Publication, ‘Civil Partnerships’

‘Civil Partnerships’ was a programme of events and art at the Grand Parade campus of the University of Brighton in conjunction with a symposium ‘Civil Partnerships?’ at Tate Modern in June 2012. The publication featured essays from contributors to the eighteen-month research Leverhulme research network project, Transnational perspectives on women’s art, feminism and curating.

The programme came together through an unexpected but wonderful collaboration which was international and transgenerational in scope, with participants brought together by a commitment to understanding and ending gender and sexual inequality through art. The associates presented an exhibition of artworks that used diverse strategies to address different aspects of the project, from tender consideration of the unique subject to political campaigning posters from around Europe.

To expand on the issues addressed through this work the team organised two events, a debate on gay marriage in Europe on 11 May and a public forum on feminist and queer curating on 17 May, all of which were held at the University of Brighton campus with the support of the university and the Arts Council. A symposium at Tate Modern, organised as the final event in the 18-month research network project funded by the Leverhulme Foundation, and including an international programme of prominent artists and curators, with some special performances,

‘Civil Partnerships’ was:

• an exhibition of queer- and feminist-inspired art from the University of Brighton and around the world
• an exploration of feminist/queer critical and curatorial inspirations and strategies
• a public debate on same-sex marriage now
• an international meeting of queer and feminist artists and curators
• a moment of reflection on feminist and queer politics in Europe and the UK
• a celebration of our creative political and visual energies- a collaboration of academics, artists, students, politicians, and curators on a local and international scale

Essays from the publication:

The 2012 exhibition featured the newest social and sensual, feminist and queer works by the students and faculty at the University of Brighton, and especially invited international artists. It consisted of three parts: queer and feminist portraiture, the homoerotic male nude, and socially engaged activist art and was curated by Lara Perry and Paweł Leszkowicz with works by Luke Beachey, Alexander Glass, Niall Gormley, Feminist Art Gallery (Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue), Claudia Kappenberg, Tomek Kitliński, Karol Michalec, Natalie Papamichael, Mo White.

Exhibition. Queer & Feminist Art & Activism Essay by Pawel Leszkowicz, and Lara Perry

Unique Bodies ‘…it’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex’.

Denise Riley, Am I that name? Feminism and the category of ‘women’ in history (1988)

Portraiture is a distinctive and powerful practice in the western art tradition. It has endured for centuries, and over those centuries been transformed through changes to aesthetic conventions and innovations in materials. In spite of these profound reshapings of the genre, the language of depicting the individual is one that remains vivid and recognizable. Through portraiture, we create images that are as distinctive and individual as the models, using a common language of representation.

This alluring conjunction of the individual and the common or collective language of representation in portraiture is what makes it a potent resource for the articulation of queer and feminist imperatives. This can happen in many different ways and on many different levels, when portraiture allows us to interrogate and contest the relationship we understand to exist between the individual sitter, and the categories through which we describe their bodies and their lives (woman, man, lesbian, gay, queer, bi, trans, etc.). Natalie Papamichael’s The Two Annas is an intriguing departure from a conventional portrait in part because it unsettles our idea of a portrait subject as individual, and in part because of its depiction of an uncertain relationship between two women. Are they sisters, friends, or lovers? We cannot easily interpret this image through the categories that it invokes.

Mo White’s photographic series Mouth Piece uses the interrogative device of portraiture directly, because the artist uses her own body to visualize the specific food metaphors that have been used to refer to women’s bodies in general. What does it mean to one’s own living mouth to have to ingest, to take on, the slang terminology through which women are represented? How hard or easy is it accept one’s own (female) body as ‘parsley’? To explore these problems visually is to wonder what it is to live according to the imperatives of cultural convention. Claudia Kappenberg’s video Extreme Ironing asks this question in a different way, by transposing into the garden and thus ‘making strange’ the activity of ironing that we normally accept as an ordinary part of (usually women’s) domestic lives.

These works offer a quizzical take on the problems of having to live Page 3 ‘soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex’, or sexuality. But the issues are not always lighthearted and quizzical, particularly when we reflect that the categories of sex and sexuality are sometimes used coercively, and even with violence. Niall Gormley connects his disturbingly bloody self-portraits to the ‘emotional torment’ of being bullied because of his sexuality at school. History – of the past and the present – provides too many examples of real, individual bodies that are coerced, dejected and damaged because of the categories we impose on them. Through portraiture, we can explore the tension of having to live ‘soaked’ in the categories through which the world perceives and understands us.

“Young” Homoerotic Nudes

The male nude is a minefield – erotically and politically. The frontal nude of a man is still controversial, repressed and often censored. As a result, gay art that deals openly with the erotically and emotionally charged male form is still provocative in dominant gender representations. Homoerotic nudes attend to the male body from gay perspective. This poses the questions about the subversive aesthetics and oppositional politics of the homoerotic gaze. The exploration of an erotic male gaze on a masculine form, questions the heteronormative system that still underpins our visual culture. The queer exposure of male nakedness transgresses patriarchal rules, according to which it is the naked woman who should be the passive object of the gaze, with the concealed man positioned as its subject.

One of the dominant preoccupations of gay art is the theme of masculinity: portraits of the male body, and psyche. The male body is studied and explored in its sexual, psychological and spiritual totality. It is invested with the emotions, the senses, and the politics of sexuality. As a result, gay male nudes contribute to the contemporary reflection on the changing condition of masculinity; they are also an affirmation of the male body and of the joy of looking at it. All of these features are present in the male nudes by young gay artists from the University of Brighton. Karol Michalec, Alexander Glass and Luke Beachey creatively explore masculinity as a means of both erotic expression, and existential reflection on their own position in art and life.

The works of Karol Michalec and Luke Beachey abound a very sexual and experimental take on the figuration of the male body. The sculptures, photographs, drawing and paintings by Michalec, archive many aspects of historical and contemporary homoerotic art. They reflect a continuity of the classical sculptural tradition in gay imagination, as well as the influence of the contemporary commercial erotica and pornography. His male figures are always imbued with sexual power and aura that might be understood as a weapon against the forces of repression. Michalec is a young Polish artist who immigrated to the UK. The freedom of gay expression and identity that he found here, has for him a political dimension in opposition to the homophobia that he encountered growing up in Poland. Thus the homoerotic male nude in his art plays not only sexual but also important existential role in affirming his position as an artist and gay man.

Similarly, the paintings of Luke Beachey reveal himself as young man grappling with conventional notions of masculinity still defined by heterosexuality in British society. Thus his male figures are rebellious, twisted, deformed, fragmented, imaginary and fragile. They struggle with and within masculine form and identity, breaking through the boundaries and sending them into the state of flux and ecstasy. The painter prefers to work with dynamic linear mark making which emphasises raptures and fluidity. This project of artistic redefinition of masculinity is also embedded in the unconscious, hence erotically potent and energetic. His images are reminiscent of the surrealist exploration of psychosomatic passions, that are on the verge of desire and destruction, eroticism and trauma. Beachey’s art taps into the disturbing libidinal essence of the male life force while sustaining the sensual homoerotic gaze.

The subject of love between men remains taboo, overshadowed by the preoccupation with sex. The face of homosexuality changes radically depending on the historical period, but its core – men linked by amorous relations with each other – remains the same. Alexander Glass is interested specifically in expressing the emotional experience and romantic aspects of gay life. His coupled clay figurines depict various intimate embraces between two male subjects. The small male forms are anticlassical, drawing on more archaic, prehistoric sculptural influences, referencing samesex love presence since the beginning of humanity. Thus his homosexual pairs have an archetypical potency that transgresses time boundaries. In the history of culture, some of the greatest love stories revolve around two men. Nowadays, legends of such couples are continued within the politics of new models of partnership. Current debates on samesex marriage are grounded in timeless stories of homosexual love. Glass’ sculptures speak about the eternity of gay romance, yet always embodied in contemporary contexts and spectacles. Again, he creates this reflection though the subject of the male nude, since his small queer men have distinctively large phalluses.

Luke Beachey, Karol Michalec and Alexander Glass draw openly upon their sexual identity in an artistic practice that is focused on the homoerotic male nude. Moreover, their representations of the male body express a range of complex personal and political issues that the artists deal with at the beginning of their professional lives. Page 4 Karol Michalec, Adam, watercolour, 2012 Alexander Glass, The Spectacle, clay, 2012The male nude here is a potent medium of existential, social and erotic explorations. What is more, as art students at the University of Brighton in the 21st century, by applying their creative interest to the male nude, they conjure up an established academic tradition from the distant past. Academic education from the Renaissance to the 19th century was based on the life study of the male form, from nature or from the antique sculptures. Men had learned to create art by copying the male body. Now young artists resurrect this conservative tradition to reflect on the contemporary status of masculinity and queer sexuality.

Queer Arts Activism

A substantial part of the Civil Partnerships exhibition is devoted to the civil partnership between the visual arts and social activism. The project gathers together artists, curators and activists who are internationally involved with feminist and queer art and politics. We are proud to present for the first time in Brighton, the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) from Toronto run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. According to their manifesto, “the FAG is – a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity. We host, we fund, we advocate, we support, we claim”. Through their web of matronage, they support feminist artists and provide a space for feminist discourse, acting on the belief that art can be a powerful tool in social change for women and LGBTQ rights. Their work on show draws from a long activist tradition of grass roots banners and agitprop images and texts designed for workers strikes, social protests, feminist and queer parades. Can’t/Won’t by FAG is a series of tactile and striking crocheted banners from yarn and felt that display the following texts: “We can’t compete, We won’t compete, We can’t keep up, We won’t keep down”. Through this type of intervention, Civil Partnerships reflects on the current anticapitalist protest movement and its ideas. FAG manifests queer and feminist resistance against the contemporary overambitious world of patriarchal hierarchical systems based on competition, exclusion, and a strict pecking order demanding conformity.

In this part of the exhibition, visual representation is treated as political activism, playing an important part in a dominant image-based civilization. Alongside its emphasis on the democratic role of the visual arts, the show underlines civil activism for human rights, and evidences how LGBTQ rights organisations have worked through the visual means, collaborating with artists and graphic designers. Therefore, we present a selection of queer visibility campaigns and antidiscrimination posters designed under the auspices of various European LGBTQ organizations: Britain’s Stonewall, Croatia’s LORI, Italy’s Arcigay, Poland’s Campaign Against Homophobia, Romania’s Accept, the Czech Republic’s Gay and Lesbian League, Belgium’s Holebifoon, Ireland’s Marriage Equality and others. We have also included different examples of posters produced by the main LGBTQ organization ILGA Europa, and some campaigns by (FARE) Football Against Racism in Europe. All the visual materials are designed and publicly distributed to combat discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. To achieve this aim they use different typography, design, illustrations and slogans. We would like to invite viewers to visually compare these diverse projects and reflect on the variety of national contexts and strategies that stand behind them. The display of LGBTQ rights posters was coordinated by Anthony Elliott.

LGBTQ activism is not only manifested by public actions and large organisational networks: it can also take the form of a quiet intellectual and pleasurable pursuit- like the act of reading. It is a private and enduring form of intimate activism that Polish artist and activist Tomek Kitliński has chosen to explore in his project of site-specific installation, Queer Bibliotherapy. He is interested in the cultivation of queer culture and subjectivities through the publishing and communication of experience via written text. For centuries, before the contemporary domination of visual culture, books have been the most accessible and safe haven of contact with the homosexual themes. Reading frequently played a significant role in personal liberation and education in a hostile homophobic society. Inside books, queer individuals could find places of resistance, freedom and the cultivation of the self. Thus the title, “Bibliotherapy”, refers to this therapeutic role of literature. Queer Bibliotherapy is a diverse collection of LGBTQ books, embedded in the local context where it takes place. For the Brighton edition the artist collaborates with Lisa Redlinski from the University of Brighton’s St Peter’s House Library, to present a selection of queer and feminist holdings from the institution.

From the collection of books, to a selection of associated artists, the Civil Partnerships exhibition queers the University of Brighton, and connects it to the artistic, activist and academic international feminist and LGBTQ culture.

Lara Perry and Paweł Leszkowicz

Sex Solidarity? #Occupy Sublimation? Feminist and Queer Art! by Tomasz Kitlinski

‘Pussy Riot’ and ‘FEMEN’ – women’s collectives, recently arrested in Davos, Minsk and Moscow – create art which we all badly need. Putin’s tsarism and (hetero)sexist capitalism must go! Worldwide, we’re going through a dark age of prejudice because of the current crisis. Female and queer subjectivities are being disrespected. And disregarded, misperceived; that’s why at the Civil Partnerships exhibition visibility campaigns, self-portraits (Niall Gormley’s blood-soaked paintings) and insolent nudes come to our rescue and empower. Imaging ourSelves is explored in the inner life and today exhibited in the Brighton academic, student civil society.

From Tunisia and Tahrir through Occupy London to protests in Russia, Romania and Poland – where is our gender/LGBT community? Women are increasingly humiliated during the Arab Spring whilst minorities are being neglected throughout Eastern Europe. Cuts and classism rule in Britain; despite civil partnership, gay bashing scars the ‘mother of democracies’. Misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia are a dirty secret in many countries. Prejudice remains, resurfacing, for example, in the censorship of gay artist David Wojnarowicz’s video work at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., despite the strong protests of curator Jonathan D. Katz. Now the show Coming After, curated in Toronto by Jon Davies, recalls this ghostly return of censorship. And this coincides with the death of Whitney Houston, diva of precariousness, who was similarly haunted by the wound of slavery and possibly closeted lesbian trauma. Racism and homophobia, like vampires, don’t die.

That’s why ‘Love the stranger’ – the Hebrew verse, psychoanalysed by Erich Fromm, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva – should become our motto. Hospitality (without its double: hostility) counters today’s sexualised hatreds. Welcoming is also inscribed in what Lara Perry calls the ‘substance of the subject: representing identity in portraiture’: a self-image hospitable to the ‘Stranger’. We are involved in an applied philosophy of the image inviting otherness.

‘Art thinks’, writes Hubert Damisch (and this is developed by Ernst van Alphen). ‘Art touches the skin’, argues Georges Didi-Huberman. Our art thinks and touches the skin at the same time, but most of all it heals. To quote Hélène Cixous, ‘Art, by definition, is a gesture of repair’. Reparation, rescue, mending the world (tikkun olam), is the task of art. While today’s world order crushes alterity, art embraces it. The embrace is violent or tender. Both! This is sublimation, ‘a process of idealisation along with the violatilisation of the constitutive elements’

Sublimation unfolds, for instance, in the woman-to-woman image of Natalie Papamichael’s The Two Annas, recalling the two Freudian mothers of Leonardo in Virgin and Child with Anne, which, in Julia Kristeva’s view, reveals the emergence of subjectivity-in-love where our inner life begins in the eternal triangle of the loving gazes of… grandma, mum and baby. At stake is a feminised liaison; as Anne Emmanuelle Berger notes: ‘It is also in relation to the mother’s desire – at least George Sand’s mother – that I would interpret the writer’s characterisation of the road of creation: the path of idealization which she represents as an ascent toward the summit’.

What do I feel before art? Impasto of blood in Niall Gormley’s selfportraits: The face is disappearing under the red… I’m still alive… Colours invade me… I’m occupying the texture… Uncanny twin women in the work of Natalie Papamichael: Fairy sleep is ending… Horror is coming… The two are breathing… They create meaning for each other… For now… Is this a double self-portrait? Even in performance, the artist evokes the ‘Stranger’ while I see myself in her art. In what could be dubbed tragedies of blood, Franko B performs his self-portrait and a portrait of us all. Instinctual drives and intertextual dramas, ravishment and reflection, reflex of light and emptiness, hunger and envy. In the performance of visibility campaigns and the nakedness in the works of Luke Beachey, Alexander Glass and Karol Michalec – everyone sees their own bare body. And psyche, Greek for ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’.

Gendered and sexed bodysouls – when shall we attain democracy? When will women and queers achieve their rights? Why do we still need to struggle for the equality and difference of the ‘Stranger’ in genders and sexualities? The self-liberation of us, women and queers, has only just begun. And here art is instrumental; more, all-important: art equals revolt. Much of feminist and queer art aims to revolt and to be gothically revolting. This strategy predominates from Cindy Sherman’s landscapes of ‘abomination’ through Abject Art to Hugo Dalton’s Mother Nature B.D.S.M., curated by the legendary Edward Lucie-Smith. There is also something about women’s and LGBT art that Pawel Leszkowicz calls a ‘new dissidence’. In my view, aesthetics meets erotics meets ethics meets #protest. Art equals direct political action, because visibility campaigns, as well as feminist and queer art fill the lacunae in how we see our-Selves and of society’s image of us. This is public art, and a very special case of it too: the art of intimate democracy.

Sussex, where the exhibition takes place, is incorrigible: a haunt of Virginia Woolf, Aubrey Beardsley and Jimmy Somerville and a hub of the Centre for Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change, the Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network and Pride Solidarity. The University of Brighton is also developing its queer cultural geography and feminism at the Faculty of Arts. In Brighton woman rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah is queering Judaism, Evlynn Sharp Sufism, and Keith Sharpe Anglicanism; these three theists and countless atheists support same-sex marriage as a human right. Artist Monica Ross made an operatic and sculptural reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights here at Brighton Festival. Although the right to gay marriage was not inscribed in this 1948 Declaration, the document has a non-heterosexist spirit due to feminist and queer Eleanor Roosevelt; as early as 1959, in the struggle against the ban on interracial marriage, political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that ‘The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right’. Yes, let’s dare human rights here and now – locally and alterglobally. G-Locally, art can help.

Tomasz Kitlinski

 

Further essays produced during the international research network are available:

The Virtual Feminist Museum, by Griselda Pollock

‘A
 Beacon
 of
 Progressive
 Policy’? : 
A 
Study 
of 
Contemporary 
Visual 
Campaigns 
for 
Equal 
Marriage 
in
 Scotland
, Kate Megan Turner

‘Rise
 of 
the 
”Young
 Gay
 Artists”
 from
 Brighton
’ by 
Austin
 Scott