editorial ladder at Frame, but is getting nowhere; she knows that she needs one ‘break’ to establish her name as an editor. Through a chance encounter with Lucy as she attempts to fix Lucy’s leaky bathtub that is dripping into her apartment below, Syd enters the space of Lucy’s loft, where desire is not simply about sex, but is “part of the intensity and passion of life itself” (Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion 181). Syd is initially attracted to this space because of the desire and intensity that circulates here and the potential for ‘expansion’ that such a space offers her.[7] Drawn in even further by the mounted photographs[8] on the bathroom wall and unaware of Lucy’s fame a decade earlier, Syd interrogates her, wanting to know if Lucy took all of the photographs, if the subjects are her friends, if art is her livelihood, and if she has ever had her work published. On a second visit to the loft Syd ‘deconstructs’ Lucy’s photographs, “Really, it ties into Barthes’ whole conception of photographic ecstasy, the way he explores temporality, memory, and meaning. I mean, I know it sounds really dry in the text, but when I’m looking at your pictures, I really feel like I understand.” The reference to Barthes is significant.[9] His notion of “photographic ecstasy” suggests that the essence of a photographic image can penetrate us, move us, and transform us (Camera Lucida 118). During this ‘ecstatic’ exchange in the bathroom, Syd’s profession and ambition are revealed, and as a result, Syd and Lucy become more fascinated by and drawn to each other. Separated from the heroin-induced, morphing bodies in the living room of the loft, energy begins to flow between the two as Lucy emphasises, “I really love having that [ambition and drive] around me again. I can’t believe how much I’ve missed it.” Syd provides an energy and opportunity for Lucy, who is stuck in repetition with Greta, and Lucy provides Syd something in return – it is a vital exchange.

Syd and the editors at Frame discover that Lucy is still producing art. Knowing that a move from assistant editor to editor is one of Syd’s aspirations, Lucy agrees to step back into the public scene and produce a photo layout for the cover and pages of Frame with the stipulation that Syd will be her editor. During this moment in the film the two lie on Lucy’s bed intimately touching each other, which ultimately leads to the exchange of a passionate kiss. Both Lucy and Syd are giving and receiving a particular intensity for life itself that binds them in erotic and complicated ways. And although they are engaging in sexually intimate ways, their desire is not aligned through identification as ‘lesbians’ per se; instead their desire is the culling forth of energy and intensities that they share through an artistic ecstasy. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner articulate the necessity of envisioning such experiences as a way to trouble heteronormative understandings of sexuality and desire. They write, “making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation” (175). The modes of connection that occur in High Art refuse any relation to heteronormativity; instead they focus more on becomings, on what the intensities “make [Syd and Lucy] do rather than what they mean or represent” (Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion 183).

During a weekend in the countryside to complete Lucy’s assignment for Frame, the two sleep together during their first evening alone. As they are each gently holding the other’s hand Syd comments, “this is so intense” and “I’m not usually this nervous.” Pulled by the energy of desire and lost in unfamiliar territory of having sex with a woman, she aggressively straddles Lucy, asking, “What should I do to you?” With an indifferent tone, Lucy responds, “Whatever you want to do to me.” Syd’s discomfort and inexperience becomes apparent and Lucy aggressively rolls her over on her back, grabs hold of her wrists, and passionately kisses her neck and breasts. Lisa Cholodenko beautifully frames Syd’s anxiety and uneasiness as a way to avoid any sort of lesbian sentimentality. As spectators, this uneasiness is destabilising because we know the desire between Lucy and Syd is not simply about sexual attraction. Syd wants it all: she craves being a part of Lucy’s edgy world, she is hoping to advance her career through Lucy’s photographs, and she is posited as naïve and inexperienced. In an interview with Marty Mapes, Cholodenko reveals the tension she intentionally sets up between Lucy and Syd. She explains, “One of the strains in the film is this younger, uninformed person who has been playing by all the rules and doing it, quote, the right way, [who] stumbles into a world where the wrong way feels like such a higher position to be in. Just so much more of an expanded kind of place” (qtd. in Mapes, para.16). In High Art desire does not arc toward the attainment of an ‘object’ (in fact both Syd and Lucy have relationships waiting for them in the city and Syd is not self-identified as lesbian); rather, their desire “aims at nothing above its own proliferation or self-expansion (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 163).

Lucy’s desire is equally fraught when we think of desire aiming at its own proliferation. The morning after their sexual engagement, Lucy searches through her bag for heroin; but in a defining moment, she glances back at the still sleeping Syd, puts away the heroin and grabs her camera. As Lucy takes a photograph of Syd’s bare back, Syd wakes up. Lucy tumbles into bed as they kiss and laugh, but Lucy then gets up and arranges the covers lying over Syd before snapping more photographs. Syd rolls over and playfully ‘poses.’ If we think of consumption as existing on a continuum, then Lucy’s exchange of heroin for the camera becomes a medium to experience the intensity and energy that the consumption of heroin provided.[10] Elizabeth Grosz reiterates the connections among and similarities between ‘lust’ and drug intake, (where the drug consumption hasn’t stopped the flow of energies and intensities). She asserts, “their intensity melts a certain subjective cohesion, the ‘high’ more or less obliterates key boundaries between the body and its other, more or less pleasurably and more or less temporarily” (Space, Time, and Perversion 202). Through framing and snapping, Lucy not only begins to consume Syd, but the distinction between self and other is blurred. Desire is proliferated as Syd participates in this exchange, consuming Lucy with an unflinching and unmasked gaze towards her.

The camera becomes a mediating device that produces, not a couple, but a machinic alliance – an image that is not that of ‘a couple,’ but an assemblage of body parts, sheets, and pillows that represents both the intensity and ambiguity of their interactions, the energy of life itself for both characters. Syd and Lucy’s passions are continually linked and severed in potentially infinite, exciting, and terrifying ways. This connection and ambiguity is further complicated when Lucy sets the timer on her camera and enters the frame (an unusual move for Lucy who spends most of her time hiding behind the camera), grasping Syd’s hand, lying on top of her back, and resting her chin on Syd’s neck. Lucy and Syd gaze into the lens and the camera snaps. As bodies merge, we cannot differentiate where shoulders or hands and fingers begin and end. What is markedly different is the kind of gaze they each offer to the camera. Lucy looks intently from behind a veil of hair with her mouth opening onto Syd’s neck. Syd, with mouth closed, stares with a lazy indifference in her eyes. This particular scene and the interactions that take place have an ephemeral feel as meanings move and change, refusing to be captured – it is at once playful and serious. The shift from playfulness to unnerving intensity resonates with Grosz’s understanding of desire as unstable and continually changing; however, as we explore below, the fixed photographs further complicate this mode of becoming.

Consumption and Commodification: Complicating Becomings in High Art

The moment the photograph is snapped, the desire expressed in this provisional moment is captured and frozen. Syd’s indifference alongside Lucy’s apparent comfort concerning their exchange of desire illustrates the coming together of different levels and modes of intensity. Although the relationship is intensified and complicated by exchanges of power, it is not about one character exerting power over another. The noticeable difference between Lucy and Syd’s expressions accentuates how the intensities between them do not culminate into a solidified identity as couple, nor in Syd’s claiming of a ‘lesbian’ identity. But the commodification of this image for Frame magazine puts forward a specific representation of lesbian desire. Once such images move into the public sphere for mass consumption, as Lucy’s particular images eventually do, the ambiguous and shifting nature of their desire is framed, captured, and fixed.

An intertextual analysis of Frame juxtaposed against and within High Art offers us commentary on the pleasures and dangers inherent in representations of lesbian desire.[11] Judith Mayne in Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture details her decision to title her text as such. She writes:

The ending is deeply fraught, unnerving, and provocative. The provisional, ambiguous assemblage of Lucy’s and Syd’s bodies lying together is, ironically, captured through the camera and published as the cover for Frame, which Syd discovers on her desk moments after learning of Lucy’s overdose. Syd gazes upon the cover of Frame and then slowly opens the first page with tears in her eyes. She takes in the energy of each photograph; in this scene Syd looks at herself who is gazing unflinchingly upon Lucy. However, this is not a sentimental recuperation of the energies they shared; the images ‘capture’ the desire between Syd and Lucy, whose power was its instability, and expresses Syd and Lucy’s professional ambitions. Furthermore, the images convert this private moment of intimacy into a public lesbianism open to consumption. Syd is not just looking upon herself looking outward; she is also looking at herself as consumers of Frame would look upon her. The last words of the film come from the editors of Frame as Syd is walking out the door with a perplexed expression and her copy of the magazine. Both say, in an indifferent tone, “Nice work, Syd.”[12] Syd’s intimate exchange of intensity with Lucy is transformed in this moment. ‘Productive’ desire is complicated. She has achieved her professional ambition through the photographs, and Lucy’s death only increases their value. However, in the course of production and consumption, she has participated in exploiting the intimate exchange of energy and intensity she shared with Lucy (she is now Framed on the cover).

This complex web of desire, commodification, ambition, and consumption unsettles Syd and is equally unsettling for spectators. As we look at Syd, Syd is gazing right back at us. In fact, the cover photo for Frame is used to promote High Art itself, appearing on the VHS and DVD sleeve and the film’s promotional poster. It is the moment we anxiously anticipate as viewers. We ‘consume’ the images of Syd and Lucy just as those who purchase Frame will consume them. This complicated intertextuality precludes easy consumption of the visual images in the film as simply a ‘lesbian couple,’ or simply a romantic tragedy. As indicated in the introduction, the film actively resists an identity-based representation. High Art comments upon itself as it ‘frames’ lesbian visual representations. The camera that both Cholodenko and Lucy hold, in an attempt to capture a subjectivity that is elusive, participates in a form of exploitation that is exhilarating and terrifying, taking spectators into potentially productive spaces where we are forced to complicate our own consumption of visual images. The pleasure of receiving images of what might be read as lesbian desire is fraught as spectators are projected into a space of ambivalence.

In fact, debates concerning the lifespan of New Queer Cinema are intimately connected to the commodification of gay and lesbian identities. Looking back on the film’s mainstream success[13], B. Ruby Rich asserts that High Art “sounded the death knell of the New Queer Cinema” (Rich, para.10). In an interview with Rich in 2004, Jennie Rose asks her about the status of New Queer Cinema. Rich responds, “it’s over. What’s up with it now? It’s a niche market. It’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It’s the worst nightmare of every gay activist from the 1970s and 1980s. […] I don’t think I’m getting my politics from The L Word. There’s nothing formality-breaking going on there” (Rich qtd. in Rose, para.37).[14] While Rich despairs that this commodification is simultaneously a loss of queer politics and activism, Robyn Wiegman, Cathy Griggers, Amy Villarejo, and Maria Pramaggiore assert that such commodification has elements of tension and pleasure, loss and possibility, and vulnerability and potentiality as lesbian bodies are transformed into ‘becoming bodies,’ bodies that continually shift and change. Griggers asserts, “In the process of mainstreaming, in which minoritarian and majority significations intermingle, the lesbian body of signs is exposed as an essentially dis-organ-ized body” (179). Because the lesbian sign is no longer fixed in time and space, the commodification of the lesbian needn’t be accepted as a loss of politics. In fact, Wiegman, Griggers, and Villarejo encourage us to move beyond a sense of despair and instead engage with the lesbian representations put forward. Wiegman herself asserts that given the shape of the representational practices of our culture “we have little alternative action but to participate” (5). Indeed, one major goal of New Queer Cinema was to create a market for queer films. The above theorists illustrate that once a market is created, commodification is inevitable.

Entrapped in this cycle of representation, production, and consumption, our strategic movement within it as spectators and consumers can inform our politics, particularly through “disidentification,” which, according to Muñoz, is always about collision, negotiation, pleasure, and pain. By refusing to label cinematic representations of lesbians and lesbian desires as only positive or negative, and instead attending to how their ‘dis-organ-ization’ might mobilize a queer subjectivity through a disidentificatory stance, we can attend to how these images shape our understanding of the world and our relationship to it. Villarejo speaks of the impossibility of pinning down lesbian desire. She writes, “as a result of its elusiveness, one cannot speak easily or accurately about lesbian desire, even as cinema depends upon representing it. Desire, as one name for the term lesbian can suggest, nonetheless has no determinate value even as it propels us” (18). High Art certainly complicates visual images of lesbians, lesbianism, and desire, propelling spectators into spaces where we are made aware of the pleasures, dangers, vulnerabilities, and tensions of representations of desiring and desirous ‘lesbians’ and offering glimpses of queer desire(s) that can be described as modes of becomings that move, shape, and transform us as spectators.