THE LGBT COMMUNITY

 Queer art, also known as LGBT+ art or queer aesthetics, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender+ imagery and issues.[1][2][3] While by definition there can be no singular "queer art", contemporary artists who identify their practices as queer often call upon "utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships and relationships."[4] Queer art is also occasionally very much about sex and the embracing of unauthorised desires.[4]

Queer art is highlyvisibility of which possibly ranging from being advocated for, to conversely being met with backlash, censorship, or criminalisation.[5] With sex and gender operating differently in various national, religious, and ethnic contexts, queer art necessarily holds varied meanings.[5]

While historically, the term 'queer' is a homophobic slur from the 1980s AIDS crisis in the United States, it has been since re-appropriated and embraced by queer activists and integrated into many English-speaking contexts, academic or otherwise.[4] International art practices by LGBT+ individuals are thus often placed under the umbrella term of 'queer art' within English-speaking contexts, even though they emerge outside the historical developments of the gender and identity politics of the United States in the 1980s.

'Queer art' has also been used to retroactively refer to the historic work of LGBT+ artists who practiced at a time before present-day terminology of 'lesbian', 'gay', 'bisexual' and 'trans' were recognised, as seen deployed in the 2017 exhibition by Tate, Queer British Art 1861–1967.[6] The term "queer" is situated in the politics of non-normative, gay, lesbian and bisexual communities, though it is not equivalent to such categories, and remains a fluid identity.[4]

Adhering to no particular style or medium, queer art practices may span performance art, video art, installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, glass, and mixed media, among many others.[7]

Beginnings

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Early queer-coded art

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In A Queer Little History of Art, art historian Alex Pilcher notes that across the history of art, biographical information about queer artists are often omitted, downplayed or else interpreted under the assumption of a heterosexual identity.[8] For instance, "[t]he same-sex partner becomes the 'close friend.' The artistic comrade is made out as the heterosexual love interest", with "gay artists diagnosed as 'celibate,' 'asexual,' or 'sexually confused.'"[8]

During the interwar period, greater acceptance towards queer individuals could be seen in artistic urban centers such as Paris and Berlin.[7] In 1920s New York, speakeasies in Harlem and Greenwich Village welcomed gay and lesbian clients, and cafés and bars across Europe and Latin America, for instance, became host to artistic groups which allowed gay men to be integrated into the development of mainstream culture.[7] During this period, artists still developed visual codes to signify queerness covertly. Art historian Jonathan David Katz writes of Agnes Martin's abstract paintings as "a form of queer self-realization" which produces the tense, unreconciled equilibrium of her paintings such as in Night Sea (1963), speaking to her identity as a closeted lesbian.[9]

Jasper Johns, White Flag, 1955, Encaustic, 198.9 cm × 306.7 cm (78.3 in × 120.7 in), In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Katz has further interpreted the use of iconography in Robert Rauschenberg's combine paintings, such as a picture of Judy Garland in Bantam (1954) and references to the Ganymede myth in Canyon (1959), as allusions to the artist's identity as a gay man.[10] Noting Rauschenberg's relationship with Jasper Johns, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon interprets Johns' monochrome encaustic White Flag (1955) in relation to the artist's experiences as a gay man in a repressive American society.[7] Graham-Dixon notes that "if [Johns] admitted he was gay he could go to jail. With White Flag he was saying America 'was the land where [...] your voice cannot be heard. This is the America we live in; we live under a blanket. We have a cold war here. This is my America.'"[7]

In 1962, the US had begun to decriminalise sodomy, and by 1967 the new Sexual Offences Act in the United Kingdom meant that consensual sex between men was no longer illegal.[7] However, many queer individuals still faced pressure to remain closeted, worsened by the Hollywood Production Code which censored and banned depictions of "sex perversion" from films produced and distributed in the US up until 1968.[7]

The director Rosa von Praunheim has made more than 100 films on queer topics since the late 1960s, some of which have been evaluated internationally. Some films are considered milestones in queer cinema. Von Praunheim is internationally recognized as an icon of queer cinema.[11]

Stonewall riots (1969)

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Main article: Stonewall riots

A key turning point in attitudes towards the LGBT community would be marked by the Stonewall riots. At the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 in New York City, patrons of the gay tavern Stonewall Inn, other Greenwich Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighbourhood street people fought back when the police became violent during a police raid. This became a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the LGBT+ community, and the riots are widely considered to constitute one of the most important events leading to the gay liberation movement.[12][13][14]

The first Pride Parade was held a year after the riots, with marches now held annually across the world. Queer activist art, through posters, signs, and placards, served as a significant manifestation of queer art from this time.[7] For example, photographer Donna Gottschalk would be photographed by photojournalist Diana Davies at the first pride parade in 1970 in New York City, with Gottschalk defiantly holding a sign that read "I am your worst fear I am your best fantasy."[15]

Formulation of 'queer' identity

The 21st century

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Since the 2000s, queer practices continue to develop and be documented internationally, with a sustained emphasis on intersectionality,[25] where one's social and political identities such as gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, among others, might come together to create unique modes of discrimination and privilege.

Notable examples include New York and Berlin-based artist, filmmaker, and performer Wu Tsang, who re-imagines racialised, gendered representations, with her practice concerned with hidden histories, marginalised narratives, and the act of performing itself.[30] Her video work, WILDNESS (2012) constructs a portrait of a Latino Los Angeles LGBT bar, the Silver Platter, integrating elements of fiction and documentary to portray Tsang's complex relationship with the bar.[31] It further explores the impact of gentrification and a changing city on the bar's patrons, who are predominantly working class, Hispanic, and immigrant.[31]

Canadian performance artist Cassils is known for their 2012 body of work, Becoming An Image, which involves a performance where they direct a series of blows, kicks, and attacks to a 2000-pound clay block in total darkness, while the act is illuminated only by the flashes from a photographer.[32] The final photographs depict Cassils in an almost primal state, sweating, grimacing, and flying through the air as they pummel clay blocks, placing an emphasis on the physicality of their gender non-conforming and transmasculine body.[32][33] Another example includes New York-based artist, writer, performer, and DJ Juliana Huxtable, part of the queer arts collective, House of Ladosha, the artist exhibited her photographs with her poetry at the New Museum Triennial, with works such as Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) from her Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming series.[25] In it, Huxtable inhabits a futuristic world wherein she is able to reimagine herself apart from the trauma of her childhood, where she was assigned the male gender while being raised in a conservative Baptist home in Texas.[25]

Furthermore, while queer artists such as Zanele Muholi and Kehinde Wiley have had mid-career survey exhibitions at major museums, an artist's identity, gender and race are more commonly discussed than sexuality.[25] Wiley's sexuality, for instance, was not highlighted in his Brooklyn Museum retrospective.[25]

Spectrosynthesis – Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now

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In 2017, a travelling show on Asian LGBTQ art, Spectrosynthesis – Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now, debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan.[34] Coming shortly after the Taiwanese High Court's decision towards legalising same-sex marriage in May 2017, this would be one of the earliest art exhibitions to specifically focus on LGBTQ issues in a government-run institution in Asia.[35] The show exhibited 22 artists from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Singapore with a total of 51 artworks.[35] It would feature art-historical works by Shiy De-jinn, Martin Wong, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Ku Fu-sheng alongside a collection of newer works mostly created after 2010 by artists such as Samson Young, Wu Tsang, and Ming Wong.[35]

The second iteration of the show, Spectrosynthesis II – Exposing Tolerance: LGBTQ Art in Southeast Asia, was held at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand in 2019.[36][37] It would feature over 50 artists such as Dinh Q. Lê, Danh Võ, and Ren Hang, with new commissions from Samak Kosem and Sornrapat Patharakorn, Balbir Krishan, David Medalla, Arin Rungjang, Anne Samat, Jakkai Siributr and Chov Theanly, with a greater emphasis of artists from Southeast Asia.[36][37]