Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain

How do you queer art history within the museum space? How can we make queer artists’ legacies visible without tokenizing their identities?

Can we make historical queer aesthetics and expressions relevant to a contemporary audience while admitting that giving them LGBTQ labels is anachronistic? Whose authority is it to define queer art, anyway?

Within a institution which has been complicit in queer censoring for so long, which issues will be raised around queer curating?

Made to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK, Queer British Art – 1861 to 1967 at Tate Britain raises more questions than answers.  Both in its representation and interpretation, the exhibition curator Clare Barlow sought to make art through a queer lens accessible to a wider mainstream audience. However, the deeply personal messages behind the works and the political activism associated with the term “queer” were often lost in translation because of this, as were radical, alternative proposals around gender and sexuality.

The exhibition starts with a selection of 19th century art playing with the notion of aesthetics and implied homoeroticism. Simeon Solomon’s Sappho and Erinna (1864) expresses his own sexuality in veiled terms while Leighton’s languid male nudes reflect the ongoing ambiguity around his own preferences. In both cases, the utopia of Ancient Greece in these paintings becomes a way to reassess queer relationships in a fantasy space.  In Evelyn Pickering De Morgan’s Aurora Triumphans (1877), veiled Night leaves Aurora suggestively dazed and tangled in loose bonds. She was modelled by Jane Hales, whose relationship with De Morgan despite her marriage would not neccessarily have been seen as queer at the time. The “scandal” around William Blake Richmond’s The Bowlers (1870) does not relate to semi-naked women embracing but rather their presence at a game full of nude men. The works express a queer sensitivity in themselves, regardless of sexuality: there is a sensuous, camp and almost kitsch appeal within their subject-matter and execution which encourages us to look closer, finding new details in form as well as content.

Evelyn de Morgan (1855–1919), Aurora triumphans, Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum

The literature and theatre displays which follow detract from the focus on queer visual art to deliver more context around queer social history.  The door of Oscar Wilde’s prison cell has some historical relevance as do items exploring the relevance of performance and drag within queer culture. As interesting as these artefacts are however, they do not always link back explicitely to influence on visual art production, save for two artists in particular who crystallize the impact of the respective genres on their art as intended. The first is Aubrey Beardsley with his fantastical queer erotic drawings either illustrating or parodying literary texts. The second is Una Troubridge and her bust of Nikinsky, whose rendition of “Afternoon of a faun” created shockwaves through the ballet scene for its raw sensuality and aesthetics breaking up traditional performance conventions.

Una Troubridge, Bust of Vaslav Nijinsky, 1912, plaster. Given by Richard Buckle. Victoria & Albert Museum.

The “Bloomsbury and Beyond” room was strangely the one in which I felt least engaged by the art on display despite the presence of Duncan Grant or Dora Carrington “queering domesticity” in the exhibition’s terms. Duncan Grant’s modernist aesthetics and queerness are explored in his depictions of bathers, meant to relate to fantasies about filling ponds with men (many can relate, I’m sure). For me however, only Duncan’s Erotic Embrace really delivers what I feel the display was trying to convey: the sense of tenderness in an explicitely homoerotic scene, with an intimacy and quiet reinvention of relationships within the home and outside the norm.

Increasingly, I felt the works in the exhibition were often at risk of becoming illustrative devices for historical  and biographical enquiry and assumptions around the artists’ queerness, whereas the works should act as queer works of art in themselves. For instance, Ethel Sands’ painting Tea with Sickert (1911-12) shows the scene of Sands and her artist partner Nan Hudson facing Sickert during one of their many visits but aside from the interesting facts about the couple, the painting itself feels devoid of any particularly charged queer meaning. This is very much a text-based exhibition, but while context and interpretation are key, the works should also speak for themselves. I would argue that it is reductive to assume a work is queer based on an artist’s identity or its portrayal of a queer artist. Nevertheless, there was an inventive addition to the labelling – the frequent intervention of external voices from current members of the LGBTQ communities. I would have liked to see this more – not only voices of assent but critical and contrasting views on what this particular representation meant for them.

The exhibition’s portrayal of blackness is limited to Glyn Warren Philipot’s Henry Thomas (1934-5) and Edward Wolfe’s Portrait of Patrick Nelson (1930s). The first is accompanied by the knowledge that this model is also in fact his servant, making the portrait an uncomfortable romanticization of racism and classism as well a queer document.  The second is more compelling as an artist’s representation of his lover Patrick, a law student he met in London who was also involved with Duncan Grant. This feels like a moment where the “British” label should suffer transgression for the sake of nuance. The short but powerful essay in the catalogue by Kobena Mercer mentions gay black artist Richmond Barthé as one of the catalysts of the Harlem Renaissance, and furthermore draws upon Isaac Julien’s inspiration from Philipot to create the iconic Looking for Langston around queer, black modernist desire in the 20s-30s.

Gluck, Self portrait, 1942, oil on canvas, 12 in. x 10 in. (306 mm x 254 mm). Primary Collection. National Portrait Gallery, London

The strong lesbian representation or lack thereof is disappointing on many levels because it skims the surface of its potential and its inspection with feminist art practices at the time. Gluck’s defiant self-portrait is powerful in showing that gender non-conformity and artistic identity conflated with her queer identity, as it did for many other lesbians and bisexual women in interwar Europe. However, Gluck’s sole other contribution is a still-life of flowers dating from her relationship with a flower arranger, which feels strange considering her powerful portraiture and what it could have brought to the exhibition. The quaint gazing of women at nudes represented by Laura Knight or Dorothy Johnstone hints at something that was going to become essential in the creation of the modern, feminist artist – the possibility for new spaces for women to interact and collaborate away from men, reclaiming and repurposing the artistic gaze as female – and queering it in the process. However it feels as though the works themselves do not do this notion justice, skirting around assumption and coyness as do the labels. There was a need for queer women to reclaim their own sexuality as a revolutionary act rather than a Victorian stereotype of platonic, sexless “marriage”, but the exhibition does not give room for more explorations around this theme. Dora Carrington’s female nude is beautiful in its sensuous execution, but it feels strange to assume that any relatively sensual nude should be seen as queer just because its artist identified as bisexual (“hybrid” in her terms). It feels strange to have a label admit that we can neither confirm nor deny lesbian undertones in an anonymous nude study when there exists a loving, erotic nude portrait of her lover Henrietta Bingham as a possible alternative, Reclining Nude with Dove in a Mountainous Landscape. Overall, it is confusing that the display for queer women feels so sparse when the interwar period was a thriving moment for them both on a literary and artistic level linked to new opportunities for women artists as well as feminist activism. The inclusion of the decidedly French Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore challenges the “British-only” theme – so why not include other lesbian artists working in Europe such as Jean Mammen or Romaine Brooks, not to mention the artist couple Gerda Gottlieb and Lili Elbe?

Keith Vaughan (1912-77), Kouros, 1960, oil on canvas, 91,4 x 71, 1 cm. Private Collection

Further on, the exploration of queerness related to urban life feels more exciting and thought-provoking. Arcadia and the Greek homoerotic ideal is revisited beautifully in Keith Vaughan’s work Kouros (1960), where the experimentation with modernist form and queer fantasy in new urban settings mingles with notions of classical aesthetics. Edward Burra’s Izzy Orts depicting US sailors in American bars encapsulates the new, giddy access of queer men to an urban nightlife to experiment sexually and trangress social public norms. The last room of David Hockney works facing Francis Bacon works had two queer visions clashing and contrasting both in terms of form and content. Portraiture pervades the exhibition, from Pennington’s iconic Oscar Wilde portrait to depictions of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolfe and Vernon Lee. However, literally documenting these queer representations does not neccessarily give us further insight into queer art practices and senstivities. This is amended with Francis Bacon’s Seated Figure representing his former lover Peter Lacy, David Hockney’s cheeky portrayal of the drag queen Bertha alias Bernie (1961) and Angus Mc Bean’s photograph of his occasional lover Quentin Crisp. They express this variation in queer relations and attitudes, from violence and provocation through to senstivity and love. This said I would have loved to have more focus on modern queer artists I knew less about – or more room to include artists from the 70s and 80s.

Angus McBean (1904-90), Quentin Crisp, 1941, photograph, bromide print on paper, 43,4 x 34,4 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London.

This is not “part” of the exhibition per say but to cut it off in 1967, before the Stonewall Riots in the 70s and the AIDS crisis of the 80s is worth commenting upon because it feels off in a British and international context. I understand that it “fits” with the anniversary the exhibition is meant to commemorate but it undermines the struggles the British LGBTQ community nevertheless endured for decades and the critical edge the exhibition could have had is lost. Section 28 brought about under Thatcher to prohibit the “intentional promotion of homosexuality” by a local authority”  was only repealed in 2000. Furthermore the 60s and 70s begin the moment where queer artists not only fight back and embrace their queerness but redefine queer art as an activist act. “Queer” as a term expresses political and counter-cultural sentiment.

I discovered and enjoyed new artworks and perspectives on queer art and artists within this exhibition. For all its power and strong intentions in terms of LGBTQ visibility, “Queer British Art” still has issues in its content, artwork selection and execution and left me feeling that it could have been far more daring in its aims and message. If this exhibition was so effective in causing some outrage despite its polite tone, why not go all the way and really kick up a storm? The disruptive power of queerness is meant to subvert and challenge our traditional way of experiencing and looking at sexuality and gender. More often than not, however, it felt as though the artists were trapped by the exhibition’s themes of coding and dissimulation. Tom Powell’s interview of Richard Dodwell reacting to the exhibition captures this perfectly – a feeling that gender identity and sexuality were treated with a tongue-in-cheek playfulness rather than a matter of life or death. This is why post-1967 art and contemporary interventions would have been so much more effective in creating a conversation around visibility, censorship and queer self-expression.

The entire experience felt like a collection display with interventions disrupting and revealing queer narratives within a wider museum context rather than an exhibition with a certain chronology, conversation and narrative taking place. This is mainly because it feels as though there is a disconnect between the works themselves, whose juxtaposition is not explained or justified as much as the individual biographical contextualisation for each artist. The selection strives to highlight a queer presence which is already a part of major British collections. The Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and of course, Tate itself are there, as well as The Fitzwilliam Museum, the National Archives and a number of private collectors, libraries and archives. This raises the question: how will these works be displayed upon their return to their respective collections? Is queerness a temporary phenomenon within the museum or is it here to form long-term, lasting relationships with visitors? Will this exhibition lead to change or another form of well-meaning tokenisation? Another important point is that public programming around the exhibition was strong, at Tate Britain as well as Tate Modern, involving artists such as Travis Alabanza and Dean Atta to engage with queerness on an intersectional level including an exploration of the queer black experience and post-colonialism. However, we need to wonder why these artists and many others are good enough for one night or workshop but not enough for long-term collection and curation.

This exhibition was long overdue and an important moment in acknowledging queer culture in a mainstream museum context. This only makes its criticism all the more important in order to facilitate more curating and visibility around queer art and its infinite potential for representation and discussion. Its legacy will hopefully be seen as the first in a long line of endeavours to give queer art the representation it needs and the curation it deserves.

Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain, until 1 October 2017.

Queer art in Art/Afrique at Fondation Louis Vuitton

Recently, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris has put contemporary African art in the spotlight. Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier, reunites the African contemporary art collection of Jean Pigozzi, the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s extensive collection of African contemporary art as well as Being There, a temporary exhibition around contemporary art in South Africa. All were insightful with a strong selection confirming African contemporary artists’ international status from a variety of different countries. However, Being There rooting itself into the context of apartheid and social difference allowed for a myriad of conversations to emerge around identity and self-representation. As a result, artists expressing  their queer identity or making these narratives visible were present throughout the display. The curators acheived the rare balance of making this queer presence tangible without ever having to signpost it self-consciously or exile the works to their own room. On the contrary, the works were scattered throughout the display as an essential part of a complex narrative exploring South-African identity.  It was refreshing to see a display operating in an intersectional way without being tokenistic. It allowed for the casual inclusion of queerness in the gallery without diluting its ability to challenge assumptions and subvert expectations.

Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi has been internationally recognised for her black and white photography supporting her activities as a visual activist. Her portraiture work reveals the diversity and complexity of the LGBTQ community of South Africa, revealing the violence and discrimination they face despite the country’s post-apartheid 1996 constitution. While Muholi has photographed gay and trans men as well as queer couples whilst extending her scope to other countries she visits, her work focuses mainly on the marginalisation of black lesbian women in her country, who often face the risk of agression and punitive rape. Faces and Phases Follow-up is an ongoing project started in 2006 and now composed of 300 portraits. They tell the stories of these lesbian women with portraits taken at different stages of their life. Butch and femme identities co-exist as Muholi accounts for the change in her models’ lives in pairs of two or three photographs, recording their names, the city, the date. There is a great publication of the series I was able to leaf through which allows for the models’ perspective on their own stories and what it means to be a black queer woman in South Africa. There, the narratives around violence, discrimination and the ongoing danger of HIV/AIDS allow for additional context to treat these portraits not only as series, but as activist and political documents. [x] [x]

Nicholas Hlobo

Nicholas Hlobo, Ndize: Tail (2010)© Nicholas Hlobo, Courtesy of Stevenson Capetown and Johannesburg, Photography by Mario Todeschini

The artist’s identity as a gay black man and as a part of the Xhosa community are both central in his work. The use of stitching and knitting in his sculptural work refers to the tradition he picked up from the community of women he was raised in. He plays with ideas of gender roles and sexuality with a traditionally feminine craft, to which he also adds leather, rubber and chains as more traditionally “masculine” elements which could also have fetish-like undertones. Hlobo frequently engages in performances in which he interacts directly with his own works to inhabit them like a costume. This gender play and the expression of his gay identity is not at odds with the exploration and representation of his Xhosa heritage: on the contrary, both play a part in making his artworks engage with issues of ethnicity, social identity and personhood.  In the exhibition, Ndize (Tail) (2010), whose name means “The one looking in hide-and-seek” in the Xhosa language, is a festive mix of satin, ribbon, rubber and leather in rainbow hues, sprawling across the walls and the gallery floor. The “tail” could refer to the importance of cattle in Xhosa culture but the elusive title and mix of materials suggests and invites layers of interpretation and looking. [x]

Athi-Patra Ruga 

Athi Patra-Ruga, The Glamoring of a Versatile Queen, 2015, wool tapestry, 220 x 192 cm. CM. The Scheryn Art Collection © Athi-Patra Ruga, Courtesy Whatiftheworld, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Athi-Patra Ruga’s work is consciously cross-disciplinary, from tapestries to performance, both using the vibrant designs and textures reflecting his training as a costume designer. His subjects reflect ideas of queerness, hybridity and utopia which he uses to question and challenge South-African identity. In a commission for Performa called “Over the Rainbow”, he engages with the issue of South Africa as a self-proclaimed “rainbow nation” in 1994, questioning the utopian social diversity supposed to herald a post-apartheid country, both in terms of race and of sexuality. Fashion and drag become transgressive tools to explore his own culture’s relationship with globalisation and cultural appropriation. Within the exhibition, his lavish series of tapestries show his embracing of a traditionally “feminine” craft but also one which returns to the roots of deep-seated African tradition. The figures in his tapestries, in camp, drag and gender-fluid haute-couture regalia, are elevated to the status of mythological heroes, heading to the utopian country of Azania. The fabled land described by Pliny resurfaced during political fights for independance throughout the African continent. [x]

Buhlebezwe Siwani

The artist’s identification as a Sangoma, a traditional healer in South African culture, is not to be dissociated from her identification as a queer woman. On the contrary, Siwani uses both facets of her identity to weave a sensitive and powerful portrayal of spirituality, womanhood and religion in her work across sculpture, installation and multimedia. The notions of concealment associated with her spiritual healing work are challenged by her artworks’ need to reveal and unveil not only her own existence, but her society’s assumption around black female bodies. On another level, her work around spirituality considers the complexities behind assumptions around African spirituality contrasted with Christianity, providing a complex portrayal of spiritual and social relationships through a post-apartheid and post-colonial lens. Her work in the display is Batsho Bancama (And they gave up) (2017), a mould of her own naked body made of soap. Its reflection of a painful childhood memory of bathing in public as a child explores the notion of the black female body under a scrutinizing, patriarcal gaze, as well as the recounting of this memory as a feminine initiation ritual. [x]

Jody Brand

Jody Brand, Say her name: Queezy, 2016, digital photograph on polytwirl, 250 x 150 cm. © Jody Brand

Jody Brand’s photographic work has an activist intention: to make visible the “voiceless” in South African culture, namely queer and trans black women. #SayHerName has become a tragically famous hashtag. It is used to reveal and denounce the violence, sexual assault and murder faced by queer and trans women of color at the hands of police brutality. Brand uses it in a series which images a utopian moment in which queer black women have reclaimed colonialist and patriarcal spaces intent upon fetishizing and diminishing their existence. In her photographs, her models are victorious and vindicative in white, normative spaces they have reclaimed by celebrating their own identity. Within the exhibition, Say Her Name: Queezy (2016) expresses this aim beautifully as the model exudes a queen-like presence, making the space her own with a power and poise inspired from fashion spreads as well as regal portraiture. The original context of the photograph, not recreated there, is one of commemoration. The photograph was originally accompanied with a floral installation to create a votive, spiritual aura as a tribute to Nokuphila Khumalo, a South-African sex worker brutally murdered by a photographer. [x]

Kristin-Lee Moolman

Kristin-Lee Moolman, Desire Marea & Fela Gucci, Johannesburh, 2015 © Kristin-Lee Moolman

The photographer’s portrayal of the young generation of South Africans toys with notions of gender and sexuality in a light-hearted manner which takes its cues from stret fashion photography, drag and performance.  Through her lens, the “cool-kids” of Johannesburg pose in gender-fluid fashion and queer attitudes against surburban street backdrops. At times camp and at others pastel, Moolman desconstructs traditional notions of gendered appearance and performance, creating a utopian vision for a society which may not only be post-apartheid but also post-gender. In her work diversity and alternative culture is given a voice which reflects the “rainbow nation” utopia explored above and relates the importance of queer narratives to fashion, visibility and culture. [x]

Art/Afrique: le nouvel Atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, 26th April to 4th September 

 

 

Gillian Wearing & Claude Cahun: Under the Mask at National Portrait Gallery

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”

Claude Cahun

Gillian Wearing confronts us at the exhibition entrance, wearing Cahun’s face but holding her own. Opposite, Cahun gazes back in the original photograph Don’t kiss me, I am in training, circa 1927. A strong man with a vulnerable, feminine twist or a feminine figure seeking and embodying stereotypical masculine values? The artwork’s provocative power by one of the first queer photographers we know of has a subversive power and energy which has not aged in a society in which we are only just starting to talk seriously about gender fluidity and queerness in mainstream media. Wearing’s work aptly reflects Cahun’s desire to blur and disrupt portraiture and appearance by making it staged, constructed and altogether unrealiable in getting the full picture.

This exhibition had the rare appeal of being as much an intimate conversation  between two artists rather than a simple tribute of a living artist to an older body of work. Death and seven decades separate 20th century photographer Claude Cahun from contemporary artist Gillian Wearing, but it feels as though their ideas have interconnected and bounced off each other with sharp clarity and insight across their respective contexts. When Wearing discovered Cahun’s work, it has already seeped into discussions around identity, feminism and gender…and Wearing had already set a course for her practice around her own image, or rather its erasure. The notion of the mask is central to her work – a disturbing and engrossing performance for the camera in which Wearing creates hyperrealistic masks of her family, friends and artistic inspirations and poses in their guise. Her eyes alone betray the identity behind the mask…but is there yet another mask to remove? And yet another?

Gillian Wearing, Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face, © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley/ Interim Art, London

“Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

Claude Cahun, Disavowals

Self-portrait from Cahun’s ‘I am in training don’t kiss me’ series, c1927. Photograph: Courtesy Jersey Heritage Trust

Claude Cahun was jointly a writer and a visual artist; in fact, her most important work, Disavowals, is an intimate collage of journal entries and face plates, whose visual and literary associations and poetics. Created in collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore, also an artist, photographer and writer, the book refuses to be intellectual or rational, revelling instead in dreamlike and surreal interconnections. Interestingly Cahun did not identify with the Surrealist label, even though her work is now mostly classified as such through its strange absurdist metamorphosis and collage. In the same way, there has been much debate about Claude Cahun’s “true” identity and how it may be “labelled”…in a contemporary LGBTQ+ spectrum. Is Claude Cahun a butch lesbian, trans, non-binary, genderqueer? In many ways, she is all of those things: she was in a  lesbian relationship with Marcel Moore till her death and definitely identified with the butch and androgynous identity constructed by lesbian artists at the time. However, this does not mean she cannot also be seen through a nonbinary and genderqueer lens. This is the point in which it becomes complex to curate a queer and gender non-conforming artist with contemporary labels, while being well aware that the artist themself perhaps would neither have enjoyed nor identified with them. Where do we draw the line between erasure and recognition of a particular time and context? We will never know if Cahun would identify as nonbinary prefer “they” pronouns, or alternate between “she” or “he”..  Claude Cahun’s (dis)avowal as a queer artists reflects a fluid relation to gender, but this does not neccessarily disavow her ties to lesbianism in any way. Labels are meant to be scratched over, boxes upturned. Perhaps that which makes Claude Cahun the first true queer artist is the way in which she still manages to subvert and escape our expectations and assumptions…even those of LGBTQ gatekeepers. Whichever pronouns she would have chosen to use now, it is fair to say she maybe would have identified beyond the lesbian signifier available at the time and which encapsulated a wide range of butch, gender non-conforming and trans sensitivities. This is why we need to embrace all aspects of her legacy, rather than in-fight or straight-up exclude trans or nonbinary readings of her work and life. She is not herstory’s to keep jealously out of any other queer discourse or influence. Yes, it is complex. But so is identity. We need to embrace this complexity and ambiguity in full – which is why I am glad this quote was displayed within the exhibition, but somewhat frustrated it was not unpacked more in written interpretation.

“I am in her, she is in me; and I will follow her always, never losing sight of her.”

Claude Cahun, L’idée-maîtresse, 1927

There are further problems with the way in which this queerness is negociated within the exhibition, however, the first being that Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore, deserved an equal seat at the table. Discourse around Cahun and Moore’s work together, including an excellent chapter on the duo in Tirza True Latimer’s Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, shows their photographic and litrerary productions as a creative duo.  While the exhibition curators are fine with the display of this gender non-conforming statement, there is a strange lack of mention of the context of the book itself, or of the fact it was, as much as the visual production on display, largely a collaborative work over forty years with Moore. She is mentioned in the role of the lover and partner, but sparingly. In fact, they could both be considered as both life and artistic partners, engaging in a queer and activist practice which was fighting against the largely straight-men dominated art world. The political and radical act of adopting butch/masculine-of-centre appearances and androgynous names was a bite back against not only society at large, but the artworld’s sexist and homophobic bias at the time, in which women were relegated to muses or written out as artists altogether. This also fed hand in hand with antisemitic bias and aggression in artistic circles: as a Jewish queer woman, Cahun escaped erasure and embraced resistance. With the arrival of Nazism on the Isle of Jersey on which they had escaped from Parisian centres of influence, this political resistance became even stronger – as the couple fearlessly slipped propaganda works to soldiers. Even though they were posing under their original “feminine” names and as sisters, their activities were discovered in 1944, leading to imprisonment and a death sentence stopped by their liberation in 1945. Although Moore is mentioned through this record, she is still somewhat sidelined. The problem is that erasing fully or partially Cahun’s queerness and her collaborations with Moore does not make her works less powerful in their visual quality but their intimate meaning and context are devalued and decontextualised. No, you do not neccessarily need to know an artist’s sexuality or gender to appreciate their work – which has been many people’s somewhat exhausted argument every time an institution attempts to curate a body of work which isn’t by straight white men. However in Cahun and Moore’s case this collaborative, gender-fluid work is intentionally queer and feminist in its nature, in its context and in its means of production.

 

“We never get to know ourselves. We are forever changing and contradicting ourselves. We’re always evolving.”

Gillian Wearing

The opposing argument would be that this is framed as a Cahun and Wearing exhibition, not a Cahun and Moore monographic exhibition. That there would a weird imbalance between one gaze and another if there was a second, more covert one to be mentioned alongside Cahun. However, I’d argue that highlighting the queerness inherent to Cahun and Moore’s work would not subsume or sideline Wearing’s work in the slightest – on the contrary, it would amplify its impact and our ability to her her transformations through a different lens, without erasing her original intentions. Her powerful imagery holds its own in vast, momentous photographic portraits which contrast beautifully with the small black and white photographs of Cahun and Moore.

The way in which Cahun and Moore’s work and life intertwine over four decades are immensely relevant to the way in which queerness in the early 20th century becomes not tied to what you do in your relationships and behaviour but to who you are and how you perform this existence. Their work was intimate and autobiographical, a record of imagined personas which both placed another mask upon her and revealed only a facet of who Cahun was in these phorographs.

Gillian Wearing, Portrait as my brother Richard Wearing, © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley/ Interim Art, London

In contrast, Gillian Wearing focuses on “real” people which are deconstructed and made to feel “unreal” in the way in which Wearing meticulously wears their faces and adopts their postures. Wearing’s portrait as her brother is particularly arresting, as her body is transformed through cosmetics, prosthetics and posture. Similarly, her portrait as her father operates a metamorphosis in imagining a time before her own existence, through old photographs. It would be strange to call these “cross-dressing” in any way. While Cahun tries on different identities without ever revealing the face behind the mask, and confronts the heteronormative gaze with butch and andronynous power, Wearing allows herself to become absorbed by them. Somehow even more disturbing are the explorations of images of her younger self, the illusion disrupted by the gaze of the older self within the face of a child. The sight is strange and unsettling. While Cahun reveals fragments of identity through her performance, Wearing does everything she can to remain hide herself, by solely constructing her identity through the visual presence of those which “made” her who she is. Her fight to reach perfection in recreating a portrait perfectly regardless of gender, age or identity is mesmerizing. It both reveals the efforts we take in creating gendered and “solid” representations, and their flimsiness.  I loved Wearing’s sincerity and commitment to her practice, her playfulness and strength, her paradoxical vulnerability in laying herself bare while hiding her face. This vulnerability reaches full circle in the last room. The exhibition led towards Wearing sponatenously revisiting what linked her to Cahun. Here, the face is hidden. There is no representation, no appearance, and in doing so Cahun and Wearing are one and the same.

At Claude Cahun’s grave, 2015 by Gillian Wearing. Photograph: © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Despite its shortcomings on some of the context of Cahun and Moore’s work, this exhibition acheives the rare feat of allowing the conversation to work both ways, confronting and subverting our ideas of appearance, gender and identity. In many ways, I think that it could have amped up the volume. Cahun and Moore’s work has inspired an entire generation of artist photographers and artists, particularly women, is a staple of queer and feminist art history and discourse and has done so on feminist and confrontational grounds unseparable from their defiant queerness. Her work needs to be shown outside of the “Surrealist” context into one resonating with contemporary concerns.  To acknowledge so does not exclude the presence of other artists outside of the LGBTQ+ spectrum. However, it will introduce a structure which operates around subversion and reframing, provoking and challenging to its very core. Cahun and Moore were well ahead of their time, and fearlessly so. Let’s celebrate this defiance by giving them even more engaging and fascinating contemporary artists such as Wearing to talk with around issues of activism, gender, queerness and feminism.

Further reading:

Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris
Tirza True Latimer, Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 8, Spring 2010

 

Curating Queerness as an Activist Practice – Curating the Contemporary

Queer curating is seen as a way of reclaiming present and future queer legacies by understanding queerness not as a supporting role, but a defining and central practice within modern and contemporary art.

Queer curatorial activism can therefore be seen as an attempt to change the system from within, through group exhibitions which fit into the institutional framework and respect the procedures of collecting and commissioning new works. This assimilating vision confronts itself to a strand of queer curatorial activism considering that queer art and curating should remain intentionally on the margins to actively challenge and question the status quo rather than integrate it gratefully, in order to raise the profile of current issues and concerns relevant to its communities.

My piece for ‘Curating the Contemporary’, on curating queerness as an activist practice.

Read it here!

Loïe Fuller, Lesbian Electric Fairy of the Belle Epoque

1892. Les Folies-Bergères, Paris. The long flowing silk fabric twists and turns into mesmerizing optical illusions through elegant, dynamic movements. The dance is revolutionary, unlike anything seen before on stage. Not only the dance, but the experience in its totality, with dramatic colourful lighting subliming the way in which the dance creates a sense of weightlessness, a shifting kaleidoscope of shapes. This is Loïe Fuller, an American dancer who found her true audience in Paris at a moment during which art was increasingly looking towards a new, fresh modernity in its outlook, seeking to capture and represent the world in different ways to counter photography’s rising appeal in mirroring reality. Loïe was a pioneer in more ways than one: she is seen as one of the founders of modern dance and one of the first performance artists. A pioneer of on-stage effects developed an impressive array of theatrical lighting techniques, with a keen interest and involvement in chemistry and astronomy. Interweaved among these acheivements lies her own identity as an openly lesbian woman in turn-of-the-century America and France. Rather than a footnote, an afterthought or a detail, Loïe’s queerness pervaded her career and her artistic acheivements.

(Papinta the Flame Dancer performing Fuller’s Serpentine/”Butterfly” Dance)

The woman who was going to be nicknamed the “Electric Salome” of the Belle Epoque was born in a modest Illinois town in 1862 and started performing at the age of 12, transitioning from acting to dancing. Her early acting performances involve pantomime and crossdressing; her dancing led to the scandalous discarding of corsets and stockings, performing with sheer materials. Paradoxically this act of revealing was also one of dissimulation: the countless veils and billowing materials she’ll become famous for hide and suggest the body rather than affirming it, transforming and subliming it. Starting as a burlesque skirt dancer, she starts to experiment with the potential of the skirt dance in a more ethereal interpretation, playing with the effects of material in motion and lighting. The “Serpentine Dance” Loïe coined in New York encompassed this ethereal, flowing quality with silk and lighting experiments which Loïe would perfect into an advance technological experience over time. The main “key” was to increase the fabric of the original skirt and to devise a show of changing coloured lights reflected in the silk material, with theatrical, improvised movements.

Frederick Glasier, Portrait of Loïe Fuller, 1902

After unsuccessful stints in London and a circus in Cologue, divorcing from a hasty first marriage and moving from New York to Paris with her mother for a clean break led to a nasty shock. She had failed to have her Serpentine Dance copyrighted in New York after a long trial and her work was already being copied, so much so that she actually had to perform under one of her imitators’ name to even get an audience! The “real deal” was soon recognised, however, and Loïe Fuller’s real début at the Folies-Bergères in 1892 cemented her success and fame.

The creativity and ingenious crafting of her shows around new dances like “The Fire Dance” or “The Lily Dance” transcended boundaries: although technically a cabaret skit, and performed by Loïe herself as well as her imitators in circuses, it soon became obvious that it was far more than a gimmick: it was a total art and an all-encompassing experience. Loïe was always more than a dancer: she was an inventor and was regarded as such. Her light shows were feats of chemistry: she developed lighting below stage for more effective dramatic effects, developed lamps with gel discs to shift colours more easily and devised lantern-like projections. She experimented with phosphorescent materials for her “Radium Dance” and also developed kaleodoscopic optical illusions with special mirrors and set design. Her first performance involved up to 27 technicians to make the magic operate, but she was the master designer of her own show. (see Jody Sperling’s essay in notes for more).

 

Jules Chéret, Poster Advertising ‘Loie Fuller’ at the Folies-Bergere, 1893 (left); PAL (Jean de Paléologue), Loïe Fuller at the Folies Bergère poster

Loïe also mingled in scientific circles, meeting with the astronomer Camille Flammarion and a close friend of Marie Curie. Her encounter with Thomas Edison led to the creation of “Anabella Serpentine Dance”, one of his first hand-coloured film performed by one of Fuller’s imitators, below. (She also produced quite a lot of experimental films herself, including a very lyrical and enigmatic film called “The Lily of Life” in 1920, the only one which was partly preserved.)

The same inventiveness occured for her costume, in which wooden wands were sewn to allow her to control the hundreds of yards of silk fabric she moved around her. The waistline was done away with, making the costume a cloud of motion in which only she head and hands were visible, only adding to the ethereal, spectral illusion.

Benjamin J. Falk, Loïe Fuller in 1901

This visual and multisensorial magic she managed to weave on-stage established her as the muse of the Parisian artistic scene. The soft curves and organic nature of her act lend itself perfectly to the soft lines and inspiration drawn from nature of the Art Nouveau movement; the myriad optical illusions she shaped with her silk robes were an endless source of poetry and romanticism for Symbolic artists. Aware of her own importance within the art of the time, she founds her own “theatre-museum” in 1900 which will allow her to control and market her image through an “official” imitator of her dances and design ornaments. She also advocated for many of her friends’ works; Rodin was amongst them although he never, strangely enough, captured her dances through his own art.

Théodore Louis Auguste Rivière, Lily Dance, Loïe Fuller, 1898

François Raoul-Larche, La Danseuse Loïe Fuller, 1900, bronze (left)
Victor Prouvé, La fille fleur, glass paste

Koloman Moser, The dancer Loïe Fuller, circa 1910, watercolour

Her use of light and effects combined with motion and music grasps at what so many avant-garde modern artists are going to search for: a sense of the ultimate art experience, making music visual and making colour tangible, immortalizing motion and bringing the painting to life through movement. In her autobiography, Loïe muses:

“What is dance? It is motion. What is motion? The expression of a sensation. What is a sensation? The reaction in the human body produced by the impression or an idea perceived by the mind. A sensation is the reverberation that the body receives when an impression strikes the mind.”

Jody Sperling, the leading expert and contemporary interpreter of Fuller’s work, notes the immense resonance that this notion of sensation and motion had within 20th century visual culture: Kandinsky would experiment with the same notions of colour, music and sensation, while, as the Futurist and Cubist movements would introduce the same elements of multiple angles and captured motion as a symbol of modernity and the subjective (Giovanni Lista). Fuller was a true modernist, in her combination of art and science, colour and music.

Toulouse-Lautrec, Study of Loïe Fuller

This modernism weaves itself into her queerness, which she discovered and embraced first in Paris. Loïe’s very introduction to the city, fleeing an unhappy marriage which seems to have been no more than a failed attempt at “fitting in”, started with a first lesbian relation with the painter Louise Abbéma, who was also, allegedly, Sarah Bernhardt’s former lover. She introduced her to a buzzing sapphic socialite scene, notably the circle of friends of Nathalie Barney, American lesbian poet extraordinaire, who assembled around her a clique of queer women artists in Paris. (Allegedly, her performances ended with a shower of violets on stage – and imagining a posse of queer influencial socialites pelting the stage with the flower symbol for lesbian and bisexual women is wonderful).

Anon, Loïe Fuller (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Further down her career she started a relationship with  Gabrielle “Gab” Bloch, a Jewish baker who exclusively wore dapper suits. (be still, my heart). After moving in together in 1905 they remained together for 23 years, up until Loïe’s death. Fuller was at the heart of a Parisian and wider movement in which queer women were finding their voice and redefining their identity as the beating heart of modernity and feminism. This modernity and this redefinition of identity seems to be at the heart of Fuller’s own work, as well as her close sense of womanhood and community, creating an all-women’s company and school to teach her dancing (but never her technical tricks) as her eyesight began to fail her. As feminist art historian Caroline Gonnard notes on this choice:

“…she only works with women…those are choices, it’s a whole commitment at the time. A lesbian way of life is more than just sleeping with a woman. In a period in which men are everywhere, she recentres the conversation. While all men until then have been proclaiming about themselves, a woman can suddenly decide who is important.” (source, translated from French).

Samuel Josha Beckett, Loïe Fuller, c. 1898 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

There are many diverging opinions on the way in which Loïe’s queerness emerges in her dancing. One viewpoint would be that dissimulating and effacing the body from a traditional “male gaze” is what makes it queer in its nature, in its refusal to be pinned down or owned. For Tirza True Latimer for instance, a major scholar and art historian specialised in queer studies:

“audiences were never sure, in all the lights and swirls of fabric, exactly what her body was doing, where it was, or even exactly how many bodies were on stage.”

Records of Loïe describe her as ungainly, clumsy and unfashionably dressed off-stage, more clownish and childish than vampy or elegant. On-stage her act works because it veils her, literally and figuratively, and her veils “transform” her, their fluidily malleable into a variety of shapes, from flower to butterfly to snake, perhaps in an attempt to evade form, and evade gender itself, as the historian Julie Townsend explored as well.

Experimenting with shapes, forms, playing with dual identities and personas, in a hide-and-seek, illusionist game, it’s hard to see Loïe’s act as anything but queer in its very nature, performing her identity in a dual game of revelation and dissimulation. Being openly queer yet hiding in plain sight on stage, she had perfect control over the visual effects surrounding her performance while never crafting an actual on-stage persona, and marketed her own image skillfully while never being the object of fantasy or objectification. The point is not so much that her work was chaste and ethereal because of her lesbianism, but rather that she freed herself from a vast amount of normative constraints to develop her performances.

Loïe died a famous and successful woman in 1928 and her girlfriend continued her legacy by managing her ballet company; history, however, was not so kind in preserving her immense legacy, and her contributions to modern dance were eclipsed by Isadora Duncan. Art historians such as Giovanni Lista, interested by the intersection between performing arts and the reprsentation of motion in modern art, started writing about her since 1994. She’s now well-established in studies around late 19th/early 20th century art and culture and I’ve seen her mentioned in many art exhibitions around the year 1900. She’s trickled into the mainstream, fascinating viewers once again with what we have left of photographs and videos of her dances (even though they are performed by other dancers). As for mainstream media representation…well…You might be wondering why I have not recommended you watch the recent 2016 biopic on Fuller, “The Dancer”. Here’s why:

1. “plot”: It involves Isadora Duncan luring Loïe Fuller into some kind of promise lesbian relationship…as part of their rivalry. After some sizzling tension, Isadora kisses her, asks her to undress…then abandons her and mocks her, thus humiliating her completely. This titillating fictionalization is therefore a perfect 2-in-1: hot lesbian action ended with shameful, moralizing tragedy! Isn’t representation great?
2. #alternative facts: But what about Fuller’s positive, real-life lesbian relationship? That’s reduced to subtext (read as: lingering gazes from Gab with no explicit mention or any kind of reciprocity), while an entirely fictional boyfriend, “Louis” was invented for Loïe. Because you know, straight men in films are an endangered species.
3. the director Stephanie di Gusto defending these decisions in a Q+A session post-screening in a Lille cinema last year by arguing that she did not want to make a “Blue is the Warmest Colour film”. To add fuel to the fire, Soko then defended this viewpoint by agreeing that “the idea was not to make yet another lesbian film.” (translated from French, source )

Gal pals! They totally hold hands like really close friends! But let’s leave the kissing for our humiliating grand finale with the sexier secondary lead. It’s not like we have an actual healthy lesbian couple under our very noses. (You’ll also notice they got rid of Gab’s dapper suit-wearing. I ask for so little, why is it taken from me.)

A missed opportunity, treated in a manner that’s nothing short of petty. The upside is that it’s not that easy to erase a queerness which Fuller was so blatant about and which has made it into serious studies of her life and work. The film was not warmly received for its inaccuracies, nor for its reduction of Fuller to a tormented artistic soul rather than a successful inventor and buisnesswoman.

There is a lot to unpack concerning the willful erasure and warping of queer identities and relations on-screen and in media in general. The main issue appears to be the impression that mentioning your historical protagonist was queer will suddenly overpower the rest of their creative content and acheivements. To the question “why should we have to know a person was queer to appreciate their acheivements?” I’d answer “why do we have to erase who they were to even make these acheivements palatable to an audience in the first place?” Until that last question is not met with illogical, embarassed or exasperated noises, I’ll assume compiling the legacies of queer women artists, performers, collectors and dealers makes perfect sense. Loïe was a master of illusion, disguise and revelation but she never cast a veil upon who she was or who she loved. Let’s continue to honour her creativity, her queerness…and that of many other women throughout history.

Sources:

Rhonda K. Garelick , Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism. 
Tirza True Latimer, ‘Loïe Fuller: Butch Femme Fatale’ (1999)
Julie Townsend, ‘Alchemic Visions and Technological Advances: Sexual Morphology in Loïe Fuller’s Dance’, Jane C. Desmond, ed., Dancing Desires: Choregraphing Sexualities On and Off the Stage (2001)
Jody Sperling, Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) – check out her website danceheritage.org  for historical documentation and contemporary interpretations of Loïe Fuller’s dances
Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light. Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller, Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut, 2007.
Gabriella Daris, Cannes Review: Stéphanie di Gusto’s “The Dancer”, BlouinArtinfo.com
Aude Fonvieille, Chronicle of casual lesbophobia, Mediapart (in French)
Marc Boucher & Leonardo/Olats, Loïe Fuller timeline, 2002 (in French)