Reply to Robert Schubert
Dear Robert,
I am responding today because BAD GAY ART was/is on my mind. This post/open letter is more tribute to the show rather than a response to your generous comment in late January. Of course this is threaded through my personal recollections of that show - presented by the Sydney’s Mardi Gras in 1997. You probably also have to imagine that this email has been sent by ship (a slow ship with wharf disputations at both sides of the exchange.)
You wrote:
I am interested in the comment you make about BAD GAY ART was really bad. Has the point lost its irony? The show was after all a conceit in the literary sense of the term.
Someone from the reading group was referring to Dean Kiley’s writing style rather than the show itself. It was unfortunate that adequate visual documentation wasn’t presented alongside the essays. I should have done a ring-around but I guess the focus in some ways was on the writing. Kiley’s work divided audiences and was a product of its time (regarding this position). While he didn’t write much art criticism - when he did it was with a wit/intellectual rigour/layered fondue quality we rarely see in Melbourne (that’s my position). Maybe Christopher Chapman, Justin Clemens and Juliana Engberg are doing it. Although all without the layering of cream, voices, hyphens, brackets and slashes.
I think your way of introducing the show, its artists, writer and context was a strategy of openness. Positing a tangential but pertinent suggestion for future elaboration that would include a grass-root expression of cock and ass art. Maybe the net is a proliferating site for this type of cultural production that is absent from ‘serious’ art institutions outside of the Midsumma or Mardi Gras period. (Could an imaginary and gay Jeremy Deller’s Folk Archive be a half way house or where you pre-empting Scott Redford’s clown porn work?) (The question then is: who is the author of this folk archive?) I guess my project - WITHOUT was trying to self-consciously reply to the question of community participation that you (humorously) suggest in BAD GAY ART’s sequel and the challenges posed by the actual physical manifestations of Redford, McQualter and Meads’ work. Although projects like the Log Cabin, The Name of this Show: Gay Art Now and more locally the Wild Boys seem to be more recent attempts to (- like Juan Davila) use “the gay body in a hypercritical way.”
I haven’t seen the Juan Davila show at the MCA but am excited by its impending NGV incarnation and the dialogue that this might provoke. Something is definitely in the air at the moment with GCS doing a forum on DRAG/MASH and Turbulence on Thursday night (well maybe that's a tenuous link as its more about collage tendencies or what Bourriaud considers post-production than Clinger in drag in war zone) and the recent furore at the art fair. All signs are leading to a resurgent questioning of the ethics / process / context of representing identity with or without the body. My issue with all of this is that we shouldn’t be trying to re-invent the wheel on this one (in the art community at least) - but use the theory, practice and activism of the past 40 years as building blocks for future articulations. I also think engaging with the question of who owns these marginal representations (indigenous, sub-cultural or gay) is an interesting area and while in the 80’s and 90’s it was clear, things have definitely become murkier or maybe more complicated. This could be a good thing. It will be interesting to see how Felix Gonzalez Torres’ survey at the Hamburger Bahnhof will be re-visited and received considering these issues that are old but new again.
But back to BAD GAY ART and my fond musings: Meade’s comic book scaled broom that set up a narrative between Redford’s lollies that weren’t there to begin with; the lollies themselves only referenced by a provisionally painted shadow or a Torres after-glow; Meade’s abstracted go-go dancers turned giant 70’s décor or boubouniera ignoring the pathos between Keanu crying for River; MacQualter’s beige banality that turned designer creche and the lip-stick intervention turning the sign into BAD GAY FART. So thank you for facilitating these relationships between these works, words and ideas and allowing me to indulge them in this letter.
Your’s sincerely,
Spiros
PS. I am going to scan the catalogue and hopefully in time I will be able to source some actual documentation of the show – considering Monash has decided not keep the archive of Globe e-journal alive.
I am responding today because BAD GAY ART was/is on my mind. This post/open letter is more tribute to the show rather than a response to your generous comment in late January. Of course this is threaded through my personal recollections of that show - presented by the Sydney’s Mardi Gras in 1997. You probably also have to imagine that this email has been sent by ship (a slow ship with wharf disputations at both sides of the exchange.)
You wrote:
I am interested in the comment you make about BAD GAY ART was really bad. Has the point lost its irony? The show was after all a conceit in the literary sense of the term.
Someone from the reading group was referring to Dean Kiley’s writing style rather than the show itself. It was unfortunate that adequate visual documentation wasn’t presented alongside the essays. I should have done a ring-around but I guess the focus in some ways was on the writing. Kiley’s work divided audiences and was a product of its time (regarding this position). While he didn’t write much art criticism - when he did it was with a wit/intellectual rigour/layered fondue quality we rarely see in Melbourne (that’s my position). Maybe Christopher Chapman, Justin Clemens and Juliana Engberg are doing it. Although all without the layering of cream, voices, hyphens, brackets and slashes.
I think your way of introducing the show, its artists, writer and context was a strategy of openness. Positing a tangential but pertinent suggestion for future elaboration that would include a grass-root expression of cock and ass art. Maybe the net is a proliferating site for this type of cultural production that is absent from ‘serious’ art institutions outside of the Midsumma or Mardi Gras period. (Could an imaginary and gay Jeremy Deller’s Folk Archive be a half way house or where you pre-empting Scott Redford’s clown porn work?) (The question then is: who is the author of this folk archive?) I guess my project - WITHOUT was trying to self-consciously reply to the question of community participation that you (humorously) suggest in BAD GAY ART’s sequel and the challenges posed by the actual physical manifestations of Redford, McQualter and Meads’ work. Although projects like the Log Cabin, The Name of this Show: Gay Art Now and more locally the Wild Boys seem to be more recent attempts to (- like Juan Davila) use “the gay body in a hypercritical way.”
I haven’t seen the Juan Davila show at the MCA but am excited by its impending NGV incarnation and the dialogue that this might provoke. Something is definitely in the air at the moment with GCS doing a forum on DRAG/MASH and Turbulence on Thursday night (well maybe that's a tenuous link as its more about collage tendencies or what Bourriaud considers post-production than Clinger in drag in war zone) and the recent furore at the art fair. All signs are leading to a resurgent questioning of the ethics / process / context of representing identity with or without the body. My issue with all of this is that we shouldn’t be trying to re-invent the wheel on this one (in the art community at least) - but use the theory, practice and activism of the past 40 years as building blocks for future articulations. I also think engaging with the question of who owns these marginal representations (indigenous, sub-cultural or gay) is an interesting area and while in the 80’s and 90’s it was clear, things have definitely become murkier or maybe more complicated. This could be a good thing. It will be interesting to see how Felix Gonzalez Torres’ survey at the Hamburger Bahnhof will be re-visited and received considering these issues that are old but new again.
But back to BAD GAY ART and my fond musings: Meade’s comic book scaled broom that set up a narrative between Redford’s lollies that weren’t there to begin with; the lollies themselves only referenced by a provisionally painted shadow or a Torres after-glow; Meade’s abstracted go-go dancers turned giant 70’s décor or boubouniera ignoring the pathos between Keanu crying for River; MacQualter’s beige banality that turned designer creche and the lip-stick intervention turning the sign into BAD GAY FART. So thank you for facilitating these relationships between these works, words and ideas and allowing me to indulge them in this letter.
Your’s sincerely,
Spiros
PS. I am going to scan the catalogue and hopefully in time I will be able to source some actual documentation of the show – considering Monash has decided not keep the archive of Globe e-journal alive.
posted by Spiros Panigirakis at 7:48 PM
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