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Art and Queer CultureBasia SliwinskaPublished online: 05 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Basia Sliwinska (2013) Art and Queer Culture, Third Text, 27:6, 808-810, DOI:10.1080/09528822.2013.860794

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earlier acclaimed film installation, Western Deep(2002), Gravesend is an impressionistic film thattraces the devastating effects of global trade par-ticularly the exploitative relations between Europeand Africa. Demos notes McQueens visual referen-cing and metaphorical allusions to nineteenth-century colonialism through Joseph Conrads 1899novella Heart of Darkness. His complex imagery isvisually compelling, but the film-makers affectiverepresentations of black bodies represent whatDemos has noted is an important political choice.McQueen, like many of the other artists discussedin The Migrant Image, produces uncomfortableworks of art that exacerbate tensions around artsloyalty to the laws of form and the imperative tomake meta-commentaries on global systems ofpower.

Demoss critical project should be commendedfor reigniting a discussion that powerfully exploresthe ongoing impasse between aesthetic and politicalaffect in the arts. As the books premise suggests,

artworks concerned with the migrant conditionadvance critical and aesthetic imperatives that arenot contingent upon rootedness to outmodednotions of place, identity and nationhood. And theglobal cosmopolitan artists, many of whom areliving in diaspora, bring a new set of concerns tothe table. Demos rightly argues that these artistshave reinvented documentary practices throughtheir imaging of migrants and the politically dispos-sessed and by extension have opened up new pos-sibilities in the artistic domain for the exploration ofsocial justice and inequality.

T J Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics ofDocumentary during Global Crisis, Duke UniversityPress, Durham, 2013

# Derek Conrad Murray, 2013

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.835093

Art and QueerCulture

A Peephole into AnythingElse You Want to Be

Basia Sliwinska

The Preface of Art and Queer Culture starts with aquote, I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy,which also features on a cardboard sign held by awoman pictured on the accompanying page. In2008 American artist and activist Sharon Hayesinvited members drawn from the Denver and SaintPaul gay, lesbian and transgendered communities toread texts she had written. She wanted to havethem read at the sites of the Republican and Demo-cratic national conventions where they could reachmainstream America. The performances of Revolu-tionary Love: I am Your Worst Fear, I am YourBest Fantasy (2008) were intended to appeal to abasic human desire for belonging, acceptance andunity beyond political divides. Those staged perform-ances with balloons re-enacted the spectacular nature

of the national conventions, addressing the powerstructures and the polarization of attitudes againstnon-normative sexualities. The text read:

We are looking for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals,transmen, transwomen, queers, fags, dykes, muffdivers, bull daggers, queens, drama queens,

flaming queens, trannies, fairies, gym boys, boxingboys, boxing girls, pitchers, catchers, butches,bois, FtoMs, MtoFs, old maids, Miss Kittens,

Dear Johns, inverts, perverts, girlfriends, dragkings, prom queens, happy people, alien sexualities

and anything else you want to be or are and wish tobring out for the event.

Hayess work deals with gender, language and iden-tity politics in specific, transient, cultural moments.The title of the performances, Revolutionary Love:I am Your Worst Fear, I am Your Best Fantasybecame a gay liberation slogan, encapsulating theduality and ambiguity of queer identity in the visualarts and art historical discourses. It also serves asthe opening phrase for Art and Queer Culture. Theperformance gave rise to a different form of activismthat can now spark theoretical debate around mul-tiple representations of queer identities in art. Theslogan might also be the best description of Hayesscontribution to the book, which manifests bothanxiety and fascination embedded in attitudesagainst non-normative sexualities that are no longer

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marginalized. The book includes essays written byCatherine Lord and Richard Meyer who selectedthe accompanying images of artworks and texts.The written and visual materials contest versatile per-spectives on alternative sexualities, and engage in dis-cussions on different identities, meanings andnegotiations of sexualities. They trace the inventionof the word homosexuality in the late nineteenthcentury, the sexual categorizations and various desig-nations in clinical, cultural and social discourses, themeanings imposed on homosexuality, and the pivotalmoments of queer visual culture over the last 125years that enabled the shifting of sexual identitiesand shaped codes and cultures of non-normativesexualities.

Even though queer culture is entwined with artand visual culture, there exist only a few publicationson queer art, sexual cultures and performing subjects.In Art and Queer Culture, Catherine Lord, a lesbianartist and critic, and Richard Meyer, a gay critic, layclaim to the first book to focus on the criticism andtheory regarding queer visual art, as stated on thesticker on the front cover. It is not the first suchtext. There are other publications tracing the influ-ence of queer sexuality on visual culture, such asThe Queer Art of Failure (2011) by Judith Halber-stam or The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts(2004) edited by Claude J Summers. However, Artand Queer Culture offers an unquestionably widevisual landscape of artistic practices and, what ismore interesting, references documents that can befollowed for further research. It takes a leap furtherthan other available publications and investigates agenealogy of queer sexuality in art from 1885 untiltoday. It does not rehearse but contests queer narra-tives that offer chronological but not progressiveaccounts.

Originally proposed as a museum exhibition, Artand Queer Culture aims to reach a global market asan academic resource but, perhaps most importantly,also as a coffee-table publication appealing to readersoutside academia. The book is divided into threeparts, starting from Survey, in which Meyer andLord discuss histories attached to queer culture,their affinity with pop culture and mixing high andlow cultures, performative aspects of identity andadopting mythic references to explain camouflage asa tactic of avoiding social repercussions for sexualpreference. Meyers essay, looking at the early twen-tieth century, traces the campaigns for homosexualrights, from the Stonewall riots of June 1969marking the birth of queer art and activist culturelinked with radical social movements of the time,

the womens liberation movement, anti-war move-ments and Black Power to post-1970s activistgroups. He mobilizes the representations of pre-Stonewall queer culture which are less familiar toinformed readers. Meyer traces what were often con-sidered phobic queer representations, looking at HalFischers Gay Semiotics (1977), a project detailingthe visual and sartorial codes of gay sex culture,and exploring the circulation of visual images fuellingresistance to the framing of homosexual subjects asoutlaws, perverts or security threats.

In the second essay, Lord focuses on the bodypolitics from 1980s onward, starting with SusanSontag, the Butchest One of All.1 Sontags multipleselves portray the insufficiency of language to encom-pass other sexuality. Queer functions as an opposi-tion to norm, resistance towards the mainstream,gendered as heterosexual and raced as white. Lordexplores these complex meanings which intersectwith class, race and nationality. She investigates thetime of the gay flu, gay cancer or Gay RelatedImmune Deficiency Syndrome, later called AIDS,equated in the media with the lifestyle of gay men.She meticulously paints a picture of a time whenartists started complicating the images of their ownbodies and imposing them on a society that wasignoring the issue and negating the need to speakup about AIDS. The body became a site of politicalstruggle and of gender performance. Lord tracks thepolitics of sexuality and illness in art from the1980s, the time of sex wars, designating thedebates concerning female objectification andsexual violence, but also sexual freedom. She thenoffers an insight into artistic practices of recentyears that affirm difference but also negate categoriesbased on identity in art. The essays give a fascinatingoverview of artists questioning and experimentingwith alternative genders in cross-cultural contexts,but these contexts are not explored in depth.

The next part of the book includes visualexamples of artworks from over 220 artists. It isalmost a peek-a-boo game in which looking at thepages mimics what the reader discovers about therepercussions, social stigma or even imprisonmentfaced by homosexuals. These quick references toalternative genders and sexualities and their disap-pearance when the page is turned over are firstmerely interesting, but then bring awareness of thelimits of identity politics and unstable definitions,and signal that queer does not necessarily encompassall cultural practices. It opposes normative hetero-sexuality and troubles the conventions of genderand sexuality. The editors decided to include only

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one work per artist, beginning at the turn of the twen-tieth century, to highlight the global dimensions ofvisual art and the increasing visibility of queerculture, but also to emphasize the wide spectrum ofhistories, identities and practices. Turning eachpage reveals what was hidden and how visual codeswere deployed to signal sexual difference and thealignment of queer first with crime and sin, thenwith identity and then with going beyond the sexualbinary of homo- or heterosexuality. Not all choicesof artists are obvious and some pages offer surprising,less familiar examples of artistic practices that nego-tiate visual framings of homosexuality as a sickness,sin or crime, subvert homophobic attitudes andbeliefs or use allegorical and symbolic codes to rep-resent it. This part of the book, entitled Works, issubdivided into the following sections: thresholdsbetween 1885 and 1909, stepping out (19101929), case studies (19301949), closet organizers(19501964), into the streets (19651979), sexwars (19801994) and queer worlds (1995present), and provides a useful chronology to trackthe changes in the representation of queer subjects.

The final part, Documents, is organized in thesame way and features over one hundred pages con-taining artists statements, manifestos and criticalessays discussing alternative forms of gender, sexu-ality and identity. This is a really valuable contri-bution to the publication, highlighting the activismand politicization of queer culture. It includes OscarWildes witty Testimony on Cross Examination,3 April (1885), Magnus Hirschfelds The Homo-sexuality of Men and Women (1913), passagesfrom Jean Cocteaus The White Book (1928),Sigmund Freuds 1935 letter to an American motherreassuring her that homosexuality is not a pathology,Norman Mailers The Homosexual Villain (1955)and Valerie Solanass S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967),among others. The inclusion of these texts highlightsthe importance of theoretical underpinnings to theunderstanding of art and queer culture.

Art and Queer Culture recognizes the importanceof queer sexuality in art and accentuates the subversivedimensions of non-normative identities. It explores theburgeoning field of queer culture and its impact onvisual culture today and in the past. It is a solid

resource for anyone interested in gender and sexualitystudies and their reverberations with visual culture,paving the way for future projects addressing the dia-logue between art, queer culture and aesthetics. Thebook highlights the asymmetries in thinking aboutart where heteronormative discourses are enforcedand the queer is still often marked with shame, oppres-sion and secrecy. Even though Lord and Meyer admitthe limitations of the project, which is restricted toWestern perspectives, the current discourses aroundglobalization and cosmopolitanism make it impossibleto talk about queer art history without looking atwider cultural, geopolitical and national contexts.Without this transnational and intercultural reach,the traditional art historical categories, approachesand methodologies are not subverted and challengedbut remain powerfully oppressive and, in a way,enforced. Art and Queer Culture is nevertheless agood start. It is a peephole through which one maylook from a secure outside place marked bynormativity and West-centricism into a world whereotherness is not stigmatized but contested, challengedand embraced. As Judith Butler says in one of thedocuments included in the book:

At stake is no less than a reconfigured world, one

which contests the strict distinctions betweeninner and outer life, and which suggests that the

pain that is suffered through pathologization isalso the resource from which angry poems arecrafted, ones that take public form, and that

demand a new public capacity to hear.2

Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Art and QueerCulture, Phaidon, 2013

NOTES

1. Terry Castle in Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Art andQueer Culture, Phaidon, London, 2013, p 29

2. Judith Butler in ibid, p 363

# Basia Sliwinska, 2013

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