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Even though there are a few more LGBTQ+ stories (love and otherwise) represented in mainstream media, I’m still left extrapolating from centuries of heteronormative art and history. For the most part, our histories remain hidden. Since getting my MFA, I’ve used my paintings to rewrite history through an LGBTQ+ lens. I’ve done that through my World War II cross sections as well as my Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas series. The Sleepers.” Petit Palais. October 03, 2016. Accessed August 2017. http://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/en/oeuvre/sleepers.
Love and sexuality in all its forms have been central themes in art from its earliest days. The way we experience the world is mediated by our desires, so I think that no matter what an artist is portraying, they are always also representing who and what they love. So many masters used their desire to convey ideas far beyond love, but because queer love stands out as the exception, whenever it is present in a piece, it’s assumed to only be able to speak about queerness. For that reason, I feel it’s important to represent how my queerness is embedded in my life as directly and honestly as I can, to celebrate all the ways in which we are different and all the ways in which we are the same, and to give queer desire equal gravity and meaning. Of course. I aim to raise questions about inclusivity, appropriation, and consumerism, but that’s not why I make work. I make for myself. What drives you to take on the roles of both director and model? The Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers famously ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’. Dora Carrington had relationships with men and women but loved and was loved by Lytton Strachey, who was attracted to men. Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell lived together in Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. A chosen few of Duncan Grant’s male lovers made visits but Paul Roche was forced to camp on the South Downs as he did not meet with Bell’s approval. Bell’s husband Clive lived apart from her but they remained happily married. While sexual intimacy was valued by the Group, it was not the most important bond tying the members together. Their network was a profoundly queer experiment in modern living founded on radical honesty and mutual support. Weller says Tom of Finland’s work is now being reimagined by a new generation of queer performers who “play with the tropes he created and then really turn them on their head to create work that is political, challenging and often sexy”. Weller also says he sees a rarely discussed drag element to his aesthetic, citing his instantly recognisable “lewks [looks], attitudes and costumes”. Equally, Tom of Finland continues to inspire creatives and fashion designers. US underwear brand Rufskin launched a Tom of Finland range in 2015, while artist and Kanye West collaborator Cali DeWitt created a T-shirt for the Tom of Finland foundation last year. Representation of non-normative bodies and identities within artworks and institutions is incredibly important, but I think that’s just the beginning of what we need to be thinking about. As a transgender artist, I am thinking more about the ways that we can refuse these forms of naming, taxonomizing, and classifying bodies. I look to art—both making it and viewing it—as a method for relearning how to perceive bodies in ways that are more expansive, unstable, and consensual.I paint people I love, and I paint using the vocabulary of paintings I love. So the influence is very straightforward; if I see a painting that sets me on fire, I want to try and make something that feels like that. I make drawings in my sketchbooks, which I use like journals. I also reinterpret paintings directly with my own characters, or work from photographs I have found or taken. The most important and frequent source of inspiration is drawing from memory. How does memory impact your compositions? All three of these things may be featured if the tree setting is in fact, near a river. This illustration also brings forward an allusion to the Qur’an’s view of paradise with all the blisses of life from the poem in tact. Resource(s) Let's consider the process of queering the sailor in art and its function. To be a mariner, or more explicitly to escape the societal conventions of life on the land was powerful indeed and recognised by queer audiences historically. Same-sex desire and affection was a facet of life at sea – in single-sex environments freedom of movement and access to different cultures afforded more options. Gay bars in ports around the world mirrored this, as did the spread of the queer language Polari (a way to speak openly and in code without overtly incriminating yourself). Previously part of Hide/Seek: Differences in American Portraiture in association with the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery Can you tell us about the work you’re showing at the Venice Biennale, Untitled (Holding Horizon) (2018)? Has the performance changed since its first iteration at Frieze London?
Significance to Queer Art History: Le Sommeil was commissioned by the Turkish Ambassador to Paris for his private collection. This painting was catered to the male gaze in this way and for the fact that men at this time were indeed, interested in looking into the romantic lives of women who loved women for their own pleasure. While this is, one can see that the women’s bodies are realistic and curved instead of (to put this plainly for the times) “photoshopped” into magazine figures. This shows Courbet’s eye for realism. The strewn objects (pearls, hair clips, and blankets) are also in a fashion that shows prior activity and lust after one another between the women. Think of the horrible view we have of sex, even though we’re the most overly sexualized country in the world,” Leslie mused. “Scratch the surface and there is this Puritanism that goes on and on and on.” That “American prudishness,” he said, was absent in European culture. He recalled going to a government-sponsored gay bar in Amsterdam: “The first thing you saw when you walked in was this huge, long bar with a gigantic picture of Queen Juliana smiling out at her gay subjects.” Queer British Art 1861–1967 explores connections between art and a wide range of sexualities and gender identities in a period of dynamic change. The exhibition begins in 1861 when the death penalty for sodomy was abolished and ends in 1967 with the partial decriminalisation of sex between men. Legal persecution affected many, yet for some, this was a time of liberation – of people finding themselves, identifying each other and building communities.In poetry, plays, and even common parlance, Ganymede came to stand for both paedophilic and homosexual tastes. Male prostitutes were commonly referred to as 'Ganymedes' in the eighteenth century.
May life provide all that you desire from three lips: those of your lover, the river, and the cup.” The male nude is, of course, one of the oldest artistic fixations: The Riace bronzes, Greek sculptures cast around 450 B.C., depict naked, bearded warriors as exemplars of masculine strength and beauty; “Farnese Hercules,” a third-century B.C. marble sculpture of the mythical hero, once stood at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. Over the next 2,000 years, capturing the naked male form became an essential artistic skill, one that reached its apotheosis in Western culture during the Italian Renaissance, when homosexual desire was subtly expressed in Donatello’s bronze “David” (circa 1440) and Caravaggio’s painting “The Musicians” (1597), wherein the traditional female muse is replaced with a band of boys, partially robed in togas, referencing a Greek and Roman period in which homoerotica was a part of society. The artist was playing “a little erotic game,” says the retired N.Y.U. classics professor Andrew Lear, 59, who now runs Oscar Wilde Tours, a company that offers excursions focused on implicitly gay art and history in major museums.As early as middle school. My father got me a video camera and I started making videos with friends––with cameos from babysitters, teachers, pets. By the time I was in high school, I was editing commercially, running programming for a public television station. It was far from glamorous, but it was like reaching into the world. Do you believe your work responds to—or critiques—ideas of representation and legibility? Crizio E Nesiote.” Crizio E Nesiote — Sito Ufficiale Del Museo Archeologico Nazionale Di Napoli. Accessed August, 2017. http://cir.campania.beniculturali.it/museoarcheologiconazionale/glossario/ploneglossarydefinition.2008-06-09.8429349527 However, if these elements of his work are inspiringly subversive, the way Tom of Finland plays with imagery from the Third Reich is undoubtedly much more morally murky – even though Laaksonen unequivocally dismissed suggestions he might be a Nazi sympathiser. Laaksonen, who had sexual encounters with German servicemen stationed in Helsinki during World War Two, claimed “in my drawings I have no political statements to make, no ideology. I am thinking only about the picture itself. The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway – they had the sexiest uniforms!” Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was known for his realistic depictions humans and his sometimes even “gritty” depictions of life and the body as seen through the eye.
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