ABSTRACT
On the entrance to the viewing gallery for William E. Jones's film Tearoom at the Whitney Museum Biennale in 2008, patrons confronted a disclaimer. Jones's use of this film footage in video format, only slightly edited from the original, raises questions about the visual experience and ethical context of the film's meaning as a museum object. Tearoom in effect of the moment of 'criminal' activity, presenting the movement and encounters between those anonymous men in the bathroom over fifty years ago, as a present and ongoing visual experience today, played again and again in fifty-six-minute showings in the museum gallery. Tearoom has none of the glamor of those films, none of the theatrical efforts that attend such porn films. This is the intriguing paradox of Tearoom, mixing images that have the grainy quality of home movies, with a distancing gaze of the police surveil-lance apparatus, and representing the awkward erotics of the men's sexual interactions in video format.
