Deborah Bright, Dream Girls, 1989 – 90. © the artist. From Art & Queer Culture

'Making art about queer sexuality is itself a kind of protest,' says Art & Queer Culture co-author Richard Meyer

The writer fast tracks us through some great art in the newly updated paperback edition of the seminal book

Art & Queer Culture is an unprecedented survey of visual art and alternative sexuality from the late nineteenth century to the present. Beautifully illustrated and clearly written, this second edition has been updated to include art and visual culture of the current moment. A group of new contributors - themselves gay, lesbian, queer and trans - join the primary authors - Richard Meyer and Catherine Lord - in emphasizing the global sweep of queer contemporary art and the newfound visibility of gender non-conforming artists. In a compact, reader-friendly format, this revised volume packs over 130 years of queer art histories. We asked Richard Meyer a few questions about the new, revised edition.

 

 

Giuseppe Campuzano, Letanía, 2012, digital collage and silkscreen on paper, 50 × 30 cm. Picture credit: c ourtesy and © the artist
Giuseppe Campuzano, Letanía, 2012, digital collage and silkscreen on paper, 50 × 30 cm. Picture credit: c ourtesy and © the artist

Broadly, is contemporary queer art and queer culture less about protest and more about sexuality than when the book was first published? The politics of queer culture have changed since 2013 but not in ways that are necessarily linked to protest vs. sexuality. I am thinking about the increasing visibility of the struggle for transgender rights and lives (and the threats posed by Trump’s military ban, for example, or the opposition to safe, gender neutral public restrooms) as well as the ongoing persecution of queers—and queer artists—within a global context, including the shutting down of an “African Queerness” exhibition at Dak’art in 2014, and the multiple arrests of Ren Hang in Beijing, who later committed suicide. Making art about queer sexuality is itself a kind of protest - pushing the boundaries of what can be seen and imagined in the public sphere.

 

Mary Ellen Strom, Nude #5, Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar, 2005, video projection, 201 × 135 cm. © the artist
Mary Ellen Strom, Nude #5, Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar, 2005, video projection, 201 × 135 cm. © the artist

 

What are the recent changes in the narrative that make queer art and queer culture interesting now? Queers and the art they produce increasingly subvert traditional gender binaries of male and female while also troubling whiteness as the default category of racial identity within Western culture. As the last section of the book makes clear, queer artists also resist being confined to or identified with any one medium.

 

Josh Faught, It Takes a Lifetime to Get Exactly Where You Are, 2012, handwoven sequin trim, handwoven hemp, cedar blocks, cotton, polyester, wool, cochineal dye (made from ground up bugs), straw hat with lace, toilet paper, paper towels, scrapbooking letters, Jacquard woven reproduction of a panel from the AIDS quilt, silk handkerchief, indigo, political pins, disaster blanket, gourd, gold leaf, plaster cats, cedar blocks and nail polish, 244 × 609.5 cm, Collection, Saatchi Gallery, London. Photo: Cary Whittier
Josh Faught, It Takes a Lifetime to Get Exactly Where You Are, 2012, handwoven sequin trim, handwoven hemp, cedar blocks, cotton, polyester, wool, cochineal dye (made from ground up bugs), straw hat with lace, toilet paper, paper towels, scrapbooking letters, Jacquard woven reproduction of a panel from the AIDS quilt, silk handkerchief, indigo, political pins, disaster blanket, gourd, gold leaf, plaster cats, cedar blocks and nail polish, 244 × 609.5 cm, Collection, Saatchi Gallery, London. Photo: Cary Whittier

How has the definition of Art and Queer culture changed and what wider forces have played a part in that? We chose the word ‘queer’ precisely for the way in which it is always changing in relation to the norms established (and imposed) by mainstream culture. The book argues that contemporary queer culture draws on the legacy of earlier moments in non-normative gender and sexualities.  We challenge the idea that queer art moves forward in a linear fashion by considering its recursive and memorial qualities.

 

Elizabeth Stephens and Annie M. S Sprinkle, The Love Art Laboratory (detail, Blue Wedding to the Sea – an Ecosexual Performance Art Wedding 2009), 2005 – 11, action.
Elizabeth Stephens and Annie M. S Sprinkle, The Love Art Laboratory (detail, Blue Wedding to the Sea – an Ecosexual Performance Art Wedding 2009), 2005 – 11, action.

The book is an international survey: what countries are coming to the fore? What we’ve discovered is that queer culture is highly site-specific. While it’s crucial to think globally, it’s equally important to realize the limits of one perspective and the particularity (and in our case, privileges) of the location from which we look. Speaking very broadly, in fact continentally, there are more Asian, South American, and African artists emerging within queer contexts but the visibility of these artists is often met with backlash, censorship, or criminalization. Finally, as sex and gender operate differently in different national, religious, and ethnic contexts, so queer art and culture will necessarily mean differently too.

 

Richard Fayerweath Babcock, Join the Navy, 1917, lithograph on paper, 106 × 72 cm.
Richard Fayerweath Babcock, Join the Navy, 1917, lithograph on paper, 106 × 72 cm.

 

Is there a particular medium snapping into focus? Today, there is no way to separate visual art in say painting or sculpture from video, performance, photography, and mixed media. Contemporary artists - and perhaps contemporary queer artists in particular - do not feel bound by medium or genre. Increasingly, artists are using the Internet to build exhibition platforms and different forms of public visibility. Cassils’ work, for example, is most accessible on their personal website, not through their gallery representation. The web allows for increased self-representation or self-fashioning, and these two ideas have been central to queer culture for decades. It’s free to show your work on instagram or do a performance in public space. These are some of the tools available to younger queer artists.

 

Ashley Hans Scheirl, Golden Shower (L’origine du monde) (detail), 2017, acrylic on canvas and cardboard, 240 × 160 × 192 cm. Picture credit: courtesy and © the artist
Ashley Hans Scheirl, Golden Shower (L’origine du monde) (detail), 2017, acrylic on canvas and cardboard, 240 × 160 × 192 cm. Picture credit: courtesy and © the artist

Is there a new work in the book you think will become iconic in the years to come? The book is invested in queer culture as a collective and ongoing project rather than the celebration of individual artist-heroes. So maybe one way to answer this question is to point to a couple of recent works that themselves bridge different moments. Phranc’s sewn and painted cardboard Red Dress (Please Don’t Make Me Wear this Dress) for example, recalls the conventional femininity she was forced to embody as a young girl. Cardboard men’s shirts and tomboy trunks from the same series celebrate the 'butch armor' Phranc adopted as she grew up and eventually came out.

The sculptures therefore bridge not only past and present but also the journey across gender codes that queerness often entails. And speaking of gender travel, I would also nominate the Museum of Transgender History and Art (MOTHA) as a project that imaginatively records - or curates - the trans past, from a replica of a shot glass thrown by the Black street queen Martha P. Johnson at the Stonewall Riots in 1969 to a 1990s t-shirt imprinted with the words 'Transgender Menace.'

 

Charles Demuth, Dancing Sailors, 1917, watercolour and pencil on paper, 20.5 × 25.5 cm, Collection, Cleveland Museum of Art.
Charles Demuth, Dancing Sailors, 1917, watercolour and pencil on paper, 20.5 × 25.5 cm, Collection, Cleveland Museum of Art.

As Cyle Metzger, a new contributor to Art & Queer Culture, puts it, MOTHA  'simultaneously looks backwards and forwards in a way that resists establishing a fixed institution'. On one hand, the project is critical of the exclusion of trans people from LGB historical narratives and of the limitations that any static institutional model places on evolving understandings of the queer past. On the other hand, the very reason MOTHA retrieves history is to foster what has been called 'trans futurity, or a space and time of expansive possibility for trans existence.' We hope this book likewise engenders an awareness of non-normative art and sexuality since the late 19th century as well as a resource for creating dynamic possibilities in the queer future.

 

Art & Queer Culture
Art & Queer Culture

Art & Queer Culture is a revised, updated edition of the acclaimed historical overview of Queer art – available for the first time in paperback. Buy it here and watch tonight's Art & Queer Culture panel discussion here.

 

Richard Meyer
Richard Meyer

Taking place at Phillips in New York it will be led by Arnold Lehman, Phillips' Senior Advisor and Director Emeritus of The Brooklyn Museum. Lehman will be joined by artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Cary Leibowitz, Deborah Kass and Marlene McCarty.