“Collage is a way of making things right by making them wrong. The British artist Linder, who wore a dress made of discarded chicken flesh for a performance at the Haçienda in Manchester in 1982, long before Lady Gaga’s raw-beef version, uses collage as a way of destroying and rebuilding narratives surrounding gender and sexuality.
“One aspect of the piece was about testing the perception that identity in general is fixed, that it belongs to individuals,” Fujiwara says.įeminists have also long opposed the idea that identity, particularly gender, is fixed. Part autobiography, part fiction, the bar becomes the set for an “erotic narrative” in which the artist casts his father as the gay protagonist (before Fujiwara was born, his parents ran a bar in southern Spain under General Franco’s dictatorship, when homosexual activity was outlawed and heavily suppressed). In his installation Welcome to the Hotel Munber, 2008-10, Fujiwara recreated a Spanish bar decked out with phallic objects-sausages, baguettes, bullhorns-and gay pornography. But soon I realised that it is also something that applies to straight people, to an extent.” Growing up thinking I was gay made me realise how much of my life could be defined by what I do in bed, and it scared me and excited me. “Sex is at the forefront of a lot of what I do, but it’s at the forefront of everything in life. “Historically, sex has been used in art in numerous ways,” he says. Sex plays a key part in Fujiwara’s work, but it is often used as a vehicle to explore other structures and systems-familial, political and architectural. One of the criticisms levied at straight artists who “flirt” with queer imagery is that it can reduce homosexuality to the purely erotic. “ what is there to do? Fight back with flags and swords? Or build a museum that explains to the new visitors the struggle that went into winning this land, the dangers of abusing it?” “It’s a small piece of land, so it’s understandable for some of the founders that it’s painful to share, especially when their efforts are not recognised, when the colonisers seem ignorant,” he says. The British-born artist Simon Fujiwara, who is on the Frieze London panel, suggests that educating straight artists who have begun to settle on queer territory is perhaps the best response. (Wolfson declined to comment for this article.) Watts also described Eddie Peake as another artist who “acts up” to a gay aesthetic. So is what we see here some post-identity dispatch from New York?” Watts concluded by admonishing Wolfson for using the Aids crisis as a vehicle to explore his own “anxieties” and “neuroses” about being an imposter. “Actually, this harbinger moves with insipid joylessness through gentrified neighbourhoods that were once scenes of SoHo’s Aids pandemic,” he wrote.
The video features several animated characters, including a condom filled with heart-shaped blood cells and bouncing HIV viruses, which Wolfson described in Interview magazine as “ joyfully around, spinning and expanding and contracting”. In a scathing article posted on the Frieze blog earlier this year, the writer Jonathan Watts criticised the New York-based artist Jordan Wolfson for “flirting with” a gay aesthetic in his video Raspberry Poser, 2012, which was exhibited at the Chisenhale Gallery in London earlier this year. “If artists turn to the queer merely because it’s a fashionable topic, they run the risk of turning queerness into a style.”
“One of the main concerns is that if your use of queer imagery is divorced from the complex lived experience of being a queer person, then the work might end up trading in stereotypes or being reductive,” says Paul Clinton, an editorial assistant at Frieze magazine who is chairing the talk. A talk at Frieze London tomorrow will examine the recent trend for art and exhibitions that focus on queer and alternative sexualities (see box), and will ask: who has the right to use this imagery, and can anyone claim ownership of queer culture? In theatre, television and pop music, being gay has become mainstream, while in the traditionally avant-garde art world, queer art (or art that draws on the codes and cultures of homosexuality) is no longer made only by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) artists.Īlthough this blurring of boundaries might seem like progress, with more and more people rejecting social and sexual “norms”, some artists who do not identify as gay have come under fire for their appropriation of queer imagery. As the US Supreme Court stands on the brink of a historic ruling that could make same-sex marriage a constitutional right in the US, homophobic barriers have been tumbling in art and popular culture for a long time.