Taking place: Building histories of queer and feminist art in North America 9781526162397

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Taking place

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

series editors

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-​wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders. To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://​manche​ster​univ​ersi​typr​ess.co.uk/​ser​ies/​ret​hink​ing-​arts-​histor​ies/​

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Taking place Building histories of queer and feminist art in North America Erin Silver

Manchester University Press

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Copyright © Erin Silver 2023 The right of Erin Silver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manche​ster​univ​ersi​typr​ess.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 6238 0  hardback First published 2023 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

I dedicate this book to Martha Langford, inveterate builder of worlds, with gratitude for all the ways she has transformed mine.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: building histories

viii xi 1

1 Shifting foundations

21

2 Dangerous developments

64

3 Border zones

97

4 Everyday and extraordinary movements

126

Epilogue: enter the virtual

148

Bibliography Index

155 176

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

List of figures

1.1. Front entrance with signage designed by Sheila de Bretteville reading, ‘The Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture, welcomes you,’ 1977. 35mm slide. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California. 1.2. Taking down the sign for Grubb & Ellis, the first step in taking over the old Chouinard building on Grandview which became the first location of the Woman’s Building, 1973. Black and white photograph; 8” x 10”. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Ephemera, Los Angeles, California. 1.3. Two women with scaffolding. Construction of the new space on Spring Street, November 1975. 35mm slide. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California. 1.4. Sheila de Bretteville and Suzanne Lacy moving sheet rock, November 1975. Construction of the new space on Spring Street. 35mm slide. Photograph by Maria Karras. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California. 1.5. Taping the walls on the second floor, November 1975. Construction of the new space on Spring Street. 33mm slide. Courtesy Otis College of Art and Design Library, Woman’s Building Slide Archive, Los Angeles, California. 1.6 FASTWÜRMS, House of Bangs, 1999. Installation/​performance, Zsa Zsa Gallery, Toronto, ON. Courtesy the artists. 1.7 Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), founded by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue, Toronto, ON. Image from The Illustrated Gentlemen, inaugural exhibition by Elisha Lim, 2011. Photo by Deirdre Logue. Courtesy the artists.

29

35

37

38

38 50

52

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xi

List of figures

1.8 Videofag, founded by William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill, Toronto, ON. Courtesy the artists. 2.1 Ryan Conrad, b. 1983, 2008–​9. Broadside Xerox poster. Courtesy the artist. 2.2 Every Ocean Hughes, untitled (David Wojnarowicz project), 2001–​7. 12 black and white photographs, 2 embroidered, 11” x 14”. Courtesy the artist. 2.3 Every Ocean Hughes, The Piers Untitled (#2), 2010. Black and white gelatin print, 31” x 36”. Courtesy the artist. 2.4 Ira Sachs, Last Address, 2010. Film still. Courtesy the artist. 2.5 Zoe Leonard, Detail (Tree +​Fence), 1998/​1999. Gelatin silver print on paper, 30 x 21.3 cm /​11 3/​4 x 8 3/​8 inches. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth. 3.1 Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–​13. Installation view of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, curated by cheyanne turions. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 15 March–​3 May 2014. Photo by Guy L’Heureux. Galerie SBC Gallery, Montreal. Courtesy the artist and Galerie SBC Gallery. 3.2 Adrian Blackwell, Circles Describing Spheres, 2014. Courtesy the artist. 3.3 Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, Space Set /​Set Space, 2013. Installation view of STAGE SET STAGE, curated by Barbara Clausen. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 30 November–​22 February 2014. Photo by Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy the artists, the curator, and Galerie SBC Gallery. 3.4 Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, Space Set /​Set Space, 2013. Installation view of STAGE SET STAGE, curated by Barbara Clausen. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 30 November–​22 February 2014. Photo by Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy the artists, the curator, and Galerie SBC Gallery. 3.5 Wendy Coburn, Semiotics of Protest Props: Sign, Code, De-​code, 2013–​14. Mixed materials. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Wendy Coburn: Anatomy of a Protest, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2014. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

52 82 83 85 88

89

103 109

110

110

112

ix

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

x

List of figures

3.6 Wendy Coburn, Slut Nation: Anatomy of A Protest, 2014. Video. 36 minutes. Installation view, Wendy Coburn: Anatomy of a Protest, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, October 30 – December 19, 2014. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. 3.7 Sheena Hoszko, Red Light Monument, 2012. Installation photo, Montreal, QC. Courtesy the artist. 4.1 taisha paggett and Yann Novak, A Composite Field, 2014. 3-​channel HD video, 23.24. Installation view, TEMPERAMENTAL, The Doris McCarthy Gallery, 5 January–​14 February 2015. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the artists and the Doris McCarthy Gallery. 4.2 Brendan Fernandes, Closing Line, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. 4.3 Brendan Fernandes, Clean Labor, 2017. Produced in collaboration with More Art. Photo by Chester Toye. Performers: Christopher DeVita, Charles Gowin, Madison Krekel, Erica Ricketts, Oisin Monaghan, Khadijia Griffith, and Wythe Hotel housekeepers, Angie Sherpa, Tenzin Thokme, and Tenzin Woiden. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. 4.4 Brendan Fernandes, Minor Calls, 2017. Design concept by Brendan Fernandes in collaboration with Joseph Cuillier. MCA Chicago. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. 4.5 Brendan Fernandes, Free Fall 49, 2017. Performance. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

112 120

129 139

140

142 143

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

I thought that writing these acknowledgements would be the reward at the end of the very long journey that has been this project, with its early genesis in my doctoral work undertaken at McGill University beginning in 2009; instead, I have found myself consumed by worry and doubt over writing the right (or wrong) thing; over the course of almost a decade, surely important names have been mistakenly left out. I offer these acknowledgements as a snapshot of the past decade which, like this book, no doubt carry and perpetuate certain misremembrances and elisions. I thank the team at Manchester University Press: Editorial Director Emma Brennan, Assistant Editor Alun Richards, and Rethinking Art’s Histories series editors Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon for their patient guidance through the multiple phases and forms this project has assumed. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for generous and honest feedback that has been transformative in coming to clearer answers about what this book is about. My special thanks go to Amelia, for her enduring support of the project over a decade, beginning with her suggestion, in the early 2010s: ‘why don’t you go check out LA?’ Amelia encouraged me to engage with scenes more holistically –​ to immerse myself, go to the places, talk to the people, forge the relationships, in ways that are not extractive, but mutually nourishing. Amelia has always been generous in sharing her networks with me (and countless others, I know for certain) and helping me to figure out ways of researching and writing and disseminating not as removed from community, but for and with them. Early research for the book was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant, while the images reproduced within have been made possible through the Scholarly Publication Fund at the University of British Columbia. Archival assistance was generously provided at NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections (New York), USC/​ONE Archives (Los Angeles), the Otis College of Art & Design (Los Angeles), and through the personal archival collections of former dUMBA collective members

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xii

Acknowledgements

(Brooklyn, New York, Alaska, and various elsewheres), while image and quote reproduction assistance and permissions were provided by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (Toronto, ON), the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Scarborough, ON), the dUMBA collective, Galerie SBC Gallery (Montreal, QC), Hauser & Wirth, Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago), Otis College of Art & Design, Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto, ON), and USC/​ONE Archives. I thank the historians and archivists, trained and ad hoc, who have done the hard work of conserving these histories. It turns out I have been working through the same problems for some time: I thank McGill-​Queen’s University Press, volume editor Martha Langford, and Editor-​in-​Chief Jonathan Crago for allowing me to reprint pieces of ‘Mending Walls: Imagining the Sovereign Subject in Contemporary Exhibition Practices’ from the volume Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2016) for Chapter 2. I also thank Performance Matters journal and editor Peter Dickinson for permission to reprint pieces of my article ‘Racism and Social Space in Canadian Dance: Actants, Structures, and Dancing Differently’ (2019) for Chapter 3. Thank you, too, to M-​C MacPhee for permission to reprint a small excerpt from my article ‘Whatever Happened to Queer Street West?’ in No More Potlucks (2010) for Chapter 1. ‘Gratitude’ seems insufficient a word for what this project owes the artists, curators, and space-​makers whom this book has permitted me to gather here: Scott Miller Berry, Adrian Blackwell, Wendy Coburn (RIP), Ryan Conrad, the dUMBA collective, FASTWÜRMS, Brendan Fernandes, Andrea Geyer, Maggie Groat, Trajal Harrell, Sharon Hayes, Sheena Hoszko, Every Ocean Hughes, Zoe Leonard, Elisha Lim, Ange Loft, Deirdre Logue, Allyson Mitchell, Slawa Osawska, taisha paggett, Adee Roberson, Ira Sachs, Walter Scott, Alexandro Segade, Sienna Shields, Videofag (William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill), and David Wojnarowicz (RIP). My relationship to scholarship, and to work, is ameliorated by several colleagues, mentors, thinkers, collaborators, and co-​conspirators who have provided support and guidance; at the University of British Columbia: Ignacio Adriasola, Rachel Boate, Tracy Chiu, Dana Claxton, Christine D’Onofrio, Bryn Dharmaratne, Greg Gibson, Gareth James, Trey Le, Giorgios Makris, Jaleh Mansoor, Michelle McGeough, Karice Mitchell, Joseph Monteyne, Jeneen Frei Njootli, John O’Brian, Melanie O’Brian, Julia Orell, Nuno Porto, Marina Roy, Maureen Ryan, Saygin Salgirli, Anthony Shelton, T’ai Smith, Catherine Soussloff, Althea Thauberger, Andrea Tuele, and Scott Watson. Further afield, mentors and advisors who have influenced and impacted the ultimate shape of this project, from its seeds as a doctoral project to now, or else have been supportive colleagues throughout the past decade include: Amber Berson,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

iixi

Acknowledgements

Anthea Black, Julia Bryan-​Wilson, Alena Buis, Elizabeth Cavaliere, Barbara Clausen, Jon Davies, Jennifer Doyle, Anne Dymond, Mary Hunter, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Jonathan D. Katz, August Klintberg, Suzy Lake, Claudette Lauzon, Allison Morehead, Ara Osterweil, Kim Simon, Johanne Sloan, Trevor Stark, and Alanna Thain. Students over the years (at Concordia University, OCAD University, Queen’s University, the University of Guelph, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto, and my current academic home, the University of British Columbia) are too many now to name, but the following in particular have and are updating and reinvigorating the fields of queer and feminist art and art history, and I consider myself lucky to have worked with them at various stages on their own paths: James Albers, Krista Bailie, Adrian Deveau, Adriana Disman, Nateene Diu, Angela Glanzmann, Clinton Glenn, Karina Greenwood, Maxim Greer, Hannah Grossman, Shala Gutierrez, Jasmine Hynes, Reiko Inouye, Erika Kindsfather, Lucas Kling, Christopher Lacroix, Cory E. Wittmann MacLeod, Robin Alex McDonald, Tatiana Mellema, Kareem Obey, Jade Pollard-​Crowe, Marcus Prasad, Ido Radon, Yasmine Semeniuk, Camille Sung, Nina Vroemen, Laurie White, Johnny Willis, and Michael Wooley. To my bio and blended family: parents Joel Silver & Sylvie Allard, Linda Overing & Ivan Patenaude, siblings Matt Silver, Andy Silver, and Mike Silver, sisters-​in-​law Diana Haber and Laura Campbell, and nephew Lake Silver-​ Campbell –​thank you for being the family I would choose if we weren’t already related, and for making ‘home’ an expansive, unconventional place that I always want to come back to. Certain friends have stuck across time and place, colliding and amalgamating in messy and queer ways: David Balzer, Jac Renée Bruneau, Natasha Chaykowski, Kari Cwynar, Nola Fay Dare, Claris Figueira, Sky Goodden, Ayasha Guerin, Trina Hogg, Jenn Jackson, Am Johal, Amy Kazymerchyk, Zoë Lepiano, Ciarán McGrath, John Monteith, Julia Rosenberg, Jesse B. Staniforth, Don Teeuwsen, Althea Thauberger, cheyanne turions, Jayne Wilkinson, and Ulrike Zöllner –​thank you for the ineffable thing, bigger than the word ‘friendship’ can encapsulate, that happens when we are together. I am fortunate to have been unofficially ‘adopted’ at the outset of my undergraduate degree by my art parents Donigan Cumming and Martha Langford, whom I thank for getting me into this racket nearly two decades ago, and for continuing to model a work ethic, integrity, and generosity that I attempt to emulate (though likely rarely achieve as effortlessly) in my own life and work. Although they are unlikely to read this, our pets must be acknowledged for their important role in my writing of this book: our dogs Grey(by), who has

xiii

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

newgenprepdf

xiv

Acknowledgements

been by my side across borders and coasts (Toronto, LA, Toronto, Vancouver) almost to the day I defended my PhD in 2013, and plucky newcomer Radio; they are the unconditional joy in our lives. Let these acknowledgements also mark the memory of two majestic cats: Neko and Tinker, both of whom diligently supervised my writing from my lap, and the absence of whom is deeply felt. Not finally, but foundationally, is my partner, Christine Atkinson, my complete opposite and, for that reason, my perfect complement. Thank you for witnessing, inspiring, stimulating, and challenging me; thank you for excising my passive phrases and phases; thank you for encouraging me to explore and embody the multitude of curiosities, desires, passions, contradictions, start-​ stops, about-​turns, and catapults that comprise an interesting life; mostly, though, thank you for sharing your life and your light with me.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction: building histories Histories of North American feminist, queer, and queer feminist art, from their roots in the second-​wave feminism of the 1970s, to their influence on queer and feminist cultural production in the present, can be traced in relation to a history of the institutions, organisations, collectives, and structures that have helped to secure and legitimise feminist and queer art practices. Over the last fifty years, a specifically feminist art history has responded to the exclusion of women artists from the official registers of art history, while the writing of queer cultural histories has resulted from increasing awareness of what histories risk being lost by remaining idle. Prior to the formation of politically activist queer communities in the 1990s, lesbian and feminist communities were considered to be politically and socially distinct from gay cis-​male communities. However, as has become increasingly clear, histories of feminist and queer cultures stand to benefit from discursive proximity; a queer feminist historiographical analysis serves to further emphasise the possibilities afforded by their union. This book engages select feminist and queer alternative art spaces in Canada and the United States in an effort to both affirm their enduring historical significance and to delineate the ways by which present-​day queer and feminist artists support and challenge the dominant narrative lenses through which these histories have been constructed. Methodologically, I posit that the intersection at which historiography, social geography, feminist theory, queer theory, and institutional critique meet is an ideal locus through which to uncover how the specificities of place, as well as space, contribute to historical understandings of feminist, queer, and queer feminist cultural p ­ roduction. Since the development of a distinctly feminist art movement in the early 1970s, the socio-​political conditions of place have resulted in divergent paths among queer and feminist institutions; I argue that the specific aesthetic, social, and political forms feminist and queer art production take on must be read through the spaces, communities, and cities that provide the conditions for their cultivation. In my position as participant-​observer, with case studies informed both by happenstance and by deliberately seeking out proximity to practices and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Taking place

histories that contribute to this research, I argue that an emphasis on locality (i.e. my locality) in an era of art world globalisation and fluidity of movement is a political choice on my part: to engage the specific conditions of places I have come to know as an inveterate inhabitant or literate visitor, a privilege of both mobility and staying-​in-​place bestowed by virtue of my citizenship (Canadian), ethnicity (white settler), and class (however nebulously defined, one that permits choice to stay or go). My movements and relocations have been precipitated in relation to institutions –​notably, those institutions offering gainful employment and rewarding intellectual and cultural ­community –​but they have not been accidental: proximity to rich and disparate queer and feminist culture has influenced my decisions to commit to certain places, places that, as this book will show, continue to engage and extend feminist and queer art ecologies and histories in the present. However, and paradoxically, as a result of my peripatetic background (sometimes working across cities and provinces in any given semester prior to arriving in Vancouver, where I have lived since 2017), in this book I am making an argument for committing to ‘place’ at the same time as I share in the scepticism about regionalist approaches that serve to confine, rather than to expand, the nuance of what the term means. I am concerned, too, not to let the entrenched pathways of history steer the direction and scope of the project, and to allow a porousness in the geographic crossings and divergences that permit certain spaces and practices to speak to each other across regional and temporal lines. Although the book’s chapters are loosely grouped into ‘regions,’ I abandon geographic didacticism, moving, as with my movement in the world, towards an improvisational methodological perambulation, applying the Debordian dérive –​a ‘mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society; a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances’ –​as organisational guide.1 I level more traditional academic research (in archives, libraries, galleries, and through interviews) with the psychogeographic opportunities and invitations afforded me throughout this project: a driving tour with artist Susan Silton to all of the former sites of the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, for instance, feeling the LA dweller’s unique relationship to the road; an invitation from Amelia Jones to a social gathering on my first day in LA in 2012, learning, as a non-​driver, just what a walk from Hollywood to Silverlake entails, what it means in reality versus how it appears on Google Maps; a walk through New York’s Greenwich Village with filmmaker Ira Sachs, our conversation punctuated by Sachs pointing out various apartment buildings, naming the artists who lived in them, and which appear in his short film Last Address; a walk across the Manhattan Bridge, to and from Jay Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn on the same trip to New York, unseasonably

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

3

Introduction: building histories

warm for early February; a view and an ear to the hundreds of thousands of bodies in the streets, the sounds of banging pots and pans, during the 2012 Quebec student movement in my hometown of Montreal. I follow a lineage of so many queer and feminist writers and scholars attempting to translate peripatetic experience onto the page: Tina M. Campt, Dianne Chisholm, Samuel R. Delany, Amelia Jones, and Karen Tongson, to name a few who have allowed their own ‘relocations,’ in Tongson’s words, to become part of the story.2 Although the Baudelarian flâneur is more regularly engaged in queer spatial theory for its links to anonymity, desire, and the state of being an outsider, a Debordian positioning opens up to Michel de Certeau’s tactical deployments against the city’s structure as passively received. Amid the backdrop of institutional histories spanning the 1970s to the present (2022), I introduce artistic practices, projects, deployments, and interventions that, I argue, activate my sites of interrogation, and make them valuable as subjects of study. The artists whose practices are examined throughout this book offer examples of tactical engagement with the sites, spaces, and places of the everyday via extraordinary punctuations and perforations of the built environment. The goals of my study are twofold: to examine and contribute to the development of histories of feminist and queer art ecologies; and to promote a queer feminist historiographical project in which queer and feminist artists are essential collaborators in the task of interrogating and critically dissecting the dominant narratives that increasingly attach to these spaces. As the following chapters demonstrate, this work requires first building up (focusing on the physical sites of early feminist and queer cultural production that made their histories legible) in order to, in essence, tear down, with cognisance of the enduringly precarious position of feminist and queer art histories relative to more mainstream art histories, and the shared motivation to first ensure the preservation of feminist and queer art histories before troubling their methodological foundations. The historical position of feminist and queer artists relative to the mainstream institutions that have long bestowed legitimacy on artists and their practices, as well as the histories of those alternative institutions that have been built and occupied in response to mainstream institutional neglect, warrant further study. The book is framed by four lines of inquiry corresponding to the four chapters that follow: first, I revisit now canonical histories of feminist alternative art spaces, founded in the early 1970s in urban centres such as Los Angeles, New York, and Montreal, to interrogate debates about ‘alternatives’ to the centre: the reasons why feminist artists felt it important to establish feminist alternative spaces that operated independently of mainstream art world spaces; the types of physical sites and their role in the urban fabric;

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Taking place

and the activities, goals, and debates that occurred within. I also consider how what were experienced as exclusionary practices within predominantly white, straight feminist spaces propelled new spatial occupation strategies for feminist arts who did not assimilate to these categories, including lesbian feminist artists and women of colour artists –​early instances of the less concrete and more ephemeral strategies for spatial occupation that came to be associated with queer art spaces, which I begin to tease out at the end of the first chapter. My second line of inquiry concerns the importance of the blend of live-​work spaces to queer and feminist alternative space-​making, notably, the queer houses that doubled as living spaces as well as performance and workshop spaces for their occupants and audiences, revealing the important affective and personal dimensions of queer alternative space. These spaces proliferated largely in the 1990s and early 2000s in tandem with the anti-​globalisation movement and surge in anarchist organising around this time. The simultaneous prevalence and under-​the-​radar nature of these spaces reflects the complex position occupied by queer communities relative to the mainstream –​spaces at once open and accessible, yet also precarious. I also reflect on the specific economic, social, and political currents of the era in which they proliferated, and why it is that these types of spaces have become increasingly rare in present-​day urban sites impacted by cycles of g­ entrification. I offer Brooklyn’s dUMBA collective as exemplary of how the identity of ad hoc queer and feminist live-​work spaces change over time in responding to political, artistic, economic, and social urgencies they confront, and the possibilities and vulnerabilities precipitated by living and working under the radar in the face of accelerated urban development. Thirdly, I want to consider curatorial strategies for making (temporary) feminist and queer space within mainstream galleries, and the ways in which the gallery, as a ‘non-​site,’ discursively constructs ‘imagined communities’; through an examination of select exhibitions and curatorial strategies emphasising autonomy and sovereignty that took place in Toronto and Montreal in the early to mid-​2010s, amid the backdrop of the multi-​issue local and global protest culture that emblematised the era, I consider and problematise the possibility of queer autonomous zones within mainstream institutional space. Finally, I am concerned to interrogate how the body is foregrounded as a site that activates queer worldmaking, and the ways artists draw attention to the taken-​for-​granted nature of the built environment, transforming the everyday into the extraordinary. Dislodging myself, in this last chapter, from any one geographic location, I examine a group of movement-​and dance-​based practices spanning multiple sites and spaces, allowing moving bodies to take the lead over the architectures that have historically directed them.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5

Introduction: building histories

Throughout the four chapters, I interrogate the shift in meaning that has occurred over the last fifty years around the word ‘alternative,’ especially as it relates to artist and subcultural communities, from its more literal ­definition –​alternative as ‘another possibility’ (though not necessarily destabilising conventions of power and often complicit in oppression) –​to alternative in the radical emancipatory sense in which the word holds relevance in contemporary art discourse. I consider, too, the ways the two meanings have been simultaneously engaged, as well as differentiated, throughout the history of queer and feminist art. In writing about the history of New York’s 112 Workshop/​112 Greene Street, which was owned by Jeffrey Lew and opened up, in 1970, to artists to undertake a series of material and ideological excavations, Martin Beck emphasises the importance of space, in particular, the physical space that was 112 Workshop/​112 Greene Street, to its identity and what artists could do there. Beck quotes Lew, who said of the space, ‘[i]‌n most galleries you can’t scratch the floor. Here you can dig a hole in it.’3 Beck considers the definition of the word ‘raw’ as carrying numerous meanings to alternative spaces and art production, writing: Artists were free to use the space, its fixtures, and raw materials as their primary medium. ‘Raw’ – with its connotations of natural, crude, unrefined, unprocessed, rough, unfinished – became a metaphor for freedom from restrictive definitions of art making, alluding to a frontier state where boundaries are negotiated and challenged and where space is explored and extended. ‘Raw space’ refers to a specific physical state of an architectural structure; ‘raw experience’ denotes a social dimension excluded from the generic white-​cube gallery space, and it impacts the artists’ encounters with the physical space, with each other, with the immediate community, with the audience at large.4

Beck establishes a spectrum along which arts spaces fall, between the regular gallery system and alternative art spaces, the ‘space of the establishment’ versus the ‘space of the alternative,’ one being ‘static, homogenous, and bourgeois,’ the other, ‘process oriented, experimental, and working class.’5 Beck deduces that ‘the physical condition of that space is less important than the social inclusion and exclusion processes that regulate access to and representation within it. Thus the main purpose of an alternative space is ability to produce visibility.’6 Pushing past potential barriers to understanding the layered and in some cases interrelated histories of feminist and queer artistic production, I argue that certain institutions were undeniably foundational to the strategic establishment of alternative venues and support structures within feminist, gay and lesbian, and queer movements. In studying these sites of important feminist

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Taking place

and queer cultural production, I reflect on their progressions, intersections, overlaps, and disparities. In addition to their social and political intersections, feminist and queer art histories are also connected by the shared task faced by feminist and queer art historians of taking charge of these historical projects. Importantly, feminist and queer cultural workers have become the lead archivists, conservators, and historians of these initiatives. As former sites of feminist and queer cultural production gain historical attention, the ways their histories are written risk perpetuating the very approaches to the writing of history that once excluded them from the dominant historical record. Although much recent art historical writing of feminist and queer art employs both feminist and queer methods, while other texts explicitly engage queer feminist concerns and urgencies, few art historians have explicitly joined queer and feminist methods. Amelia Jones’s pioneering articulation of a queer feminist durationality brings into relief ‘feminism’s now two-​centuries-​long rich and conflicted tendency to expose the circuits of meaning-​making as inexorably productive of and supported by structures of power’; she examines how, within art criticism, feminism has ‘durationally complicat[ed] the fixing of meaning by exposing the bodies and investments inevitably playing a role in any interpretation, no matter how seemingly neutral or disinterested.’7 Addressing feminism’s own lapses into historical certainty, Jones offers queer as ‘that which indicates the impossibility of a subject or a meaning staying still, in one determinable place.’8 Queered approaches to temporality, a preoccupation of queer theory through the 2000s and 2010s, taken up by a handful of theorists, notably, Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, and José Esteban Muñoz, whose articulations of ‘reproductive futurism,’ ‘temporal drag,’ ‘queer time,’ ‘feeling backward,’ and ‘cruising utopia,’ respectively, carry value, too, for an updated examination of how histories of feminist and queer alternative art spaces, sites, and communities have been written.9 The historical position of feminist and queer artists relative to the mainstream institutions that have long bestowed legitimacy on artists and their practices, as well as the histories of those alternative institutions that were built in response to mainstream institutional neglect, also warrant further study. While I benefit, in my approach, from earlier historical projects that demonstrated intent to make visible previously underdeveloped histories of feminist and queer art, I argue that the gains of these strategies for achieving cultural recognition have also permitted queer feminist analyses of feminist and queer historical strategies that were not previously possible. Contemporary queer feminist artists who engage with histories of feminist and queer art play

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

7

Introduction: building histories

central roles in the historical record for how they productively engage and challenge their historical precedents through critical and political opportunities made available in the queer feminist present. Although this book takes as catalyst the physical buildings and spaces in which queer and feminist art-​making and display occurs, it is via establishment, building, formation, and activation by queer and feminist practitioners that these spaces become relevant to analysis. For this reason, each chapter engages the material specificities of queer and feminist art spaces in dialogue with historical and present-​day uses and interventions within them. Importantly, much of my study concerns how contemporary queer, feminist, and queer feminist artists have responded to, addressed gaps in, and played with the institutions they have inherited. In her introduction to Féminismes Électriques, the 2000–​10 decade publication of the fifty-​year-​old feminist artist-​ run centre La Centrale galerie Powerhouse in Montreal, Canada (a study of which features in the book), former board president Leila Pourtavaf delineates the problem and potential introduced by the confluence of the queer art present and the feminist art past. Pourtavaf writes that the recent mainstreaming of older feminist discourse within contemporary art institutions has allowed for a certain amount of access to elite cultural space for some women, while others continue to fight along the margins. This is in line with a common critique of ’70s feminism: that it lacked serious engagement with race and class politics –​not to mention its history of hostility towards queer, transsexual and transgender people –​while asking all women to think or act under a unified subject position of ‘women’ or ‘womyn’. By setting the norm of ‘women’ as a predominantly white and middle-​class identity, second-​wave feminism created a margin outside its own normative narrative that was occupied by all those who did not meet its unified mandate.10

The surge in interest in feminist art practice and history, in tandem with the development of queer scholarship and the mobilisation of queer activist communities over the course of the 2000s and the 2010s, suggests that these histories cannot be excavated without radical critique; as Pourtavaf continues: it is important to remember that […] feminist discourse […] gave us strategies for re-​thinking language, codes of representation and politics. It taught us to unpack the notion of subject and look for and resist both apparent and hidden forms of power. At its core, feminism has always been about the deconstruction of master narratives […] it is for this reason we must continuously deconstruct feminism’s own meta-​narratives.11

7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

Taking place

This reconciliation –​a recognition of the damages of past feminist practices as valuable to the continued promotion of present and future queer and feminist practices and discourses –​is a central focus of this book. I follow the queer theoretical tendency towards ‘looking backwards’ and, in the words of literary theorist Heather Love, ‘feeling backwards’ to expand the trajectory of feminist and queer art historical narratives in ways that not only accommodate, but also develop from, both their successes and failures. In her 2007 book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Love writes that, ‘[a]‌central paradox of any transformative criticism is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma, and violence.’12 This has certainly been the case for queer, as it came to be reclaimed, away from its derogatory assignations, and as an identity category in the late 1980s; as Love points out, ‘[w]hen queer was adopted in the late 1980s it was chosen because it evoked a long history of insult and abuse –​you could hear the hurt in it.’13 Love continues, ‘[t]he emphasis on injury in queer studies has made critics in this field more willing to investigate the darker aspects of queer representation and experience and to attend to the social, psychic, and corporeal effects of homophobia.’14 Engaging with the strands of queer theory that focus on negativity, anti-​ sociality, and failure opens the door to examinations of damage and exclusion as both integral and productive to the nascent field of queer feminist art history. Although my emphasis on the failures of queer and feminist art spaces might appear, at first, to be incongruent with more utopic, worldmaking threads of queer theory, I argue that queer feminist art history can not only accommodate, but also thrives in the face of, this type of interrogation, proving the enduring survival of queer and feminist art histories as they respond to shifting political and theoretical challenges with each passing era. Feminism can be understood as a response to histories of injury; however, histories of feminist struggle often all but erase any evidence of these injuries having occurred. Given the tenuous place of feminist art history in relation to more canonical fields of art historical study, acknowledging internal vulnerability also risks undermining the perception of feminist art history as a legitimate field of study. Instead, these histories of exclusion and damage within the feminist movement –​that is, as they often occur within spaces of feminist organising –​are often neglected in the pursuit of a unified feminist history. Earlier generations of historians of the feminist art movement tended towards the pursuit of linear progress narratives that continued to promote clearly defined, universally shared goals, experiences, successes, and failures; at the risk of offering a corrective to the corrective, I argue that queer feminist art history offers a preservation strategy precisely by holding earlier feminist tensions and irreconcilabilities in the balance.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

9

Introduction: building histories

Cultural theorist Rebecca Coleman has written that feminism can be perceived as a ‘progressive’ movement, in that it ‘seeks to assess the material and imaginary conditions of women’s pasts and presents and propose and progress towards different futures.’15 The idea of feminist lineage becomes tied to genealogy, as in Mira Schor’s ‘Patrilineage’ essay from 1991, in which she writes: The past two decades have seen systematic research and critical analysis of work by women artists, beginning with the goal of recalling them from obscurity and misattribution, inserting such artists into an already-​constituted, ‘universal’ (read: white male) art history, more recently, focusing on a critique of the discipline of art history itself.16

Schor importantly points to what she describes as a ‘second historical and critical system,’ whereby works by women artists are validated only by ascribing to the tenets of a patrilineal historical system, so that work by women artists viewed to derive from such ‘mega-​fathers as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and such mega-​sons as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’ maintain historical recognition.17 Queer theory works to dismantle this long-​ upheld genealogical approach, in particular, its perpetuation of heteronormative structures and uncritical notions of family and its notions of social respectability. Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has observed that in the conventional family home, one must follow a certain line, and that the heterosexual couple becomes a ‘point’ along this line, which is given to the child as its inheritance or background. The background then is not simply behind the child: it is what the child is asked to aspire toward. The background, given in this way, can orientate us toward the future: it is where the child is asked to direct its desire by accepting the family line as its own inheritance. There is pressure to inherit this line, a pressure that can speak the language of love, happiness, and care, which pushes us along specific paths.18

Seeming, at first, to be unrelated to the study of history-​writing, Ahmed’s observation illustrates the pervasive influence of heteronormativity not only on the genealogy of the family unit, but also extending out, to influence, expand, or delimit the entirety of one’s worldview. To queer the lineage of history scrambles the genealogical model altogether. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam sets up what he refers to as a ‘genealogical account of history that stretches back in time through the family line.’19 Moving away from the Oedipal –​tracing what he calls ‘broken mother-​daughter bonds’ –​ Halberstam calls for

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

Taking place

a feminism grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence, and silence [that] offers spaces and modes of unknowing, failing, and forgetting as part of an affirmative feminist project, a shadow feminism which has nestled in more positivist accounts and unravelled their logics from within. This shadow feminism speaks in the language of self-​destruction, masochism, an antisocial femininity, and a refusal of the essential bond of mother and daughter that ensures that the daughter inhabits the legacy of the mother and in doing so reproduces her relationship to patriarchal forms of power.20

In the pursuit of legitimacy, feminist historical narratives have often uncritically accepted the very same linear progress tropes and genealogical models that have omitted women from the historical record and that threaten to do the same to other marginalised groups. Perpetuating an approach to feminist art history that affirms the movement but that threatens to buckle with critical intervention would only confirm that the movement and its history can only survive as an ‘alternative’ in the sense of being cordoned off from the scrutiny applied to more broadly recognised art movements. In considering the writing of feminist art history, Angela Dimitrakaki asks: How, for example, can the feminist researcher be attentive to the ways cultural hegemony is inscribed in the process of cultural interaction […]? How can she or he acknowledge the presence of, and disentangle the links between, hegemonic and nonhegemonic narratives in her or his practice in the first place, given the fact that such a practice is shaped within ideologically determined places?21

Dimitrakaki’s argument that ‘practice is shaped within ideologically determined places’ is key to my analysis of the founding and discursive formation of alternative sites of feminist and queer cultural production. Alternative spaces for feminist and queer cultural production are at once examples of the success of feminist and queer political and cultural mobilisation, and sites through which to explore how debates about the particular identities, needs, and aesthetic goals of feminist and queer art took place; as physical sites, they open up critical spaces to explore the tensions that have resulted from the attempts that have been made to write their histories, ignited by different recollections and affective relationships to these spaces, different stakes in their survival, and, importantly, different levels of access to power; as Love writes: Oppositional criticism opposes not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning. Insofar as the losses of the past motivate

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11

Introduction: building histories

us and give meaning to our current experience, we are bound to memorialize them (‘We will never forget’). But we are equally bound to overcome the past, to escape its legacy (‘We will never go back’). For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.22

Love emphasises the value of addressing the traumas of the past in writing queer history, but her observation can be applied, more broadly, to historical subjects looking to escape the damages of the past by writing triumphalist histories in the present. Historians of the feminist art movement have tended towards the pursuit of linear progress narratives that continue to promote clearly defined, universally shared goals, experiences, successes, and failures. However, feminism as historicised as a progressive movement tends to homogenise the spectrum of subjectivities that congregated, and continue to congregate, around feminism, promoting a normative account of the movement –​what cultural theorist Chela Sandoval calls ‘hegemonic ­feminism’ –​and neglecting to fully account for the experiences of those falling outside of its assumed norms and unified goals.23 Discourses of ‘failure’ are now resolutely entrenched within queer theory. Various iterations and historical accounts of queer feminist art don’t conceal or simply try to reconcile the aspects by which a project or institution failed, but actively foreground and pick at the social injuries initiated by its original presentation, working to absorb failure into the success and legacy of the project. Failure as a queer method, in my estimation, has almost become ‘too successful’ and, like so many other once transgressive queer models, risks crystallisation when taken up in academic discourse –​in other words, theory or methods with no import on the ground. My focus instead is on those things that were anticipated that did not occur, on the notion of ‘tension’ that comes with holding multiple subject positions, straddling oft maligned centre/​periphery lines, and working with multiple audiences and stakeholders in mind. As each of the chapters will explore in distinct ways, tensions may include how it’s ok that a physical space may have existed for a period of time and then ceased to exist, its closure not indicative of a failure. Or of a project to have not succeeded in its goals of emancipation, despite desiring to do so. Failure also encompasses issues of identity and exclusionary practices and harms committed on marginalised folks within specific communities. In confronting these types of failures, Kyla Wazana Tompkins offers ‘intergenerational anger,’ which, to Tompkins, carries value for both feminism’s historical recuperation and present-​day queer feminist thinking.24 As Tompkins asks, ‘what kinds of ethical relations to problematic queer, lesbian, and feminist histories are possible when the desire for inclusion into

11

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Taking place

queer, lesbian, and feminist history is so pressing, so injured, and so hurt?’25 This is where historiographical considerations are introduced –​how we can tell these stories that don’t ignore that these instances have occurred, and how staying with the sticky irreconcilability of endings, failure, and injury may fortify, secure, and elevate histories in all their complexities. Throughout the book I focus on select sites and spaces in cities including Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, and Toronto in order to affirm the historical and symbolic relevance of these particular geographic locations to queer and feminist art history. A key question that must be addressed is: why are regional studies of disparate geographic sites of feminist and queer cultural production valuable to histories of feminist and queer art and to the development of a queer feminist art history? It can certainly be argued that every city carries its own particular set of cultural histories that are just as relevant to the formation of this art historical field, so why the focus, then, on geographic locations –​urban ones at that –​that have already been mined (and some might argue, overmined) for their particular feminist and queer artistic contributions? As I will show, places such as Los Angeles and New York City –​ bridging the geographic expanse of the American West and East Coasts –​have been positioned, since the 1970s, as active sites of feminist cultural production, with exhibitions such as Doin’ It in Public and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution in Los Angeles and the 2007 Global Feminisms, and the establishment of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (the permanent home of Judy Chicago’s iconic 1979 work The Dinner Party) in New York reflecting the curatorial and historical zeal for the excavation and preservation of these histories. In Canada, Montreal as an important historical site of feminist activity is confirmed by the lasting influence of the fifty-​year-​old La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, Canada’s oldest feminist artist-​run centre, which is significant given the prominent role of artist-​run centre culture in the Canadian art world. Additionally, Quebec’s unique feminist history as it developed apart from that of the rest of Canada and as it maintains a radical activist inflection further embeds Montreal as an important site of feminist culture. Juxtaposing the enduring legacy of feminist cultural production in these cities with feminism’s ideological shifts over the past fifty years, in part due to the influence of queer and trans activism and theory, I argue that each city should now also be read through their accumulative contributions to present-​day queer identifications, activism, and cultural production. Canonical art histories chronicle a shift, beginning during World War I and fully realised in the early 1950s, from Europe as the centre of the art world to the United States (notably, New York City), following mass immigration and displacement during the two world wars, and the building up of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

31

Introduction: building histories

new mythologies supporting singularity and a view to a detached form of art spectatorship to support this shift. On a global scale, Canada’s unique art histories, while at times overlapping with American art histories and at other times entirely divergent, are rarely taken up in canonical writings, despite the wealth of historical and contemporary practices and, in particular, what artists and theorists offer in articulating notions of ‘place’ and ‘situatedness.’ Canada, in this book’s estimation, has functioned as a form of invisible support to more dominant art world discourses, self-​consciously evidenced within Canada in the 2012 Canadian Biennial, Builders, at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), which, according to then NGC Director Marc Mayer, placed ‘emergent practices alongside long-​established Canadian artists who have been instrumental in “building” a context for Canadian art today.’26 The enduring push, since the 1950s, for legislation supporting LGBTQ+​rights, coupled with Canada’s art world centres, notably, Toronto and Vancouver, being largely built and defined, in the 1960s and 1970s, by the experimental practices and institutional initiatives of queer and feminist artists, support my view of Canada as queerly operating in relation to dominant art historical discourse. More recent urgencies surrounding Indigenous land claims and reconciliation, as well as critical thinking around and activist rearticulations of national borders, have also influenced institutional practices within art spaces at all levels, from the symbolic to the structural. A cultural imaginary positioning Canada as a ‘vacant lot,’ albeit one of many vacant lots, is notably articulated in the 2014 edited volume Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada, in which the authors argue at once for the cultural specificity of the nationalist discipline of Canadian art history as built up by State support and for the increasingly tendentious formulation of a view to a national art history in an era of globalisation and a view to the arbitrariness of state-​defined borders.27 My focus on spaces and practices in Canada and the United States is one that attempts to account for a kind of productive corrosion to formerly rigid definitions of ‘nation,’ ‘citizenship,’ ‘land,’ ‘country,’ and ‘border’ to allow for more marginalised histories to come to the fore while also recognising, for better or worse, their historical reliance on hegemonic cultural, geographic, and economic centres for recognition. I position Canada and the United States as a geographic backdrop constructed by colonial demarcations and upheld in the dominant cultural imaginary. Working against a universalist view to the effects of these dissolutions and in an era in which identity politics are simultaneously urgently called on in leftist discourse and viewed as suspect in both leftist and conservative discourse, I argue that a return to, a retreading, and a rearticulation of the distinct material conditions that organise our worlds is greatly needed.

13

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Taking place

What else does each regional site stand to gain via this historical, geographical, and ideological confluence? I argue that there is good reason to further examine spaces of cultural production that have already received significant attention, as is the case of places like Los Angeles, New York City, and (to a lesser extent globally, but no less in my local –​read: Canadian –​context) Toronto and Montreal. For one, confronting stereotypical understandings of a notion of place and testing those stereotypes against queer and feminist readings changes perception as to the way certain stereotypes have historically operated. Almost unthinkingly, certain ideas about the cities that form the scope of my study crop up: Los Angeles as a city lacking a centre; New York City as made unrecognisable by cycles of gentrification; Toronto as trailing other urban centres in building up its distinct history; Montreal as divided by debates about language, class, and cultural heritage. I am aware of the risk of perpetuating these stereotypical articulations and attempt, instead, to complicate them via juxtaposition with contemporary feminist and queer art practices and histories. To this end, I position queer and feminist art practices as forms of tactical infiltration into dominant city narratives, and offer examples, in each chapter, of how queer and feminist artists, activists, and culture workers confront, negotiate, and critically engage the physical spaces that lend or deny platforms and frames to the legibility of their work. Chapter outlines In the first chapter, I lay the foundation for the chapters to follow in charting the early histories of the feminist art movement as it was developing in various urban centres across the United States and Canada, and consider the material sites of making and their implications for the constructions of history that have attached to such physical sites as the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, Montreal’s La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, and A.I.R. Gallery in New York City. I trace the pedagogical methods of the early feminist art movement in Los Angeles, considering, as well, the position of its leader, Judy Chicago, in espousing a DIY pedagogical programme in which a mastery over industrial materials and building become essential elements of the Feminist Art Program (FAP). The renovation projects undertaken by members of the FAP at the various sites occupied by the Woman’s Building from its founding in 1973 (closed in 1991) are examined and support the centrality of building and making to these pedagogical ventures. I consider, as well, how in subsequent decades of historicising the movement, well documented through oral histories, exhibitions, and online repositories, former participants have commented on this engagement with form and materials as an arduous yet essential part of the process of recognising themselves as artists, while form and materials have

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

51

Introduction: building histories

coalesced into some of the most emblematic historical containers for feminist art production, such as Womanhouse and the Woman’s Building. I also consider A.I.R. Gallery towards an alignment of the feminist currents of the era as they were being experienced on the American West and East Coasts, and at a time before adequate attempts were being made to accommodate the diversity of the identificatory needs of its constituents. A.I.R. Gallery’s multiple relocations over its almost fifty-​year (and counting) history speak to cycles of development in New York’s art world and how institutions both influenced its formation and struggled to stay afloat. Certain politics and policies point to A.I.R. Gallery’s ability to influence neighbourhood demographics, as well as the conflicting positions arising from attempts to become, and remain, visible as a women’s cooperative gallery. An early example of an alternative art space with a complex position in the tension between gentrification and the possibility of securing permanent physical space, A.I.R. Gallery, founded in 1972, was part of the first wave of art galleries to take up residence in New York’s Soho neighbourhood, transforming a formerly industrial space into a publicly recognised and legitimised space for women’s cultural production. I position A.I.R. Gallery as an alternative institution negotiating its visibility and recognition with the changing makeup of the neighbourhood in which it found itself, and consider how subcultural communities address victimisation of other local communities by gentrification, and their potential complicity in this process. On the other side of the border, I introduce Montreal’s La Centrale galerie Powerhouse, founded in 1973, and its important role in the early years of Canada’s alternative arts community. La Centrale contributed to Canada’s newfound sense of artistic identity as reflected in its burgeoning alternative arts scene as rooted in artist-​run centre culture, and to the unique political identities and divisions stemming from the feminist movement as it was developing in Canada and, more specifically, in Quebec. La Centrale also provides an example of a site of struggles over identification based in feminist and queer discourses and complicated by the shifting social demographics of Montreal’s feminist and queer communities. It is also positioned, here, as a cultural site that responds not only to these upheavals, but also to the historical transformation of feminist ideology over five decades, demonstrating a commitment to the ever-​shifting interests and needs of the social demographic it aims to serve. Extending out from the interior, to buildings as forming and formed by urban infrastructure, ‘the stones of the city’ (in Maurice Halbwachs’s words) in motion with regard to urban development and decay, legacy as related to history-​writing is key to my examination, in Chapter Two, of New York’s subcultural occupation.28 I interrogate recent histories of feminist and queer

15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Taking place

culture and the positioning of each as working to produce the environmental conditions necessary to their existence, but also victimised by the effects of gentrification. In his study of Times Square before and after the redevelopment projects of the mid-​1990s –​the result of a commercial building boom undertaken first by Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins in the late 1980s and early 1990s and completed by Mayor Giuliani in the mid-​1990s –​Samuel Delany highlights a notion of ‘contact’ as a productive form of relationality, one that can be applied not only to the culture of public sex of a community of men in the area from the 1960s to the 1990s, but also the numerous communities coming into being via shared social, political, artistic, and sexual values throughout New York’s recent cultural history. Delany writes, ‘given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.’29 Warning against urban renewal projects, such as the Times Square redevelopment project, for their consequences in reducing possibilities for contact, Delany argues that the consequences of these projects are felt most strongly by individuals and communities who lose any vestige of intimate public space to call home. New York City’s feminist and queer communities have often sprung up in underused spaces in the city and cyclically confront charges of gentrification, whereby popular narratives offer up marginalised communities as simultaneously complicit in the process and victims of its effects. An examination of the late-​twentieth-​century urban history of New York’s cycles of subcultural occupation operates at this intersection. Looking at dUMBA, the queer performance arts collective that existed in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighbourhood between 1996 and 2007, I present a chronology of the inception, use, and ultimate demise of the collective and its physical mark on the neighbourhood to show how queers both counter and are victim to the devastating effects of gentrification, zoning laws, and other threats to urban dwelling. In their physical absenting, how are the legacies of these sites of radical creativity and relationships preserved? In attempting to weave together a social history of dUMBA from the archival material and oral accounts of former members, I juxtapose with this history lens-​based projects, including Ira Sachs’s short film Last Address (2009) and photographic work by Every Ocean Hughes and Zoe Leonard from the late 1990s through the 2000s that, I argue, reclaim and reimagine the material city via artistic enactments of queer spatial occupation. My third chapter examines curatorial strategies within institutions that attempt dialogue with social movements as they occur outside of the gallery. I foreground the place of the structural support in recent exhibitions as

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

71

Introduction: building histories

producing relational encounters and theorise an imagined, if not actual, form of autonomy within the exhibition space. I consider how these structures evoke land artist Robert Smithson’s non-​site –​a ‘two dimensional analogy or metaphor’ or ‘logical picture’ of representation of an actual site that does not resemble it, where the non-​site of the gallery provides the controlled and yet malleable environment for the discursive exploration of social movements. I look to curatorial practices and works by artists that perform acts of negotiation in articulating ‘other othernesses’ defined not only by cultural context but also by the implicit negotiations experienced by the subject as racialised, ethnicised, gendered, and/​or queered –​a return to the 1980s and 1990s feminist theorising, in particular, in the work of Chandra Mohanty, Elspeth Probyn, and Adrienne Rich, on a politics of location, but with a new political urgency instigated by a renewed, increasingly centralised focus on sovereignty. In thinking through ideas about the subject, the focus is on artists who embody these other othernesses in ways that play out performatively in the imaginatively –​sometimes problematically so –​autonomous space of the gallery. The question of autonomy revolves around the political and activist aims of the encounters and negotiations enacted in the gallery space, and their transformative potential –​or impossibility –​beyond the gallery’s walls. Accentuating structures and spaces that have typically been considered ‘support’ (such as the elevator, the hallway, and the exit), as well as spaces of the everyday, such as the queer dance club, in my final chapter I consider the art, choreography, dance, and curatorial practices of a group of Canadian and American artists and choreographers including Brendan Fernandes, taisha paggett, and Trajal Harrel, whose bodies force a reckoning with taken-​as-​given understandings of art’s built environments –​the bodies they have historically served, as well as the ones they have historically made invisible. I focus on the bodies and structures that commingle with other bodies and structures within institutional space –​institutional designating the physical space of galleries and studios, but also the institution, more conceptually, of history-​writing, and the material effects of its strategic erasures. I argue that movement-​based and dance practices offer forms of strategic deployment against said erasures in the body’s pervasive and unignorable presence within scripted institutional spaces. The dancer as an actant in the gallery, rather than as a performer on the stage, occupies a space with historically fixed connotations, in particular in large-​format institutions, which have, in the last decade, turned their attention to movement-​based practices. In this chapter I consider dance’s potential, as well as shortcomings, within the context of the gallery, to foreground bodies and their movements that are typically theorised as in support of a more central

17

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

Taking place

object, experience, or performance. But I also consider how the body in the museum space signals to an outside, for instance, spaces of queer social dance, and works as a bridge between mainstream and alternative space in bringing the everyday spaces of queerness into the institution. Contrary to the title of this book, I am not looking to ‘build’ a feminist or queer art history but, rather, to examine how feminist and queer art histories have come to be built in relation to the sites that house feminist and queer artistic activity. In asking how these spaces hold up historically in the present-​day context, I put them into dialogue with contemporary queer feminist initiatives and interventions, showing how queer feminism can work, in the present day, simultaneously to secure these spaces and to critically engage their histories as integral to their continued relevance. Notes 1 Guy Debord, ‘Definitions,’ trans. Ken Knabb, Internationale Situationniste, No. 1 (June 1958), accessed 6 March 2022, www.cddc.vt.edu/​sionl​ine/​si/​defi​ niti​ons.html. 2 See Tina M. Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021); Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012) and In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2021); and Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 3 Jeffrey Lew, quoted in Martin Beck, ‘Alternative Space,’ in Alternative Art New York, 1965–​1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 254. 4 Beck, ‘Alternative Space,’ 254–​5. 5 Ibid., 255. 6 Ibid., 267. 7 Amelia Jones, ‘Queer Feminist Durationality: Time and Materiality as a Means of Resisting Spatial Objectification,’ in Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 174. 8 Ibid., 174–​5, emphasis in original. 9 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

91

Introduction: building histories

Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 10 Leila Pourtavaf, ‘Introduction,’ in Féminismes Électriques, ed. Pourtavaf (Montreal: Les Éditions du remue-​ménage & La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, 2012), 12–​13. 11 Ibid. 12 Love, Feeling Backward, 1. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Rebecca Coleman, ‘“Things That Stay”: Feminist Theory, Duration and the Future,’ Time & Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2008), 86. 16 Mira Schor, ‘Patrilineage,’ Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 2, Feminist Art Criticism (Summer 1991), 58. 17 Ibid. Of particular relevance is the fact of the semi-​closeted homosexuality of artists like Johns and Rauschenberg, analysed by scholars including Gavin Butt and Jonathan D. Katz, and the possibility that these two artists nevertheless maintain art world prominence, over women artists, despite the perception of sexual deviation. See Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–​1963 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005) and Jonathan D. Katz, ‘Lovers and Divers: Interpictorial Dialogue in the Work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,’ Frauen, Kunst, Wissenschaft, Vol. 25 (June 1998), 16–​31. 18 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 90. Emphasis in original. 19 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 124. 20 Ibid. 21 Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘Researching Culture/​ s and the Omitted Footnote: Questions on the Practice of Feminist Art History,’ reprinted in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2010), 361. 22 Love, Feeling Backward, 1. 23 Chela Sandoval, quoted in Becky Thompson, ‘Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2, Second Wave Feminism in the United States (Summer 2002), 337. Thompson writes, in 2002, of her initial excitement to read a number of then recent histories chronicling the emergence of second-​ wave feminism and her subsequent concern in discovering their accounts of feminism as ‘white led, marginaliz[ing] the activism and world views of women of color, focus[ing] mainly on the United States, treat[ing] sexism as the ultimate oppression. Hegemonic feminism deemphasizes or ignores a class and race analysis, generally sees equality with men as the goal of

19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Taking place







feminism, and has had an individual rights-​based, rather than justice-​ based vision for social change.’ 24 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, ‘Reflections of a Real-​Life Feminist Killjoy: Ball-​ Busters and the Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-​Feminist Life,’ in Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings, ed. Cait McKinney and Allyson Mitchell (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019), 143. 25 Ibid., 152. 26 National Gallery of Canada, ‘Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012. An exhibition that showcases some of the most provocative and important art being made in this country today from 2 November 2012 to 20 January 2013,’ press release, 31 October 2021, accessed 20 November 2021, www.gall​ery.ca/​for-​profes​sion​ als/​media/​press-​relea​ses/​build​ers-​canad​ian-​bienn​ial-​2012-​an-​exh​ibit​ion-​ that-​showca​ses. 27 Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton and Kirsty Robertson, eds. Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2014). 28 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 134. 29 Delany, Times Square Red, 111.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Shifting foundations

Rather than interpret ‘women’s culture’ as the obscure underbelly of culture, one might instead follow the metaphors, and see women, feminists, and Woman’s Building art workers as rebuilding a house from the inside. These ‘houses’ are the institutions of women’s culture, which we have built (rather than rebuilt), perhaps using ‘feminist process’ and education to develop out from the center. These houses are often referred to as ‘alternative feminist organizations,’ those fluid, egalitarian, informal, unstructured nebulae of our imaginations. These are laboratories where women can apply their dreams and metaphors, and recreate themselves in a concrete environment, spinning out redemptive culture-​ in-​­formation. –​Sondra Hale, ‘Power and Space: Feminist Culture and the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, A Context’1

From 1 October 2011 to 25 February 2012, the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California, was host to Doin’ It in Public Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building. This historical exhibition chronicled the activities that took place under the roof of the now defunct Woman’s Building, ‘a public center for women’s culture,’ and the hub of much feminist art activity occurring in the Southern California region from its founding in 1973 until its closure in 1991.2 Curators Sue Maberry, Director of the Library and Instructional Technology at Otis and former member of the Woman’s Building, and Meg Linton, Director of Galleries and Exhibitions, mined several archives across the United States, including those held at Otis College of Art and Design, the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, as well as the private collections of several former members of the Woman’s Building, to curate what amounted to but a small sample of the vast amount of art work and ephemera that collected in and around the building. The exhibition featured hundreds of posters, photographs, photocopies, flyers, postcards, catalogues, journals, news clippings, buttons, videos, and other forms of documentation, and was supported by an expansive two-​ volume catalogue, as well as a comprehensive website featuring a timeline, oral history video interviews with former members, an image archive, and

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

Taking place

an extensive bibliography. This sample evoked a broader spectrum of feminist art activity and activism as it ignited in the early 1970s, anchored to physical sites such as the Woman’s Building –​in the absence of an enduring physical space, memorialised and historicised, in more recent years, through its material effects. Former Woman’s Building member Terry Wolverton has argued that the extensive documentation that has survived despite the closure of the Woman’s Building is due, in part, to the participation and mentorship of trained art historians within the feminist art movement and at the Woman’s Building, who recognised the importance of keeping, and leaving, a record;3 record-​keeping within the Woman’s Building did not reflect an effort to establish and promote individual careers, but to fill the gaps left in the historical record as it concerned women artists –​and to effectively change culture. An exhibition like Doin’ It in Public, centred on the events at the now defunct physical space of the Woman’s Building, confronts several historiographical challenges in its effort to resurrect the feminist art movement in the space of the gallery. By virtue of the limitations of their taxonomies, archives are necessarily limited, and limiting: art historian Joan M. Schwartz and historian Terry Cook write that archives ‘wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies.’4 The use to which archives are put by historians and curators, in evidence in the Doin’ It in Public exhibition, shines a light on underdeveloped histories but also risks the promotion of certain histories –​promoted through material effects –​as indisputable truth. Archives, as containers for material ephemera, risk neglecting the affective histories that cannot be immediately read onto the object and that, as Ann Cvetkovich argues, are ‘hard to archive because they are lived experiences, and the cultural traces that they leave are frequently inadequate to the task of documentation.’5 It is now well established that archives, in their directing the researcher to what is there, can distract from thinking about what is not, and from questioning the affective repercussions of being absented from the historical record. The particular form of history-​writing related to the Woman’s Building and other earlier feminist art spaces has tended towards representing the ­physical building and its material effects: the building as a physical trace of the flurry of professional, artistic, and relational activity that occurred within it (while much of the artwork –​often collaborative, performance-​based, and installation-​based –​survives only as documentation or memory). The task of historicising the movement, which increasingly agitates at the margins of inclusion in canonical art history, introduces challenges with regard to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Shifting foundations

representation, such as the curatorial choice, in Doin’ It in Public, to position the Woman’s Building as symbolically and literally central to the early feminist art movement. Paradoxically, histories of the Woman’s Building consistently position the building itself as the resounding individual in a movement that eschewed individualism, and as a towering monument to the development of the feminist art movement. While foregrounding the physical site that was the Woman’s Building as a central actor in the feminist art movement may have been the point, this decision prompts my question: does curating the feminist art movement from the vantage point of what is arguably its most iconic institution transform it into a sitting duck for critique? Or does this curatorial frame support an argument for the radical historical possibilities afforded by institutional histories? What do later developments in feminist, queer, trans, and critical race theory offer in returning to these sites, and, in entering queer institutional histories into the dialogue, how have notions of ‘alternative’ shifted in subsequent decades? The Woman’s Building is a well-​trodden entry point for considering the early feminist movement and the events that transpired within it, despite the fact that many feminist theorists, artists, curators, and activists have since turned their backs on the era that catalysed feminist art. The radical and cultural feminisms of the 1970s that inspired the pursuit of autonomous spaces for women artists to create nevertheless have ongoing influence, just as earlier emancipatory cultural works, such as Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, as well as cultural events centred around women’s art production and women’s culture, such as the 1893 Woman’s Building at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, influenced the formation and identity of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building.6 The second-​wave feminisms that effectively mobilised a generation of women into feminist political consciousness extended the struggle for women’s equality by magnifying key issues deemed central to women’s experience, including reproductive rights, women in relation to the family unit, and sexual empowerment. But despite the gains of the feminist movement as it overlapped with civil rights and anti-​war activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the movement came to be criticised, with the advent of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic feminism in the 1980s and a turn to the performative nature of gender in the early 1990s, for its lack of attention to and over-​ simplification of cultural, racial, sexual, and class differences, and its resulting emphasis on women’s ‘shared experiences’ that excluded many women from its purview.7 However, I argue that the creation of enclaves for the production of art by women catalysed the social and political conditions necessary to later generations of feminist artists, producing the very platforms necessary to subsequent decades of self-​critique.

23

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Taking place

What follows is far from exhaustive, nor is it faithfully chronological; rather, I attempt to identify shared and divergent tactics within several feminist art institutions across Canada and the United States, emphasising the role of the institutions and buildings themselves not as playing support roles, but as central actants that provided burgeoning feminist art ideology its material manifestation. Alternative to what? In a 1986 interview, Wolverton recounted, ‘The Woman’s Building was founded with the initial anger of the feminist art movement… We really saw ourselves as an alternative to the art world. Now we feel a viable part of the art world. We’re not over on the fringes sneering at everyone.’8 In Wolverton’s statement we must consider the shift in meaning that has occurred over the last fifty years around the word ‘alternative,’ especially as it relates to artist and subcultural communities, from its more literal definition –​alternative as ‘another possibility’ (though not necessarily destabilising conventions of power and often complicit in oppression) –​to alternative in the radical emancipatory sense, and the ways in which the two meanings have been simultaneously engaged, as well as differentiated, throughout histories of feminist and queer art and art history.9 At a time in North America when dominant styles had already been challenged and a singular movement had been upended by a plurality of movements –​not to mention the effects of the 1960s countercultural movements and the rise of various rights movements –​it is intriguing to think of what ‘alternatives’ could offer women artists, and why it is they were pursued in an era dominated by alternatives. We can think of early sites of feminist art production not as seeking to be annexed from the centre, but attempting to enter into the frame, in many ways mirroring approaches taken in more dominant movements. The physical sites of this activity become important not only for historical mapping purposes, but also as sites of critical interrogation. As I explore in subsequent chapters, ‘alternative’ opens up to various ways of building, occupying, and conceptualising space for later feminist and queer artists. But in the 1970s, becoming visible first required physical space. Although we are likely to take for granted, in the present day, the now canonical histories of the feminist art movement, I argue that it’s important to consider the simultaneous challenges and possibilities afforded feminist cultural workers in making these spaces, leading to what now seems like the logical outcome: a network of art spaces across North America devoted to supporting women artists. However, as I will show, it is wholly unsurprising

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Shifting foundations

that particular demographics of feminist artists –​read: white, cisgender, straight –​were successful in entrenching their specific histories within the canon, aided by the prominence of their physical sites of creative production. Historical approaches to early feminist art have tended to promote a unified history, positioning a string of initiatives as instrumental to the movement’s coming into being. This approach has had the effect of flattening the history of the movement, rarely reflecting its complexities, and leading to the continued exclusion of those activities, groups, and identifications that posed a challenge to the linear progress narratives of second-​wave feminism. As feminist historian Michelle Moravec observes, History making occurs in many ways. Most simply, history involves constructing linear narratives connecting the past to the present. However, in the process, branches get pruned in order to create a single story. Determining what gets cut and what remains involves far more complicated processes than simply putting events in chronological order.10

The triumphalist approach to feminist history works to establish distance between cultural legitimacy and the damages of the past, often leading to the omission of these damages –​and those within their scope –​from the historical record. I argue that one of the reasons why the complex histories of non-​heterosexual, non-​white participants in the feminist art movement often remain in the margins of history is that the desire to produce a positive, triumphalist narrative in the face of mainstream backlash against feminism resulted in an inability to confront the movement’s internal tensions and complicity in perpetuating exclusionary structures. The impact of these omissions makes a queer feminist reading especially relevant, as does the work of queer and feminist artists working in more recent years who engage the feminist art movement, however, retrofitting it for the queer feminist present.11 Curating history from the privilege of the present offers an opportunity for critical reframing: for instance, while Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building provided a new occasion to interrogate linear progress narratives and the symbolic positioning of the Woman’s Building at the historic centre of the feminist art movement, the exhibition’s inclusion in the city-​ wide Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–​1980 also incites a reading of the Woman’s Building through established scholarship on margins and centres, which carries particular import for the study of minoritarian communities. Tending to the specificities of space and, perhaps more importantly, place, to histories of subcultural art production, the curatorial premise of Pacific Standard Time (PST) invokes scholarship on the psychogeography of the city

25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

Taking place

of Los Angeles and challenges the lines along which margins and centres are traditionally drawn. Theorists and historians warned early on against readings of PST along the lines of centre/​periphery, suggesting that the relative ‘newness’ of Los Angeles’s cultural histories, as art historian Thomas Crow wrote, ‘obviates worries about regionalism, center/​periphery, or any other obsolete comparative p ­ erspective.’12 This conforms to art historian Donald Preziosi’s apprehension about centre/​ periphery dualisms and his belief that ‘every centre/​periphery model of art history […] unavoidably reiterates the historical relations of power that its critical reemployments attempt to dismantle.’13 However, in the context of the historicisation of Los Angeles’s subcultural arts communities, many of which had never entered into mainstream historical consciousness until PST, Crow’s dismissal skates over the significance of the opportunity for these communities to see themselves reflected in culture; it is, after all, all too common for claims of obsolescence to be deployed at the very moment when minoritarian subjects are given arenas in which to become visible. As PST showed, Los Angeles’s art scene largely owes its identity, as well as its history, to art movements constituted by a series of marginalised and subcultural art communities. This confirms urban historian Dolores Hayden’s earlier observation that in past decades the history of ethnic minorities and women has been obscured by the belief that these activities are not of broad public interest and importance. In the case of ethnic minorities, some historians and preservationists have assumed that only other members of the minority group have an interest in the history. In the case of women, the stereotype that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ has suggested that women have no significant public history. In a city with the demographic composition of Los Angeles, where ethnic minorities and women are the majority, both of these outmoded views can lead to the even more destructive generalization that Los Angeles is a city without any history.14

Paying particular attention to Black, Chicanx, and Asian-​American artists, as well as women artists and queer artists, as reflected in well-​funded and well-​documented exhibitions, Pacific Standard Time included Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, as well as exhibitions such as Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican American Generation, Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–​1987, Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–​1980, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–​1980, Places of Validation, Art, and Progression, and ‘Round the Clock: Chinese American Artists Working in Los Angeles –​to name a few.15 Just

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

Shifting foundations

under a third of the exhibitions were devoted explicitly to practices by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Colour) artists, queer artists, and women artists, while many others diverged from conventional histories of modernism and postwar artistic mediums to present Los Angeles’s participation in histories of experimental film and video, performance art, and collective and collaborative practices. This event provocatively challenged the mainstream singular view of Los Angeles’s cultural identity, in essence hinging Los Angeles’s cultural identity on a series of shifting centres.16 This reflects what Meiling Cheng has called ‘multicentricity,’ which she developed specifically in relation to Los Angeles and its performance art communities and which she defines as a strategy for cultural intervention [that] focuses on the conceptual level. The multicentric paradigm serves to activate a procedure of cognizances that may eventually change general perceptions about the status of minoritization […] the concept of multicentricity subverts the existing power structure, which takes for granted the boundary between the ‘majority’ and the ‘minority,’ between ‘dominant’ cultures and ‘marginal’ others. The multicentric paradigm consequently has the potential to become a resistant strategy for those who are involuntarily relegated to the margins by the existing power structure.17

Cheng’s Los Angeles stands as one point that subsequently influences conceptions of the centrality and marginality of other Los Angeleses, which ultimately influence the centrality and marginality of both Cheng and her Los Angeles; she importantly states, ‘center is seldom self-​sufficient, center is usually situational, center is potentially receptive, and center is always ­provisional.’18 Cheng underlines multicentricity’s value as an ‘instrument of analysis’ that carries the potential to ‘attain a more lasting and diffusive power’ when attached to Michel Foucault’s theory of discursive formation; to Cheng, discursive formation is a ‘ “system of dispersion” between statements, textual objects, concepts, and themes that reach “a regularity” in culture. The power of discursive formation accordingly derives from its cultural scale, demonstrated by the regularity and circulation of similar statements in a massive intertextual performance of correlated concepts.’19 Foucault’s discursive formation initiates a consideration about physical space in relation to ideology, linguistics, agency, and performance, building on earlier work on language and performativity by J. L. Austin (in particular, his articulation of ‘speech acts’ and ‘performative utterances’), taken up in postmodern theory and cultural studies by Raymond Williams and, subsequently, in performance studies and queer theory by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler.20 Theorising has centred predominantly on the body and embodiment, and the way by which the body and its materiality are, in part,

27

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Taking place

discursively constructed. It is only in recent years that the fields of geography and architecture, both traditionally conceived of as fields of materialist study, have turned towards considerations of performativity, affect, and the effect of human agency in the material world, confirmed by the development of psycho-​ and social geography and feminist architectural theory. As Tony Giddens has observed, ‘the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that constitute those systems,’21 while Elizabeth Grosz has argued that ‘[t]‌he body and its environment … produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have had into the image of the other.’22 The Woman’s Building tagline, ‘a public center for women’s culture,’ offers an example of how discursive formation mobilises the building and subject formation at once; it points to the way in which women who came to the Woman’s Building might have felt ‘centered’ by a sense of the community of which they came to be part and to the way in which the Woman’s Building, both spatially and metaphorically, came to be at the ‘center’ of their worlds. In an interview conducted on the occasion of Doin’ It in Public, Wolverton recounted how she initially came to be involved with the Woman’s Building, promoting a narrative of personal progress that had an epiphanic effect on her life: I couldn’t put together my feminism and my creativity. There was no space that allowed for both those things. The women’s movement did not understand my desire to be an artist and the people I was hanging out with in theatre did not understand my feminism, let alone my lesbianism, and I felt kind of despairing. And then I read about the Woman’s Building. And I had never been to California, I had never thought I would go to California –​because when you grow up in Detroit, you think, ‘I’ll go to New York’ –​but I just thought, ‘I have to go there. I’m going there.’23

Situating California and New York –​two cultural ‘centers’ –​as though the only two cultural poles from which one could choose (a common perception that obliterated the spectrum of feminist activity that was happening across the country), Wolverton’s own sense of disorientation by her choice to travel west, rather than east, suggests a mythical, magnetic pull towards the Woman’s Building, a magnetism that serves to both re-​orient and pull her out of cultural, political, and sexual isolation. This narrative has been repeated in various forms by many other former members of the Woman’s Building who came to Los Angeles from all over the United States to take part in the feminist art activities begun with the formation of the Fresno Feminist Art Program. Taken together, they construct a dichotomy of ‘before’ and ‘after’ the Woman’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Shifting foundations

Front entrance with signage designed by Sheila de Bretteville reading, ‘The Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture, welcomes you,’ 1977.

Building and all it came to stand for, and a coming into awareness of and involvement in feminist consciousness-​raising and the feminist art movement, in line with the linear progress narratives of 1970s feminisms: ‘And then I read about the Woman’s Building’ secures the Building’s central position in the narrative and also serves another purpose, which is the monumentalisation of the building itself. Physical sites of exhibition and cultural production provide valuable evidence for further exploration into the way in which ideology and subjecthood are both reflected within and constituted by space. Specific tactics employed within early feminist art spaces promote ideology made manifest, or else, reflect attempts to manifest ideology into physical, indelible form. In retreading the material and discursive terrain of the early feminist art movement, a self-​conscious self-​historicisation also becomes palpable. For instance, the Feminist Art Program, led by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro at CalArts from 1971 to 1976, often promoted the idea of a genealogical link between the nascent feminist art movement and the writings of Virginia Woolf, from whom the term ‘a room of one’s own’ was regularly borrowed and liberally used. The adoption of the phrase carried not only ideological, but also practical implications, specifically concerning the space required to make art and, ultimately, to the material process of making art. The historical

29

1.1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Taking place

identity of the Woman’s Building was intentionally constructed as a progressive narrative around its namesake, the Woman’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago, funded by Chicago socialite Berthe Honore Palmer and designed by architect Sophia Hayden to house the women’s pavilion.24 A booklet created in 1975 by Maria Karras, entitled The Woman’s Building Chicago 1893, the Woman’s Building Los Angeles 1973–​, was intended to make the link between these two geographically and temporally disparate sites more explicit, and to symbolically propel the Los Angeles Woman’s Building into the future, as suggested by the hanging hyphen. The 1893 Woman’s Building was run by the Board of Lady Managers, a name that was subsequently appropriated by the Los Angeles Woman’s Building members to refer to their own board, which had the unwanted effect of promoting a hierarchical structure. Member Julia Stein’s contribution to Karras’s booklet reflects the self-​consciousness of history-​making that had already begun to take hold with regard to promoting the Los Angeles Woman’s Building and the history of the feminist art movement as sharing this narrative thread: The first Woman’s Building in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was only a temporary exhibit of women’s work. When the fair ended, the building was torn down and Mary Cassatt’s murals were destroyed. In 1975, the Los Angeles Woman’s Building has lasted one and half [sic] years. Are we too going to leave a few photographs and a half-​forgotten history? Will a girl child born this year need a Woman’s Building in 1993? If in 1993 that young woman of eighteen years received as much encouragement and support in her art as her brother gets, then she will not need a separate building. But if, as I fear, sexism will merely be ameliorated but not eliminated, then, I hope, in 1993 our young women artists will not have read an art history book titled ‘A History of Women’s Buildings: 1893 Chicago and 1973–​1978 Los Angeles,’ but she will be walking through the doors of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building.25

What we see in these examples is a recognition of the power of the discursive in forging and entrenching genealogy; feminist artists offered a neatly packaged history for entry into the canon, but one with dangling threads for subsequent generations of queer and feminist artists to unravel. Shifting centres: artist-​run centre culture in Canada and feminist intersections At the same time that women artists across the continent were grappling with and innovating new spaces in which to produce and exhibit, several disparate

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

13

Shifting foundations

arts communities in Canada were responding to the relative lack of venues in which to show and a belief that Canada lacked an art scene of its own. Although this was not an exclusively feminist endeavour, queer and feminist artists were often at the forefront, notably in urban centres such as Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, and through the forging of cross-​country and cross-​ border networks. In his 1983 essay ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,’ in which he chronicles the development, in the early 1970s, of Canada’s own artistic identity, General Idea member AA Bronson portrays a self-​consciousness similar to that of feminist artists in the United States in attempting to forge a history and mythology that, at the time, was still in the process of unfolding: As such a Canadian artist desiring to see not necessarily himself, but the picture of his art scene pictured on TV; and knowing the impossibility of an art scene without real museums […] without real art magazines […] without real artists […] as such an artist desiring such a picture of such a scene […] it was natural to call upon our national attributes –​the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic –​and working together, and working sometimes not together we laboured to structure, or rather to untangle from the messy post-​ Sixties spaghetti of our minds, artist-​run galleries, artists’ video, and artist-​run magazines. And that allowed us to allow ourselves to see ourselves as an art scene. And we did.26

The artist-​run centre (also sometimes known as ‘parallel galleries’27 in the early 1970s) model has achieved longevity in the Canadian context due to sustained support from municipal and federal governments and the dedication of alternative arts communities to their survival. In the early 1970s, two programmes established by Canada’s Liberal Government –​Opportunities for Youth and the Local Initiatives Program –​allowed artist groups to identify themselves as community organisations in order to apply for funding under these programmes. The funding permitted organisations to hire staff and implement programming, which then permitted them to put pressure on the Canada Council for the Arts –​a Crown corporation established in 1957 for the funding of art in Canada –​to begin to fund artists’ organisations.28 With this support, early artist-​run centres could focus on non-​commodifiable experimental and political practices, to which feminist and queer artists contributed greatly.29 A consultants’ report titled ‘The Distinct Role of Artist-​Run Centres in the Canadian Visual Arts Ecology,’ published in 2011 and prepared for the Canada Council for the Arts, identified four key characteristics that have defined the role of artist-​run centres in Canada’s art ecologies: ‘1) self determination and artistic experimentation 2) collaboration and networking 3) a grounding in

31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Taking place

larger social movements and 4) a more recent trend towards increasing professional capacity.’30 Like their counterparts in the United States –​artist-​run spaces operating outside of the mainstream museum and gallery system –​the increasing professionalisation of artist-​run centres has introduced questions as to their alternative status. Anne Bertrand, Director of Artist-​Run Centres and Collectives Conference (ARCA) has observed, ‘There’s often a debate within artist-​run culture about whether these centres are a training ground upon which emerging artists can eventually become affiliated with larger institutions, or whether they are actually an alternative to the system.’31 The artist-​run centre model, as articulated by Clive Robertson, engages a ‘hybrid’ model of organisation in its engagement with the state and in ‘problematiz[ing] the rights and responsibilities of cultural work and citizenship within a governmental framework.’32 Robertson has also argued that early artist-​run centres, regardless of geographic location within ‘centre’ cities such as Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, nevertheless included ‘centre’ in their designation to ‘signal an inversion of “centre and periphery.” ’33 The shared emancipatory goals of feminist and alternative institutions meet in one of Canada’s oldest artist-​run centres, Montreal’s La Centrale galerie Powerhouse (founded in 1973), originally Galerie et atelier la Centrale Électrique/​Powerhouse Gallery & Studio, which contributed importantly not only to the feminist art movement, but also to Canada’s newfound sense of alternative artistic identity as reflected by its burgeoning alternative arts scene in the 1970s. Like its American counterparts, such as the Woman’s Building, La Centrale, in its early years, was keen to position itself not only as a site for the production and exhibition of women artists’ work, but also as a kind of feminist community centre open not just to women artists, but to all women. Sheena Gourlay has written about La Centrale that ‘women’s culture was understood in a large sense, including not only all the arts but also in the sense of a community with its own way of thinking and doing things. It was to be a place where women’s culture was to be generated –​hence Powerhouse.’34 Quebec’s feminist mobilisation in the early 1970s introduces another consideration with regard to alternatives, annexing itself from the feminist movement in the rest of the country and engaging the political tensions of Quebec in relation to the rest of Canada at the end of the 1970s. As a statement on the province’s perceived colonisation by the rest of Canada, Quebec feminists aligned themselves with global decolonisation movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Janine Marchessault has explained: ‘if feminist culture continues to assert a collective spirit in Quebec, it is in part because the rise of second-​wave feminism was aligned to the sovereignty movement [of the 1960s and 1970s].’35 Marchessault argues that in Quebec, feminist and separatist politics were

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

33

Shifting foundations

aligned in their pursuit of a liberation that was defined by cultural i­dentity. The Front Commun des Québécoises [Common Front of Quebec Women] focused their efforts on securing space for women in the public sphere, while The Front de libération des femmes du Québec (FLF) [Liberation Front of Quebec Women] had both anglophone and francophone members who were united by their investment in the labour movement. The name of the group spoke to its alignment with the radical leftist Front de libération de Québec (FLQ), whose slogan, ‘Pas de Québec libre sans libération des femmes! Pas de femmes libres sans libération du Québec,’ [No liberation for Quebec without women’s liberation! No women’s liberation without Quebec liberation!]36 joined Quebec sovereignty struggles with women’s liberation. The FLF was also clear about their desire for emancipation from capitalist and patriarchal systems of oppression, clearly stated in the Québec Women’s Manifesto: ‘we are victims of two systems, capitalism and patriarchy … our liberation supposes the end of these two systems … something no social revolution has ever accomplished.’37 While in many ways Quebec’s feminist movement, catalysed by such organisations as the FLF, endorsed the pursuit of the goals that were coming to define the feminist movement across North America (from universal daycare, to access to abortion and birth control, to wage equality), it was different in its focus on the idea of the dismantling of capitalism as key to women’s liberation. Marchessault delineates how the FLF was initially concerned to draw links between race, ethnicity, and gender, before class came to dominate discussions regarding how to achieve emancipation. Ultimately, the FLF expelled its anglophone members and began to form a two-​tiered concept of identity that would incorporate Marxist-​Leninist analysis and American radical feminism, an intersection that responded appropriately to their focus on class and labour issues and the turn towards cultural production and a ‘utopian politic.’38 After disbanding and reforming as the Centre des femmes in 1971, the group continued to refuse to be involved in anglophone feminist initiatives, such as the Montréal Feminist Association, due to a perception of its foundations in liberal feminism; as Marchessault argues, it was radical feminist culture that led to the formation of women’s cultural collectives in Quebec in the mid-​ 1970s: ‘identity needs a culture, and culture must have its space.’39 La Centrale opened its doors in 1973 in a 4 ½ room apartment on the second floor of 1210 Greene Avenue in Westmount –​a solidly anglophone area of the city. What brought about the founding of La Centrale, then shorthanded as Powerhouse, was the same popular feminist practice of consciousness-​raising that was informing feminist art practices across the continent. A group of women who gathered at the nearby crafts store Flaming Apron agreed that there

33

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Taking place

existed no adequate spaces in which to present women’s work in a professional context.40 However, tensions quickly arose as to whether or not La Centrale’s objective was to show art that was explicitly feminist, or simply art that was made by women, regardless of whether or not the work was conscientiously political in nature –​an effect of the overall lack of spaces in Montreal for women artists to exhibit.41 Further institutional tension resulted from La Centrale’s roots, at the time, in Montreal’s anglophone community (with founding members including Elizabeth Bertoldi, Leslie Busch, Isobel Dowler-​Gow, Margaret Griffin, Clara Gutsche, Tanya Rosenberg,42 Billie-​Joe Mericle, Stasje Plantenga, and Pat Walsh), resulting in an alignment of the gallery’s anglophone members with the broader North American feminist movement, while its francophone members remained entrenched in the identity issues of feminist communities in Quebec. Following a succession of relocations, from the anglophone Westmount location, to the east-​ end francophone location on rue St-​Dominique in the Plateau in 1974, to boulevard St Laurent in 1987, to the commercial zone of rue St Catherine West near Place-​des-​Arts, before moving, in 2003, to its current location, 4296 boulevard St Laurent, the commercial strip of Montreal known, unofficially, as ‘The Main,’ and also known, unofficially, as the border between anglophone (west of St Laurent) and francophone (east of St Laurent) Montreal, La Centrale, in its present-​day incarnation, has predominantly francophone membership, but works to engage artists and art workers in both English and French, strengthening its local, national, and international presence. An important way in which La Centrale diverged, early on, from other early feminist organisations, such as the Feminist Art Program or the early communities formed around the Woman’s Building, is due to the implicit tensions surrounding its identity, the community-​focused political structure of artist-​ run centres, and an awareness of and sensitivity to an inability to represent all women. For example, in 1991, La Centrale published a statement outlining the programming committee’s position on representing the Polytechnique Massacre of 1989,43 commenting that, ‘La Centrale cannot have an opinion or adopt a specific position as it is composed of numerous individuals who have different opinions. There is not just one feminism. No one woman can speak for all other women.’44 While this statement can be read as a reflection of Quebec’s feminist artists diverging from prevalent, continent-​wide trends in the feminist art movement –​for instance, the feminist art movement in Southern California, which has been perceived to gain its strength in the very cultural feminism for which it has also been criticised –​and the ability to establish goals separate from the constraints imposed by this movement, this statement also speaks to a culture consistently defined by political and social tension, more specifically, the intentional splintering of feminist camps

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

53

Shifting foundations

35

into linguistic and class-​based categories. Thus, it is possible to conceive of La Centrale as groundbreaking –​at the time –​in its refusal to affix a singular idea of womanhood to a dominant idea of feminism.45 Building pedagogy 1970s feminism in the United States and Canada witnessed the development of a feminist aesthetic and pedagogy that was dubiously received and rarely legitimised within broader, male-​centric art world circles. A notable aspect of early feminist art pedagogy and praxis was not just its adoption of physical space, but its engagement with the very making of these physical spaces as a key pedagogical endeavour. In 1970, Judy Chicago was working as a visiting professor at Fresno State College, where she developed the first Feminist Art Program (FAP), an all-​women’s class that met off-​campus (mostly in the homes of students) and which required special permission for students to attend. Shortly thereafter, the members of the class sought out their own studio space away from the college’s campus and took on the first of many renovation projects that would become part of a developing feminist art

Taking down the sign for Grubb & Ellis, the first step in taking over the old Chouinard building on Grandview which became the first location of the Woman’s Building, 1973.

1.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36

Taking place

pedagogy, based on Chicago’s own adoption of the traditionally masculine domain of sculpture and its use of industrial materials, as well as her belief in the need for women artists to hone ‘masculine’ skills. Following the temporary Womanhouse project (1972), in which FAP students renovated a derelict mansion on Los Angeles’s Mariposa Avenue, retrofitting each room with an art installation intended to reflect the original domestic purposes of each room, the Woman’s Building provided a more visible, permanent home for the feminist art community formed in its first Southern California permutation at Fresno. Founded in 1973 by Judy Chicago, designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and art historian Arlene Raven, whose Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW), an independent art school for women, was housed in the building, the first Woman’s Building took over the Grandview building, which had formerly housed the Chouinard Art Institute, at 743 Grand View Street near MacArthur Park –​a predominantly Chicanx neighbourhood whose community had little to do with the activities at the Woman’s Building.46 The Woman’s Building has been explored by Sondra Hale as an instance of radical feminist ideology materialised; she observed that 1727 North Spring Street, the last site at which the Woman’s Building was located before its closure in 1991, was a 1920s building in a warehouse district that was transformed from a ‘male’ space of factory work into one of women’s culture by a group of ‘metaphoric squatters’: the woman who came to form the Woman’s Building community.47 Shifting margins to centre, the willingness of women artists to occupy the sparsely populated and rundown industrial area of downtown Los Angeles demonstrated both their lack of access to mainstream space and their resourcefulness in claiming alternative space to suit their needs. Hayden has argued that the Woman’s Building was most notable for espousing not the cultural feminism that had instigated the feminist art movement as a whole, but a burgeoning socialist feminist material culture; Hayden writes: In the process of domesticating public space, cultural institutions that exist somewhere between the private domain and the public domain play a key role … One such institution is the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, a public center for women’s culture … It includes gallery space, artists’ studio space, a performance space, and offices. The Woman’s Building was designed to create a political and cultural bridge between public and private life.48

Projects such as the Woman’s Building worked, on the one hand, to counter gendered monopolisation of space by making transparent the labour being done by women to renovate these formerly industrial zones, while, on the other hand, neglecting to adequately respond to the forms of labour oppression deeply embedded in industrial space.

73

37

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Shifting foundations

Two women with scaffolding. Construction of the new space on Spring Street, November 1975.

1.3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

Taking place

1.4

Sheila de Bretteville and Suzanne Lacy moving sheet rock, November 1975.

1.5

Taping the walls on the second floor, November 1975.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

93

Shifting foundations

Art historian Juli Carson has commented on the overall effect the mobilisation of women artists had on the art world, writing that, ‘one could argue that the proliferation of alternative spaces and galleries in the 1970s and 1980s, centered on a politics of class, race, and gender identification, was, in part, a result of [the] feminist demand for [gender] parity.’49 Amid this early 1970s flurry of feminist art activity, New York’s A.I.R. Gallery was founded in 1972 by Dotty Attie, Maude Boltz, Mary Grigoriadis, Nancy Spero, Susan Williams, and Barbara Zucker, who rounded out their twenty-​person membership with artists Rachel Bas-​Cohain, Judith Bernstein, Blythe Bohnan, Agnes Denes, Daria Dorosh, Loretta Dunkelman, Harmony Hammond, Laurance James, Nancy Kitchell, Louise Kramer, Anne Healy, Rosemarie Mayer, Patsy Norvell, and Howardena Pindell. Intended to sound like the ‘Eyre’ of ‘Jane Eyre’ (while ‘A.I.R.’ was adopted from the ‘Artists in Residence’ designation required for abandoned industrial spaces occupied by artists to meet fire codes), A.I.R. Gallery’s goal was to provide a permanent physical site for women artists (all of whom had to be members) to exhibit, a model that became popular for women’s art galleries across the continent. At their original 97 Wooster Street location in New York’s Soho neighbourhood, A.I.R. Gallery contributed to what was then a burgeoning gallery community, a non-​profit organisation financed by members’ dues and a ‘pay to show’ policy. As with Womanhouse, most of the labour to renovate A.I.R. Gallery was undertaken by members; Martin Beck has commented on the before-​and-​ after photographs that were taken while renovations were underway, noting how they ‘illustrate, step by step, the transformation of one kind of space into another; they document the process of inserting a clean spatial shell into a masculine-​coded working space.’50 That the interior of A.I.R. came to resemble the white cube aesthetic of commercial, mainstream galleries and larger institutions confirms Beck’s estimation that A.I.R. aimed to create ‘an opening for women artists within the regular system, not a venue outside it.’51 A.I.R. Gallery, it can be argued, was not guided by the same emancipatory goals of artists involved in the Los Angeles feminist movement, but looked to seek out the means necessary to establish a visible and competitive position within New York’s art world. This hypothesis requires a shift in thinking about the original purpose of alternative spaces: Beck writes that ‘the physical condition of that space is less important than the social inclusion and exclusion processes that regulate access to and representation within it. Thus the main purpose of an alternative space is ability to produce visibility.’52 This definition is useful to keep in mind when considering the ways in which a space like A.I.R. Gallery negotiated its feminist mandate focused on the inclusion of women artists in the art world and promoting a more mainstream feminist

39

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

Taking place

politic, at times to the detriment of the intersecting political identifications a contemporary understanding of feminist activism would seek to advocate. A.I.R. Gallery demonstrates that for some feminist institutions, the goal was not necessarily emancipation from dominant circuits, but rather, seeking out the means necessary to establish a visible presence and competitive position within the art world –​legitimisation via imitation. In 1981, A.I.R. Gallery moved to a larger space on Crosby Street, a space they purchased following the loss of their lease on Wooster. In a Notice of Lease Expiration, A.I.R. Gallery members write of changes being implemented in order to prepare for their move, including the hiring of a paid director who would be tasked with developing funding sources, liaising between A.I.R., the public, and the art world.53 They note the need for a board, as well as an assistant or secretary for the director. Finally, they note the estimated cost of renting a new space, pointing to the rapid increase in rental costs (to approximately $2,000 USD –​over triple the cost of their current rent) in the area over the course of less than a decade. However, the challenges also presented an opportunity for A.I.R. Gallery to reenvision its purpose towards becoming a resource centre more broadly valuable to women artists beyond New York.54 Collectively purchasing space for the gallery in 1981 offered a viable strategy for survival in the face of pending government cuts to women’s groups.55 Here, A.I.R. Gallery reveals its tenuous position in the New York art world at the beginning of the 1980s, the effects of a conservative political climate that witnessed the slashing of funds not only to women’s groups but also to art organisations, and the determination of A.I.R. Gallery to survive and to professionalise despite a lack of access to financial resources. In so doing, however, there are times during which it appears that A.I.R. Gallery aligns itself with more conservative social values, a strategic move in their quest for survival. Perhaps due, in part, to their recent purchase of their gallery and the added financial pressure to survive, A.I.R. Gallery can be perceived, in the early 1980s, to be walking a line between survival and exploitation, a line further blurred by their position as a women’s gallery and the additional obstacles to success compounded by this identity. Like neighbouring alternative galleries, including Franklin Furnace and Artists Space, A.I.R. Gallery positioned itself initially in support of New York City’s controversial Artist Homeownership Program, a programme the city’s agency of Housing Preservation and Development tried to implement in 1982 to convert several abandoned buildings into ‘loft-​type units’ available to artists at low interest rates. Seeing the project as beneficial to artists attempting to make a living as artists, A.I.R. Gallery wrote a letter of support for the project, with a view to artists as victims of gentrification and displacement.56 Responding to a perceived lack of understanding of the issues on the table and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Shifting foundations

the consequences not only for artists, but also for Lower Manhattan as a whole, a group called Artists for Social Responsibility (ASR) sent out a letter, dated 24 October 1982, to arts organisations, detailing why the Artist Homeownership Program was a bad idea. They explained how the project was to be financed by public funds earmarked for ‘Special Use’ housing, of which loft-​type units did not fit that description. They noted how various community groups had submitted plans for the buildings in question but were turned down, and how the Program did not reflect the ethnic makeup of the community which, at the time, was over 40 per cent Hispanic, 10 per cent Black, and 6 per cent Asian. They argued that the proposed programme was also already inducing unwanted transformation in the neighbourhood, incited by a variety of tactics, including raising rents for existing tenants and payouts for tenants to move.57 In a letter sent by Bonnie Greer on behalf of ASR to arts organisations, Greer also highlights that ultimately 55 per cent of the units were not allocated to artists but to private real estate developers, and of the artists given space, only 15 per cent were already inhabitants in the neighbourhood. Further, she notes that scant few BIPOC artists were awarded units.58 On 29 November 1982, a letter from the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council was sent directly to Nancy Spero and A.I.R. Gallery.59 Like ASR, it also stated its opposition to the Artist Homeownership Program as proposed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and referred to the letter from A.I.R. Gallery in support of the programme.60 The letter intended to make clear that A.I.R. Gallery understood not only how the proposed programme would impact the neighbourhood, but also that it was broadly opposed by various neighbourhood inhabitants.61 In closing, the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council urged A.I.R. Gallery to reconsider their position on the Artist Homeownership Program, underlining the city’s deliberate contribution to the gentrification of the Lower East Side and its deleterious effect on the communities within.62 No further correspondence on the matter is included in the A.I.R. Gallery Archives, and the Lower East Side community was ultimately successful in the battle against the Artist Homeownership Program, which did not go forward. But the situation with A.I.R. Gallery in the face of accusations levelled at galleries in the Lower East Side over gentrification introduced important questions with regard to legitimacy, and whether or not a gallery like A.I.R. operated in the best interests of the community towards the ends of supporting other marginalised peoples. More nuanced understandings, in the present, of the ultimate historical effects of such processes of gentrification make the writing of this history more complicated; obstacles to visibility also complicate the issue, making it unclear as to which side of the issue a space like A.I.R. Gallery should ultimately align itself.

41

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

Taking place

Trespasses: whose feminism(s)? Even within the marginalised communities that formed around the early gay liberation movement that was building momentum in New York around the same time, women continued to be relegated to the back of the movement. Christopher Reed has commented that, even though much of the social change associated with homosexuality in the 1980s came about as a result of the work done by feminist artists in the 1960s and 1970s, there remained ‘fraught relationships among the identities “feminist,” “lesbian” and “artist”.’63 Artists who were members of women’s galleries such as A.I.R. Gallery often worked outside of these spaces when they wanted to focus their work on other aspects of their identities. Harmony Hammond, one of the first members of A.I.R. Gallery, was also one of its members who operated at this intersection, and perceived herself to be a sort of bridge –​moving back and forth between groups. I brought an art consciousness to lesbian separatist, socialist feminist or Marxist cadres on the Lower East Side, many of whom were anti-​art because they considered art making a bourgeois art world activity, and I brought a political consciousness and a consciousness of sexuality into the art world.64

Hammond has stated that A.I.R. Gallery was not a queer space in its early days.65 At the time, there were no explicitly queer galleries and, because one had to be a member to exhibit at A.I.R. Gallery, in 1977, Hammond began to work on what would become A Lesbian Show at 112 Workshop/​112 Greene Street, addressing her ‘frustration at the absence of a “conscious political” context that would allow her art to signify as she intended’ and ‘determined to create “lesbian art contexts” to counter “the heterosexualization and erasure of works by lesbian artists in both mainstream and feminist art communities.” ’66 Working in Soho at 112 Workshop/​112 Greene Street afforded not only the visibility, but also opportunities for experimentation. For Hammond, attempting to produce A Lesbian Show in 1978, before the rise of queer consciousness (a time when women artists were still trying to gain legitimacy and lesbians and trans people remained at the back of the gay liberation movement), a space like 112 Workshop/​112 Greene Street provided a more experimental, arguably more ‘queer’ environment for explorations of lesbian art –​an invisible community working in the margins of the mainstream art world. As Hammond explains: It was about being public, these women were out in their lives, but this was different … art was one space where they could openly express themselves. It was a private activity. By participating in the exhibition the work was no longer

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Shifting foundations

private. I was taking it out of the closet and installing it in an art space for the entire world to see. There was the fear that they would be judged as artists. In general they felt very vulnerable and isolated as individuals, however by participating in the exhibition they developed a community of lesbian artists and even went on to show together elsewhere. They felt empowered… We were trespassing in Soho. At the same time our exhibition poster that was plastered all over the streets of Soho, was torn down.67

Hammond expresses the perception that, despite being permitted to exhibit in a space like 112 Workshop/​112 Greene Street, she and other artists participating in A Lesbian Show were nevertheless ‘trespassing’ in Soho, suggesting the continued tenuous position occupied by women artists, and perhaps doubly so by lesbian artists –​‘being public’ about ‘private’ sexual identification and simultaneously displaying sexual agency on the gallery walls while maintaining a precarious position within the broader community in which they worked. An analysis of the Woman’s Building’s lesbian communities also provides an opportunity to consider identification within the Woman’s Building as practised, represented, and antagonised, pointing to roadblocks to a linear narrative model and to a blanket advocacy of all of women’s culture that neglected to address the needs of all of the women who helped to form it. Several historical accounts suggest that lesbian artists were considered separate from the overall group, which has been attributed to several factors, including the conflict in opinion regarding heterosexual members’ desire and choice to live and be in relationships with men and the belief purportedly held by some straight members of the Woman’s Building that lesbian presence undermined the building’s credibility and appeal. Apart from the internal debates that arose from inclusion of lesbian artists, designers, critics, and art historians within the Woman’s Building, debates as to the legitimacy of lesbian art as a category emerged. Art historian Jennie Klein argues that much lesbian art has been absented from official histories of feminist art, writing that ‘[c]‌ritics and artists influenced by the tenets of queer theory dismissed much of the art work made in the 1970s from a lesbian feminist perspective. This has resulted in very little being known or written about this pioneering work.’68 Just as the quality of women’s art was challenged in the 1970s, criticism of lesbian feminist art has, according to Klein, endured due to a perception of its incompatibility with newly developing intersections of art history and queer theory. The founding of the Lesbian Art Project (LAP) by Arlene Raven and Terry Wolverton in 1976 suggests that the needs and desires of all members of the Woman’s Building could not be accommodated by a singular mandate, resulting in the development of alternative avenues of expression and identification. As Klein has

43

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

44

Taking place

written, ‘[t]he LAP engaged in a performative relationship with both lesbian feminism (as they understood it in the late 1970s) and heterosexual norms in the art world and the feminist art community to which they belonged in order to assert their identities as lesbians, feminists, and most of all artists.’69 The organisation of the Great American Lesbian Art Show (GALAS) in 1979 extended past the doors of the Woman’s Building into a variety of locations across Los Angeles and created a national network of lesbian art through the encouragement of lesbian artists across the country to organise their own lesbian art shows. In addition, GALAS featured an invitational exhibition that honoured the work of ten women (Lula Mae Blocton, Tee Corinne, Betsy Damon, Louise Fishman, Nancy Fried, Harmony Hammond, Debbie Jones, Lili Lakich, Gloria Longval, and Kate Millett) who were perceived to be role models as lesbian artists, and the creation of an archive of slides of work exhibited in the GALAS network. The goals of GALAS were to expand the ‘definition of lesbian art, by inviting women to identify their work as such; to celebrate lesbian art by making it public, visible, and accessible, to build a national network of lesbian artists; and to increase awareness of the power of lesbian vision and sensibility.’70 It is only in more recent historicising that the exclusions and tensions experienced by women of artists of colour have begun to be acknowledged, despite prominent and constant disavowals and dismissals of, as well as barriers to, access for women of colour dating back to the beginning of the feminist art movement. Becky Thompson has expressed concern over histories of second-​wave feminism that perpetuate a ‘hegemonic feminism’ that ‘treats sexism as the ultimate oppression’ and ‘ignore[s]‌a class and race analysis,’ which has had the effect of diminishing the centrality of women of colour to the development of second-​wave feminism. Moravec and Hale have importantly examined the conflicts that arose at the Woman’s Building as they hinged on cultural, ethnic, racial, class, spiritual, regional, political, and generational differences; they argue that the failure of not just the feminist art movement, but the feminist movement as a whole, to acknowledge its racism meant that only women who felt represented by the events and discussions occurring at a space like the Woman’s Building became involved in organisational capacities, leading to continued obstacles to reconciling both institutional and ideological patterns of exclusion.71 Moravec and Hale point to the attempt by Woman’s Building members to become more sensitive to their institutional racism and to draw more women of colour to the building, precipitated by their receipt of funding under the Comprehensive Education and Training Act (CETA), which employed a large number of women of colour. However, at the Woman’s Building, women of colour often remained employed in positions

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

Shifting foundations

of less authority than did white members, leading Moravec and Hale to conclude that the CETA funding necessitated more concrete examinations of racism than had previously been attended to. They note, ‘[t]he inability of the Woman’s Building to create space for all women had the ironic result of creating that splendid isolation that Woolf craved, the room of one’s own.’72 Perhaps due to its already diverging from mainstream feminist concerns, GALAS sought to confront more directly the intersectional nature of oppression, both from within and outside the movement, in particular attempting to address the unique needs of lesbian artists of colour by prioritising exhibition space for Black and Latinx artists. However, GALAS was nevertheless criticised for a lack of adequate representation of lesbian artists of colour, which organiser Terry Wolverton attributed to their own difficulty in finding lesbian artists of colour and to a perception that lesbian artists of colour were more reticent than white lesbian artists to participate due to their even more precarious position in the art world. In a letter to Yolanda Retter from the group Lesbians of Color, Wolverton addressed the difficulties of GALAS in developing a racially inclusive exhibition, writing ‘[i]‌t is not surprising that a collective of white women would create a project that is racist in its structure.’73 It is not that the Woman’s Building was incapable of expanding its mandate and the way in which it enacted that mandate to reflect the needs of the women it sought to engage, but that it was ill-​equipped to confront the ways in which the existence of a space like the Woman’s Building tended towards the perpetuation of implicit forms of historical and systemic racism and heterosexism that could not be reconciled through tokenistic efforts. Women of colour artists were not simply waiting to be invited to the table by white feminist artists; at the same time as they were critiquing the exclusionary spaces and practices that were coming to define feminist art as monolith, they were also actively building their own spaces, collectives, not to mention languages and aesthetics of signification. Emerging in New York in the early 1970s, yet relatively under-​historicised compared to the white-​centric feminist art movement of Southern California, ‘Where We At’ Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) introduces an important instance whereby members were at odds with white American feminists in their alignments,74 refusing to reject the Black Power movement for its perceived sexism and aligning itself with the Spiral Group (founded in 1963 by Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, and Romare Bearden), COBRA (Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists, founded by Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-​Hogu, Jeff Donaldson, and Gerald Williams in 1968 and later renamed AfriCOBRA –​ African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) and the Black Arts Movement, begun in the mid-​1960s and lasting through the mid-​1970s, in which several

45

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

46

Taking place

women artists and poets, including Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, participated. Whereas the white-​led feminist art movement was predominantly concerned to address sexism, Black feminist artists centred their struggle around racial discrimination, with many reticent, as Kay Brown reflected, to ‘alienate [them]selves from [their] artist brothers.’75 Where We At originated as a group exhibition in 1971, titled Where We At: Black Women Artists, held at Acts of Art Gallery, which had been opened by Nigel Jackson in the early 1970s to exhibit the work of Black artists. The founding of Acts of Art was spurred by the ‘Whitney Fiasco’ whereby fifteen prominent Black artists removed themselves from participation in the Whitney’s 1971 Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition on the grounds that the museum diminished the value and diversity of African American art, citing, as well, the lack of meaningful consultation with Black art specialists in white curator Robert M. Doty’s curatorial research, as catalysing the protest and withdrawal.76 Following the success of the Where We At exhibition, the group of exhibiting artists, which included Brown alongside Carol Blank, Vivian Browne, Iris Crump, Pat Davis, Mai Mai Leabua, Dindga McCannon, Onnie Millar, Omnlaye, Charlotte Richardson, Faith Ringgold, and Ann Tanskley, went on to form an artist collective, called ‘Where We At’ Black Women Artists, Inc., leading to a similar professionalisation including the development of bylaws, the appointment of a governing board, and several committees. Originating in Harlem, the group moved to Brooklyn, and began accepting new members. Howardena Pindell, a founder of A.I.R. Gallery, who offered another bridge, this time, between Black feminist and white feminist art communities, addressed the racism she observed, experienced, and called out within the white-​centred feminist art movement in her work Free, White, and 21 (1980), which was included in A.I.R. Gallery’s 1980 exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists. Pindell’s ‘Art (world) & racism: Testimony, documentation and statistics,’77 which she first presented at the Agendas for Survival Conference at Hunter College, New York, on 28 June 1987, offered an extensive and damning audit of the pervasive occurrence art world racism and feminist complicity and, alongside the initiatives of the Guerrilla Girls around the same time, a template for future audits across North America of the state of representation in art institutions (work undertaken, in Canada, by art historian Avis Lang Rosenberg in her 1979 article ‘Women Artists and the Canadian Art World: A Survey,’ by art historian Joyce Zemans in her 1998 article ‘A Tale of Three Women: The Visual Arts in Canada /​ A Current Account/​ing,’ and by culture workers Alison Cooley, Amy Luo, and Caoimhe Morgan-​Feir in their 2015 Canadian Art article ‘Canada’s Galleries Fall Short: The Not-​So Great White North’).78

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

Shifting foundations

The cracks in a cohesive narrative about feminist art began to appear more visibly by the late 1970s; Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists, curated in 1980 by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina at A.I.R. Gallery’s 92 Wooster Street location, critiqued the whiteness of North American feminism and the lack of acknowledgement of the contributions of women of colour (a term that had at that time only recently been coined by Black participants at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977, and soon adopted by the Combahee River Collective, while the curators employed the term ‘Third World’ as a mode of alignment between racialised, immigrant, refugee, and exiled women in the United States with developing nations in the Global South that refused alignment with NATO countries and the Communist bloc) to the movement; as Mendieta bluntly put it in her introductory catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, ‘American Feminism as it stands is basically a white middle class movement.’79 The exhibition featured eight artists: Judith F. Baca, Beverly Buchanan, Janet Olivia Henry, Senga Nengudi, Lydia Okumura, Howardena Pindell, Selena Whitefeather, and Zarina. More recent analyses of this exhibition critique the centralisation of Mendieta as having solely carried out the intellectual labour for the exhibition and how, as Sadia Shirazi has asserted, ‘the continuing attribution of the intellectual labor of the exhibition solely to Mendieta is an extension of [the] various strands of tokenization, imperialism, and white supremacy within North American histories of feminist art and activism.’80 Shirazi points to Zarina’s participation as a guest editor of ‘Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other,’ a special issue of Heresies journal, published prior to the exhibition, as an ‘important precursor.’81 Paradoxically, when white women artists were being called out, their artistic contributions devalued, for subject matter depicting ‘women’s experience,’ much of the work in the Dialectics of Isolation exhibition was devalued for its formalism, rather than direct engagement with issues related to personal experience and identity.82 Queer feminist palimpsests: presence from absence The physical sites that housed the feminist cultural production of the 1970s and 1980s were necessary to establish visibility, legitimacy, and spaces to make and show, whereas physical sites like the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York) and SUM Gallery (Vancouver) are rarities in the world of queer art spaces because they are spaces with physical and enduring sites. The Leslie Lohman Museum of Art grew from Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman’s personal gay art collection, which they exhibited for the first time in their SoHo loft in 1969. Their collecting accelerated during the AIDS crisis as they attempted

47

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

Taking place

to preserve the work of dying artists, leading to the founding of the Leslie-​ Lohman Gay Art Foundation in 1987, and receiving accreditation as a museum in 2016. SUM Gallery was begun as Pride in Art in 1998, founded by Robbie Hong and Jeffery Gibson and, through the organisational work of SD Holman and Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, was incorporated in 2006, leading to the first Queer Arts Festival in 2008. The permanent exhibition space SUM Gallery opened in 2018, the culmination of these preceding efforts and currently the only permanent queer art space in Canada. For the most part, however, queer spaces have been far more elusive, often performative in nature, temporary, infiltrating, prone to precarity, and strategically hidden as a mode of evading co-​option. As the following chapters demonstrate, we might instead think about queer alternative space as queer palimpsest, a ‘shadow map,’ or an ephemeral, temporary network transposed onto physical spaces and mostly articulated temporarily and discursively by those with trained eyes with which to detect it. The queer art history of Toronto’s Queen Street West serves as an exemplary model. Queen Street West, once part of Toronto’s garment district, has been the site of several generations of cultural occupation. The 1970s and early 1980s witnessed the migration of cultural activity away from the Yorkville, Annex, and Riverdale neighbourhoods to the west side of town. During this time, disparate arts communities responded to the relative lack of venues in which to show and a belief that Canada lacked an art scene of its own in mobilising on Queen Street West, first at bars such as the Beverley Tavern and with art collective General Idea at the core of this coming together. Earl Miller has pointed to General Idea’s 1977 move to Simcoe Street (just south of Queen Street) and their founding of FILE Megazine as critical moments in the formation of the Queen West arts community; General Idea’s social notoriety and the way in which FILE set out to chronicle and promote this new scene in effect gave birth to it. Miller writes, ‘From its first issue on, FILE was a progenitor of the cultural changes –​artistic, political, sexual and musical –​that the postmodern movement embodied.’83 General Idea’s founding, in 1974, of Art Metropole as a distribution site for artist books and ephemera helped to further materialise the national art scene that Canadian artists aspired to create.84 Other factors have been recognised as contributing to the new energy that came over Toronto’s arts community as newly anchored in the Queen West neighbourhood, including a burgeoning sense of radical social responsibility, resulting in the cross-​community support of such events as the censorship battle fought by the city’s gay newspaper, The Body Politic. The 1990s saw the inauguration of a new wave of art spaces along Queen Street West, creating a new conglomeration of artist-​run centres,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Shifting foundations

not-​for-​profits, and commercial galleries ‘engaged with social commentary and dangerous aesthetics’ that permitted artists to ‘flit back and forth between the artist-​run centres … and the commercial galleries run by art dealers … circling their easels like pioneer wagons against commercial convention while selling work nonetheless.’85 This newfound commercial appreciation of so-​called ‘dangerous aesthetics’ permitted for the development, preservation, and continued legacy of such galleries as Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Katherine Mulherin Gallery (and Mulherin’s BUS Gallery before that, slightly further west in the Parkdale neighbourhood, as well as 1080Bus, on Queen Street), Zsa Zsa Gallery, and, after the closure of Zsa Zsa, Paul Petro Special Projects Space, which opened in its place. Paul Petro Contemporary Art has been a fixture on Queen Street West since 1993. The gallery represents a combination of established and emerging artists, and the space is usually divided between two shows, with an upstairs room reserved for Petro’s multiples collection. Zsa Zsa Gallery, which existed from 1998 to 2005, was operated by Andrew Harwood, considered by some to be one of the first artists to establish a visibly queer presence on the Queen Street West strip, no doubt due to the high concentration of queer exhibitions at Zsa Zsa during its seven-​year run. Petro and Harwood’s exhibitions often favoured installation-​based practices that created temporary alternate realities, employing the historically commercial storefront window to produce a diorama-​like aesthetic. Jon Davies has considered the tenure of Zsa Zsa’s storefront performative installations of Toronto/​ Creemore-​based queer witch duo FASTWÜRMS (Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse) and the artists’ use of kitsch, vernacular, high art, and mass culture to create ‘residual mise[s]‌-e​ n-​scène… of crafting, socializing, play and performance,’ which figured prominently on the strip between 1999 and 2008.86 Reflecting on two FASTWÜRMS installations at Zsa Zsa, Unisex House of Bangs (1999), a hair salon with walls covered in wigs and hairdressing tools and featuring FASTWÜRMS and Harwood as hairdressers, and Blood and Swash (2002), where a tattoo parlour was set up, with needles replaced by pen and marker, Davies writes: Attesting to Zsa Zsa’s openness and its status as an interactive, semi-​public space, its bite-​size floor plan blending with the street life outside, the hair salon and the tattoo parlours were service-​oriented projects where enthusiasm trumped expertise and everyone who walked in –​artists, queers, mental health patients and neighbourhood residents –​could depart transformed, not only by their new ‘do and Sharpie tattoo, but by the class-​mixing, queer-​inflected sociability encountered within.87

49

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50

1.6

Taking place

FASTWÜRMS, House of Bangs, 1999. Installation/​performance, Zsa Zsa Gallery, Toronto, ON.

The sense of ‘queer-​inflected sociability’ also thrived in the queer installations featured at Petro’s two galleries, through a combination of art, ephemera, and props. ‘Maximalist’ artist Allyson Mitchell’s Lady Sasquatch installation was displayed at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in 2005 and featured a combination of furs, fun furs, sculptural and embroidered sexualised half-​human, half-​ animal figures amid a backdrop of vernacular objects that created a kitsch-​ inflected wilderness environment. Calling on her own adolescent memory of mainstream sexual imagery, Mitchell appropriated this reserve to reflect her own sexual reality, ‘recycling for dykey ends images that were intended for straight men.’88 Queer group shows, such as the 2006 Queercore Punk Archive, curated by G. B. Jones and Petro at the Special Projects Space, attest to queer worldmaking as a family affair. Queercore Punk Archive comprised Jones’s personal collection of posters, zines, record sleeves, and correspondence that documents the queer punk movement, as perceived to have originated in the 1980s with the founding, by Jones and Bruce LaBruce, of the zine JDs. Jones has reflected on Toronto’s gay scene at the time: ‘You were supposed to look a certain way, you were supposed to behave a certain way… Anything outside of those very narrow parameters was scoffed, your politics were scoffed at. And the fact that you were really poor didn’t help either.’89 Seeking refuge in the punk scene, Jones and LaBruce came up against more resistance –​this time,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

15

Shifting foundations

for being queer. As LaBruce explained, ‘that made us even more marginalized and more angry, because we rejected the gay community and we were rejected by punks. So we were doubly alienated.’90 The Paul Petro installation visually reflected the ad hoc community created by like-​minded queers through the linking of ephemera plastered across the gallery walls by pieces of black tape decorated with silver arrows. The grid-​like image wall also served a mapping function by grouping documents according to geographic origin, ‘capturing the more-​or-​less spontaneous creation of self-​made culture across a continent.’91 In the 2010s, a new wave of art spaces re-​engaged the independent spirit of earlier artist-​run spaces –​they were neither commercial nor government-​ funded, and the freedom from having to sell and to meet grant targets seemed to allow for a spontaneity to define, invent, and re-​invent according to community interests and urgencies. The Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), begun in 2010 and operated in the Toronto backyard of artist-​partners Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue, was always intended as a term-​limited engagement, while the ideology and spirit of mentorship, matronage, and feminist pedagogy has carried on in other projects initiated by the duo, including the Feminist Art Residency (FAR), an extension of FAG, situated outside of a dense urban centre, in rural Ontario, Canada.92 Inspired by their own experiences, as artists, of art world sexism and homophobia, Logue and Mitchell introduced a new alternative feminist exhibition structure, responding politically to the power inequalities of institutional practice and developing a new type of environment for the production, exhibition, and dissemination of contemporary queer and feminist art practices. FAG has been described by Logue and Mitchell as ‘a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity.’93 The acronym ‘FAG’ offers a play on the history of feminist acronyms and a comment on the sexually, socially, politically, and conceptually amorphous nature of the space. After arriving in Toronto in the early 2010s and inspired by such spaces as Zsa Zsa and FAG, then partners William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill began Videofag in 2012, which was located in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. The space, a former barber shop, doubled as Ellis and Tannahill’s apartment, to which they invited Toronto’s art community to hold events in the storefront space. Over the course of its four-​year run, Videofag provided an important platform for experimental practices ranging from plays, performances, concerts, screenings, and readings, not all of which were queer, but which, much like its predecessors on the Queen West strip, engaged the ‘dangerous aesthetics’ and the general queer inflection that had long come to define Toronto’s artistic communities.

51

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Taking place

1.7

Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), founded by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue, Toronto, ON. Image from The Illustrated Gentlemen, inaugural exhibition by Elisha Lim, 2011.

1.8

Videofag, founded by William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill, Toronto, ON.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

35

Shifting foundations

There is a disjuncture between early feminist initiatives and the pursuit of permanence and the transient, fleeting, precarious tendencies of queer exhibition spaces. The feminist art movement as caught up, in the present, in its own attempts to remain visible, occasionally reproduces the historical conditions once specific to an earlier time –​conditions that threaten to delegitimise the movement’s value to the feminist and queer present. The queer initiatives surveyed above respond to a question posed by the 1980s Toronto-​based artist collective ChromaZone, both a group and a gallery who were also committed to the project of forging new structures and aesthetics more reflective of Toronto’s increasingly diverse art ecologies, and who, recognising the exclusivity of the Toronto art world and championing inclusivity, asked, ‘Whose work is being left out of the galleries even though it is more than worthy of being seen or heard?’94 But as the chapters to follow demonstrate, queer alternative space requires an expansion in thinking as to what constitutes a space. Notes 1 Sondra Hale, ‘Power and Space: Feminist Culture and the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, A Context,’ in From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, ed. Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton (Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011), 50. 2 The Woman’s Building official tagline. 3 Terry Wolverton, interview with Amelia Jones, 12 May 2010, interview transcript, Los Angeles Goes Live archive, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. Wolverton points to the late Arlene Raven, an art historian and founding member of the Woman’s Building, as instilling the importance of record-​keeping. 4 Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,’ Archival Science, Vol. 2 (2002), 2. 5 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 9. 6 A debate continues, in the present day, as to whether or not the feminist art movement can be defined as subscribing to the tenets of radical and/​or cultural feminisms, with historians, including Sondra Hale, pointing to a ‘tension between “cultural feminists” and “political/​materialist/​socialist feminists” ’ and the belief in the Woman’s Building as ‘comprised entirely of “cultural feminists” ’ to be a totalising stereotype (Hale, ‘Power and Space,’ 43). For the purposes of this chapter, I emphasise cultural feminism as informing the formation of the feminist art movement, which in and of itself can be viewed as simultaneously subscribing, at its outset, to materialist and socialist goals, as well.

53

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

Taking place

7 ‘Essentialism,’ in present-​day understandings, has come to work as shorthand for a social category in which everything falling into the category must fit the same description. In feminism, ‘essentialism’ has come to refer to a binary whereby the categories ‘men’ and ‘women,’ for instance, are meant to proscribe the definite characteristics that those falling into these classifications are assumed to embody. In an interview between feminist theorists Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell about the influential philosophy of Luce Irigaray, Butler reminds us of the important disjuncture between the way ‘essence’ functions philosophically, whereby essence ‘does not appear’ and therefore, ‘does not appear … in the domain of description’ (22). Essentialism, Butler continues, needs to also be considered as it addresses something ‘essential,’ as she states, ‘that without which one cannot move’ (22). Someone like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Butler argues, whose ‘strategic essentialism’ is employed in postcolonial theory and is considered a useful strategy for minority groups, can be regarded in this way. See Pheng Cheah, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell, ‘The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell,’ Diacritics, Vol. 28, No. 1, Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference (Spring 1998), 19–​42. 8 Terry Wolverton, quoted in Zan Dubin, ‘Prejudice Back, Chicago Charges at Arts Awards,’ Los Angeles Times, 21 October 1986, Lesbian Legacy Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, CA. 9 In her paper for the panel ‘Historiography/​ Feminism/​ Strategies’ at the College Art Association conference, 26 February 2000, New York, Marsha Meskimmon addressed the inherent difficulties of both acknowledging women’s art’s ‘historical occlusion’ and the ‘othering’ that tends to follow such acknowledgements: ‘Scholarship which defines women artists as an homogeneous cohort, irrespective of the dynamics of their histories, or which seeks in women’s art some unified “female essence”, preceding specific practices as their knowable “origin point”, erases differences between women and reinstates the binary logic through which female subjectivity is rendered invisible, illegible and impossible to articulate. The theoretical task is how to engage with women’s art and radical difference; how to think women’s art “otherwise” ’ (30). Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Historiography/​ Feminisms/​Strategies,’ n.paradoxa online, No. 12 (March 2000), 29–​30. This panel preceded the ‘year of feminist art,’ 2007, by several years. 10 Michelle Moravec, ‘Fictive Families of History Makers: Historicity at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building,’ in Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, ed. Meg Linton, Sue Maberry, and Elizabeth Pulsinelli, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design, 2011), 69. 11 In ‘Historiography/​Feminisms/​Strategies,’ Meskimmon importantly points to two categories under which popular strategies for writing histories of women’s art fall –​‘additive reclamation’ and ‘theoretical revision’ –​and argues that ‘maintaining this dualistic paradigm actually enacts another, more insidious form of exclusion through producing an acceptable “alternative canon”.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

55

Shifting foundations

That is, by pitting new primary research against theoretical reconceptions of existing material, we reinforce the “catch-​22” of women’s art –​either we add their names to the canon and do not question its standards of judgment or we harness all of our most skillful thinking to rework the canonical tradition itself, thereby reinforcing it by default’ (30). 12 ‘L.A. Stories: A Roundtable Discussion,’ moderated by Richard Meyer and Michelle Kuo and featuring Thomas Crow, Andrew Perhuck, Maurice Tuchman, Ali Submotnick, Helene Winer, John Baldessari, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Liz Larner, Artforum (October 2011), accessed 14 November 2021, www.artfo​rum.com/​inpr​int/​id=​29043. 13 Donald Preziosi, ‘Anthropology and/​ as Art History,’ in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 2nd edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 151–​212. 14 Dolores Hayden, ‘The Power of Place: A Proposal for Los Angeles,’ The Public Historian, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer 1988), 8. 15 A full list of Pacific Standard Time exhibitions can be found at www.paci​fics​ tand​ardt​ime.org/​exhi​biti​ons?view=​list. 16 Pacific Standard Time: LA/​LA, which was on display from September 2017 to January 2018, further demonstrated the inability to pin down one articulation or experience of Los Angeles, foregrounding the work of Latinx artists, with notable contributions by queer, feminist, and queer feminist artists in exhibitions such as Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–​1985, Judithe Hernández and Patssi Valdez: One Path Two Journeys, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. and The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judith F. Baca’s Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete. 17 Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 13. Multiculturalism, in both its present-​day political connotations and as it developed as a key term in the visual arts in the 1990s, is explored in depth in Amelia Jones’s chapter ‘Multiculturalism, intersectionality, and “post-​identity”,’ in her Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts, 117–​69. The focus on ‘multicentricity’ in this chapter is due to its discursive value; Cheng argues that multiculturalism ‘aspired to institute fundamental changes in the directions and definitions of “national cultures” through education, hiring principles, and media advocacy,’ while ‘multicentricity’ offers her a ‘more precise description for an existing phenomenon’ in the city in which she lives (13). 18 Ibid., 4–​5. 19 Ibid., 64. 20 See Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), which aims to ‘show that some important social and historical processes occur within language, in ways which indicate how integral the problems of meanings and relationships really are’ (22).

55

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

56

Taking place

21 Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1979), 69. 22 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies-​Cities,’ in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 242. 23 Terry Wolverton, interviewed by Jerri Allyn, ‘The Woman’s Building,’ Doin’ It in Public video herstory interview, 13 February 2010, accessed 10 November 2021, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​I9Ls​6Ohw​frM&list=​PL9​BF2A​6F54​0F23​156. 24 The popular narrative of the discovery of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building’s name has been recounted by Michelle Moravec: ‘While searching for props to use in Womanhouse … student Nancy Youdelman found a catalog of the 1893 Woman’s Building. It was one of those fortunate happenstances that make history. Flabbergasted to learn that not only had women artists existed in the past, but also that they had organized to exhibit their work, Youdelman brought the book back to the Feminist Art Program, where students and teachers alike pored over its pages. After that initial, exciting discovery, the memory of the Woman’s Building lingered.’ Moravec, ‘Fictive Families of History Makers,’ 70. 25 Julia Stein, quoted in Maria Karras, The Woman’s Building Chicago 1893, the Woman’s Building Los Angeles 1973–​, 1975. Woman’s Building ephemera held at Otis College of Art and Design following Doin’ It in Public. 26 AA Bronson, ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-​ run Spaces as Museums by Artists,’ in From Sea to Shining Sea, ed. AA Bronson with René Blouin, Peggy Gale, and Glenn Lewis (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 164. 27 The term ‘parallel’ was offered by the Canada Council in their naming of a funding programme for ‘parallel galleries,’ yet it was widely rejected by those working in artist-​run centres; as Barbara Shapiro, editor of Parallelogramme, Association of National Non-​Profit Artists Centres/​Regroupement D’Artistes Des Centres Alternatifs (ANNPAC/​RACA)’s publication wrote, ‘The term [parallel galleries] has always been somewhat of a misnomer, for the centres are neither “galleries” in the traditional sense, nor do they run “parallel” to any existing institutional art system. Each centre operates rather as an artistic complex, supporting new art in all disciplines … Together they form not a parallel line but a communication system, a multi-​directional exchange, a “Network.”  ’ Barbara Shapiro, Parallelogramme Retrospective, 1976–​ 7 (Vancouver: ANNPAC/​RACA, 1977), np. 28 The Canada Council for the Arts was established following the major recommendation put forth in the 1951 report by the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (commonly known as the Massey Report, after the Commission’s Chair, Vincent Massey). The Commission, established to survey the state of culture in Canada, found that the country’s cultural identity was unable to thrive without financial subvention by the government; as the report stated: ‘No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-​technical books can make

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

75

Shifting foundations

even a modestly comfortable living by selling his work in Canada. No composer of music can live at all on what Canada pays him for his compositions. Apart from radio drama, no playwright, and only a few actors and producers, can live by working in the theatre in Canada. Few painters and sculptors, outside the fields of commercial art and teaching, can live by sale of their work in Canada.’ Recognising the propagandistic risks of government subvention being too closely tied to cultural production (the world having only recently emerged from World War II and entering into the Cold War), the proposal for the establishment of a Canada Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, Letters, Humanities and Social Sciences would see government operating largely as arms-​length benefactor. 29 While my peripatetic methodology sees me only briefly dabbling in the history of artist-​run centres in Canada, Amber Berson’s PhD dissertation provides a critical, sustained, and expansive examination of the history of feminist artist-​run centres in Canada, engaging a utopian framework in considering issues of funding, structure, inclusion, diversity, and equity. See Amber Berson, ‘A Case for Utopian Dreaming: Feminisms within Canadian Artist-​Run Centres,’ PhD diss. (Kingston: Queen’s University, 2022). 30 Marilyn Burgess and Maria De Rosa, ‘The Distinct Role of Artist-​Run Centres in the Canadian Visual Arts Ecology,’ Canada Council for the Arts, 13 October 2011, 12–​13, https://​canada​coun​cil.ca/​resea​rch/​resea​rch-​libr​ary/​2012/​05/​art​ ist-​run-​cent​res-​in-​the-​vis​ual-​arts-​ecol​ogy. 31 Anne Bertrand, quoted in Shannon Moore, ‘The Lacey Prize: Recognizing Artist-​Run Centres in Canada,’ The National Gallery of Canada Magazine, accessed 21 July 2021, www.gall​ery.ca/​magaz​ine/​in-​the-​spotli​ght/​the-​lacey-​ prize-​reco​gniz​ing-​art​ist-​run-​cent​res-​in-​can​ada. 32 Clive Robertson, ‘Movement +​Apparatus: A Cultural Policy Study of Artist-​Run Culture in Canada (1976–​1994),’ PhD diss. (Montreal: Concordia University, 2004), 2. 33 Ibid., 61. 34 Sheena Gourlay, ‘Feminist/​ Art in Quebec, 1975–​ 1992,’ PhD diss. (Montreal: Concordia University, 2002), 44. 35 Janine Marchessault, ‘The Women’s Liberation Front of Québec,’ Public, No. 14, Québec (Fall 1996), 38. 36 Translation by the author. 37 Front de la libération des femmes québecoises, quoted in Marchessault, The Women’s Liberation Front,’ 40. 38 Marchessault, The Women’s Liberation Front,’ 44. 39 Ibid., 46. 40 For an in-​depth look at women artists’ position in Montreal’s cultural milieu in the preceding decades of the 1950s and 1960s, see Sandra Paikowsky, ‘The Girls and the Grid: Montreal Women Abstract Painters in the 1950s and Early 1960s,’ in Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–​1970,

57

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

Taking place

ed. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2012), 259–​ 81. Paikowsky shows how even in the politically radical group of painters known as the Automatistes, there was only one woman, Marcelle Ferron, associated with the group. While Paikowsky argues that there were exhibitions of women’s art in Montreal as early as the late 1940s, as well as more democratic discussions of women’s cultural production on par with the language used to describe men’s work, this seems to be at odds with the slightly later generation of women artists, who perhaps lacked knowledge of Montreal’s recent art historical precedence, or felt that this precedence did not align with the political currents emerging from second-​wave feminism. 41 Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2006), 50. 42 Now Tanya Mars, a Governor General Award-​winning performance artist who has been an important figure in the intersections of feminist art, performance art, and alternative art spaces, such as artist-​run centres. With Johanna Householder, she co-​edited Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004). 43 While those of us who have lived in Montreal for any amount of time are, for the most part, well aware of the events of 6 December 1989, it is nevertheless not possible to discuss Montreal’s feminist communities of the past forty years without reference to the feminist politicisation brought about by the Polytechnique Massacre, in which fourteen women were murdered at École Polytechnique, an engineering school at the Université de Montréal. The fourteen women (mostly engineering students) who were shot and killed were: Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-​ Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-​Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-​ Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznik-​ Widajewicz. While mainstream controversy exists as to the ethics of appropriating the massacre to feminist ends, the clarity with which the murderer identified his targets for being feminists arguably makes a case for its feminist uptaking undeniable. Dianne Chisholm describes the significance of the Montreal Massacre in the narrative of Gail Scott’s Main Brides, writing, ‘Against the memory of the Montreal Massacre, the ongoing history of women’s impoverishment and endangerment, she who dares forge her story of coming out in the city must deploy a battery of fictional devices. At the same time, she remembers history “in the tradition of the oppressed,” never forgetting where she, and her sex, are coming from.’ See Dianne Chisholm, ‘The City of Collective Memory,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2001), 230. 44 See Gail Bourgeois, Carole Brouillette, Barbara McGill Balfour, and Suzanne Paquet, ‘Silence as a Vigil,’ in Feminism-​Art-​Theory: An Anthology, ed. Hilary Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 123–​4.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

95

Shifting foundations

45 In her dissertation ‘A Case for Utopian Dreaming: Feminisms within Canadian Artist-​Run Centres’ (2022), Berson continues the story of La Centrale and its identity transformations through the 2000s and 2010s, critiquing its emphasis on representational initiatives (such as exhibitions) while lacking similar attention with regard to structural issues –​notably, equity and diversity. Berson also charts La Centrale’s public reckoning, in the late 2010s, following the resignation of its board and most of its staff members following accusations made in a public post by an anonymous group of Black artists and curators charging La Centrale with anti-​Black racism and transphobia. Accusations of sexual harassment were also levelled at this time. At the Annual General Meeting in October of that year, the board was dissolved and a new board was elected. An equity officer, Yen Chao Lin, was also hired. Berson writes, ‘Four years after this crisis, it is not yet possible to assess how La Centrale has and will be impacted by these changes.’ (211). See Berson, ‘A Case for Utopian Dreaming,’ 208–​14. 46 For the history of the Chouinard Art Institute as it intersected with the interests of the Woman’s Building, see Jenni Sorkin, ‘Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building,’ in Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, 36–​64. 47 Hale, ‘Power and Space,’ 49. 48 Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 222–​3. 49 Juli Carson, ‘On Discourse as Monument: Institutional Spaces and Feminist Problematics,’ in Alternative Art New York, 1965–​85, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 131–​2. It is important to also point out the impact of other rights movements, in particular, the Civil Rights movement, which pre-​dated second-​wave feminist mobilisation, as critical to the development of alternative spaces. 50 Beck, ‘Alternative Space,’ 266. 51 Ibid., 267. 52 Ibid. 53 A.I.R. Gallery, Lease Expiration Notice, A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries B, Box 1, Folder 57, Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. 54 Ibid. 55 A.I.R. Gallery Members, letter dated 23 April 1981, A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 4, Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. 56 Letter from Nancy Spero, ‘To whom it may concern,’ 10/​20–​82, A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 5, Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY.

59

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

Taking place

57 Letter from Artists for Social Responsibility (ASR), 10/​24/​82, A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 5, Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. 58 Letter from Bonnie Greer on behalf of Artists for Social Responsibility (ASR), 2 November 1982, A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 5, Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. 59 Lower East Side Joint Planning Council letter to Nancy Spero from Margarita Lopez, 29 November 1982, A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Box 1, Folder 5, Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 188. 64 Harmony Hammond, interview with Carlos Motta, Galisteo, New Mexico, 6 March 2011, We Who Feel Differently, accessed 14 November 2021, www. wewho​feel​diff​eren​tly.info/​interv​iew.php?interv​iew=​109. 65 Hammond, email to author, 18 May 2012. 66 Reed, Art and Homosexuality, 193, emphasis added. 67 Hammond, interview with Motta. 68 Jennie Klein, ‘The Lesbian Art Project,’ Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2–​3 (2010), 238. 69 Ibid., 241–​2. 70 GALAS Guidebook, Lesbian Legacy Collection: GALAS (Great American Lesbian Art Show) (Los Angeles: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives). 71 Moravec and Hale, ‘“At Home” at the Woman’s Building (But Who Gets a Room of her Own?): Women of Color and Community,’ in From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, ed. Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton (Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011), 167. 72 Ibid., 185. 73 Terry Wolverton, letter to Yolanda Retter, Lesbians of Color, 12 February 1980, Lesbian Legacy Collection: GALAS (Great American Lesbian Art Show) (Los Angeles: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives). 74 Kay Brown’s ‘The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York,’ written in 1998, was, up until recently, one of the only detailed accounts of the group. For the catalogue accompanying the 2007 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Valerie Smith contributed an essay, ‘Abundant Evidence: Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 70s,’ in which she focuses on the contributions of Where We At, alongside Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar as but a handful of the work being

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Shifting foundations





done by Black women artists, with several others further providing ‘abundant evidence of the enduring and variegated legacy of black feminists in visual culture’ (413). The exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–​85, organised by Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2017, included nine sections focusing on specific themes, media, or groups, including one devoted to Where We At. See Brown, ‘The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York,’ The International Review of African American Art, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998) ; Valerie Smith, ‘Abundant Evidence: Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 70s,’ in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 2007), 400–​13; Morris and Hockley, eds., We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–​85: A Sourcebook (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 75 Brown, ‘The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York,’ 47. 76 In his 2016 book 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, Darby English argues that the exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America (CBAA) has ‘virtually no art history’ (124), save for that offered by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC). In his detailed, archivally supported account of the controversy that embroiled CBAA even before its opening, English outlines a complex web of relations between BECC representative Henri Ghent, white curator Robert Doty, and Whitney Director John I. H. Baur, and the unappeasable demand, from the BECC, for meaningful consultation with Black experts in place of the hiring of a Black curator (the only one of the BECC’s demands that was not met); as English states, ‘the museum had met every BECC demand except for the very one that would authenticate the exhibition in the coalition’s view: the appointment of a black curator’ (125). English further elaborates that while the claim made by the BECC that Doty ‘failed to consult black art professions was patently false’ (129), offering the Whitney’s exhibition records as evidence of Doty’s having sought advice from six Black art specialists, it was further reported by Grace Glueck that the expectations of the specialists to be granted the status of (paid) consultants were not met. See Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 77 Howardena Pindell, ‘Art (world) & Racism: Testimony, Documentation and Statistics,’ Third Text, Vol. 2, No. 3–​4 (1988), 157–​90. 78 See Avis Lang Rosenberg, ‘Women Artists and the Canadian Art World: A Survey,’ Atlantis, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 1979), 107–​26; Joyce Zemans, ‘A Tale of Three Women: The Visual Arts in Canada /​A Current Account/​ing,’ RACAR: Review d’art canadienne /​Canadian Art Review, Vol. 25, No. 1/​2, Producing Women /​Ces femmes qui produisent … (1998), 103–​22; and Alison Cooley, Amy Luo and Caoimhe Morgan-​Feir, ‘Canada’s Galleries Fall Short: The Not-​So Great White North,’ Canadian Art (21 April 2015), accessed 20 November 2021, https://​cana​dian​art.ca/​featu​res/​cana​das-​galler​ies-​fall-​ short-​the-​not-​so-​great-​white-​north/​.

61

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Taking place

79 Ana Mendieta, introductory essay from the catalogue for Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, reprinted in Dialectics of Entanglement catalogue, 2018, accessed 10 November 2021, https://​stat​ic1.squa​resp​ace.com/​sta​tic/​574dd​51d6​2cd9​4208​ 5f12​091/​t/​5b6cb​5cba​a4a9​92cb​aac2​23c/​153385​1141​682/​AIR​_​DOE​_​pub​lica​tion​_​ sin​gle-​vers​ion.pdf. 80 Sadia Shirazi, ‘Returning to Dialectics of Isolation: The Non-​ Aligned Movement, Imperial Feminism, and a Third Way,’ Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 2021), accessed 13 November 2021, https://​editi​ons.lib.umn.edu/​panor​ama/​arti​cle/​asian-​ ameri​can-​art/​dia​lect​ics-​of-​isolat​ion/​. 81 Ibid. 82 In 2018, Dialectics of Entanglement, curated by Roxana Fabius and Patricia M. Hernandez at A.I.R. Gallery, engaged the original artists in the show to open up what they viewed as a ‘conversation’ between the original exhibition and contemporary artists and thinkers. In her essay contribution to the catalogue for Dialectics of Entanglement, Aruna D’Souza offered the following observation with regard to intersectionality as a political strategy: ‘It is a way of thinking about feminism as a matter of coalition building and collaboration across difference, in a way that leaves difference intact, that abandons the hope for a unified voice because it sees strength in many, sometimes conflicting and contradictory, positions as the most effective way to undermine the maddening single-​mindedness of white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. It is rooted, most crucially, in an explosion of the center, of rendering untenable the notion of margins.’ 83 Earl Miller, ‘File Under Anarchy: A Brief History of Punk Rock’s 30-​Year Relationship with Toronto’s Art Press,’ C: International Contemporary Art, No. 88 (Winter 2005), 33. 84 Art Metropole, ‘About,’ accessed 18 September 2021, https://​artme​trop​ole. com/​about. 85 Kevin Temple, ‘Toronto Needs Freakier Rich People,’ The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, ed. Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio, and Johnny Dovercourt (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006), 75. 86 Jon Davies, ‘Props to the Fairy People,’ C: International Contemporary Art, No. 98 (Summer 2008), 28. 87 Ibid., 29. 88 Allyson Mitchell, quoted in Helena Reckitt, ‘My Fuzzy Valentine: Allyson Mitchell,’ C: International Contemporary Art, No. 89 (Spring 2006), 15. 89 G.B. Jones, quoted in Sholem Krishtalka, ‘We Are Queercore: Toronto Punks /​A “Porntastic Fantasy” Made Flesh,’ Xtra! (Thursday 4 January 2007), accessed 14 November 2021, https://​xtram​agaz​ine.com/​cult​ure/​art-​essay-​we-​ are-​queerc​ore-​39260. 90 Bruce LaBruce, quoted in Krishtalka, ‘We are Queercore.’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36

Shifting foundations

91 Krishtalka, ‘We are Queercore.’ 92 See Allison Morehead, ‘The Radical Healing Possibilities of Witchcare,’ The Polyphony, 1 March 2022, accessed 15 April 2022, https://​thepo​lyph​ony.org/​ 2022/​03/​01/​the-​radi​cal-​heal​ing-​possib​ilit​ies-​of-​witchc​are/​. 93 Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, ‘Feminist Art Gallery: Description,’ Facebook, accessed 12 November 2021, www.faceb​ook.com/​Fem​inis​tArt​Gall​ ery/​info. 94 ChromaZone was formed in 1981 and its original collective comprised six artists: Oliver Girling, Andy Fabo, Rae Johnson, Sybil Goldstein, Tony Wilson, and Hans Peter Marti. Their gallery, at 320 Spadina Avenue, was funded by members and exhibitors, freeing the collective from adhering to governing funding criteria, and they programmed only a few months out at a time, allowing them to respond to shifting currents, trends, and preoccupations they were observing. Their landmark exhibition Chromaliving took place in Toronto’s Harridges department store in 1983, inviting artists to design living environments. ‘ChromaZone /​Chromatique: A Brief History 1981–​1986,’ The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (CCCA), http://​ccca.concor​dia.ca/​chr​ omaz​one/​chr​omaz​one_​hist​ory.html.

63

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Dangerous developments

Relationships between individuals, and between individuals and groups, are established in relation to the things and designs of the city as part of the process of habitation. The durable, inorganic materials of urban habitations generally outlive their inhabitants. The most enduring image city dwellers possess is that of ‘the stones of the city’ itself. When a neighborhood suffers demolition or decay, the individual inhabitant feels that ‘a whole part of himself is dying,’ whereas the group resists that assault ‘with all the force of its traditions’ and ‘endeavors to hold firm or reshape itself in a district or on a street that is no longer ready-​made for it but was once its own.’ –​Dianne Chisholm, ‘The City of Collective Memory,’ 20011

Walking to 20 Jay Street in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighbourhood in February 2012 from the Lower East Side, along the Manhattan Bridge, and then under it, I am aware that, already, on this walk to Brooklyn, I am diverging from the ‘official’ history of New York’s alternative art spaces. I have embarked on this walk in order to meet up with former members of the now defunct queer performance arts collective dUMBA, which occupied a live/​work loft just a few doors down, at 57 Jay Street, from 1996 to ​2007. We meet in former member Sienna Shields’s studio, and Shields has arranged for other former members Pamela Giaroli and Slava Osowska to be present, and another former member, Anthony Richardson, joins us later on.2 We meet because I have been curious about the history of dUMBA since reading about it as the host site of Queeruption in 1999, as documented in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s 2004 book, That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation.3 However, most of what I have read about the collective has focused on the site’s identity as a host to a series of queer musical and performance events over its decade-​long existence, with little documented about its own identity and formation. The collective’s online presence is negligible –​namely, a series of defunct web pages, abandoned social media platforms, and short Wikipedia entries, and what little journalistic information is retrievable refers mostly to the collective’s eviction from 57 Jay Street, signalling the end of the collective’s existence. The lack of publicly accessible documentary evidence becomes all the more curious upon meeting up with Giaroli, Shields, and Osowska, and discovering

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

56

Dangerous developments

the vast amount of ephemeral material they have preserved; more so, in talking to these three former members, I realise there is a rich and complex history to be told. dUMBA has all but completely been absented from official registers of history, even those focusing on alternative histories and despite the interest of its former members in seeing its history preserved. Why have some histories of New York’s alternative art spaces and communities been preserved, while others have been all but lost? As Lauren Rosati writes in her introduction to her 2012 book Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces 1960–​2010, ‘[s]‌ince the 1960s, many significant alternative spaces have closed, collectives have disbanded, and archives of their activities have often been poorly preserved. Yet alternative spaces and projects remain important sites for experimentation and platforms for underrepresented artists.’4 The exhibition of the same name that precipitated the publication of Rosati’s book privileged archival material, prominently displaying brown boxes of said archival material, borrowed from the approximately 140 spaces forming their historical study; as co-​curator Mary Anne Staniszewski observed, ‘[t]he brown boxes can be seen as a physical metaphor for the institutionalization process –​the literal framing and packaging of elements that occurs when creating an exhibition of a publication.’5 Immediately apparent to my mind are the histories of alternative spaces that are left out by this act of framing. Who makes the cut, and who has been omitted from the official alternative record? Despite its notable appearance in John Cameron Mitchell’s 2006 film Shortbus, dUMBA appears nowhere in recent historical accounts of New York’s alternative art spaces. This absence may be the result of a lack of organisation on the part of former members or even as an instance of a now defunct space that will grow in historical significance and gain interest with the passing of time. But it is also possible that the history of dUMBA, an alternative space defined more by its affective character than its physical structure, completely evades the ‘literal framing and packaging’ approach to the historical preservation of institutional spaces. While the previous chapter emphasised beginnings, the catalyst for this chapter is a fight against endings. Coming at the recent history of some of New York City’s (and adjacent neighbourhoods just on its outskirts) feminist and queer art communities from the present allows us to look back on concomitant histories of development and devastation, and to forge new ways not only of writing history, but also of transposing the past onto the present. Accounts of New York’s cultural and subcultural communities throughout the past fifty years emphasise how rapidly the city has changed –​to whose gain, and to whose detriment; in a 2010 conversation with Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union, musician and writer Patti Smith commented, ‘New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit.

65

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

Taking place

Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you… So my advice is: Find a new city.’6 In her 2012 memoir The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation, Sarah Schulman, writer and co-​founder (both with Jim Hubbard) of New York City’s Mix NYC, New York’s queer experimental film festival, and the ACT UP Oral History Project, and a long-​time resident of New York City’s Lower East Side neighbourhood, outlines what she perceives to be the conditions necessary for artistic production: (1) affordable places for unrecognized practitioners to live, have work space, and find time to make their work; (2) diversity of thought and experience that produces a dynamic mutual exposure to varied points of view; (3) stimulation, unlimited raw material; (4) some kind of pleasure in difference; (5) regular, direct access to great artists and their work.7

Reflecting on the cycles of gentrification that have transformed New York City and, in particular, the effects of gentrification on queer communities (notably, as Schulman points out, the opportunistic gentrification of Lower Manhattan in the wake of the first devastating wave of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s), Schulman argues that artists working in the present day continue to be affected by these cycles: Under gentrification, what is possible for young artists, hence how they see themselves, is dramatically different. They cannot afford to live or work. They are faced with conformity of aesthetics and values in their neighborhoods. Conventional bourgeois behavior becomes a requirement for surviving socially, developing professionally, and earning a living. By necessity, their goals are altered […] This is a much more difficult environment in which to imagine one’s self as an artist, negotiate the expense of art-​making, and –​most challenging of all –​to be allowed, by the right fist of the prevailing institutions, to emerge without losing one’s soul.8

In ‘The Fine Art of Gentrification,’ their pivotal 1984 study on gentrification and the art world, art historians Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan point to the failure on the part of the art community of the Lower East Side to take responsibility for its complicity in the rapid transformation of the neighbourhood from a predominantly working-​class, Latinx, and African-​American community into the ‘East Village scene’ which effectively drove original occupants out of the neighbourhood. At the time of their writing in 1984, Deutsche and Ryan identified the unwillingness of art world participants to acknowledge their role in this process, writing that ‘the possible interrelationship is treated

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Dangerous developments

in two ways: either it is ignored altogether or it is raised only as a side issue to be quickly dispensed with.’9 Deutsche and Ryan magnify the important perception of the Lower East Side held by artists coming to occupy the neighbourhood in the 1980s: that, prior to their occupation, there was ‘nothing’ there, when, as the authors make clear, there were over 150,000 people living in the area (albeit people whose poverty may have made them ‘appear’ invisible); Deutsche and Ryan continue: It is not a case of mistaken class identity for the people of the Lower East Side to place artists and professionals in the same social category. Nor is it simplistic, as many apologists for the scene would like to claim, to include the new wave of artists among the neighbourhood’s enemies. For despite their bohemian posturing, the artists and dealers who created the East Village art scene, and the critics and museum curators who legitimize its existence, are complicit with gentrification on the Lower East Side. To deny this complicity is to perpetuate one of the most enduring, self-​serving myths in bourgeois thought, the myth that, as Antonio Gramsci wrote, intellectuals form a category that is ‘autonomous and independent from the dominant social group…’10

Popular histories and dominant understandings of gentrification often neglect to account for the histories of displacement of the lives of underprivileged and unprivileged dwellers of the city, the fringe occupants, subcultural communities, and marginalised populations who have made habitation in certain areas appear attractive –​those individuals who ultimately become the scapegoats for why gentrification has occurred in the first place. Queer strategies of covertness and the dangers resulting from too much visibility are central to my examination of dUMBA, the queer performance art collective that occupied a live/​work loft in Brooklyn’s Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighbourhood from 1996 until eviction in 2007. The decade-​long history of this alternative art space has all but vanished, existing namely in the form of private collections of ephemera held by former members. My interviews with five former members provide occasion to consider the confluence of queer life, art production, community-​building, and the deleterious effects of gentrification on subcultural communities. Likewise, the vanishing imprint of the New York art communities that were wiped out by the AIDS crisis has prompted present-​day artists, including Ira Sachs, Every Ocean Hughes, and Zoe Leonard, to produce work in this gap; looking at Sachs’s Last Address (2009), contextualised here with work by Hughes and Leonard, introduces strategies for bringing into the present, as well as claiming for the future, art practices that have fallen through the cracks in official alternative records.

67

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Taking place

This chapter is not intended to provide a comprehensive history of New York City’s alternative art communities; that work has recently been done in such publications as Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces 1960 to 2010, and in Julie Ault’s 2002 Alternative Art New York, 1965–​1985. Rather, I am interested in the fact that, despite the increasing historical preoccupation with unearthing hidden alternative histories, several ‘alternatives,’ not to mention alternative understandings of what constitutes art space, nevertheless remain absent from these histories. I work to enter them into the discussion, noting the markers of marginalised difference that, in part, account for their absence. The subcultural histories that form this chapter can be linked to the narratives of gentrification that have increasingly become synonymous with cultural histories of New York City; as has been well documented, gentrification narratives often place responsibility on marginalised communities that include queers, artists, and queer artists, who are often viewed as the harbingers of this process. As geographers including David Ley have argued, artists ‘are very special members of the middle class for they stretch its imagination, its desires, even its practices, beyond its norms and conventions.’11 What is perceived as a choice to live and work in places ‘valorised as authentic, symbolically rich and free from the commodification that depreciates the meaning of place’12 (though the reality suggests that there is often no choice for low-​income artists but to occupy underused spaces in the city), Ley contends, nevertheless becomes a valuable entrepreneurial resource, and ‘the accrued cultural capital of a location can be traded in for economic capital, as the edge becomes the new centre.’13 Responding to charges that queers cause gentrification, Schulman inverses the equation to show how gentrification has negatively impacted vulnerable citizens in New York City, demanding a more nuanced form of ‘simultaneous’ thinking that allows for what she perceives to be a ‘more truthful understanding’ of the role of marginalised communities in processes of gentrification.14 Writing on the economic and demographic shifts in New York City’s West Village that forced communities of young queer people of colour out of the neighbourhood, increased rent prices, and pushed the neighbourhood’s public sexuality into the private homes of wealthy gay residents, Schulman acknowledges that ‘the racism of white gay men and their willingness to displace poor communities in order to create their own enclaves is historical fact,’ but also points out that this development would not have been possible in the first place without ‘tax incentives for luxury developers or without the lack of city-​sponsored low-​income housing.’15 The multitude of interests –​including queer interests –​ related to each instance of cultural power and the question of who stands to lose and who stands to gain must be considered in a queer history, and considerations of the physical spaces in which these interactions, transactions, and conflicts occur is critical.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Dangerous developments

Materials, movements, shapes, gestures: the ephemerality of queer histories Several physical sites in New York City’s artistic, political, and cultural history that contribute to histories of feminist art queer art production represent distinct instances of coming into being through processes of doing, supporting an argument that ‘materiality is agency.’16 This phrase is borrowed from geographers John David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose, and John Wylie, who, in reflecting on their experiences of the Enacting Geographies conference convened in Brighton in 2000, observed that the dominant memories they took away from the meeting were not the specifics of what had been said but their enactments. They write, ‘[w]‌hat has slipped away are sentences, phrases, what remains are materials, movements, shapes, gestures.’17 Arguing that representation is action, they write, ‘in the performances that make us, the world comes about.’18 This observation carries potentially productive connotations for queer feminist history projects that struggle to become, and remain, visible; as Ann Cvetkovich argues, queers have had to struggle to preserve their histories. In the face of institutional neglect, along with erased and invisible histories, gay and lesbian archives have been formed through grassroots efforts […] Forged around sexuality and intimacy, and hence forms of privacy and invisibility that are both chosen and enforced, gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces. In the absence of institutionalized documentation or in opposition to official histories, memory becomes a valuable historical resource, and ephemeral and personal collections of objects stand alongside the documents of the dominant culture to offer alternative modes of knowledge.19

Cvetkovich counters the historical injuries encountered by queer cultures in attempts to preserve their histories, as well as strategies for projecting queerness into public space. With queer, we are stuck somewhere between the desire to appropriate the material while nevertheless remaining immaterial, the immaterial acting, in a sense, as a shield through which to evade co-​option. The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz once commented on this ‘in between’ –​ what constitutes a queer strategy: Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere –​while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.20

69

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Taking place

Writing in 1999, Muñoz’s observation still carries relevance over two decades later, especially during a time when communities are increasingly keen to mine archives for signs of queer presence. But has the deliberateness of queer invisibility hindered this project? In a sense, the ephemeral nature of much queer experience shares certain qualities in common with movements in the visual arts and earlier forms of radical, emancipatory, and dematerialised avant-​garde cultural production, notably minimalism, conceptualism, and performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly in New York, a key centre of such movements. Exhibitions of these movements tend to privilege the documentary object, the indexical link to the past of performance –​a nod to a past moment, not the art object itself. Ephemeral and covert representation has long been employed by queer artists; Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–​1963, for instance, examines gossip’s use value in chronicling the secret homosexual lives of several well-​known artists, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, working in New York City in the mid-​twentieth century. Butt’s project can be construed as contributing to a broader queer art history project (which has been also tended to by Jonathan D. Katz, who has worked to enter into relief the motivations connected to non-​normative sexualities present in postwar American art). Important to note, however, is that gossip here functions not as a methodology in and of itself, but as what Butt refers to as a dangerous supplement to a history that has already been written; it is the artists here who are the dangerous supplements to the dominant modernist strands of artistic production and criticism, which advocated the disembodied, yet implicitly male, white, heterosexual perspective embedded in Greenbergian formalism. As Butt comments, ‘in the two decades in American art which preceded the Stonewall riots, discussions of sexuality, and particularly of homosexuality, were habitually bracketed off into “lesser,” quotidian modes of communicative activity, positioned outside the circuits of art critical meaning and exchange.’21 An emphasis in art historical accounts solely on material archives and formalist readings of artworks or on ephemerality produces narratives that often fail to respond to the already supplemental nature of many alternative histories; but could it not be argued that a queer art history is one that intentionally evades the historical and archival structures that once worked to ensure its invisibility? As John Paul Ricco has hypothesised: What if we were no longer impressed by permanence, longevity, and a certain museological artifactuality rendered as evidence? What if we began to recognize the false comforts of situatedness and the adverse effects of territorialisation?

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

17

Dangerous developments

What if, in our queer theorization of globalization, we neither strove for a singular totality (a ‘Queer Planet’) nor a pluralistic string of places? What if then, in our investigation of sex and space, we did not rely upon visual-​based modes of knowledge production that are intended to generate statistical mappings and models of community (i.e. presupposed zones of identity?) What if we were to think sex and space beyond positivizing logics of reification, commodification, and privatization? In the end, what if we were to substitute something like a cruising ground for an epistemological ground?22

Following theorists including Butt, Cvetkovich, Muñoz, and Ricco, what if we were to look more closely at the traces that are theorised as potential solutions to questions of queer practice, queer space, and queer history? Are these traces material –​remnants that point to something that has occurred, and that continues to occur, even if only ideologically, through artefactual remains? These questions echo how Ricco conceptualises a notion of trace as resembling ‘a social bond that is materialised as nothing more of less than a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot, a handwritten note on a scrap of paper, or two drinking glasses stacked together and left on the counter.’23 Muñoz further points to the value of physical trace in conjuring histories that would otherwise go undocumented, observing that, ‘the presentation of this sort of anecdotal and ephemeral evidence grants entrance and access to those who have been locked out of official history and, for that matter, “material reality.” ’24 In the wake of New York’s rapid urban development, those marginalised art communities that at once struggled to establish visibility and played a role in the city’s gentrification can be viewed to have again gone underground. However, an expansive body of artwork that focuses on the residual traces of queer lives supports an argument for the enduring significance of the study of trace to queer art’s histories. These examples also serve to emphasise the difference between trace as a radical queer strategy, and trace as that which can be salvaged following dramatic shifts to the urban terrain. ‘Oh, I know someone who needs a place’: subcultural sprawl and the dUMBA collective Added obstacles to visibility, as experienced by marginalised communities, complicate the overly simplistic view of the artist’s negative role in processes of gentrification. The case of dUMBA in Brooklyn demonstrates how art communities that are perceived to be the instigators of gentrification are simultaneously the marginalised communities that are most vulnerable to its effects.

71

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

Taking place

It has been variously observed that Brooklyn has been in the midst of unprecedented and unparalleled transformation throughout the past two decades, from dilapidation to revitalisation in a manner that mirrors the mass displacement experienced by New York City dwellers in the decades preceding Brooklyn’s most recent cycle of development. However, as Suleiman Osman argues in his 2011 book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York, this process has been ongoing since the late 1940s, when ‘[a]‌rtists, lawyers, bankers, and other white-​collar workers migrated to the aging Gold Coast district, restoring old townhouses and moving into run-​down tenements. By the 1960s, white-​collar professionals priced out of Manhattan flooded into surrounding areas in search of cheap housing.’25 Prior to gentrification’s maligned reputation due to its now well-​documented devastating effects with regard to displacement, the postwar migration to Brooklyn was once considered a positive transformation of a neglected part of town, one in which more well-​to-​do residents could ameliorate and implement initiatives that would benefit both old and new residents. Ideologically, as Osman writes, ‘Brownstoners […] believed they were involved in something more than a renovation fad. Brownstoning was a cultural revolt against sameness, conformity, and bureaucracy.’26 Brooklyn’s present-​day gentrification carries fewer positive connotations, with a ‘divide between, on the one hand, “the creative class” and some immigrant neighborhoods, and on the other, “the concentrated poverty” in many other struggling areas […]’27 Trespassing comes to carry different connotations for the queer performance arts collective dUMBA, which borders each of these demographics and which, while it legally occupied its space for ten years, from 1996–​2007, did so in a neighbourhood that remained largely unoccupied throughout its existence, its eventual gentrification leading to the increased difficulties dUMBA encountered in continuing to survive. Not squatting in the traditional sense, dUMBA nevertheless likely benefited from the lack of visibility their once-​remote location provided them, engaging in more a more metaphorical practice of squatting –​what Michel de Certeau viewed as a tactical practice of spatial appropriation, ‘determined by the absence of power … it is subtle, tireless, ready for every opportunity, scattered over the terrain of the dominant order and foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by a rationality founded on established rights and property.’28 dUMBA appeared on the scene at the tail end of an aggressive phase of city revitalisation in Manhattan, and operated in an urban climate in which public intimacies, if not outright criminal, were often suspect. In Manhattan, for instance, Mayor Giuliani’s anti-​pornography zoning code delimited the physical parameters of the sex trade business, granting the city the right to remove

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

37

Dangerous developments

any visible markers of the sex trade that were deemed not to meet the approval of the zoning board. The population density and overlap between residential and commercial zones made the effects of this code immediately felt: many businesses were forced to close, while others were pushed to the outskirts of the city. Responding to Giuliani’s interventions in the social and sexual life of New York City, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argued that even those who do not make direct use of these commercial sites nevertheless feel the effects of their existence, writing, in particular, about the historic sexual culture that once thrived in Lower Manhattan that, ‘[n]‌ot all of the thousands who migrate or make pilgrimages to Christopher Street use the porn shops, but all benefit from the fact that some do. After a certain point, a quantitative change is a qualitative change. A critical mass develops. The street becomes queer. It develops a dense, publicly accessible sexual culture.’29 It has been speculated that the outcome of Giuliani’s efforts to erase the visible signs of sexual culture from the city may have been the very purpose of his rezoning efforts; in her expansive study of North American strip shows and in reflecting on the transformation of New York City’s sexual economy, Katherine Liepe-​Levinson has written, ‘Giuliani appeared less interested in actually forbidding the sale of erotic or pornographic goods than in eliminating any explicit signs of sexual desire (along with any signs of “social trouble” in all senses of the phrase) from the official map of his city.’30 Although what happened to dUMBA cannot be directly attributed to the sanitation efforts of Giuliani, it nevertheless seems fair to argue that ongoing attempts to erase signs of public sexuality from the city had a cumulative effect on the social values of New York’s citizens, ushering in a new kind of resident to the city and its environs, with far-​reaching impact on long-​standing residents, including those occupying once-​desolate areas, such as Dumbo –​not even on the island, but Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. An extensive archive of the queer performance arts collective dUMBA and its activities does not exist, and what material does remain is in the possession of its former members. Founding member Scott Miller Berry, who lived in dUMBA from 1996–​2001 and was the leaseholder until around 2003–​4, has attributed the scant material evidence of dUMBA’s ten-​year existence to several factors, including the fact that the space was somewhat ‘off the grid,’ that the rapid turnover in membership led to a lack of consistency in archival practices, that the collective refused identification along institutional lines, and that it existed on the cusp of the Internet Age.31 As such, the cultural history of dUMBA is largely dependent on the recollection of its former occupants, the physical site that once housed the collective, now surrounded by shops and cafes, a looming reminder of the before-​and-​after Dumbo’s gentrification.

73

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

Taking place

The dUMBA collective was founded in 1996 when four individuals moved into the 5,000-​foot commercial loft (formerly a printing press) at 57 Jay Street, at the tip of Brooklyn, just on the other side of the Manhattan Bridge. Berry, along with Vincent Baker, Maria-​ Rose Callieri, and Samantha Longoni, had met as residents of the New School Media Studies Program and were interested in living in a space with programming potential, especially at a time in New York’s subcultural history when there were very few all-​ages alternative queer venues operating. The live-​work space of the formerly industrial loft, which was cut up for darkrooms and offices, permitted for this kind of multi-​ use space to be envisioned and come into being.32 Berry’s description of the motives behind the founding of the collective recalls the earlier occupation of industrial spaces by the Woman’s Building and A.I.R. Gallery, sharing in common with these spaces accessibility due to their former undesirability.33 As Berry reflected, ‘[i]‌ts desolation was the biggest plus when it came to providing all that we were doing WITHOUT permits, without a formal “business,” letting all ages in…’34 Former member Shields, who lived in dUMBA from 2002 until the collective was evicted in 2007, recalled how even in the early 2000s, the neighbourhood was still relatively deserted, by New York City standards: ‘It was dead in the sense of high rents and commerce. It was a completely alive place behind doors. [Outside] it was, like, tumbleweeds…’35 The affordability of the loft, due in part to its location (and in part due to a landlord named Chaim who never raised the rent), was made even more so by the number of occupants: seven at the outset and as many as fifteen by 2007. Later member Slava Osowska, who lived in dUMBA from 2002–​4, recalled that they would clean out rooms and divide them into smaller rooms in order to accommodate more tenants.36 The loft comprised a series of alcoves connected by a long hallway, and within the alcoves were several smaller rooms, in addition to what became the performance space, and space behind the performance space where there were several more bedrooms, as well as a second living room area and a second kitchen. The sheer size of the space provided for compartments for living and working, a mix of private space and public space.37 Nevertheless, new tenants had to be amenable to one foundational living rule, which was that you had to either enjoy noise or be able to sleep through it.38 The organisation of the space was in constant flux, dependant on the needs of its occupants at any given point in time. In the beginning, the space was funded solely by the residents’ rent, which was split among tenants, a policy that continued to varying degrees of success until dUMBA’s end.39 The events funded themselves, with dUMBA holding back only 10 per cent of the revenue from non-​fundraiser shows for food and (non-​alcoholic) drinks, but

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

57

Dangerous developments

not to subsidise rent. This, Berry explains, permitted the collective to continue to be selective in choosing what events to host. Events ranged from punk shows to benefits for tenants’ rights groups, radical environmental projects, AIDS and other health organisation benefits, and, over time, came to include cinema screenings and the Lusty Loft Parties for which dUMBA came to be well known. Additionally, dUMBA’s hosting of Queeruption, the annual international Queercore festival, in 1999, speaks to the collective’s then central role in radical queer political and cultural organising through the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s. As is the case with many collectively run spaces, dUMBA’s mandate transformed as tenants were added and subtracted, reflecting the malleable identity of the collective as it worked to respond to the individual needs of its members who were attempting to live and work collectively. Working to serve the interests of the intersecting communities in which they participated, ‘making connections between queer struggles parallel to class, race, ability, and all forms of oppression,’40 the dUMBA collective negotiated situations such as how to live in a queer-​positive, sex-​positive space with a small child –​ the child of a woman who came to live in the space until its end.41 To accommodate their desire to respond adequately to the situation, the child was given an alcove room with sliding doors that could be closed off to grant the child his own living area that would not be impinged on during parties, though it was not entirely possible to fully avoid a party that was in full swing.42 In regard to the sexual identity of the collective and how it played out in the space, collective members noted how identification as queer had to be fluid, not merely in binary opposition to heterosexuality but sexually inclusive and open to various forms of expression and sexual practice. Neither male-​nor female-​dominant, dUMBA, Osowska observed, worked best when there was a good mix of members across the gender spectrum, and that race came to be an increasingly important element of the collective’s identity in its later years, during which the whiteness of much queer organising and activism was subverted by collectives, such as dUMBA, almost entirely comprising queer people of colour. Shields made an important observation about how the racial composition of the collective came to change over time, important in particular for how it relates to the specificities of New York City’s demographics and the increasingly deleterious effects of gentrification on minority populations: A lot of us come from traditional, religious, and homophobic families. And once we came out or were outed to our families we were disowned. For someone like me who grew up fundamentalist Christian in Alaska –​I was disowned and moved to the city in order to be able to live openly. But for people from

75

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Taking place

New York –​who often stack up generationally in housing and live with family because rent and cost of living is so high –​when they experience being kicked out of their home and cut off from physical and emotional support –​where do they go? This was a more pressing issue in the sense of what a lot of us considered was more important than some other aspects of activism. There were people that came to dUMBA after running away, or being kicked out and disowned.43

In terms of the collective’s timing, a space like dUMBA benefited a vulnerable demographic that was quickly losing access to other physical spaces on and around Manhattan, such as the West Side Piers, which were ultimately closed off, and then demolished, by the city and replaced with a public park. The privatisation of this space effectively obliterated a community of gay men, queer youth and trans people of colour, sex workers, and drag queens, who had historically claimed the space for various purposes, including sleeping, having sex, and socialising. During this time, dUMBA could offer queer youth of colour and other individuals in need something that was becoming increasingly rare; Shields explained how individuals came to take up residence in the loft: ‘[p]‌eople would find out [about dUMBA]. We’d get email and emails were forwarded to us… “Oh, I know someone who needs a place…” ’44 Osowska and Shields reflected on what seemed to be a shared sentiment among former collective members, which was that, socially, nothing in New York City compared to what was happening at dUMBA, and that dUMBA was at the centre of members’ social, political, artistic, and sexual lives; Shields recalled, ‘I moved in on a sex party and then when I wanted to celebrate that I moved in I invited people to come to brunch and it turned into a sex party.’45 Where dUMBA was most different from other alternative art spaces was in its translation of radical sexual ideology into action, most notably, at the Lusty Loft Parties, which were semi-​public queer sex parties where attendees could choose to engage, to watch, or to socialise on the sidelines. In her weekly Village Voice column, ‘Pucker Up,’ sex writer Tristan Taormino describes her experience attending one of the Lusty Loft Parties, celebrating the event for introducing to New York City a pansexual event without risk of becoming heterosexual. Commenting on the group makeup, Taormino writes: Now, I did notice that most of the group had several characteristics in common: They were young (was anyone there over 30?), queer (I seriously doubt anyone would use ‘gay or lesbian’ to describe themselves), radical (with clearly anti-​mainstream, punk-​rock, anarchist aesthetics and politics) genderfuckers (boys with lipstick, girls in drag). Young, queer, radical genderfuckers for whom the term ‘opposite sex’ was practically meaningless.46

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

77

Dangerous developments

Taormino’s description of the unrestricted sexuality that dUMBA made accessible through the Lusty Loft Parties clearly, and importantly, points to a shift in thinking from political action as inspired by sexual difference to sexual difference as a form of political action. Indeed, dUMBA performed what Berlant and Warner have called ‘criminal intimacies,’ though not without consequences tied to spatial occupation, visibility, and the implications of otherness in an increasingly homogenised place.47 The mid-​2000s saw the gentrification of Lower Manhattan begin to again sweep into Brooklyn. Shields recalled how people already living in Dumbo did not have the resources to develop the area or to change their living s­ituation: ‘Everyone was kind of stuck with a certain kind of entryway or broken staircase…’48 As the demographics of the neighbourhood changed, so did its physical appearance: ‘the facades of the buildings, everything changed, what was possible… it was harder to get into buildings, get through buildings…’49 As Jerry Portwood wrote a month before the collective lost their lease, ‘Dumbo is now a neighborhood packed with expensive strollers, gourmet grocery stores and high-​end furniture outlets. With the influx of new residences snatching up the million-​dollar views of Manhattan, it seems there’s no longer room for the groping, sucking, and fucking that used to take place here.’50 The changing demographics of the neighbourhood ushered in increased police presence, which included racial profiling of dUMBA collective members and police monitoring during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City. An additional nail in the coffin came accidentally, in the form of queer appreciation for the collective from filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell, who negotiated a rental of the space to film his 2006 full-​length independent film Shortbus, a queer sex comedy-​drama partly inspired by the events of the Lusty Loft Parties. Shields and Osowska, who were residents of dUMBA at the time of filming, recalled how neighbourhood residents filed complaints against what they perceived to be scantily clad drag queens hanging out on the corner in broad daylight, when, in fact, they were extras in Mitchell’s movie. The obvious question is: should it have made any difference? The semi-​public sexuality of the space was altogether too public for the neighbourhood’s new residents, which dUMBA members believe resulted in their eviction in 2007. Shields confirms that the landlord’s petition to the court to have dUMBA’s tenants evicted included the following: The course can see that these people operate parties under a business name D.U.M.B.A. COLLECTIVE. These are run almost every weekend and people pay to get into the parties. The court can see that the sex offered is deviate sex, i.ie. Lesbian and/​or Gay. When they are running their parties they have tremondous

77

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Taking place

[sic] loudspeakers that you can almost hear all over Brooklyn and these parties run almost to dawn. After the party on Monday morning you can see loads of empty beer bottles that is [sic] left over by them. I cannot say that they are running a house of prostitution because I personally did NOT see such activity. However, the advertising they do can certainly lead one to such conclusions.51

As Osowska commented, ‘[i]‌t’s really hard to have places like this in New York.’52 The loss of dUMBA and the semi-​public queer sexual culture it promoted in a neighbourhood that nobody used to want to live in is but one example among many of how this has increasingly become the case. Witnesses against vanishing In the early 2010s, curator Dieter Roelstraete commented on the shared interest among contemporary artists in ‘looking back’: The retrospective, historiographic mode –​a methodological complex that includes the historical account, the archive, the document, the act of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the art of reconstruction and re-​enactment, the testimony –​has become both the mandate (‘content’) and the tone (‘form’) favoured by a growing number of artists… They either make artworks that want to remember, or at least turn back the tide of forgetfulness, or they make art about remembering and forgetting: we can call this the ‘meta-​historical mode,’ an important aspect of much artwork that assumes a curatorial character.53

Roelstraete attributes the ‘historiographic turn in art’ to the events of 11 September 2001, the ‘war on terror,’ and the anti-​war protests that failed to interrupt the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003, observing that the remaining five years of the Bush presidency were characterized in the main by a deep-​seated sense of resignation permeating all layers of (Western) society and (Western) cultural life, by ‘inner exile’ (a historically fraught phrase), by escape and withdrawal into both intro-​and retrospection, by depoliticization and hedonist apathy –​this is the background against which the defining features of the contemporary art scene of the last eight years or so should be read.54

Roelstraete makes reference to Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, writing that terror is the new global geopolitical ‘ “ideological” specter’ –​an update on the ‘specter of communism’ haunting Europe that Marx warns against at the beginning of his Manifesto.55 In Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

97

Dangerous developments

Derrida employs the term ‘hauntology’ (hantologie in the original French, a deliberate near homophone of ‘ontology’), originally intended to affirm his belief in Marx’s impact on post-​Communist Europe while supporting his argument that the present can only exist with respect to the past. Ghosts, for Derrida, become a critical metaphor for understanding the condition of being ‘neither present nor absent, neither living nor dead,’ and for refusing a totalising occupation with the present:56 The present is what passes, the present comes to pass, it lingers in this transitory passage, in the coming-​and-​going, between, what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives, at the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself … Presence is enjoined, ordered, distributed in the two directions of absence, at the articulation of what is no longer and what is not yet. To join and enjoin.57

Conjuring Derrida’s hauntological project, itself a theoretical intervention, as well as reflection of the political preoccupations with Marxism in the nineteenth century, Roelstraete similarly responds to what he perceives to be the totalising nature of the political moment of the early twenty-​first century, engaging a conception of time as extending backwards and forwards, whereby thinking about the future remains inextricably linked to the past. He suggests that this might be due to the political failures of the first decade of the twenty-​ first century, which, he argues, resulted in a subsequent inability to imagine the future. He argues that the art of the first decade of the 2000s cannot be grouped together into a coherent movement, only that in the place of theories of art in the present and into the future exist massive amounts of art made today concerned with ‘yesterday’; our inability to either ‘think’ or simply imagine the future seems structurally linked with the enthusiasm shared by so many artists for digging up various obscure odds and ends dating from a more or less remote, unknowable past –​and the more unknowable the past in question, the deeper the pathological dimensions of this melancholy, retrospective gaze.58

Importantly, Roelstraete asks, ‘what would an excavation of the future yield, and what would such an excavation site even look like?’59 His question prompts a glance at developments in queer theory around the same time asking similar questions. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muñoz argues that ‘queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.’60 Examining

79

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

Taking place

different factions of feminist and queer cultural production in New York City has opened my study up to different moments in time, a looking backward to articulate strategies for historical preservation in the future. Looking at aspects of the recent history of New York’s gentrification provides many points to consider: on the one hand, the idea that gentrification has resulted in the end of new modes of art production in the city, perceptible in the narratives told by an older generation of artists, namely, that New York City can no longer offer the conditions necessary for productive and successful artistic careers. On the other hand, in looking beyond what has become the dominant narrative about gentrification’s effects on cultural production, this idea of an end to innovative cultural practices does not appear to have played out as anticipated, as the continued occupation of New York City by a younger generation of artists and what seems like a shared desire to engage artistically with earlier decades in New York City’s cultural history would attest. This is clear in work by artists grappling with the trauma of the mass loss experienced during the first wave of the AIDS crisis. The impact of AIDS on New York City’s feminist, queer, and activist art history is undeniable, particularly in examining the first decade of the epidemic and into the mid-​1990s, before the advent of the protease inhibitors that slowed down the rate at which people were dying. In addition to New York City’s then unparalleled gentrification is its position as one of the cities most devastated by the AIDS crisis in its first decade. The demographic shifts resulting from the mass devastation of AIDS, particularly from the mid-​1980s through the mid-​1990s, is one angle through which to approach recent histories of New York’s activist art histories, and has been substantiated by many who emerged from this era, including Sarah Schulman, an early lesbian member of ACT UP, who argues that it was the advent of AIDS that mobilised disparate groups of feminists, lesbians, and gay men and culminated in radical queer collective identity with increasingly visible presence in the city. Schulman writes: Men became endangered and vulnerable. They needed each other and women to intervene with the government, media, and pharmaceutical and insurance industries. They needed intervention in all arenas of social relationship. They needed women’s political experience from the earlier feminist and lesbian movements, women’s analysis of power, and women’s emotional commitments to them. They needed women’s alienation from the state. As men became weak, they allowed themselves to acknowledge the real ways that women are strong, particularly recognizing our hard-​ won experience at political organizing. There was more room for women to be seen at our level of merit, to occupy social space that we deserved to occupy, even if the reason was that men were

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

Dangerous developments

disappearing. Like Rosie the Riveter, gay women gained more equality within the queer community, more social currency and autonomy because men were threatened, wounded, and killed.61

The popular imagination surrounding the epidemic on a cultural level is rife with inaccuracies, romanticisation, and increasingly hegemonic histories that often stand in for the complex and fraught impact of AIDS on the subcultural communities living in its wake. Histories of contemporary art focusing on the AIDS crisis are important yet few, and notable studies by Robert Atkins, Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, Jonathan D. Katz, and Richard Meyer have worked to fill this gap, albeit from a gay white male perspective. There is always a danger of misrepresenting history, which is particularly interesting in the case of the early history of the AIDS crisis, relief from which relied heavily on the visual materials –​from the SILENCE =​DEATH posters that blanketed New York City towards the end of the 1980s, to Nicholas Nixon’s photographic portraits of People With AIDS, which infuriated AIDS activists, calling on ACT UP to demand ‘NO MORE PICTURES WITHOUT CONTEXT.’ Over the last decade, there has been renewed interest in the early history of AIDS and AIDS activism, evidenced by the proliferation of documentaries at the beginning of the 2010s, such as United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (dir. Jim Hubbard, 2011), We Were Here (dir. David Weissman and Bill Weber, 2011), and How to Survive a Plague (dir. David France, 2012), the titles of which all make reference either to time, or to popular terminology from the first decade of the epidemic. However, the fact that few individuals who were directly affected survived the first wave of the epidemic has made the development of cultural and activist histories difficult, but increasingly important. Resources such as the ACT UP Oral History Project, an online digital archive of interviews with former ACT UP members, developed and organised by Schulman and Hubbard, attempts to build an early history of AIDS and AIDS activism through interviews with surviving members, who speak of various aspects of the organising and the movement in its political, social, and historical context.62 The 2011 exhibition, Coming After, curated by Jon Davies at the Power Plant in Toronto, featured a group of artists primarily born in 1970 or after whose work engages with the recent past, specifically, the period from the mid-​1980s to the early 1990s. As the exhibition statement explains: This exhibition does not focus on those artists who were, as artist Christian Holstad succinctly put it, ‘burying their dead’ at that time, but instead those who grew up in the shadow of the crisis, whether by fate or by choice. Artist Sharon Hayes has noted, ‘what marks me generationally is that … it wasn’t my friends who were dying, it was the people I was just discovering, people I was just beginning to model myself after, people I longed to become.’63

81

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

2.1

Taking place

Ryan Conrad, b. 1983, 2008–​9.

Davies, Holstad, and Hayes address a series of overlapping and contradictory temporal moments that have been taken out of chronological order, and the abilities of some but not others to access these moments (artists who died of AIDS in the past not making it to the future, artists working in the future that followed the first wave of the epidemic with limited access to the past). American-​ born, Canada-​based artist Ryan Conrad’s b. 1983 (2008–​9) responds to David Wojnarowicz’s One Day This Kid… (1990), which features a Xeroxed photograph of the late Wojnarowicz as a child, his head and torso surrounded by typed text telling the future autobiographical narrative and homophobic encounters that will follow after the artist discovers (as a young man) ‘he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.’ In Conrad’s update on the work, at an almost twenty-​year remove, the Xeroxed image of a young Wojnarowicz has been replaced by the higher quality Xeroxed image of a young Conrad; Conrad’s autobiographical narrative, told in the same future tense, begins, tellingly, ‘[i]‌n 1983 this boy was born into the middle of a deadly epidemic. It would be decades before he understands the severity of his situation and the ghosts haunting his unclaimed and abandoned histories of sexual liberation.’ Conrad’s work follows earlier work by American queer feminist artist Every Ocean Hughes, whose 2001 untitled (David Wojnarowicz project) profoundly addressed this temporal disconnect, evoking what it means for artists working and living in the shadow of the AIDS crisis to engage with the unknown past that has nevertheless informed their cultural present. Hughes’s photographic series can be positioned as a collaborative response to Wojnarowicz’s earlier photographic series Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–​1979, where

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

Dangerous developments

Every Ocean Hughes, untitled (David Wojnarowicz project), 2001–​7.

Wojnarowicz himself began the process of resurrection that carries over in Hughes’s work through a photographic masking exercise, situating the rebel Symbolist poet (who has been appropriated as a queer hero) Rimbaud in a variety of underbelly locations in New York City in the late 1970s, including Brooklyn, the Meat Packing District, the Bowery, and the West Side Piers, all of which, importantly, have been gentrified in more recent years. The figure is shown engaging in intravenous drug use, urinating in a decrepit bathroom, hustling in Times Square, and masturbating in bed. Twenty years later, and also a decade after Wojnarowicz’s death from AIDS, Hughes was inspired by his project and took Wojnarowicz, calling him ‘David,’ as her mask, re-​enacting the photographic series and imbuing it with queer feminist connotations. In doing so, Hughes not only represents the multi-​layered, cross-​temporal conversations Wojnarowicz instigated with Rimbaud and that Hughes subsequently instigates with Wojnarowicz, but also employs the photographic object as a performance representing the practice of spatial reclamation, community formation, and intergenerational dialogue. The masks depicted in both series invoke other artists, raised here as if to elicit a ghostly mass of bodies long dead. Past lives are projected onto present experiences. The physical space of the city, as represented in each set of photographs, is a palimpsest between temporal worlds; the image of one can be transposed onto the other, while the practices depicted in each would thus appear as double exposures –​two bodies acting in the same space across time.

83

2.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Taking place

When asked, in an interview with filmmaker Jean Carlomusto, about the insertion of herself into Wojnarowicz’s original project, Hughes commented, ‘It’s both to say definitely a guest spot, in having the phallus, in making the sex and sexy images, and also feeling a desire to work with David, stitch myself into bed with him, turn myself into a fag. Yes, turn myself into a fag, allow my desire to move my body, change my body, to make something that gets me closer.’64 Hughes confuses notions of essentialised gender and sexuality by assuming the identity of ‘David,’ a gay man, and through the use of prosthetics, as in her re-​enactment of Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud masturbation photograph, in which she straps on a dildo and assumes Wojnarowicz’s pose, imbuing her images with additional queer and trans significance. Where Wojnarowicz poses his model with a needle in his arm, Hughes poses herself partly nude on a bed with a needle in her thigh –​a reference here to the injection not of recreational drugs, but of testosterone –​adding a new layer of trans meaning to the project. These are not simply appropriative gestures on Hughes’s part; they also carry with them strategies of solidarity, resistance, community formation, and remembering. As Hughes makes clear: I think especially from the ravaging of our communities through AIDS and the straight world we live in, queers are less willing to forego our icons and the lessons from the past. We have had the opportunity to cull our history and in that action we perform our future. What we remember, the spaces we inhabit, the jeans of a lover, the face of a lost friend. We can’t release them, so we play with them.65

Hughes’s statement resonates beyond her astounding resurrection of Wojnarowicz for how it speaks to history and absence, to presence and to the future, to love and to remembrance, and to a devotion to preserving queer legacies. Hughes’s The Piers Untitled (2010) works again at this intersection of New York’s urban landscape, queer social histories, and absence in the face of the city’s gentrification, representing the West Side Piers in black and white photographs, haunting in their emptiness and the knowledge of their former queer occupation. The former site of Manhattan’s commercial shipping industries which, by the 1960s, began to move to Brooklyn and New Jersey, offered a newly abandoned space to disparate groups of urban dwellers, including gay men, trans women, and queer youth of colour –​bodies whose various activities, including cruising, transactional sex, socialising, and art-​making, have been documented by photographers including Wojnarowicz, Alvin Baltrop, and Leonard Fink –​to name a few.66 Hughes explains that she chose to omit bodies from the pictures because she was ‘thinking about non-​monumental

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

Dangerous developments

85

relationships to public space and spaces we all live amongst where history is made and unmarked.’67 The affect of her chosen site arises from absence, and the knowledge of what the piers once were, and what they have become; Hughes explains: I was looking at the post-​industrial piers along the West Village in New York City that from the late 1960s to the early 1980s were heavily trafficked cruising areas as well as a diverse array of spaces that were off the legible grid of New York City. Many interesting lives were constituted and lost in these spaces. I spent a lot of time sitting down at the piers and am crushed by the hyper regulations taking over these spaces as they become now privately owned, but

Every Ocean Hughes, The Piers Untitled (#2), 2010.

2.3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

Taking place

public appearing parks that occupy the entire waterfront of New York City. The work thinks also about the reverberations of this all over the city.68

Hughes’s 2010 West Street, an accordion fold artist’s book that combines photographs from her The Piers Untitled project with photographs by the late Alvin Baltrop, who also photographed the piers (while they were still a cruising ground), reintroduces the human figure into the urban landscape, working as a transposition in a similar way to her untitled (David Wojnarowicz) series, an imaginative corrective to an erased history. Reflecting on the title of the bookwork, Hughes explains, ‘because West Street is the street you had to cross to get to the piers. I am interested in this choice to cross the street and that sort of boundary, which takes different shapes, and in many ways is not there, except we queers know it is there, and we step over it and we go to a space to find many different things.’69 On the same trip to New York when I encountered the dUMBA crew in Shields’s loft on Jay Street, I had occasion to walk around the West Village with filmmaker Ira Sachs; the reason for our meeting was to discuss his 2009 short, elegiac video work Last Address, an eight-​minute HD colour film that documents the exteriors of the last apartments inhabited by a generation of artists working in New York City and lost to AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. Prior to our meeting, I entered the addresses of all of the residents included in the film into Google Maps, creating a visual cluster on the flat screen of my computer that could barely register the temporal and affective bonds and bridges between the artists represented in the film: in front of the brick facades of several of New York City’s residential buildings flash the names of some of the era’s most notorious and most beloved artists –​Joe Brainard, Felix Gonzalez-​ Torres, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, Charles Ludlum, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cookie Mueller, Klaus Nomi, Norman René, Vito Russo, John Sex, Jack Smith, and David Wojnarowicz among them. The film is mostly silent, its soundtrack comprising light ambient sounds of the city. Sachs, who came to New York to live in 1988, explains how he perceives the film to operate, as well as his own autobiographical investment in it: [The film’s] temporality sort of relates to my own. I think it’s the work of a middle-​aged man, in a certain way, who is aware of the shortness of life… I never had any mentors. I didn’t go to film school. I never knew people who were older than me who were doing what I do, and I think it struck me that AIDS was certainly the cause of that, that there was a decimation of people. I’m five years younger than the major, you know, maybe even three years … I was just on the cusp of… surviving.70

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Dangerous developments

Sachs expresses a similar sentiment to that of Hughes and similarly conveyed through the premise of the Coming After exhibition: that of arriving to the scene late enough to survive, but too late to have formed personal relationships with those who died. Artists like Hughes and Sachs, then, have had to invent their own processes of legacy preservation and cultural excavation, acknowledging the heavy impact of the loss of these artists on their practices and sense of place in the world. Sachs, for instance, makes careful note that what happened with the first wave of the AIDS crisis was not solely that people disappeared, but that access to their work was also impeded, forcing younger generations to do the work of bringing it out of the shadows: When we say there was this absence because everyone died, it’s also what happened to the work. And is this work visible? And how does the work perpetuate itself? Because, actually, the work is there, so if you were born in the ‘80s, the stuff is there, but how do you ever find it? […] [That]’s a little bit of the complexity of the queer community, because it doesn’t perpetuate itself by generations in the exact same way that other communities do, it’s not the Catholic Church. It doesn’t have money behind it.71

Sachs’s statement nods to theories of queer history as contingent on being able to read for queer traces and the obstacles to accessibility this strategy introduces. Speaking to an awareness of the need to bring queer history out of obscurity, Sachs regards his role as that of a curator, viewing the role of curator as ‘the most powerful thing [he] can do as an artist, which is to create spaces.’72 Although the physical spaces that appear in Last Address were around long before Sachs took a camera to them, Sachs curates the buildings into a short narrative, where the buildings, herded into the space of the screen, stand as physical representation to the lives and drama being enacted within. Sachs acknowledges the hidden dramatic component of the staid buildings, commenting, ‘I’m sure there was drama in all these houses. There was a lot of drama in all these houses… I think that the film, in a way, asks you to look at the city as a place of drama that goes unnoticed.’73 Although Sachs was a member of ACT UP, whose art affiliate Gran Fury produced the more obviously aggressive agit-​prop posters and broadsides that blanketed New York and other cities through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sachs’s work is more in line with the conceptual practices of filmmaker Chantal Akerman, as well as those of Felix Gonzalez-​Torres and Zoe Leonard, who employed conceptual strategies to address the affect of living in a rapidly changing material, natural, and human-​made world. While not a direct meditation on the AIDS crisis, Leonard’s Tree +​Fence pictures from 1998, which

87

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

2.4

Taking place

Ira Sachs, Last Address, 2010.

depict trees around New York City that have melded into the human-​made materials of the city, such as fences, speak to the materiality of the city and the constant negotiation between the natural world, the industrial city, presence, and time. As Leonard has written: I was amazed by the way these trees grew in spite of their enclosures –​bursting out of them or absorbing them. The pictures in the tree series synthesize my thoughts about struggle. People can’t help but anthropomorphize. I immediately identify with the tree. At first, these pictures may seem like melancholy images of confinement. But perhaps they’re also images of endurance. And symbiosis.74

Leonard touches on melancholy as though a reading of the work as such would be negative or incorrect. Although Last Address evokes emotion, Sachs expresses a similar ambivalence about what kind of emotion is at play, drawing a line between sentimentality and nostalgia: I’m always trying to find a position that has an emotional affect on the audience, but one that I’m comfortable with and that represents how I see the work… it’s certainly nostalgic. And it’s certain about… it’s about loss. I can’t actually delineate between nostalgia and loss.75

Sachs’s use of the term ‘nostalgia’ raises important questions about the experience of nostalgia, as well as loss, for something that was never experienced or

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 98

Dangerous developments

Zoe Leonard, Detail (Tree +​Fence), 1998/​1999. 89

2.5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

Taking place

had, which could extend to considerations of Hughes’s work and to the more general trend articulated by Roelstraete as the historiographic turn. Paolo Magagnoli argues that, while the ‘nostalgic impulse’ in contemporary art, as seen in the work of Grant Koester, as well as Leonard, Tacita Dean, Fiona Tan, Gerard Byrne, and Stan Douglas, is often viewed harshly by critics, seen as a ‘pathological escapist fantasy’ or an ‘incapacity to look at the present [and] to think and even imagine a future,’ it is necessary to evaluate the specificities of each work in order to determine ‘whether nostalgia is progressive or reactionary, critical or ideological, generative or sterile.’76 Magagnoli offers several reasons for nostalgia’s maligned position relative to history, including the belief in time’s narratives of progress and emancipation (whereas the opposite force is perceived to be at play with regard to nostalgia), as well as the equating of nostalgia with the past, which Marx viewed as ‘correspond[ing] to a more oppressive form of organisation of society and therefore … a conservative political move that hindered the pursuit of the proletarian cause.’77 In addition to these charges, nostalgia, Magagnoli outlines, has often been positioned as the opposite of history, where history stands as ‘an objective and well-​documented account of the past’ and nostalgia is ‘ideological distortion.’78 Moreover, nostalgia, as taken up in poststructuralist criticism, becomes tied up in loss and melancholy, producing a form of pathology, as when literary theorist Susan Stewart argues, ‘the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt “lack”.’79 And in the 1980s, Magagnoli explains, nostalgia was viewed in postmodernist critique as a symptom of the ‘incapacity of the subject of late capitalism to grasp its present as part of a broader historical process.’80 Importantly, Magagnoli argues that nostalgia serves a special purpose to those members of non-​majoritarian cultures and groups, for whom ‘the past can provide positive models of resistance to the status quo and show utopian possibilities which are still valid in the present.’81 Looking to Koester, who engages in a form of appropriation art, Magagnoli argues that the artist, who views his practice as ‘ghost hunting,’ engages in a form of imitation that is also ‘a strategy to conjure up the past and to fictionalise the present.’82 Artists such as Hughes and Sachs engage in several of the processes Magagnoli claim to be at the core of Koester’s practice, including imitation (as described in Hughes’s imitation of Wojnarowicz), re-​enactment (Hughes’s re-​enactment of Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud photographs, Sachs’s staging of the apartments of a generation of artists, suggesting a re-​staging of their lives), and the ‘representation of architectural ruins.’83 Hughes’s The Piers Untitled series very much works in a similar vein to the absences depicted in photoconceptual

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

19

Dangerous developments

works by Koester, as well as Dean, Leonard, and Douglas. Although Sachs’s Last Address depicts facades of buildings that are still very much in use, they stand as reminders of the mass cultural decimation brought on by AIDS.84 In these ways, Hughes and Sachs are artists who engage in the form of ‘critical nostalgia’ Magagnoli identifies as key to Koester’s oeuvre, and which distinguishes it from ‘the empty sentimentality and regressive quality traditionally attributed to this approach.’85 And, as with Koester’s work, an important aspect of both Hughes and Sachs’s projects are the ways in which they trouble the very theories of progress and freedom critics of nostalgia uphold. As Schulman has explained in The Gentrification of the Mind, what gentrification has done –​in the name of progress –​has had devastating effects on the cultures and communities who, in actuality, were never intended to gain. Instead, Magagnoli argues, there can be a ‘progressive nostalgia that springs from a desire to transform the present, perceived to be too conservative and oppressive.’86 It is important to note that Sachs argues that Last Address is a ‘film about the present.’87 However, it is a film that collapses time onto a singular plane at the same time as it expands that plane into countless temporal layers. The film prompts questions about permanence and materiality, given that it is a time-​based media, and a short one, at that. In 2010, with the help of Visual AIDS, Last Address was screened in the storefronts of several galleries and institutions across the United States for the annual Day With(out) Art that is held on 1 December –​the art world’s response to the AIDS crisis.88 In so doing, Last Address gained a corporeal dimension, becoming, almost, a series of buildings within buildings, and projecting the affect conjured within the work onto the physical space not only of New York City, but also of cities across the country, whose minoritarian communities face similar threats to preservation. The case studies that make up this chapter have confronted similar obstacles in the quest for visibility, preservation, and survival, with varying results. Each artistic response is made possible by understandings of what we owe to history, how we can continue to make that history relevant and useful in the present, and how to reflect, materially, the desire to ‘create permanence.’89 Yet, as Schulman notes, ‘simultaneous thinking’ about gentrification demands an examination of how subcultural communities, such as the feminist and queer arts communities discussed here, are complicit in processes of gentrification, and have suffered at its hands. Although none of the sites examined in this chapter escape this reading, each nevertheless risks historicisation as either victimised by, or benefiting from, New York City’s gentrification. However, history, as Schulman, as well as Roelstraete and Magagnoli show, is rarely so simple. In re-​conceptualising gentrification’s push towards

91

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Taking place

urban and historical ‘progress’ at the expense of the subcultural blights it has profited from, the ‘historiographic turn’ now must turn to progress’s casualties and carve out space in the physical city from which they have been expelled. Notes 1 Dianne Chisholm, ‘The City of Collective Memory,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2001), 196. Chisholm is quoting Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 134. 2 In 2013, Shields, an artist known for her large collage works, organised the HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? Collective (also known as the YAMS Collective), which included 38 international Black and queer artists (former dUMBA members among them), to participate in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The work they submitted, a fifty-​three-​minute digital piece entitled Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, was intended to function as a form of infiltration of the mainstream art world, evading institutional tokenism by sheer size of the collective. The YAMS Collective ultimately withdrew from participation, citing the Whitney’s ongoing refusal to meaningfully address structural, systemic, and representation issues with regard to racial exclusion and inequality, and premiered the work at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival instead. See Ben Davis, ‘The Yams, on the Whitney and White Supremacy,’ Artnet News, 13 May 2014, accessed 24 February 2022, https://​ news.art​net.com/​art-​world/​the-​yams-​on-​the-​whit​ney-​and-​white-​suprem​ acy-​30364. 3 See Jesse Heiwa, ‘Getting to the Root,’ in Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. Sycamore (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004), 273–​7. 4 Lauren Rosati, ‘Introduction,’ in Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces 1960–​2010, ed. Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press in collaboration with Exit Art, 2012), 9. 5 Mary Anne Staniszewski, ‘On Creating Alternatives and “Alternative Histories”,’ in Alternative Histories, 11. 6 Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem, ‘Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem in Conversation’ (1 May 2010), PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, accessed 14 November 2021, https://​pen.org/​mul​time​dia/​ patti-​smith-​and-​jonat​han-​let​hem-​in-​conve​rsat​ion-​2/​. Smith’s own arrival in New York City in the late 1960s and participation in the city’s subcultural communities is chronicled in her 2010 memoir Just Kids (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). 7 Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2012), 81–​2. 8 Ibid., 82.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

39

Dangerous developments

9 Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, ‘The Fine Art of Gentrification,’ October, Vol. 31 (Winter 1984), 98. 10 Ibid., 102. 11 David Ley, ‘Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification,’ Urban Studies, Vol. 40, No. 12 (November 2003), 2533. 12 Ibid., 2535. 13 Ibid., 2541. 14 Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, 39. 15 Ibid. 16 John David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose and John Wylie, ‘Enacting Geographies: Introduction,’ Geoforum, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2002), 439. 17 Ibid., 437. 18 Ibid., 439. 19 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 8. 20 José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence,’ Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1996), 6. 21 Butt, Between You and Me, 3. Butt points to Irit Rogoff ’s essay ‘Gossip as Testimony’ as particularly critical for how it signals the postmodern turn in its ‘acknowledgment of its author’s and its audience’s curiosities.’ See Rogoff, ‘Gossip as Testimony: A Postmodern Signature,’ in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 75–​85. 22 John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), xix. 23 Ibid., xx. 24 Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence,’ 9. 25 Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 26 Ibid. 27 Joel Kotkin, ‘The Hollow Boom of Brooklyn: Behind Veneer of Gentrification, Life Gets Worse for Many,’ Forbes, 25 September 2012, accessed 27 June 2020, www.for​bes.com/​sites/​joe​lkot​kin/​2012/​09/​25/​the-​hol​low-​boom-​of-​brook​ lyn-​beh​ind-​ven​eer-​of-​gen​trif​i cat​ion-​life-​gets-​worse-​for-​many/​. 28 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), 38. 29 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2, Intimacy (Winter 1998), 562. 30 Katherine Liepe-​Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 20. 31 Scott Miller Berry, email to author, 26 March 2012. 32 Guy Trebay, ‘Queers in Space: DUMBA Takes Off,’ The Village Voice, 11 May 1999.

93

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Taking place

33 Later member Sienna Shields has haphazardly joked, ‘we basically were being Benzened… you’re really not supposed to live in a print shop. Wood doesn’t lose the Benzene.’ Shields, interview by author, Brooklyn, NY, 22 February 2012. 34 Berry, email to author. 35 Shields, interview by author. 36 Slava Osowska, interview by author, Brooklyn, NY, 22 February 2012. 37 Ibid. 38 Shields, interview by author. 39 Berry, email to author. 40 Berry, email to author. 41 Shields, interview by author. 42 Ibid. 43 Shields, email to author, 28 April 2022. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Tristan Taormino, ‘Pucker Up: Queer Co-​Ed Lust,’ The Village Voice, Vol. 46, No. 35 (4 September 2001), 128. 47 Berlant and Warner, ‘Sex in Public,’ 558. 48 Shields, interview by author. 49 Ibid. 50 Jerry Portwood, ‘Dumbo’s Lusty Loft: The final days of the DUMBA collective,’ New York Press, Wednesday 1 November 2006, accessed 14 November 2021, https://​web.arch​ive.org/​web/​200​7 101​3172​518/​http://​nypr​ess.com/​19/​43/​ news%26colu​mns/​featu​re3.cfm. 51 Shields pointed me in the direction of this quote, published on the website Urban75 in December 2006. www.urba​n75.org/​pho​tos/​newy​ork/​dumbo-​ dumba.html. 52 Osowska, interview by author. 53 Dieter Roelstraete, ‘The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art,’ e-​flux, No. 4 (March 2009), accessed 27 June 2020, www.e-​flux.com/​ jour​nal/​the-​way-​of-​the-​sho​vel-​on-​the-​archeo​logi​cal-​imagin​ary-​in-​art/​. 54 Roelstraete, ‘After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings,’ e-​flux, No. 6 (May 2009), accessed 27 June 2020, www.e-​flux.com/​jour​nal/​after-​the-​hist​ orio​grap​hic-​turn-​curr​ent-​findi​ngs/​. 55 In the first line of The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx writes, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe –​the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-​spies.’ 56 Warren Montag, ‘Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida’s Specters of Marx,’ in Ghostly Demarcations: a Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinkler (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 71.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

59

Dangerous developments

57 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 25. 58 Roelstraete, ‘After the Historiographic Turn.’ 59 Ibid. 60 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 61 Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, 157. 62 Shulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–​ 1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), lay down in words, on tangible pages, the networks, tactics, and affects of ACT UP’s members, drawing on almost 200 interviews conducted for the ACT UP Oral History Project. 63 Jon Davies, Coming After, exhibition statement (Toronto: Power Plant, 2011), accessed 27 June 2020, www.thepow​erpl​ant.org/​Exhi​biti​ons/​2011/​2011​_​Win​ ter/​Com​ing-​After.aspx. 64 Jean Carlomusto and Every Ocean Hughes, ‘Radiant Spaces,’ Corpus, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2006), 78. 65 Ibid. 66 Jonathan Weinberg’s 2019 Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront, what has been called ‘part art history, part memoir,’ charts the author’s personal remembrance of frequenting the piers as a member of queer subcultures in New York’s West Village, and his encounters with the art and photography produced therein. See Jonathan Weinberg, Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019). 67 Every Ocean Hughes, interview with Carlos Motta, New York, NY, 15 April 2011, We Who Feel Differently, accessed 2 June 2012, www.wewho​feel​diff​eren​ tly.info/​interv​iew.php?interv​iew=​112. 68 Ibid. Hughes also comments, ‘I am interested in reclaiming the piers as a much more diverse queer space where there were women. I interviewed about thirty people about their experiences at the piers, and they all deny seeing women there so I am challenging both the idea there were no women there as well as the idea that most of the people there were white.’ 69 Ibid. 70 Ira Sachs, interview by author, New York, NY, 23 February 2012. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., emphasis added. 73 Ibid. 74 Zoe Leonard, quoted in Matthew Debord, ‘A Thousand Words: Zoe Leonard Talks About Her Recent Work,’ Artforum, Vol. 37, No. 5 (January 1999), 101. 75 Sachs, interview by author. 76 Paolo Magagnoli, ‘Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester,’ Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, 99. 77 Ibid., 100.

95

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Taking place

78 Ibid. 79 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. 80 Ibid., 101. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 102. 83 Ibid., 103. 84 In our interview, Sachs noted that he and his crew were pleasantly surprised to find that each of the buildings they wished to include in the film were still standing. They originally thought that Vito Russo’s had been torn down, only to learn that they had the wrong address. Russo’s building, with correct address, was still there. 85 Magagnoli, ‘Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester,’ 103. 86 Ibid., 119–​20. 87 Sachs, interview by author. Emphasis added. 88 Day With(out) Art was begun in 1989 by the then newly formed Visual AIDS, made up of a small group of white male art critics, curators, and museum directors, including Robert Atkins, William Olander, Thomas Sokolowski, and Garry Garrels, who were ‘tracking a growing body of artwork about AIDS and trying to give it visibility.’ See Robert Atkins, ‘How to Have Art (Events) in an Epidemic: A History of Visual AIDS from Day Without Art to the Red Ribbon,’ an address delivered at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on 1 December 1992, adapted for the book Disrupted Borders, ed. Sunil Gupta (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993), available on Atkins’s website, accessed 27 June 2020, www.rober​tatk​ins.net/​beta/​witn​ess/​cult​ure/​body/​day​with​ out.html. 89 Sachs, interview by author.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Border zones

Space –​the interior space of the bar and the exterior space of the street into which she gazes from her window table –​fills her head […] the border between psychic and material reality dissolves, as does the border between interior and exterior […] Reveries mix memories with fantasies that belong as much to the city as to the self since they are equally inspired by the physiognomies of street women and street facades. Into the mix flows history, the traces of which are preserved in the buildings and are further cues to dream. –​Dianne Chisholm, ‘The City of Collective Memory’1 The double city is a special kind of place: it is a plot waiting to happen. The dividing line is a barrier inviting passage between the unequal halves of the city, anticipating the dramas that will ensue. –​Sherry Simon, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, 2006 2

The political events that transpired in Montreal throughout 2012 had a significant impact on the social identity of the city, bringing into clear focus the affective and aesthetic character of urban space, and the political and activist ends to which the city can be used. February 2012 witnessed the commencement of student demonstrations in Montreal against the university tuition hikes proposed by Quebec’s Liberal Government, under the leadership of former Premier Jean Charest, which would have seen a 75 per cent increase over five years. This proposed hike was regarded as a failure to uphold the province’s commitment to its Quiet Revolution-​era promise of accessible higher education. With opinion divided regarding the ethics of the proposed hike, its very suggestion catalysed broader concerns over Quebec’s austerity measures, transforming the issues from ones singularly affecting university and CEGEP students, to issues of citywide import.3 Even more catalysing was the Charest Government’s Bill 78, ‘[a]‌n Act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend’ (Laws of Quebec, 2012, c­ hapter 12), passed as an emergency law on 18 May 2012, by the National Assembly of Quebec, and its enforcement aligned the rights of students to access the schools they attend with the criminalisation of free speech, public assembly, and protest, effectively rendering spontaneous

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

Taking place

mobilisation illegal. The countermovement became concerned not only with challenging barriers to access to education, but also with upholding the social democratic system that emergency government policies threatened to eradicate. On 22 May 2012, Montrealers took to the streets to protest the proposed tuition hikes and the oppressive Bill 78. The protest, following 100 days of demonstrations and with numbers estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, has been called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. A red felt square symbolising support for the student movement was plastered across the city, worn on clothing and on backpacks, tacked onto public monuments and sculptures, graffitied onto walls, billboards, and Canadian currency, and Photoshopped into various pop culture images that circulated on the internet. The protest tactics engaged throughout the ‘Printemps érable’ [Maple Spring], as the movement came to be known, echoed the Arab Spring that began in the Middle East at the end of 2010, and heeded the call of the Occupy Movement that reverberated globally throughout 2011. Alia Al-​Saji describes her participation in the nightly demonstrations: Walking, illegally, down the main Montreal thoroughfares with students in nightly demonstrations, with neighbors whom I barely knew before, banging pots and pans, and with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people every 22nd of the month since March –​this was unimaginable a year ago. Unimaginable that the collective and heterogeneous body, which is the ‘manif [demonstration]’, could feel so much like home, despite its internal differences. Unimaginable that this mutual dependence on one another could enable not only collective protection from traffic and police but the affective strength and audacity to take back the street.4

Of critical note to this chapter is the evocation, via the Quebec student protests, of the city as a meeting ground for a tangle of aesthetics, politics, and movement, and the spilling out of each from their traditional confines; as Erin Manning observed, ‘Notice that red has come to stand in for much that was unthinkable five months ago. Notice that you see red –​a balloon, a garment, a light –​and it is no longer simply a color but a movement, a movement of thought.’5 Under the red felt square, Quebec’s student movement was quickly narrativised as having mobilised the political and activist energies of seemingly disparate organisations and cultural groups, suggesting an understanding, among these groups, of the importance of intersectional, multi-​issue political organising, born of the shared experiences of marginality broadly encompassed by anti-​capitalist activism.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

99

Border zones

At the 22 May demonstrations, Montreal’s artist-​run centres closed for the day and participated actively in the protests. La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse’s members and staff carried signs featuring slogans such as ‘FEMINISTS ♥ THE PROTESTORS,’ extending the long history of protest and activism associated with feminism and the women’s movement in Quebec and elsewhere, while the same can be argued of the mobilisation of a pink bloc, recalling Montreal’s long history of gay liberation and queer activism. Chronicling her participation in the nightly demonstrations that occurred throughout the spring and summer of 2012, blogger Cindy Milstein reflected on the presence of the pink block, writing: I hadn’t counted on its courage, not to mention its cunning. From the moment it put high heel or heavy boot to the pavement, this pink bloc –​which I soon found out was heavily weighted toward anarcho-​feminist queers –​(gender) fucked up the streets and befuddled the cops in a way that seems as if it were 1,000 or 10,000 people.6

Both concurrent to and following the Printemps érable, amid the various and overlapping decolonial, anti-​capitalist, and anti-​racist social movements that were occurring around the globe, I observed a different kind of engagement with social movements, which was that going to exhibitions now often involved a similar hyper-​awareness of one’s passage through space, asking of the visitor to snake through plywood passageways, climb wooden structures to crowd into even smaller wooden structures, sit in unconventional and sometimes awkward arrangement among other visitors, on benches, at tables, on risers and bleachers, or else gather, seated cross-​legged, on square platforms. These structures were not intended to amplify or extend access to experiences of other artworks: they were the artworks –​bare-​boned, stripped of sheen or aesthetic pleasantries, forcing relational encounters and temporary communion with other bodies in the space. What seemed to set these structures apart from their minimalist forebearers was something not immediately evident in encountering and experiencing the works; some temporal distance from these experiences permits me to now consider them as politically and socially inflected objects that offered a kind of scaffolding for dialogue amid the backdrop of heightened politics and activism occurring globally, and in which gallery exhibitions attempted to engage. The succession of the Arab Spring (2010), Occupy Wall Street (2011), the Printemps érable (2012), Idle No More (2012), and Black Lives Matter (2013) movements initiate a view to an era defined by social uprising, and art institutions that viewed themselves as sites of critical and political encounter and experimentation were keen to get

99

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

Taking place

in on the action. In retrospect, it seems unsurprising that activism’s structural supports –​platforms, soapboxes, placards, and meeting spaces –​were installed in the gallery as prompts and supports for encounter. The gallery became an arena in which to examine discursively the political dimensions of the street, to various effects and with varying degrees of success. The spontaneous and temporary autonomous zones (TAZs) catalysed by activists on the streets were becoming the source of artistic and curatorial inspiration and a kind of academic study, removed from the spaces of authenticity afforded in their actual (versus representational) sphere. Art historian Kirsty Robertson has identified the ‘tension and friction created at the intersections of protest, museums, cities, and culture,’ and how museums function as ‘key institutions that occupy the uncomfortable space between the state, the private sector, the arts, and the economy, while also being both targets of, and occasionally providing encouragement for, contentious politics.’7 The 2014 exhibition Disobedient Objects, at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, UK, amassed and organised a collection of protest objects from around the globe spanning the 1970s to the 2010s (including the student movement’s red felt square). It also acted as a platform the dissemination of informational materials and DIY instruction kits for fashioning makeshift tear gas masks, and is exemplary of the intersection Robertson identifies.8 I situate this chapter amid the backdrop of the aesthetically inflected Quebec student movement and, in the second part of the chapter, queer and feminist anti-​capitalist movements, to offer a different wager as it pertains to this book’s focus on queer and feminist strategies of making and claiming alternative space, which is that both political demonstration and its evocation in the gallery make claims to a specific autonomy: the autonomous zones of political and cultural organising, where aesthetic dimensions shape and materially document mobilisation and movement; and the autonomous zone of the gallery, where social and political dynamics are inferred within the white cube. I also argue that these spaces carry particular queer and feminist inflections in their publicly affective dimensions and in their evocation of histories of feminist and queer protest. However, given that most institutions continue to only be equipped to engage a representational approach to autonomy, I ultimately ask: what can the gallery, as a representational space, offer understandings of social movements as they occur outside of the institutional frame? What can we ask of these types of exhibitions, and what can we expect them to deliver? In many ways, the structures that were presented in galleries at this time evoked Robert Smithson’s non-​site, which he describes in his 1968 ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-​Sites’ as a ‘two dimensional analogy or metaphor,’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

0 11

Border zones

a ‘logical picture’ or representation of an actual site that does not resemble it.9 The autonomous non-​site of the gallery at once provides the discursive, controlled, and yet malleable environment for forms of symbolic political engagement, at the same time as it reinforces the boundary between symbolic and on-​the-​ground engagement. The question of autonomy revolves around the political and activist aims of the encounters incited within the gallery space, and their transformative potential –​or impossibility –​beyond the gallery’s walls. My point of contention is not with the ideology of exhibitions but with the utopic idea of the function of exhibitions beyond the imagined political space of the gallery to enact a politics more broadly useful beyond the gallery walls, initiating a return to questions provoked by the debates around relational aesthetics in the 1990s and 2000s. Testing this proposition against the public spaces of protest that the gallery seeks to evoke, in the second part of this chapter, I turn to the aesthetically infused tactics engaged by queer and feminist artists and activists in the streets, looking fervently for instances in which two very different autonomous zones converge. Activism’s supports Historically overlooked structural supports work beyond their service as framing devices to communicate radical political ideology, promote social change, and make visible historically marginalised subjects. In her work on container theory, communications theorist Zoe Sofia argues that ‘Artifacts for containment and supply are not only readily interpreted as metaphorically feminine; they are also historically associated with women’s traditional labors.’10 Following psychoanalytic metaphors of the material body as a unit of containment, notably, D. W. Winnicott and Thomas Ogden, Sofia describes the mother as both identifying with the infant and as ‘sufficiently separate to serve as the container and interpreter for its experience, “thereby making her presence felt, but not noticed”.’11 The 2009 book Support Structures, by Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade, charted this territory from an artistic vantage point, examining what ‘bears, sustains, props, and holds up […] things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life […] that which assists, corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; […] what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens.’12 The place of the structural support is typically theorised in art history as just that: in support of or foregrounding a more central object, experience, performance, or space, mirroring the support role often played by marginalised subjects relative to mainstream histories and institutions.

101

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Taking place

As Robertson points out in her book Tear Gas Epiphanies, around this time, several exhibitions flipped the equation by instigating and/​or representing civic engagement as a subject of curatorial study occurring not in the open space of the city, but within the walls of the gallery. For instance, Montreal’s SBC Gallery ‘Sovereignty’ programme, which launched at the tail end of 2012, worked to address ‘pressing concerns about the recent wave of alternative strategies for attaining change in urban centres like Cairo, New York, Montréal, Mexico City and the ongoing struggles in the Middle East, in Latin America and elsewhere in the world.’13 Director Pip Day offered the gallery as a ‘forum in which to explore strategies of political action that have been generated by cultural, youth, labour, immigrant, feminist and other political movements both historically –​often under the banner of decolonisation or emancipation –​and today.’14 It is not insignificant that the two-​year Sovereignty launched on the heels of the 2012 student movement in Montreal, a political movement that came to define the early 2010s in a city historically defined by its vibrant protest culture, multiple overlapping and competing claims for sovereignty and over land and the right to the city, deeply entrenched perceptions of lines of division around language, and with rich and unique histories of feminist and queer struggle. As part of the ‘Sovereignty’ programme, and undertaking a curatorial residency that would culminate in the exhibition A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, cheyanne turions explored the hypothesis that sovereignty lies not with the nation-​state, but in the processes of negotiation at the level of the subject. Negotiation, here, it should be noted, was proposed by turions as a process in which ‘sovereignty manifests through intimacy, contact and sociality.’15 The visual and functional centrepiece of the exhibition was Fences Will Turn Into Tables (2010–​13) by Canadian Indigenous (Skarù∙reʔ Nation) artist Maggie Groat, a table made of fence board collected by Groat from Toronto and Guelph. With artists from a variety of specific and overlapping cultural, regional, and political points of origin coming to the proverbial and literal table, what became quickly evident were the implicit contradictions, as well as compatibilities of subject positions, brought forward by this curatorial call to order, and the acts of negotiation, both explicit and implied, on display and under interrogation. Groat’s Fences Will Turn Into Tables was completed over three years, during which Groat, who works in a variety of media and whose research-​based practice explores connections to Indigenous land, collected fence boards from around Toronto and Guelph. This gathering followed a predetermined set of rules: Groat could only take fence board that she could tear off with her hands without the use of tools and that she could carry home herself (although over

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

301

Border zones

Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–​13. Installation view of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, curated by cheyanne turions. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 15 March–​3 May 2014.

time, her method was redefined, with Groat beginning to collect the fence board through exchanges carried out on online message boards). The resulting table is 429.3 cm long by 99 cm wide by 81.3 cm high (169 inches by 39 inches by 32 inches), with four benches of varying dimensions that invite visitors to gather around the table and to engage in dialogue.16 The title of Groat’s piece is not insignificant to this study: in his 2006 book Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Martin A. Berger discusses extensively the appearance of the picket fence in nineteenth-​century American landscape painting, as well as how fences were used for multiple purposes, in particular, ‘to keep animals away from crops and as barriers to contain and exclude human beings, and, just as significant, to symbolically demarcate the use of exterior spaces.’17 Importantly, he also argues that the fence, in art and visual culture, as well as in its symbolic demarcation of physical space, also conformed to a perception of Indigenous land as ‘unfenced and unimproved’ and thus, ‘they concluded that it was free for the taking.’18 Enclosure via fences was an indication of ownership. The material effects of the fence repeat themselves innumerably with regard to the enforcement of boundaries and borders, both symbolic and actual: specifically, with regard to this chapter’s focus, the state-​enforced borders that define the nation

103

3.1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

104

Taking place

state, albeit enforced due to their symbolic delineations and the violent force deployed to establish them on traditional, ancestral, and unceded Indigenous land. The body, in its constant slippage between signifiers, identity markers, and locations, offers a constant reminder of the porousness of these national boundaries –​a fragility requiring violent fortification to maintain, and in abundant evidence during the 2012 student movement, in the form of the controversial police tactic of kettling, in which police crowd demonstrators from all sides so that there is no avenue for escape, and then arrest everyone trapped within their human wall. The metaphor of the fence –​literalised by Groat with Fences Will Turn Into Tables –​can be mapped onto an intellectual and historical trajectory whereby the fence and its connotations regarding issues of privacy, territorial demarcations, and private property are extended into the realm of politics and policy, importantly, by Canadian historian Ian McKay in his 2000 essay ‘The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History.’ McKay’s text presents a view to Canada not only as a ‘vacant lot’ but also a field worthy of study. McKay’s articulation of the development of the liberal order, and the liberal individual, is linked as equally to Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s 1879 tariff policy as to the farmer’s fence post. As McKay argues, ‘What connects the farmer’s fence with Macdonald’s tariff is a common respect for private property and the propertied individual as the foundation of a sociopolitical order ultimately defended by the state’s legitimate violence.’19 turions has explained her rationale for the inclusion of Groat’s massive work –​a work that functions as an autonomous structure and a site of performance and encounter –​as follows: While fences mark off private property, the evidenced disrepair of the liberated materials pointed to a neglected logic of the fence: the one-​time care taken to keep others out has been abandoned as a project of separation. Groat’s small destructions can be thought of in service of this new imperative of degradation and there exists (in imagination only) a shadow map –​of all the small gaps her acts of removal left behind –​resonating outward from the table.20

The idea of a ‘shadow map’ functions as a metaphorical backdrop for the geographic context in which the gallery is located: Montreal, Quebec, itself a historical and present-​day stage for a series of negotiations, translations, demonstrations, and altercations. In the context of an exhibition about sovereignty as negotiation, and in the face of the political urgencies posed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (established by the Indian

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

501

Border zones

Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2008 and completed in 2015),21 Groat’s table is a work that negotiates antagonism. The present-​day political and activist dimensions of curatorial strategies working through questions of nationalism, identity, and sovereignty both reframe and diverge from the models put forth in the 1990s; the identity politics that defined the 1980s and 1990s in many ways built on earlier and concurrent developments in feminist theory, notably, on writings by Indian postcolonial and feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty, as moving beyond a definition of women as a monolithic group towards more historical and geographic specificity, and the view that race cannot be levelled alongside gender among other identifications, and the Italian-​Australian philosopher and gender theorist Rosi Braidotti, who argued for the politics of location as ‘the practice of decoding –​expressing and sharing in language the conditions of possibility of one’s own political and theoretical choices. Accountability and positionality go together,’ also noting the ‘importance of accounting for one’s investments … [and] the level of unconscious desire and consequently of imaginary relation to the very material conditions that structure our existence.’22 American lesbian feminist theorist and poet Adrienne Rich wrote: As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three times ‘As a woman my country is the whole world.’ Tribal loyalties aside, and even if nation-​states are now just pretexts used by multinational conglomerates to serve their interests, I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create. Begin, though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in –​the body.23

As an object that might serve a deeply instrumentalised, as well as instrumentalising, role in the institutional environment, Groat’s table must be considered not only for its phenomenological functions, but also for its domestic affirmations: Edmund Husserl’s writing table as a location from which, in the words of Sara Ahmed, ‘the world unfolds,’24 where the bodily presence of the philosopher creates an ‘intimate co-​dwelling of bodies and objects,’25 or Martin Heidegger’s table, a space of action in which the table maintains its centrality and defines and is defined by those who gather around it: What is there in the room there at home is the table (not ‘a’ table among many other tables in other rooms and houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, or play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g. during a visit: it is a

105

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Taking place

writing table, a dining table, a sewing table –​such is the primary way in which it is being encountered in itself. This characteristic of ‘in order to do something’ is not merely imposed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not.26

In bringing these definitions together, Ahmed interprets Heidegger to be writing about what ‘we do’ with the table: ‘what we do with the table, or what the table allows us to do, is essential to the table. So we do things “on the table” which is what makes the table what it is and take shape in the way it does. The table is assembled around the support it gives.’27 Although a work unto itself, in exhibitionary contexts, Groat’s Fences Will Turn Into Tables became the stage for a series of performative negotiations, witnessing various players coming to the table from a variety of cultural locations – locations that, in the context of turions’s curatorial premise, were notable for their geographic, cultural, and political contingencies. What relations outside of the gallery did these works index? Basil AlZeri, born in 1982 in Jordan to Palestinian parents, living in Toronto, and, in 2012, having recently become a Canadian citizen, presented the work Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry, and Crush, in which AlZeri spoke English, French, and Kanien’keha words to name various subjective relationships to land, dragging his materials from the office into the exhibition space and commencing a series of actions, including the clipping of sage leaves from a bundle hanging from the ceiling; the burning of sage; the spreading of rose-​coloured salt; and the making of za’taar. Speaking in Arabic as he went through the process of preparing the herb-​based spread, the space of the gallery provided a temporary space for communion and cultural translation. Alutiiq artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, in collaboration with dancer and choreographer of Dutch, Cree, and Métis descent Daina Ashbee, performed negotiation as choreography, reading from the banners that comprise Lukin Linklater’s work Slow Scrape, a series of nine banners (three of which were included in the exhibition) developed from her poem ‘The Harvest Sturdies’ (2014). The poem was written in response to Chief Theresa Spence’s forty-​ four-​day hunger strike, which began on 11 December 2012, to bring attention to Indigenous rights and to incite then Prime Minister Stephen Harper and then Governor General David Johnston to come to the table to discuss treaty rights and Indigenous leadership. Chief Spence (of Attawapiskat First Nation) wore mitts that are considered an important symbol for the people of James Bay, Northern Ontario, and Lukin Linklater conducted interviews with James Bay residents Agnes Hunter, Marlene Kapasheshit, and Lillian Mishi Trapper, who described the process for making the traditional mitts, which became

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

701

Border zones

the basis for the poem. The banners themselves reflected various processes of negotiation, teaching, and learning, with further acts of negotiation and translation conducted between Lukin Linklater and Ashbee, between the artists and their audiences, and between the artists, their audiences, and the gallery space itself. The ongoing negotiation of treaty rights and self-​government that was underway between Indigenous communities and the Canadian government was intricately woven into an experience of the work, the banner texts providing the score for the performance. In addition to the ways in which objects in the exhibition, like Groat’s table, exemplify Smithson’s definition of the non-​ site, included in this exhibition were also instances of theoretical and historical invocations –​the object as stand-​in or substitute for historical or political occurrences (for instance, the colonisation of Indigenous land), whose intangible weight can only begin to be felt via material markers. Transposing a series of workshops, discussions, and reading and looking groups onto the table, the table offered not only a structural support, but also a relational apparatus, a Brancusi plinth; it is not insignificant that the works in A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, which at first glance appeared as material supports for the exhibition’s ‘true’ object –​negotiation –​are indebted to histories of modernist explorations of material and form, Brancusci famously laying the foundation for minimalist artists to engage and elevate the support to the level of an object of its own merit: ‘By 1910 Brancusi’s ‘plinth’ had become a sculpture in itself.’28 Relating her experience of sitting around the dining room table, the collective experience of the dining room table versus the solitary writer’s table, and the idea of the dining table as ‘a table around which bodies cohere through the mediation of its surface, sharing the food and drink that is on the table,’29 Ahmed links her theorising of the phenomenological function of the physical table to that of Hannah Arendt: ‘To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.’30 Groat’s table becomes an object that indexes a realm of sociality –​of other worlds, and other struggles doubly relocated, on the table and within the gallery. Mary L. Gray has articulated a notion of the ‘frontstage,’ as the public-​facing aspects of social movements;31 in many ways I view the representational strategies employed in galleries at this time to serve a similar function; they are the tangible, observable elements of far more complex issues than can be mediated and translated didactically or discursively within an e­ xhibition –​indexes of a world beyond their physical boundaries at the same time as artworks attempt to ‘do’ something beyond representation. A few other examples of works (or were they situations?) I experienced around the same time substantiate this claim: a work by Canadian artist

107

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Taking place

and urbanist Adrian Blackwell (b. 1966), Circles Describing Spheres (2014), also becomes legible via the activation of audience members, performed by those sitting ‘around’ the autonomous object and perhaps most clearly ties to evocations of autonomous space. Circles Describing Spheres is a series of overlapping and intertwined plywood circles intended for visitors to sit on. The work, inspired by anarchist meeting circles intended to promote non-​ hierarchical forms of discussion, can be arranged to produce different seating configurations which, in turn, influence, expand, and/​or impede different relational and antagonistic possibilities, organised around an anarchist ethos of self-​governance. A circle that at once levels everyone who sits around it so as to be facing one another also promotes an antagonistic relationality with the addition of a second circle so that backs are turned away from one another, legs are uncomfortably close to those of a stranger, and individuals are seated at awkward slants, forcing the body to physically compensate in order to achieve balance. The work performs its own outcome, staging the structural conditions necessary for viewers to negotiate the various relational encounters the work makes possible. Circles Describing Spheres instigated similar questions of relational and phenomenological negotiation and antagonism, importantly circling around contingency and encounter as critical to the work’s activation.32 I must have seen this work in three different exhibitions (as did I see Groat’s table) around this time, suggesting, to me, something of the fervour for its interactive qualities and the ability for visitors to temporarily experience a simulation of the grassroots organisational strategies happening outside, but from within the controlled confines of the gallery space. In 2013–​14, the exhibition Stage Set Stage (curated by Barbara Clausen), at SBC Gallery, presented works concerned to explore the performative dimensions of identity and gender in relation to site and institutionalism. Clausen invited Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes to create the mobile structure Space Set /​Set Space (2013), which included a snaking plywood platform, plywood tables that doubled as seating areas, and sets of painted black plywood steps, in which a research library was nestled into its sides. Like Groat’s table and Blackwell’s circles, in addition to being a work unto itself, Space Set /​Set Space provided the exhibition’s structural framework as a lookout point onto the other works in the exhibition, but also a research station, permitting audience members, presenters, and researchers a platform on which to speak, explore, and perform ideas related to the exhibition’s theme. The work, in the context of Clausen’s exploration of site and institutionalism, challenged the perceived limitations of the representational sphere of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

901

Border zones

Adrian Blackwell, Circles Describing Spheres, 2014.

the gallery, using the gallery as invitation and catalyst for mobilisation and dissemination. Well-​known for her ongoing project In the Near Future (begun in 2009), in which Hayes re-​stages a series of historically significant protests, carrying the iconic signs associated with these movements and re-​enacting them as a one-​woman demonstration, taken up by Hayes, the placard comes to carry queer and feminist significance and links present-​day economic, gender, class, and race struggles to these histories (and perhaps increasingly significant in the face of Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, etc.). In an interview with Julia Bryan-​Wilson, who asked how Hayes’s engagement with historical political events differs from that of other artists, Hayes responded, ‘I can’t just cut out the protest sign and put it on a wall in this present moment –​it just becomes style. That excision is not actually an investigation; nor does it tease out how history is rupturing in the present moment. Instead, it becomes anesthetizing of the conflict. My interest was to actually work with protest and protest signs by putting myself in the space of e­ nactment.’33 Hayes has been called a demonstrator in the Brechtian sense, re-​ enacting an event that has taken place. In Gay Power (2007–​15), Hayes worked

109

3.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

Taking place

3.3

Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, Space Set /​Set Space, 2013. Installation view of STAGE SET STAGE, curated by Barbara Clausen. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, 30 November–​22 February 2014.

3.4

Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, Space Set /​Set Space, 2013. Installation view of STAGE SET STAGE, curated by Barbara Clausen. Galerie SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, November 30–​22 February 2014.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11

Border zones

with feminist theorist Kate Millett to resurrect 16 mm footage of New York City’s 1971 Christopher Street Liberation Day, the two providing voiceovers from two generational perspectives: Millett, who shot the footage with the Women’s Liberation Cinema, was able to comment from the perspective of having been present, while Hayes offered contemporary analysis of the value of such mobilisation, at a time of nascent gay liberation, for the present day. The work, when shown in the gallery (as it was in the exhibition After My Own Heart at Oakville Galleries in Oakville, Canada, in 2013, an exhibition about contemporary feminist art practices, where I encountered it), became a platform for the bridging of temporal moments, offering a discrete environment (I can’t remember for sure but one installation in this exhibition included a set of wooden bleachers for viewers to sit on –​it may or may not have been this one, though Hayes’s installations are regularly supported by or projected onto plywood constructions) to look closely at this footage that in another time, another place, had gone underexplored. The gallery offers space for the kind of dedicated and slow looking and thinking that gets lost in the thick of things. Wendy Coburn’s pivotal exhibition, Anatomy of a Protest (2014), at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, centred around Coburn’s documentary Slut Nation: Anatomy of a Protest, which simultaneously chronicled the world’s first Slut Walk (in Toronto) and deconstructed the protest as form, interrogating the role of certain players who are hypothesised to be police-​planted provocateurs –​ another Brechtian offering, interrupting the spectacularisation of the large-​ scale demonstration (during several screenings of the film, several audience members claim to have seen a few of the provocateurs in the audience). In the gallery’s main space, a series of ephemeral objects and paraphernalia related to public protest, including placards (‘S.L.U.T. =​DIGNITY’) and megaphones, here placed on plinths and in frames and vitrines, brought the outside into the gallery in a literal flip of the script. As Robertson reflected on Coburn’s exhibition: ‘As a work that is viewed in a traditional manner –​it does not involve participation –​it is at odds with a great deal of successful recent activist art. In fact, non-​participatory art is assumed to be pacifying, a uni-​directional stream of narrative from which the viewer can emerge totally unchanged or unscathed by the impact of the work. Coburn’s work shows that this is not always the case. […] it creates a quiet space in the gallery where the contemplation of new potentials, new events, new ways of moving forward, can be imagined.’34 The threat of violence and tactical manoeuvrings evacuated, the viewer can reflect, or even re-​live, but the moment of intervention and agency has passed, with the artworks themselves left to carry on the struggle.

111

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

Taking place

3.5

Wendy Coburn, Semiotics of Protest Props: Sign, Code, De-​code, 2013–​14.

3.6

Wendy Coburn, Slut Nation: Anatomy of A Protest, 2014.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

311

Border zones

Relational encounter as activism In the 1990s, theories of art and curatorial practice took a turn towards the relational, with curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud (relational art) and Mary Jane Jacob (socially engaged art), as well as artist-​curators such as Suzanne Lacy (new genre public art) promoting an outward-​looking model of curatorial practice that moved art into non-​art communities and drew non-​ art communities into the gallery. In Bourriaud’s words, relational art was intended to encompass ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent private space.’35 Bourriaud claimed that the role of artwork was ‘no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real.’36 This theoretical model for thinking about socially engaged art practices was intended to create useable models for interaction and political engagement that responded to contemporary culture. With an air of incredulity, Claire Bishop responded: Rather than a discrete, portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art is entirely beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience. Moreover, this audience is envisaged as a community: rather than a one-​to-​one relationship between work of art and viewer, relational art sets up situations in which viewers are not just addressed as a collective, social entity, but are actually given the wherewithal to create a community, however temporary or utopian this may be.37

Bourriaud argued that relational art ‘invent[s]‌possible encounters’ and the ‘conditions for an exchange,’38 displacing the utopias that were sought in earlier countercultural movements in favour of microtopias, by which artists learn ‘to inhabit the world in a better way’ in the present.39 As Anthony Downey reflected, ‘Aesthetic practice, in this instant, requires a reply of sorts –​or at the very least, a reaction. In focusing on “relations of exchange,” social interplay and inter-​subjective communication, relational art practices –​in their exhibitionary method –​also provide nodal points for reflections on their socially transitive potential.’40 Happening concurrently was a re-​examination of institutional critique; as Hito Steyerl outlined, the shift from the 1970s to the 2000s away from institutional critique to the critique of institutions prompted yet another shift from a criticism that ‘produced integration into the institution’ to a criticism that ‘only achieved integration into r­epresentation.’41

113

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

Taking place

She positions Benedict Anderson’s 1991 Imagined Communities as offering an important analysis relevant to thinking about the ways in which museums both create a sense of a national past and generate and legitimate the nation-​ state. But she argues that the institutional critique that wages war against the institutional processes of nation-​building also produces the very subjects that become legible via this critique, simultaneously obliterating the institution instead of improving it: ‘so in this sense institutional critique serves as a tool of subjectivation of certain social groups or political subjects.’42 The works examined above extend the relational and institutional critique practices of the 1990s, in which art objects are ontologically engaged, becoming newly reified for their performative, political, and cathartic potential, for what they, like the table, ‘do’ in the context of institutional space, and for what they represent outside of it. This reflects what Alex Farquharson, referring to J. L. Austin’s definition of speech acts,43 critiqued in the early 2000s as ‘performative curating’ –​an Austinian notion of curating would be ‘that [which] always actively structures and mediates the relationships of art and audience.’44 In her essay, ‘The Exhibition as Discursive Event,’ Reesa Greenberg writes that, ‘In the majority of exhibitions that become known as discursive events, the discussion is uninitiated by the exhibition’s organisers and is seen as a happy or unhappy result of unforeseen circumstances. There are exhibitions, however, in which discussion intentionally is built into their very framework.’45 Positing the exhibition as discursive event, Greenberg offers a model for thinking about the exhibition in performative terms that is more broadly useful in thinking about the exhibition space not as annexed from the spaces in which events happen, but as key to their incitement. Taking this into the realm of the invisible social borders imposed by the gallery, we need bear in mind the recent observation by Diedrich Diederichsen that ‘an art museum is a public space. Yet this status is often challenged by the argument that it excludes vast sections of the public and ultimately serves only a narrow –​even elite –​audience. In response, museums mobilise an army of educators, organise participatory programming, and deploy endless wall texts in their efforts to engage a wider public, as if didacticism alone could improve class relations.’46 Recent initiatives in Canadian galleries suggest a recognition of the limitations of symbolic gestures void of dedicated structural changes regarding staff makeup, inclusivity, diversity, and sustained civic engagement, at the same time as they continue to promote representational engagement with social change while structural change lags behind. The gesture, then, appears increasingly insincere –​one that capitalises on social movements while only beginning to scratch the surface of addressing inequalities within the structural organisation of the gallery itself.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

511

Border zones

Outside: queer autonomous zones Although the 2012 student movement reached its apex in May 2012, its reverberations were felt through the remainder of the characteristically humid, festive summer months, trailing into August’s Pride festivities. Begun in 2007, Pervers/​cité –​a play on the Divers/​cité festival that, until 2015, made up part of Montreal’s Pride festivities –​originated following a workshop on queers and anarchism that was facilitated by the now defunct Qteam, a predominantly anglophone radical queer collective that formed following the end of the Anti-​ Capitalist Ass Pirates and operated in Montreal through the second half of the 2000s and into the early 2010s.47 During this workshop, it was determined that Montreal lacked a summer Pride festival that responded to the need for queer community-​building and radical collective resistance to the corporate interests that were increasingly defining Pride, despite Montreal’s Pride origins, and its unique placement in August, in commemoration of the Sex Garage raids of 1990 that have been historicised as catalysing the bridging of various factions of Montreal’s LGBTQ2A+​communities into radical queer communion. With mainstream Pride events heavily concentrated in the Village and organised through two organisations, Divers/​cité and Fierté Montréal,48 Pride was first organised to ‘unite the city’s fractious communities and bring them together under one great big party.’49 Pervers/​cité, which has no home base, no leaders, and no corporate sponsorship, offers a once-​a-​year queer autonomous zone. Grassroots organising has long engaged the possibilities afforded by autonomous zones –​permanent autonomous zones, such as communes, squats, and free schools, as well as temporary autonomous zones, as articulated by anarchist thinker Hakim Bey, which may include festivals, marches, temporary occupations. Temporary autonomous zones have particular significance within queer culture, and countless examples abound, from queer festivals like Queeruption and Queer Shame, to queer collectives like Queer Nation, and ACT UP, to temporary queer mobilisation in the form of pink blocs, to queer practices like zine-​making. According to Bey, TAZs create enclaves rather than take power, grasping all the tools at one’s disposal in order to do so in the pursuit of insurgency; as Bey articulates, ‘The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/​ elsewhen, before the State can crush it.’50 Queer autonomous zones, as Sandra Jeppesen has written, are Open-​ ended spaces in which participation of all comers is encouraged through a direct (rather than liberal) democracy model. They are facilitated via engagement with a multiplicity of intersectional and anti-​ oppression

115

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

Taking place

politics. Interactions in queer autonomous spaces develop sustainable social relations and value-​practices, based on mutual respect, consent, sexual liberation, and non-​normativity, in which people engage in open-​ended processes of developing alternative ways of being, feeling, thinking, engaging, acting, and becoming liberated.51

Pervers/​cité represents alternative models for pursuing not only visibility, but also political engagement, and forms of political engagement that focus heavily on aesthetic savvy and cultural activism in the pursuit of social change. Unlike the gallery space, it is not separate from, but engaged directly in the organisational structure of urban space and its attendant social, economic, and political organisation. The campy collage posters that double as schedules of events and promotional material both celebrate queer icons and highlight their topical import: the 2012 poster, for instance, featured the late Whitney Houston in the central position, with a drawn-​in diamond appearing to emerge from her cleavage –​a testament to the cultural histories of camp and diva worship that connect present-​day queers to their gay predecessors. Other perennial queer heroes, such as David Bowie, Frida Kahlo, and Claude Cahun –​notable for their models of gender, sexual, political, and social transgression –​also feature prominently. Juxtaposed with these queer cultural icons are images of high-​profile queer and trans individuals including Chelsea Manning, the United States Army soldier detained on charges of communicating national defence information after sharing classified material with Wikileaks and who, throughout the course of her detainment, was heavily scrutinised in the media for her sexual and gender identity, and CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was sentenced in 2012 to 42 months in men’s prison for manslaughter for stabbing a white man who was part of a group that physically and verbally attacked her. In the poster, McDonald is positioned next to Manning, while the late trans activist and writer Leslie Feinberg, who was one of McDonald’s ardent supporters throughout the trial, is positioned just above. Toronto-​based performance artist and harm-​reduction activist Mikiki is also featured, as is Anarchopanda, the giant panda mascot who figured prominently throughout Quebec’s student movement as the guise worn by an unidentified college philosophy professor to reduce instances of violence between protestors and police. The juxtaposition of campy idols with the portrayal of serious political instances of radical struggle echoes communications scholar Mél Hogan’s observation that: Radical queers transform social spaces, especially the spaces of protest, by adding humour in their militancy, and transforming parades and celebration

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

711

Border zones

by injecting a dosage of politics. Perhaps they can be said to be a movement merging politics with parties, in order to convey important political messages to the masses, with free spaces to party and have access to information and meet people sharing similar attitudes and ideas.52

The 2012 edition of Pervers/​cité opened with a queer punk show and a pink bloc affinity group meeting, and was followed by a roster of cultural, artistic, academic, and activist events that took place in bars and cafes including Co-​op Katacombes on lower St Laurent, Il Motore on Jean Talon, le cagibi in Mile End, and Cabaret du Mile End, artist-​run centres articule in Mile End and Studio XX in the Plateau, community spaces AIDS Community Care Montreal in the East End and the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy at Concordia University, and in outdoor public spaces including Place Emilie-​Gamelin, Parc Raymond-​ Préfontaine, and outside the Ritz Carlton, the starting point for Pervers/​cité’s annual Queer Historical Walking Tour. Other events included a film screening of works by queer filmmaker John Greyson and the annual Queer Between the Covers bookfair, which promotes a space for the dissemination and exchange of independent, small press, and hard-​to-​find queer publications, and a series of educational workshops, with topics ranging from intersex activism, BDSM, and self-​care. The 2012 Pervers/​cité also featured Montreal’s first Radical Dyke March, a contingent of many Prides that has historically provided a designated and pointed political space for lesbian-​identified women, but that had never before been part of Montreal’s Pride festivities.53 Importantly, the group exhibition 2-​qtpocmontréal, co-​organised by Elisha Lim and Kama Maureemootoo at the artist-​run centre articule, received considerable attention for its focus on queer and trans BIPOC artists. Positioned as the first ‘Racialized Gay Pride’ exhibition in Montreal, 2-​qtpocmontréal was adopted into Pervers/​cité’s programming and ran through the course of the festival, providing a temporary reprieve from the intense currents of xenophobia boiling over in the election fever of late summer. Featuring work by Ange Loft, Leroi Newbold, Adee Roberson, Kesso Saulnier, Walter K. Scott, and Textaqueen, 2-​qtpocmontréal worked to recognise and reconcile the underrepresentation of racialised and Indigenous artists in cultural spaces and to uncover hidden colonial histories. It also responded to the lack of queer space for queer racialised artists to work and to exhibit by creating one, albeit a temporary one, in the politicised, DIY space of articule, an artist-​run centre with a commitment to socially engaged practices. Scott and Loft focused on the biography of Catholic saint Káteri Tekahkwi:tha, a seventeenth-​century Algonquin-​Mohawk woman who converted to Catholicism following the Jesuit invasion of the Mohawk Valley. Káteri died of injuries received in her

117

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

Taking place

attempts to imitate her colonisers’ piety, and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Kahnawà:ke-​born Scott contributed a screenprint, Arrival to the Riverside, part of his series 16th Century Gurl (2011), that depicts a portion of this story via a juxtaposition of narrative segments in a single frame. Four layers of screenprint, in bright blue, red, and black, carve out a cloaked figure in a hard-​edge style. Becoming translucent along its length, the cloak reveals a small body underneath and two blue open palms layered on top, the face an obscure tangle of red and blue lines. To the right of the figure are a series of squiggly lines and three blue opaque faces, what appear to be depictions of spirits, while the figure is tended to, on the left, by what appears to be the spiritual influence of the Catholic Church, depicted by a two-​faced figure, faces separated by an upside-​down cross, its black hands in seeming pursuit of the cloaked girl. The ‘gurl’ of 16th Century Gurl propels the figure into the present and the realm of pop culture, suggesting that Káteri has the potential to be viewed as a poster child for the Catholic Church. Loft, whose Cult of Kateri: Armour and Accessories references the beaded whimsies –​tourist trade items made of silk, velvet, ribbon, and glass beads –​created by women in her home of Kahnawà:ke for tourists visiting the shrine of Káteri. Using found materials and tinfoil to replicate the armour and beadwork patterns, Loft comments on the cult following that proceeded Káteri’s death, pointing to the founding of the Community of Kahnawà:ke as partly resulting from this following. Roberson, who has long been involved in Afro-​punk and queer Black punk movements, reclaims histories of queer Black musical culture through collage, working with photographic images of semi-​closeted popular figures in American Black history, including Ma Rainey and Langston Hughes, as well as more obscure queer figures, such as J. C. Honey Campbell, most well known as an actor in Lizzie Borden’s 1983 cult feminist film Born in Flames. Newbold, one of the founding members of Ste-​Emilie Skillshare and the Fleshtival Film Festival for queer BIPOC filmmakers, presented large-​scale collage posters that doubled as documentation of a series of music and film events organised by and for queer people of colour in Montreal. In addition to the artworks included in the exhibition, 2-​qtpocmontréal featured one artist talk and one community presentation for each night of the eleven-​day exhibition, as well as performances, dance parties, and readings, seeking to draw links between the various communities in Montreal devoted to queer people of colour, including African Rainbow (a non-​profit organisation promoting the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+​Quebecers of African and Caribbean origin), Massimadi (an LGBTQ+​Afro-​Caribbean film festival in Montreal during Black History Month), Ste-​Emilie Skillshare, AGIR (a service provider for LGBTQ+​refugees), and GLAM (a not-​for-​profit support

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

911

Border zones

and activist group for LGBTQ+​Asians living in Montreal). In the vein of new genre public art, 2-​qtpocmontréal –​part exhibition, part festival, part community programming –​functioned as a temporary space being built via a magnification of the strengths of Montreal’s 2-​QTPOC cultural communities and recognition of the urgency of responding to invisibility. A view to queer activism as combining humour with politics echoed in the playful activist strategies employed throughout the student movement, the two directly overlapping most visibly during Pervers/​cité, witnessed by the formation of radical queer affinity groups to ‘Bloquons la Rentrée’ [block the re-​entry] of college students returning to class at the end of August, and the participation of a Pervers/​cité contingent against the tuition hike, Bill 78, and police brutality in the official Pride Parade on Pride’s closing day. Pervers/​ cité’s pink bloc was joined by GLBT contre la hausse, whose call for participation, issued widely online by Bernard Gaduoa, pleaded to supporters to be conscientious of the queer movement’s history in the student movement: Ce que beaucoup ignore cependant c’est qu’il y avait eu d’autres rassemblements de la Fierté auparavant, et que celles-​ ci étaient essentiellement le fait d’organisations gaies et lesbiennes étudiantes. Car de tout temps, le movement étudiant a été notre meilleur allié dans la lute pour la reconnaissance de nos droits, la lute à l’homophobie, etc. Nous pensons donc qu’au moment où les étudiants sont aux prises avec la plus grande vague d’arrestations, de repression et de brutalité policières de l’histoire du Québec, il est de notre devoir d’accompagner et de souligner notre solidarité avec notre allié de toujours.54 [What has often been ignored is the fact that there were other Pride mobilisations before ‘Pride,’ and that this was essentially made possible by gay and lesbian student organising. As always, the student movement is our strongest ally in our seeking out of our rights, the fight against homophobia, etc. We turn our attention now to students who are faced with the most severe instances of arbitrary arrests, repression, and police brutality in Quebec’s history. It is our responsibility to underline our solidarity with our ongoing allies.]55

That several of Montreal’s early gay, lesbian, and lesbian feminist groups were formed in the 1970s around academic institutions, notably, the McGill University-​affiliated Gay McGill, Gay Montréal Association, and Montréal Gay/​Women/​Labyris, while others (such as Front homosexuel québécois de libération, Centre homophile de Montréal, and Co-​op femmes) were created as responses to the fact that the early groups predominantly served Montreal’s anglophone communities, speaks to this important confluence of the student movement and the gay liberation and radical queer movement. While the

119

120

Taking place

presence of Pervers/​cité in the official Pride Parade functioned as an intervention intended to re-​introduce a political component into the increasingly apolitical Pride, the 2012 student movement as a whole provided an important reminder of the political power of public mobilisation, and the need to return to a conception of Pride more reflective of its political origins.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Red zone

3.7

By virtue of their physical constraints alone, galleries cannot offer the unbridled, spontaneous spaces required for the critical masses, but perhaps by virtue of their roles as mediators of inside and outside, they can nevertheless offer understandings of historical events and the creative work necessary to complicate and challenge the dominant historical narratives through which events come to be read. My concern over artworks, institutions, social movements, and the boundaries between them find their join in a curious spectral red square that, in the November following the Printemps érable, appeared on an otherwise unremarkable surface outside of the Saint Laurent metro. In fact, in my first attempt to locate it, I failed, unaware of the particular trick to its viewing: barely visible in the light of day, the projection radiated, like embers, at night. Montreal-​based artist Sheena Hoszko’s Red Light Monument: Floor Area of Café Cléopâtra Stages (500 square feet), was

Sheena Hoszko, Red Light Monument, 2012. Installation photo, Montreal, QC.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

121

Border zones

situated a block away from the actual Café Cléopâtra, a queer and trans-​ friendly strip club that has occupied the corner of Boulevard St-​Laurent and Rue St-​Catherine since 1976. Café Cléopâtra’s owner Johnny Zoumboulakis refused to sell the bar despite expropriation attempts, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, by the developer Societé de développement Angus during the development of Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles –​an initiative formally begun in 2003 to transform Montreal’s historic red light district into a cultural hub, and which, in the ensuing years, has resulted in the neighbourhood becoming all but unrecognisable to its former inhabitants. Hoszko, who identifies as a sculptor, is known for large-​scale installations that conceptually re-​map physical spaces on a 1:1 ratio, employing industrial materials traditionally associated with the sites of her excavation –​offering another kind of ‘shadow map,’ a transposition of the inside to the outside, and back inside, most often to gallery spaces (this method carries additional import with regard to Hoszko’s work in prison abolition activism). Red Light Monument, an off-​site presentation with the artist-​run centre Dare-​Dare, stayed resolutely outside. With light emulating the stadium lighting of the newly spectacularised neighbourhood and beating against and accentuating the ground’s gritty texture, Red Light Monument pulsated in the literal and metaphorical space between high and low, its ephemeral borders allowing it to tactically seep into the increasingly oppressively zoned city. In a protest, the red zone is a space for protesters intending to engage in acts of civil disobedience that carry high risk of arrest; in the context of the events of 2012, Hoszko’s red zone spectrally evoked bodies in movement, transaction, and infraction, proffering the stage not only as support for a series of relational encounters, but also as a site marker, a trace, and a witness of the invisible, pulsating histories lying beneath its translucent surface. Notes 1 Dianne Chisholm, ‘The City of Collective Memory,’ 204. 2 Sherry Simon, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2006), 4. 3 CEGEP is an acronym for Collège d’enseignment général et professionel and refers to post-​secondary collegiate institutions attended by Quebec students prior to university admittance. They have significant import to Quebec’s student movement, both in 2012 and throughout their history, having been introduced in 1967 as a form of free education. 4 Alia Al-​Saji, ‘Creating Possibility: The Time of the Quebec Student Movement,’ Theory & Event, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2012) Supplement, accessed 14 November 2021, online.

121

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

Taking place

5 Erin Manning, ‘Propositions for Collective Actions –​Towards an Ethico-​ Aesthetic Politics,’ Theory & Event, Vol 15, No. 3 (2012) Supplement, accessed 14 November 2021, online. 6 Cindy Milstein, ‘“Queer & Feminista! Anticapitalista!” Montreal, Nights 53 & 60,’ Coop média de Montréal, 24 June 2012, accessed 14 November 2021, http://​montr​eal.mediac​oop.ca/​blog/​cindy-​milst​ein/​11480. 7 Kirsty Robertson, Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2019), 5. 8 See Steve Lyons, ‘Disobedient Objects: Towards a Museum Insurgency,’ Journal of Curatorial Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018), 2–​31. 9 Robert Smithson, ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-​Sites’ (1968), reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 364. 10 Zoe Sofia, ‘Container Technologies,’ Hypatia, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2000), 182. 11 Ibid., 184. 12 Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade with James Langdon, Support Structures (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), promotional description. 13 Pip Day, ‘Sovereignty,’ SBC Gallery, Montreal, Quebec, accessed 14 November 2021, www.sbc​gall​ery.ca/​souv​erai​net?lang=​en. 14 Ibid. 15 cheyanne turions, ‘A Table for Negotiation, Mediation, Discussion, Difference,’ 21 March 2014, accessed 14 November 2021, https://​chey​anne​turi​ ons.wordpr​ess.com/​2014/​03/​21/​a-​table-​for-​nego​tiat​ion-​mediat​ion-​dis​cuss​ ion-​dif​f ere​nce/​. 16 Groat has noted that the dimensions of both the table and the benches have morphed over time and that these are the dimensions of 7 September 2015. Groat explains, ‘Because the table can be fragile in places, it has been a kind of unexpected work in progress, as I need to care for it before/​after it has been used in order to make sure it is safe to sit at. It is a funny, slightly precarious object that travels and gets assembled and reassembled and because of that I have become its custodian.’ Maggie Groat, email to author, 7 September 2015. 17 Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 36. 18 Ibid. 19 Ian McKay, ‘The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,’ The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 81, No. 4 (2000), 641. 20 turions, ‘A Table for Negotiation, Mediation, Discussion, Difference.’ 21 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) is a component of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement reached in 2007 in the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. The TRC’s mandate is ‘to inform all Canadians about what happened in Indian Residential Schools (IRS).’ As the TRC’s summary report stated, ‘Residential schooling

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

321

Border zones





was always more than simply an educational program: it was an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide.’ See the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada website, www.trc.ca/​. As this chapter foregrounds political ideology, it is significant to note the emphasis on ‘cultural’ genocide –​ the violence of cultural assimilation –​as well as the reality that the Residential Schools, in the eyes of many and in light of the high number of deaths that occurred therein, ought to be considered, in the words of Montreal-​based journalist Jesse B. Staniforth, a ‘regular genocide.’ See Jesse B. Staniforth, ‘“Cultural genocide”? No, Canada committed regular genocide,’ Star, 10 June 2015, accessed 14 November 2021, www.thes​tar.com/​opin​ion/​com​ment​ary/​ 2015/​06/​10/​cultu​ral-​genoc​ide-​no-​can​ada-​commit​ted-​regu​lar-​genoc​ide.html. 22 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 168. 23 Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–​ 1985 (New York: Norton, 1986), 212. 24 Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2006), 546. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). 25 Ibid., 551. 26 Martin Heidegger, Ontology –​the Hermeneutics of Factivity (1988), trans. John van Buren (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 69. 27 Ahmed, ‘Orientations,’ 551. 28 Penelope Curtis, ‘The Object: Function, Invitation and Interaction,’ in Sculpture 1900–​1945: After Rodin (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 141–​76. 29 Ahmed, ‘Orientations,’ 555. 30 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 53, quoted in Ahmed, ‘Orientations,’ 555. 31 See Mary L. Gray, ‘“Queer Nation is Dead/​Long Live Queer Nation”: The Politics and Poetics of Social Movement and Media Representation,’ Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 26, No. 3 (August 2009), 212–​36. 32 Circles Describing Spheres featured prominently in three exhibitions in the mid-​2010s, the 2014 Getting Rid of Ourselves, at Onsite [at] OCADU (Toronto), curated by Helena Reckitt, an exploration of the effacement of the self, of authorship, and of individualism, the 2014 This Could Be The Place, a symposium curated by Bojana Videkanic and Ivan Jurakic at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, and If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution, curated by Natalie Musteata at Haverford College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The exhibition Getting Rid of Ourselves proposed a fascinating flip of the relational equation hypothesised by turions, where the self, and subjecthood as

123

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124

Taking place

advantageous positions in a capitalist economy were obscured by the collective, the anonymous, and the fugitive. The exhibition was on display from 16 July–​11 October 2014 and featured the work and participation of Becky Beasley, Adrian Blackwell, Heath Bunting, Jesse Darling, Kajsa Dahlberg, Claire Fontaine, Goldin+​Senneby, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša [sic], and Kernel. 33 Sharon Hayes, quoted in Julia Bryan-​Wilson, ‘We Have a Future: An Interview with Sharon Hayes,’ Grey Room, Vol. 37 (Fall 2009), 87. 34 Robertson, Tear Gas Epiphanies, 180–​1. 35 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002), 113. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’ October, Vol. 110 (Fall 2004), 51–​79. 38 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 23. 39 Ibid., 13. 40 Anthony Downey, ‘Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics,’ Third Text, Vol. 21, No. 3 (May 2007), 267–​75. 41 Hito Steyerl, ‘The Institution of Critique’ (2006), reprinted in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 492. 42 Ibid., 487. 43 See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). In this foundational text in performance studies, Austin introduces the term ‘performative utterance,’ in which language does not only ‘say’ something, but performs an action. The ‘speech act’ –​the action performed by a performative utterance –​moves the exhibition’s function beyond representation (and a non-​interventionist approach to audience reception) and towards a model whereby specific signs, symbols, or encounters are intended to instigate specific responses or types of engagement. 44 Alex Farquharson, ‘I Curate, You Curate, We Curate,’ Art Monthly, No. 268 (September 2003), 8. 45 Reesa Greenberg, ‘The Exhibition as Discursive Event,’ in Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, exhibition catalogue (Site Santa Fe: Distributed Art Pub Inc, 1995), 121. 46 Diedrich Diederichsen, ‘Kai Althoff, MOMA –​The Museum of Modern Art’ review, Artforum (January 2017), accessed 14 November 2021, www.artfo​rum. com/​print/​revi​ews/​201​701/​kai-​alth​off-​65396. 47 On their website, Qteam identified as ‘a Montreal-​based radical queer collective committed to anti-​imperialism, anti-​racism, short shorts, queering activist spaces and politicizing queer spaces, the downfall of single-​issue politics, raging pervy queer dance parties, destroying all prisons, opening all

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

521

Border zones

borders, burning pink dollar$, and keeping on keeping on.’ The group ended in 2012. See their Facebook page: https://​m.faceb​ook.com/​gro​ups/​10061​6313​ 719?bac=​MTM3MTc0MDQyMjoxMDE1MTU0ODAyMzc4MzcyMDoxMD E1MTU0ODA​yMzc​4Mzc​yMCw​wLDE​6MjA​6S3c​9PQ%3D%3D&multi​_​per​ mali​nks. 48 Divers/​cité and Fierté Montréal are two distinct festivals that happen at the end of July and beginning of August, respectively. Fierté Montréal was begun in 2006 after Divers/​cité stopped holding an annual Pride Parade as part of its festivities. As of 2012 (though following years of a perception of the two as rivals), the festivals were perceived to complement one another, and to further cement Montreal’s reputation as a gay mecca. Divers/cité filed for bankruptcy in 2015. 49 Matthew Hays, ‘Fierté Montréal Marches Forward: The City’s Pride Parade Continues to Expand,’ Xtra! (14 August 2012), accessed 14 November 2021, https://​xtram​agaz​ine.com/​cult​ure/​fie​rte-​montr​eal-​marc​hes-​forw​ard-​31990. 50 Hakim Bey, ‘T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism,’ The Anarchist Library, 1985, accessed 13 November 2021, https://​thea​narc​hist​libr​ary.org/​libr​ary/​hakim-​bey-​t-​a-​z-​the-​tempor​ary-​aut​ onom​ous-​zone-​onto​logi​cal-​anar​chy-​poe​tic-​terror​ism. 51 Sandra Jeppesen, ‘Queer Anarchist Autonomous Zones and Publics: Direct Action Vomiting Against Heteronormative Consumerism,’ Sexualities, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2010), 477. 52 Mél Hogan, ‘Radical Queers: A Pop Culture Assessment of Montréal’s Anti-​Capitalist Ass Pirates, the Panthères Roses, and Lesbians on Ecstacy,’ Canadian Woman Studies/​Les cahiers de la femme, Vol. 24, No. 2,3 (Spring 2005), 159. 53 Montreal’s first Radical Dyke March did not escape the drawing of political lines of division that have defined queer communities, especially in Montreal: two Dykes marches were being planned independently, and both proceeded, though one was pegged as the ‘mainstream’ Dyke March, and one, more radical. One called on only women-​identified women to participate in the march, while the other was open to dykes and allies. 54 Bernard Gadoua, ‘Appel aux GLBT et à leurs ami-​e-​s pour participer au Défilé de la Fierté avec le contingent contre la hausse des frais, la loi 12, la brutalité policière et le néolibéralisme,’ Facebook, accessed 14 November 2021, www. faceb​ook.com/​eve​nts/​3072​7683​9368​795/​?ref=​ts. 55 Translation by the author.

125

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Everyday and extraordinary movements

At a panel discussion I organised in 2015 at the University of Toronto Scarborough, entitled ‘Experimental Dance: Histories, Politics, Presence,’ American Black queer choreographer, dancer, and artist taisha paggett, alongside Chicago-​based Canadian artist Brendan Fernandes, Toronto-​based Black dance scholar Seika Boye, and Toronto-​based independent curator Jacob Korczynski, considered their practices in relation to genealogies of modern and contemporary dance practices and discourse; what transpired was a recounting of a series of encounters and experiences accentuating bodily specificity based in corporeal hierarchies and orderings within the dance world, and how pushing up against barriers to access and visibility informs, and forms, distinct embodied practices and politics. During this conversation, paggett recounted her experience attending the Trisha Brown dance school: ‘The elevator goes up and the doors open and all the people of colour exit –​and that’s the Alvin Ailey School. And then the doors close and it’s me and all other white people and then it goes up and it’s Trisha Brown, and I go, “ok, this continues. So I need to talk about this.” ’1 Elevators, entryways, and other invisible backdrops to public-​ facing practices –​the often overlooked spaces of the everyday –​are sites of othering and of accentuated embodiments; they also offer opportunities for resistance, refusal, and emancipation. In George Yancy’s ‘Elevators, social spaces and racism,’ the elevator is a setting in which a racist encounter between Yancy and a white woman unfolds; ‘The elevator example is such a fecund site for exploring racism not only because many Blacks have had the experience of whites reacting to their Black bodies as suspicious within tight spaces, but also the elevator itself functions as an “actant”. In short, the elevator is part and parcel of the fabric that constitutes the events that take place within that elevator.’2 In the introduction to her article ‘Dancing with Social Ghosts: Performing Embodiments, Analyzing Critically,’ Rosemarie Roberts also finds herself on the elevator at a dance studio with a group of dancers of colour and a white venue representative. She recounts the experience she shared with dance company members of Ronald K. Brown/​Evidence of being guided by the representative onto the elevator and through the theatre kitchen, a space historically relegated to Black and Brown kitchen ‘help,’ to which

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

721

Everyday and extraordinary movements

the representative appeared oblivious and, consequently, oblivious to the psychical effects on Roberts and the dancers of being made to walk through this socially loaded space. As Roberts argues, ‘Performing Black and Brown bodies bear the burden and embody the weight of history, experience, and affect, moving them out from private and into public spaces. These corporeal articulations are the means through which insights about injustice based on race, class, gender, and sexuality are revealed to a public.’3 The elevator is a space of liminality rife with anxious anticipation; its doors open onto distinct environments whose organisation often cannot be known prior to entering. The elevator, in paggett’s retelling, opened up to different worlds each time the door opened; however, this difference refracted back and accentuated forms of embodied difference and evoked the bodies that have been historically absented or subjugated within these spaces. The catalyst for this conversation was an invitation I received to curate a ‘Pride’ exhibition at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The resulting exhibition, TEMPERAMENTAL, attempted to bring queer otherworlds into the gallery, to conjure the sensualities and socialities of queer spaces, or else, to queer the space of the gallery. Extending and queering the genealogy of minimalism, whereby spectators’ confrontations with abstract objects in the gallery space forced a phenomenological reckoning, I wanted to nod to this history via the inclusion of minimalist-​like objects and more overt evocations of the body as mode through which to confront the phenomenological and social dimensions of the gallery space as an institution –​ the literal and proverbial wending the Othered body must do in confrontation with mainstream institutional spaces, and the possibilities for worldmaking otherwise afforded via embodied queer praxis. The concept of ‘minor architecture’ has been explored by architectural theorist Jill Stoner as instances of ‘undo[ing] structures of power.’4 Building on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s definition of minor literature, in which, Stoner argues, they articulate a link between literature and architecture via an engagement with spatial terms, Stoner borrows the characteristics of minor literature, arguing minor architecture to be acts of clearing. Each act yields an emergent, revolutionary space, even as that space begins to close in behind. It is space displaced, a deterritorialization. It challenges authority and its management of time; it is political. It overrides heroic aspirations with an inclusive, collective voice. The lines of force that generate minor architectures begin always in the middle, yet not from the center. They have only their elastic length, with never a true beginning or end. These lines are complex trajectories that open outward.5

127

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

Taking place

Operating from inside physical architectures, minor architecture, to Stoner, inverses Michel de Certeau’s assertion that ‘space is practiced place,’ offering, instead, ‘practiced space’ that ‘dissolves material, privileges air, inscribes meaning onto surfaces, folds exteriors inward and interiors outward, and blurs definitive objects into contingent relationships.’6 Importantly, minor architectures, in Stoner’s estimation, ‘reframe the definition of architecture from the making of buildings with materials of nature to the making of spaces within the already built.’7 In the 1990s, John Paul Ricco was engaging the potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature for identifying and articulating what he referred to, at the time, as ‘queer sex space theory’; in his 1993 essay ‘Jacking-​off a Minor Architecture,’ Ricco takes up the jack-​off rooms of gay bars and clubs as examples of minor architecture –​‘escape routes from the institutionalized intimacy, interiority, and domesticity of heterosexism, or major sexuality,’ and as ‘in-​between zones, corridors which are never entirely outside of a major architecture.’8 In the jack-​off room, Ricco asserts, ‘all bodily senses are activated,’ while ‘distinctions of Self and Other (not-​Self), inside and outside, are subsumed by this collectivizing network of multiple desires, bodies, practices and durations […]’9 Although I wasn’t drawing from Stoner and Ricco’s engagements with minor architecture at the time, I shared in their project in my attempt to engage curatorial work to evoke and foreground a queer minor architecture; as with experiences in the everyday spaces of queer sociality, I wanted the orientation to be bent, to draw the viewer into phenomenological awareness of space via immersive, multisensorial experiences, asking visitors to peel back curtains, enter into dark rooms and corners, crane necks to see, look up, look down, lose a sense of corporeal delineations between themselves, other selves, and objects. I wanted to offer a radically queer update of an art of the everyday. Upon entering the gallery’s windowed vestibule, visitors encountered the muffled sound of August Klintberg’s 2013 Quiet Disco, a fifty-​five-​minute audio work played on a retro turntable in plain view of a dance party in full swing, inducing a discordant sensorial experience when one looked into the gallery, only to see that no actual dance party was underway. Opening the door into the gallery, the visitor, when turning to the left, encountered velvet flesh and faeces-​coloured curtains, but to draw them by the black leather dildo-​like rod revealed nothing but a bright pink wall behind. The bright pink backdrop of Hazel Meyer’s diarrhea (2015) was refracted on the opposite wall by the late Will Munro’s grid of square mirrors, screenprinted in pink with the logos of legendary gay and punk bars, but here with no bar stools, loud banter, or the yeasty smell of spilled beer. Were visitors entering into a space after the party,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

921

Everyday and extraordinary movements

129

a party that had not yet begun, or a party existing in some imaginary space bridging history with the present, the material ‘here’ and the queer somewhere? The bright gallery lighting suggested none of the above. The environments created by these artists were activated by bodies, movement-​makers, and dancers. In addition to Fernandes, whose work I will discuss at length in closing this chapter, paggett presented A Composite Field (2014), a three-​channel installation produced with collaborator Yann Novak. Entering into dialogue considerations of presence, movement, documentation, and witnessing, and the historically fraught position of the queer Black body in the gallery space, paggett dances the same dance three times, with slight variations that become noticeable when the three videos are watched together. Novak’s manual manipulation of the lighting in each recording of the dance accentuates paggett’s subtle movements as she performs for an audience in the room with her, tangling and untangling from a men’s white blazer. On the three screens, the high-​tone colours seemingly altered the colour of paggett’s clothing and skin. In his off-​site performance Boy Band Audition, New York-​based Alexandro Segade led the viewer into the loud, hot space of the dance club, a space where, in the words of UK artist Elizabeth Price (for whom one of the on-​site galleries

taisha paggett and Yann Novak, A Composite Field, 2014. 3-​channel HD video, 23.24. Installation view, TEMPERAMENTAL, The Doris McCarthy Gallery, 5 January–​ 14 February 2015.

4.1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

Taking place

was retrofitted for her 2012 immersive video work The Woolworths Choir of 1979), you can ‘smell other people’s bodies.’ Segade assumed the role of a casting director, leading the audience through a series of audition prompts towards forming ‘boy bands’ that would inspire people to change the past and, subsequently, the future. The off-​siteness of Segade’s performance, at the legendary, and historically, very queer, Gladstone Hotel on Queen Street West in downtown Toronto (in the same block as Munro’s queer bar, The Beaver, which closed during the COVID-​19 pandemic in 2020, and within a block of the now mythical ‘queer street west’ strip of galleries), was epiphanic for my thinking about what I was trying to do with this exhibition –​and what I could not accomplish within the institutional gallery. What I neglected to consider, at the time, was what alternative spaces of sociality offer that mainstream institutional spaces cannot and, bridging the disciplines of the visual with the performing and dance arts, the particular implications of transposing sites of queer sociality into institutional space –​the particular injuries, violences, and exclusions experienced by Othered bodies within these spaces and within institutionalised forms of practice. I offer these anecdotes in an attempt to begin to understand how bodies resist and reveal the social organisation of space, or else forge otherwise spaces, beginning with how the body navigates and confronts the social and historical dimensions of space –​spaces of the everyday, and extraordinary spaces, too. While previous chapters in this book are more firmly rooted in specific geographies, this chapter examines how bodies not only negotiate, but also bring into relief, the physical spaces of the everyday, the limitations of representational space, and the untranslatability of the lifeblood offered in the extraordinary spaces of queer sociality. To foreground bodies in relation to physical space is also to reveal how the seemingly benign ‘minor architectures’ of the traditional institution enforce dominant social structures. As Korczynski commented during the 2015 panel, a ‘privileging of the neutral body […] is neutral for some, and not neutral for others.’10 Disability studies in relation to museums has worked to address the physical barriers imposed by museum space; the term ‘complex embodiment,’ coined by Tobin Siebers, ‘understands disability as an epistemology that rejects the temptation to value the body as anything other than what it was and that embraces what the body has become and will become relative to the demands on it, whether environmental, representational, or corporeal.’11 The ocularcentrism of museums poses many problems with regard to embodied difference, opening up to greater awareness of the overall physical and sensorial inaccessibility of museum space, with attendant calls for an ameliorated user experience taking into account all of the senses; larger accessibility issues

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

131

Everyday and extraordinary movements

exist within the realm of the social, which is the primacy of visual representation looking back at the eye which privileges forms of ‘mirroring’ the subject in an effort for identification –​what Martin Jay has called ‘specularity as a model of knowledge.’12 Tending to both the embodied experiences of occupying space and their discursive as well as social potential when these spaces are made central offers an opportunity to examine how, as Imani Kay Johnson writes, ‘we are socialized to move through our worlds and how one physically moves in dance.’13 This chapter also confronts the enduring invisibilities, both historical and present-​ day, around racialised and queered bodies and their exclusions not only from participation, but also from historical retelling and focuses on contemporary queer, trans and BIPOC artists who reimagine, intervene in, and refuse this historical terrain. Embodied objects Claire Bishop has observed that ‘it is striking that interest from museums and galleries has focused on choreography belonging only to certain traditions, above all Merce Cunningham and Judson Dance Theatre, both of which fostered rich interdisciplinary collaborations with visual artists.’14 Judson is notable for its emphasis on de-​skilling and practices of the everyday, emblematised by Yvonne Rainer’s work, which emphasised a ‘process’ look. At the same time as dance was breaking out of its rigid shell and movement-​ based practitioners began to experiment with everyday movement, other experimental artistic practices were also on the verge of becoming: the history of minimalism in the United States is well mined, reflecting the preoccupation, in the mid-​1960s to the present, with the phenomenological encounter and the embodied spectator –​a troubled intersection in art, and more overtly in line with what was happening concurrently and overlapping with currents in postmodern dance. The minimalist ‘structures’ that were first engaged by dancers like Simone Forti in the early 1960s went on to influence minimalist sculpture in the gallery, but replaced the dancer’s body with the body of the visitor. But both postmodern dance and minimalism soon revealed certain shortcomings: the iconoclastic experimentation of choreography in the early 1960s promoted a neutrality and absence of cultural signifiers, which took for granted how said neutrality equated ‘American,’ white, able-​bodied experience with universal experience; and, as Hal Foster has pointed out, there was an implicit problem within minimalism, as well, which was the view to ‘perception’ in purely phenomenological terms, which neglected to account for a variety of social and systemic factors, such as history, race, and sexuality.

131

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

Taking place

As Foster states, ‘it does not regard the subject as a sexed body positioned in a symbolic order any more than it regards the gallery or the museum as an ideological apparatus […] if minimalism does initiate a critique of the subject, it does so in abstract terms.’15 On a phenomenological level, developments in sculpture and dance at this time are notable for how they interrupted what had been upheld, until the 1960s, as an uncomplicated relationship between viewer and artwork, forming the foundations on which to wage the aforementioned social critiques. As Rosalind Krauss articulated in her canonical 1979 essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ ‘modernist sculpture appeared as a kind of black hole in the space of consciousness, something whose positive content was increasingly difficult to define, something that was possible to locate only in terms of what it was not.’16 The sculpture in the gallery forced a consideration not only of its obstructing presence within space, but also of other dimensional objects –​ actants –​in space, namely, the bodies that commingled among sculptures. Krauss’s evocation of a ‘kind of black hole’ introduces metaphorical language intended to signal a space of nothingness or emptiness, but also reflects the common practice, within art writing at the time, to divorce formal considerations (such as the qualities of ‘blackness’) from social ones.17 Krauss continues on to argue that the artwork being produced in the early 1960s operated in a kind of ‘no-​man’s land’; that ‘it was what was on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the landscape.’18 Krauss’s essay, and the concept of the ‘expanded field,’ has become a template for testing out the qualities of a plenitude of mediums that remain nebulously defined, or defined more by what they are not than by what they are –​as when Krauss evokes Barnett Newman’s notorious observation that ‘Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.’19 ‘Not-​ness’ –​a negation of meaning, value, and agency –​is a useful frame to distinguish between some moving bodies as dancing bodies, and others as not-​dancing bodies; those bodies which are conceptually and literally ‘bumped up’ against and which punctuate an experience of space and the act of looking. Rebecca Schneider has pointed to how many artists working in performance liken their work to sculpture as a way of avoiding ‘the messy, impure, and historically feminized performance-​based arts of theatre and dance.’20 The act of watching some body move (be it aestheticised movement or not, any body intended to be looked at is, in one manner or other, a labouring body, as well) introduces a social dynamic whose hierarchies are informed by difference (I am not that body that is labouring, other, for my spectatorial enjoyment). This dynamic has been explored and problematised by Randy Martin as exemplary of the colonial gaze of the West; however, for Martin, with the advent

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

31

Everyday and extraordinary movements

of postmodern dance and its critical examination of the body as constructed by culture, the relationship between dancer and audience was one in which the assignations of ‘productive labour’ and ‘passive reception’ were regularly confused or reversed; participant-​observers became self-​critical ethnographers who were called on to account for themselves in their interpretation of what they were seeing.21 To Martin, ‘production is what dancing assembles as a capacity for movement, and the product is not the aesthetic effect of the dance but the materialized identity accomplished through the performativity of movement.’22 Bodies define and are defined by the bodies they are not, accentuating distinctness, and therefore, difference, in a literalisation of the relational difference that was earlier metaphorically implied by the relationship between sculpture and viewer. Punctuated bodies, those aestheticised moving bodies that share space among bodies and objects, are neither other bodies, nor the built environment, yet work to delineate the others’ specificity. The art institution poses a threat to the emancipatory and mobilising potential theorised by Martin in its continued valorisation of the representational qualities of the dancer’s body and movement at the same time as it evacuates consideration of the body in its social context. This disregard carries particular consequences for bodies marked by racialisation in the historically unwelcoming space of the gallery. Tavia Nyong’o references José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of the ‘burden of liveness,’ whereby ‘queer, transgender, and racialized bodies are so often exceptionalized through temporary displays of liveness in the very institutions that reject them as permanent occupants or stakeholders,’ and how this produces a ‘confrontation between the living labor of the performing black body and the demands of the institutions that seek to valorize themselves through that encounter.’23 In his 2015 book Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, Uri McMillan takes as central focus what ‘objecthood,’ specifically, what he terms ‘performing objecthood,’ offers as a means for ‘black subjects to become art objects.’24 In reclaiming ‘objecthood’ as a strategy of Black women performers, McMillan is careful to delineate the ways by which Black bodies have been subjugated via processes of equation with objects, as argued by Hortense Spillers in her analysis of chattel slavery, whereby she draws a distinction between ‘body’ and ‘flesh,’ the former denoting a liberated subject position, the latter, a captive one; and by Mel Y. Chen in articulating the hierarchy among animate beings, non-​human animals, and inanimate objects –​with humans being cast as the most animate of beings.25 In his ‘rescrambling the dichotomy between objectified bodies or embodied subjects,’ McMillan offers Black objecthood as a site of potential agency.26 Challenging Michael Fried’s warning against the theatricality introduced by sculpture in the 1960s, McMillan positions objecthood

133

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

Taking place

as a way to bring art and performance together, and as a mode (and here, ‘rescrambling’ Newman, making the object agential) through which art objects can ‘get in the spectator’s way.’27 McMillan’s ‘performing objecthood’ is joined by Martin’s concept of ‘overreading,’ whereby ‘the subtext displayed in dancing accounts for more than that particular aesthetic activity and points instead to the very contours through which a given horizon for social activity is possible’ in critically toppling a formalism that demands a ‘demarcation between a piece’s interiority and its exteriority’ and that rejects context as consequential to a work’s reading.28 The most seemingly benign forms of movement, either durationally or repetitively performed, work not to distract the viewer with spectacle, but to redefine, for the viewer, the structures of difference in which each actant –​ viewer not exempted –​participates. Dancing differently Although the conversation that unfolded at the 2015 panel at the Doris McCarthy Gallery was not predeterminedly centred on race, what did emerge were various experiences of difference and/​or differentiation from the expectations of institutionalised forms of dance practice. The dancers at the table represented three entirely distinct practices and each discussed how space and the negotiation of spaces of the everyday amplified experiences of embodied difference. Fernandes, paggett, and Boye nodded in agreement that they have systematically been directed towards styles of dance deemed to be part of a Black dance genealogy or believed to be suited to a notion of the Black body and what have problematically been viewed, historically and taxonomically, as its ‘unique’ capacities. Fernandes and paggett recalled instances in which they were directed to Alvin Ailey (whose founding of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City in 1958 created opportunities and garnered international recognition for African-​American dancers in the 1960s), even though experimental practices such as Trisha Brown’s and Yvonne Rainer’s had figured more centrally as influences in their work. Fernandes’s training in ballet was deemed ill-​suited to his small frame and he was encouraged into modern dance for this reason. Additionally, age also factored as a point of difference; paggett spoke about coming to dance later in life, eighteen being considered older than most professional dancers begin their training. She recalled becoming absorbed in the university library’s dance collection, and the inspiration taken from experimental practices, including Rainer’s.29 Rainer’s 1965 ‘No Manifesto,’ with its opening lines, ‘No to spectacle/​No to virtuosity,’ can be read, on a formal level, onto paggett’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

531

Everyday and extraordinary movements

slow, unspectacular movements.30 But paggett’s subtle gestures, stances, and transitions also forge links between her own contemporary embodiment and histories of the inescapability of visual othering of the Black body induced by its juxtaposition within the white cube. These accounts, taken together, contribute to a growing refusal against the narrative of ‘neutrality’ that has attached to histories of postmodern dance and the spaces in which it occurs, and many other instances abound; the queer Filipino-​American dancer Gerald Casel wrote a response to having been invited by Hope Mohr Dance’s 2016 Bridge Project to respond to Trisha Brown’s Locus. At once noting the undeniability of ‘embodied movement affinities and adopted compositional vocabularies’ shared in common with Brown, Casel wrote that Formal constraints have the capacity to invigorate creativity, however, they do not function equally for all bodies. More precisely, there is no such thing as pure movement for dancers of color. In my view, it is difficult to separate structural and systemic power from race. Among other intersectional factors (such as age, gender, class, etc.), dancing by brown and black bodies is read differently than dancing white bodies. One of the assumptions that postmodern formalism arouses is that any body has the potential to be read as neutral –​that there is such a thing as a universally unmarked body. As a dancer and choreographer of color, my body cannot be perceived as pure. My brown body cannot be read the same way as a white body, particularly in a white cube.31

Contrary to racist perceptions regarding the physical incompatibility of bodies of colour to certain types of dance practice, these examples emphasise the important distinction between constructions of ‘race’ and occurrences of ‘racialisation’ as enacted on non-​white bodies. As Rebecca Chaleff has argued, ‘Any body does not have the potential to be read as neutral, and so not every body has the same access to what is presumed to be ordinary.’32 Radical juxtapositions The term ‘radical juxtapositions’ was coined by Susan Sontag in describing Happenings, themselves the interdisciplinary overlapping of various mediums and movements within experimental art communities in the 1960s.33 The term has been borrowed by Rainer to describe her choreographic and cinematic approach, and by American conceptual artist Adam Pendleton, who works across disciplines and appropriates found texts and images, bringing together

135

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

Taking place

seemingly disparate ideas that help to forge new views to the present and future.34 The approach had particular poignance when Rainer and Pendleton intersected in a fourteen-​minute video portrait made by Pendleton, titled Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer (2016–​17), the third in a series of video portraits (the earlier two focusing on the work of Lorraine O’Grady and David Hilliard). The portrait is an interview between Pendleton and Rainer, both of whom are on screen, sitting in the Ridgeway Diner in New York, the two in conversation. At one point, Pendleton asks Rainer to read from an assemblage of texts, including excerpts pertaining to Rainer’s life, scattered among which were texts about the killings of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, as well as essays about Pendleton’s work. In a conversation between Pendleton, Rainer, and curator Adrienne Edwards following a screening of the video portrait at Anthology Film Archives, Rainer acknowledged her shift from dance to film to mark a split between her more aesthetic preoccupations as explored through dance, and her more explicitly political explorations and activism in relation to the Vietnam War and women’s rights. Significant to this chapter is not only the content of this portrait, and Rainer’s acknowledgement of the need to veer towards a different medium altogether in order to pursue more overtly political projects (suggesting, implicitly, a certain limitation within postmodern dance), but also the method: for Rainer and Pendleton, the term ‘radical juxtapositions’ offers a frame through which to hold in the balance the quotidian and the politically urgent; the term might be more broadly useful to artists looking for something beyond what the canonical history dictates as the official narrative, and the linearity that many ‘official’ narratives command. For instance, the American dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell, in Twenty Looks Or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, first performed in 2010, enacts a radical juxtaposition in his rewriting ‘the minimalism and neutrality of postmodern dance with a new set of signs.’35 The white filmmaker Jennie Livingston, with her 1991 documentary film Paris Is Burning, introduced the underground ball culture of queer people of colour –​begun in the early twentieth century in Harlem as ‘faerie balls’ and continuing into the present day –​to a mainstream audience; however, as Harrell’s radical juxtaposition makes clear, the ball culture of Harlem was well underway by the time the white-​dominated postmodern dance community was occupying Judson Church in Greenwich Village.36 Indeed, a racialised delineation of ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ had been well established since the Harlem Renaissance, when white ‘downtowners’ would make the trek to Harlem to frequent jazz clubs and other spaces of Black sociality –​not unlike, as House/​Ball community member and LGBTQ+​activist Michael Roberson describes, how the House/​Ballroom community (HBC) was generated by and for its community, only to be co-​opted from outside itself: ‘The HBC –​with

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

731

Everyday and extraordinary movements

its artistic practices rooted in the Black radical aesthetics tradition, and its cultural, political, and theological formulations rooted in the history of the Black struggle for freedom –​has been commodified and misappropriated through the white supremacist gaze.’37 Just as the Harlem Renaissance’s literary figures attempted to depict the social and political realities for and potential for emancipated Black life in America at the same time as they performed as primitivist ‘Other’ for white audiences, the jazz clubs, which were often white-​ owned, were transformed from spaces that nurtured Black cultural forms to spaces that tailored to white audiences and, in many instances, space where Black bodies were increasingly absented and segregated in a manner mirroring the Jim Crow laws of the South. In Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces, Ramsay Burt argues that, despite the collaborative work being done at the time between white and African-​American dancers, writers, and artists, including collaborations by Fred Herko, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Diane Di Prima, and Cecil Taylor, the dancers at Judson did not make connections ‘Between avant-​gardism and the politics of race,’ nor did they recognise ‘the need to oppose mechanisms that maintained boundaries in terms of race.’38 Harrell imagines an inverse of this racialised dynamic, asking, ‘What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church? […] in the distance between who we imagine a work is being performed for and its actual performance for those present, what kind of new relations can be created, adapted, and reassigned between performer(s) and audience?’39 In this critical re-​imagining –​a ‘radical juxtaposition,’ or what Nyong’o, in his study of Black artistic production as engaged in practices of ‘polytemporality,’ refers to as ‘afro-​fabulation in motion’ –​Harrell reclaims an agency historically denied Black performers in decades past, when Black bodies were subjugated for white cultural consumption at the very moment in which they were forging liberatory cultural forms.40 Harrell’s choreographies recall Roberts’s articulation of the need for an ‘embodied analysis of dance,’ which she argues ‘harness and expose the excess –​the micro-​level gestures, postures, and movements, which in turn reveals the felt/​social psychological experience of the history of oppression and the acts of resistance to that oppression’;41 they also trace these historical delineations and critically reconfigure the power dynamics inherent to performer-​audience relationships, exponentially so in attending to and foregrounding racialisation as further entrenching them. Oppositional choreographies In these examples, what choreography brings to the fore are the ways in which perceptual and embodied shifts make visible previously unseen dynamics,

137

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Taking place

juxtapositions, statures, and structures. Michel de Certeau’s 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life is a guiding text for studies of everyday life, offering a magnified view to how one’s position vis-​à-​vis the built environment influences a view to power. This position, and attendant perception, extends from the highest highs to the lowest lows (from those in the skyscraper to those underground) –​take the city bus at dawn, or the Los Angeles subway anytime, and note the types of bodies that comingle in these spaces of darkness and undergrounds: labourers, working classes, bodies resigned to the built environment’s stranglehold on mobility, robbed of the illusion of a kind of emancipated right to movement. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, ‘the city’s form and structure provide the context in which social rules are internalized or habituated in order to ensure social conformity or position social marginality at a safe or insulated distance or boundary.’42 These spaces magnify the classed, gendered, and racialised dimensions of everyday movements. Even within supposed spaces of ‘representation,’ bodies nevertheless quietly organise experience and delineate power differentials at the intersecting levels of gender, race, and class. De Certeau proposed the concept of ‘oppositional tactics’ as a strategy for subverting these governing structures via a subversion of their traditional functions. American artist Fred Wilson’s institutional critique of the early 1990s, notably, his work Guarded View (1991), is exemplary of this project, at the same time as it challenges a view to sculpture’s neutrality as object-​ negating and subject-​augmenting. The sculpture comprises four Black headless mannequins (we know they are Black from the colour of their hands) outfitted in the museum guard uniforms associated with four major New York cultural institutions. In Wilson’s installation, the museum guard’s expected stoic, static silence and invisibility is accentuated via stillness; the museum guard is not to intervene in the museum visitor’s experience; one’s leisure time is another’s labour time, and Wilson’s headless mannequins also critique the stereotypical perception of the Black body as intellectually removed from the supposedly ‘heady’ ambitions of the white cultural imbiber. The headless mannequins, however, are slightly elevated by their position on a plinth, signalling to the viewer that these are bodies to be looked at. Here, the unique embodied subjectivity of the viewer is forced into a more direct and nuanced dialogue with difference. In Wilson’s critique, the body, more accurately, its likeness, is static; it is its own form of relic to a past, present, and likely future regarding the state of race relations and subjugations within white supremacy. Wilson’s static sculptures are evoked and brought to life in Brendan Fernandes’s 2014 Closing Line, which also engages institutional critique and the intersections of race and class as visually organised within the gallery.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

931

Everyday and extraordinary movements

Brendan Fernandes, Closing Line, 2014

However, Fernandes’s choreographic work directly imposes itself within the viewer’s space, at once closing and widening the uncomfortable gap between viewer and artwork, and introducing a more tactile and confrontational discomfort based in touch, force, and insistence. Closing Line was performed at the Sculpture Center and mimicked the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1960s practice whereby guards would usher visitors out at closing time with touch or with speech. Uniformed in grey army sweaters and black pants, a line of dancers slowly encroached on gallery attendees as they either relented or resisted the physical ushering out of the space. After leaving his own dance practice due to injury, Fernandes began to incorporate choreography into his artistic practice, with works that melded the crisp, hard edges and geometric clarity of minimalism, often juxtaposing the bodies of dancers alongside plinths and other geometric structures to accentuate this connection. Over time, his choreographies began to explore the repetitive gestures of often invisible forms of labour, reflecting a joint engagement in institutional critique and the possibilities afforded for exploring its often overlooked dimensions via performance. Clean Labor (2017), performed at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, magnified the labour of hotel cleaners. Visitors were permitted into the hotel room to watch as dancers and cleaners performed together, the trained dancer mimicking the movement of the cleaners. Dressed in white uniform-​like jumpsuits, the dancers were distinguished via a kind of

139

4.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

4.3

Taking place

visual organisation with historical precedence in modern dance, specifically, evoking a form of racialised visual organisation, described by Susan Manning as follows: ‘Blackness and whiteness became perceptual constructs on stage, ways for linking physical bodies and theatrical meanings, ways for reading bodies in motion. Blackness was a marked category, whiteness, an unmarked category in American theatrical dance. The visibility of blackness opposed the invisibility of whiteness, and spectators in the mid-​century relied on this opposition to read the meanings of theatrical performance.’43 Although the performers in Clean Labor were not organised around racial lines, the choice of uniform/​ costume similarly serves to delineate ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ categories of labour, where one is aesthetic and the other is functional. One has historically made the other possible (i.e. the invisible/​behind-​the-​scenes labour necessary prior to public performances). In Clean Labor, the ‘cleaner’ is foregrounded and instrumentalised to make a point about invisible labour; nevertheless, dance and aestheticised movement reigns supreme. In reflecting on the performance, Soo Ryon Yoon has observed, ‘These otherwise “unremarkable” movements of folding linens, scrubbing bathtubs, and sweeping floors, became ‘remarkable’ through their incarnation in ­performance.’44 Fernandes’s project extends the

Brendan Fernandes, Clean Labor, 2017. Produced in collaboration with More Art. Photo by Chester Toye. Performers: Christopher DeVita, Charles Gowin, Madison Krekel, Erica Ricketts, Oisin Monaghan, Khadijia Griffith, and Wythe Hotel housekeepers, Angie Sherpa, Tenzin Thokme, and Tenzin Woiden.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

141

Everyday and extraordinary movements

legacy of other artists, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose feminist-​ infused institutional critique took on the form of the performance of domestic labour within cultural institutions, notably, her Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969) and the maintenance performances she undertook through the 1970s.45 Returning to Krauss’s notion of the expanded field and its potential value for identifying otherwise liminal forms of artistic output, while the work of Wilson and Ukeles operates within the space of not-​dance, Fernandes’s choreographies, which mimic and aestheticise everyday movement, are considered dance, perhaps by virtue of this aestheticisation and by attempts to intervene in existing acceptable practices both within the art world and the dance world. Practices like Fernandes’s point to spaces of invisibility and draw them to the centre while simultaneously interrogating the organisational structures and barriers to access within the art world. For instance, in a rare occasion in which Fernandes performs in his work, Standing Leg (2014) presents Fernandes on the floor, using what is known as a ballet foot stretcher, in which, over time, the ballet dancer’s foot, if subjected to the structured form of the stretcher over time, will eventually reform towards an imposed aesthetic ideal. Fernandes’s intervention on the scripted language of the dance call that has historically served to describe sought-​after body types while discriminating against others illustrates Roberts’s claim that ‘Black and Brown unruly bodies, demonstrate that race (among other social categories) and inequality/​racism is not only encountered in linguistic forms or ideas and perceptions, it is also encountered intimately and provocatively in and through individuals as well as between bodies.’46 To this end, Fernandes’s Minor Calls (2017), a series of vinyl wall works mimicking a call for dancers, also challenges the ideals of beauty as they coalesce on and around the dancer’s body. Texts boldly call out for dancers not defined by societal ideals but by internally harnessed states: ‘LOOKING FOR: BODIES THAT ARE INVISIBLE OTHERED AND SMALL WHO SELF DEFINE TO CONTRACT AND RELEASE TO ACT OUT IF INTERESTED INQUIRE WITHIN’ and ‘LOOKING FOR: PERFORMERS WITH CONFIDENT AND STRONG BODIES WHO SELF DEFINE TO COLLIDE IN A CASUAL ENCOUNTER WITHIN FLUX TO MAKE “MOVEMENTS” IF INTERESTED INQUIRE WITHIN.’ Beyond the physical geography of the art gallery or studio walls exist other forms of spatial engagement, political geography, and phenomenology of the everyday, as well as spaces of social dance versus the formal training offered in studios, for instance, the gay dance club or disco. The late Felix Gonzalez-​Torres’s ‘Untitled’ (Go-​Go Dancing Platform) (1991) holds space in the gallery regardless of whether or not one of the go-​go dancers is present, the plinth extending both into the realm of the art historical and the realm of the socio-​sexual. Fernandes

141

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

4.4

Taking place

Brendan Fernandes, Minor Calls, 2017. Design concept by Brendan Fernandes in collaboration with Joseph Cuillier. MCA Chicago.

takes up this space in an imagined as well as eulogistic way in his work Free Fall 49, which responds to the 12 June 2016 Orlando Shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida –​a homophobically motivated massacre of attendees of the gay club, most of which were Latinx, in which forty-​nine people were killed and fifty-​three others were wounded. Fernandes has stated, ‘Working with this challenging context, the work makes visible the political dimensions of spaces

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

341

Everyday and extraordinary movements

Brendan Fernandes, Free Fall 49, 2017.

often viewed as outside of or ignored in contemporary political conversations. It explores the dance floor as both a space and a surface that supports, and also a space and surface that can penetrate, harm and ultimately hold still fallen bodies.’47 Extending an art historical genealogy concerned with an art of the everyday, Fernandes’s mimicking of everyday movement –​here, in the form of social, rather than trained dance –​situates his work within the contemporary political moment and its specific urgencies, where any uncertainty as to the worldmaking potential of the queer dance floor is assuaged in consideration of the world-​shaking and life taking events of Orlando. American artists Wu Tsang and Leilah Weinraub, in their respective art documentaries, Wildness (2012) and Shakedown (2018), also offer the dance floor as a social space of worldmaking, notably, as it serves communities of queer people of colour –​in Tsang’s documentary, the underground nightclub the Silver Platter, a Los Angeles nightclub that has served the Latinx queer community since the 1960s, at which Tsang launched her club night, ‘Wildness,’ in 2008; in Weinraub’s Shakedown, an underground strip club night catering to a predominantly Black lesbian clientele in South LA, with Weinraub’s film following the Shakedown Angels, the all-​Black femme and stud performers from the late 1990s until 2004, when the club night was shut down by the LAPD. Each also reveal the specific tensions arising from the queer and trans occupation of space within communities and neighbourhoods regarding other

143

4.5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Taking place

‘Othernesses’ suspiciously. As with paggett’s A Composite Field, when watching these documentaries in the gallery or cinema environment, there is one level to which the viewer is granted access. But the screen acts, as well, to remind the viewer as to the concurrent and complete inaccessibility to these worlds save for in person –​work that is generous at the same time that it holds back the very thing that makes it in its own time and place and, therefore, impervious, in the ways that matter, to co-​option. Pulling from a variety of historically specific moments, including institutional critique, critical race, labour, and process, the deliberate situatedness of the dancer’s body simultaneously calls all to the fore, both holding the space and delineating the chasm between bodies and the physical space of the gallery and its invisible structures of organisation both within and outside. The works discussed in this chapter reveal and critically retread the canons of modern and experimental dance, interrogating dance’s own organisational structures as centred on an idea of bodily neutrality –​like the neutrality of the art object –​ that does not disrupt a view to the ‘pure’ act of viewing. In these works, bodies simultaneously direct and point outwards, to spaces underlooked and unseen, and hold our focus inward, not in spectacular elevation of form but in deep introspection around the structures that organise some bodies some ways and other bodies, otherwise. Notes 1 taisha paggett, ‘Experimental Dance: Histories, Politics, Presence,’ panel discussion, the University of Toronto Scarborough, 9 February 2015. 2 George Yancy, ‘Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism: A Philosophical Analysis,’ Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 8 (2008), 844. 3 Rosemarie A. Roberts, ‘Dancing with Social Ghosts: Performing Embodiments, Analyzing Critically,’ Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2013), 8. 4 Jill Stoner, Towards A Minor Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 7. 5 Ibid., 14–​15. 6 Ibid., 16. 7 Ibid. 8 John Paul Ricco, ‘Jacking-​off A Minor Architecture’ (1993), reprinted in Keep It Dirty, Vol. a., Filth (2016), accessed 20 November 2021, http://​keep​itdi​rty. org/​a/​jack​ing-​off-​a-​minor-​archi​tect​ure/​. 9 Ibid. 10 Jacob Korczynski, ‘Experimental Dance: Histories, Politics, Presence,’ panel discussion, the University of Toronto Scarborough, 9 February 2015. 11 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 27.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

541

Everyday and extraordinary movements

12 Martin Jay, ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,’ Poetics Today, Vol. 9, No. 2, The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (1988), 316. 13 Imani Kai Johnson, ‘Battling in the Bronx: Social Choreography and Outlaw Culture Among Early Hip-​Hop Streetdancers in New York City,’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 50, No. 2 (August 2018), 64. 14 Claire Bishop, ‘Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone,’ TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Summer 2018), 28. 15 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-​Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 42–​3. 16 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ October, Vol. 8 (Spring 1979), 34. 17 In Canada in 1967, the October issue of the national arts magazine artscanada was titled ‘Black,’ however, despite the political climate of the late 1960s and urgencies surrounding race and civil rights, the issue was heavily weighted towards ‘the black of outer space, new jazz, and paint,’ and prioritised the voices of white artists in theorising the issue’s theme. Particularly telling, with regard to a view to blackness as divorced from its racial context, was a ‘simultaneous conversation’ that took place on 16 August 1967 between seven speakers, only one of whom, the American jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, was Black. As panellist Ad Reinhardt offered: ‘I once organized a talk on black, and I started with black as a symbol, black as a colour, and the connotations of black in our culture where our whole system is imposed on us in terms of darkness, lightness, blackness, whiteness. Goodness and badness are associated with black. As an artist and painter I would eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a colour but as a non-​colour and the absence of colour’ (artscanada, No. 113, October 1967, 3). In 2019, Vancouver-​ based curator Denise Ryner and Toronto-​based writer Yaniya Lee convened Bodies Borders Fields in Vancouver and Toronto, a public symposium that ‘re-​ imagine[d]‌the 1967 conversation about “blackness” with particular attention to blackness and fugitivity as represented in critical art practices today,’ with the intention to ‘dislocate the original panel discussion to contemporary contexts and representations of black and blackness in sound, performance and visual culture with respect to black social life and expression.’ See Bodies Border Fields website, www.bodi​esbo​rder​sfie​lds.com/​. See also Krys Verral, ‘artcanada’s “Black” Issue: 1960s Contemporary Art and African Liberation Movements,’ Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 36, 539–​58. 18 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ 34. 19 Barnett Newman, quoted in Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ 34, 36. 20 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), 130. 21 Mark Franko, ‘Dance/​Agency/​History: Randy Martin’s Marxian Ethnography,’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2016), 34.

145

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Taking place

22 Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 4. 23 Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-​ Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 35. 24 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 7. 25 See Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’ Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1987), 64, and Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012). 26 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 9. 27 Ibid. 28 Randy Martin, ‘Overreading The Promised Land: Towards a Narrative of Context in Dance,’ in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (London: Routledge, 1995), 184. 29 In 2011, paggett and Rainer, along with art historian and activist Douglas Crimp, were co-​signatories of a letter to LA MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch in which they protested the inclusion of a performance by Marina Abramović at an upcoming donor gala in which young performers would be ‘ensconced under the diners’ tables on lazy Susans and also required to display their nude bodies under fake skeletons.’ They identified the performers’ willingness to participate as saying ‘something about the generally exploitative conditions of the art world such that people are willing to become decorative table ornaments installed by a celebrity artist in the hopes of somehow breaking into the show biz themselves. And at subminimal wages for the performers, the event is economic exploitation as well, verging on criminality.’ See the full text of the letter on Artforum, ‘Yvonne Rainer Accused Marina Abramović and LA MoCA of Exploiting Performers,’ 11 November 2011, www.artfo​rum. com/​news/​yvo​nne-​rai​ner-​accu​ses-​mar​ina-​abram​ovi-​263-​and-​la-​moca-​of-​ exp​loit​ing-​per​form​ers-​29348. 30 In the programme for The Mind is a Muscle, performed at the Anderson Theater in 1968, Rainer wrote, ‘ideological issues have no bearing on the nature of the work’ and ‘my body remains the enduring reality.’ 31 Gerald Casel, ‘Gerald Casel on Responding to Trisha Brown’s Locus,’ Hope Mohr website, accessed 14 November 2021, www.hopem​ohr.org/​blog/​2016/​11/​ 1/​ger​ald-​casel-​on-​res​pond​ing-​to-​tri​sha-​bro​wns-​locus. 32 Rebecca Chaleff, ‘Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance,’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3 (December 2018), 79. 33 See Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ (1962) in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 263–​74.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

741

Everyday and extraordinary movements

34 Adam Pendleton and Yvonne Rainer, Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer, single-​channel black-​and-​white video, 2016–​17. 35 Trajal Harrell, ‘Artist Statement,’ Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, accessed 27 June 2020, https://​bet​atra​jal.org/​artw​ork/​2284​ 457-​Twe​nty-​Looks-​or-​Paris-​is-​Burn​ing-​at-​The-​Jud​son-​Chu​rch-​XS.html. 36 James F. Wilson dates the ‘drag ball phenomena’ as beginning in Harlem as early as 1923: ‘the annual Hamilton Lodge Ball, established in 1869, evolved from a “Masquerade and Civic Ball” into what was commonly referred to as “The Fairies Ball” ’ and ‘variously referred to as “The Dance of the Fairies” and the “Faggots Ball.” ’ See James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 82. 37 Michael Roberson, ‘Ballroom: The Trans Sounds of Black Freedom,’ ArtsEverywhere, accessed 10 November 2021, www.art​seve​r ywh​ere.ca/​ ballr​oom/​. 38 Ramsay Burt, Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 130. 39 Harrell, ‘Artist Statement.’ 40 Nyong’o, Afro-​Fabulations, 42. 41 Roberts, ‘Dancing with Social Ghosts,’ 8. 42 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies-​Cities,’ in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (New York, Routledge, 1999), 386. 43 Susan Manning, ‘Modern Dance, Negro Dance and Katherine Dunham,’ Textual Practice, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2001), 488. 44 Soo Ryon Yoon, ‘Clean Labor by Brendan Fernandes,’ ASAP Journal (1 March 2018), accessed 27 June 2020, http://​asap​jour​nal.com/​clean-​lab​our-​by-​bren​ dan-​fernan​des-​soo-​ryon-​yoon/​. 45 In Quebec in 1975, the feminist performance group Mauve performed a similar gesture at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, arriving to the opening of Femmes 75 in bedraggled wedding dresses and proceeding to scrub the exterior of the museum with their dresses. 46 Roberts, ‘Dancing with Social Ghosts,’ 8. 47 Brendan Fernandes, ‘Artist Statement,’ Free Fall 49 (2017), www.brend​anfe​ rnan​des.ca/​free-​fall-​49/​.

147

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Epilogue: enter the virtual

The character Haley Clark in the American period drama Halt and Catch Fire (2014–​17), a fictional account of the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s and beginnings of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, finds solace in stand-​up comedy and identifies with Riot Grrl music and fashion sensibility. She is also nascently queer. Upon discovering his daughter’s personal web page, where she has compiled a list of web pages about comedy, Haley’s father, the owner of an internet start-​up company in San Francisco at the outset of the internet boom, hires her to work on a team building a database of all existing web pages –​right before Yahoo swoops in and launches their search engine. Before this happens, however, Haley finds her people at the company –​a motley crew of nerds, geeks, and punks –​and this, coupled with the virtual communities afforded by the beginnings of the public World Wide Web, seems to alleviate the growing pains of her queer teenagerdom. This is not the first time the show represented the queer relational potential of cyberspace; an earlier plotline revolves around prodigy programmer Cameron Howe realising that users were signing into her online game in order to use the chat function; her employee, Lev, a young queer coder, has already begun to use the chat function to meet men (and becomes an early victim of a homophobic catfish, resulting in his violent assault). As many critics concluded about the series, it was not a show about specific computational or software developments, about triumph, competitiveness, and winning, but about human networks (some might call them ‘relationships’), and failures as the ‘thing that gets you to the thing.’ I begin here because, as a cusp millennial –​someone who remembers life before the internet but who was young enough to become internet-​fluent at a young age –​I felt like the what the show did was capture so evocatively what it felt like, as a teenager, to get online. Message boards, crudely designed Angelfire web pages, and the moment of hybrid engagement where you could meet people virtually who would drop things like mix tapes and zines in the mail (not Amazon –​actual people, using the mail). In its early days, and diverging from the self-​conscious preservation impetus within the feminist art movement, much of the queer cultural space set up on the internet during this time was immediate –​a trend that has continued in the present –​and far more impermanent

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

941

Epilogue: enter the virtual

than the internet of today. But as Cait McKinney has argued, the internet that we take for granted today, and which has provided a lifeline for queer and trans folks, can claim roots in the lesbian feminist activism of the 1970s; as they state in the introduction to their 2020 book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, ‘Radical feminists have designed complex multimedia practices to circulate information that has been difficult, or even impossible, to come by otherwise’ and that ‘lesbian feminists practice technological resourcefulness and perform behind-​the-​scenes labor with new media technologies that constitutes a queer history of information.’1 A project bridging the queer affective dimensions of physical space with the potentialities for queer belonging within virtual space, Montreal-​based artist and designer Lucas LaRochelle’s Queering the Map, begun in 2017 as a class project, offers a ‘community generated counter-​mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+​experience in relation to physical space.’2 As LaRochelle has stated, ‘as a young queer person growing up in rural Ontario, where for a very long time I felt like I was the only queer person, I would say the internet saved my life, in terms of seeing representations of queerness.’3 The website invites users to drop a pin on a world map and to describe the personal queer significance of a place. With clusters first appearing in Montreal –​the physical site of the website’s genesis –​the map, with land depicted in pink, is now overwhelmed with black pins, with particular concentrations in North America and Western Europe (and many mid-​flight missives posted in the blue of the ocean). Queering the Map demonstrates the internet’s power as a versatile archival repository, which has been variously explored and employed towards the preservation of queer cultural production, such as QZAP (Queer Zine Archive Project, founded in 2003 by Milo Miller and Chris Wilde) and MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, founded by Chris E. Vargas. As MOTHA’s website notes, its physical status is ‘forever under construction,’ which ‘allows the project to take multiple forms such as exhibitions, poster graphics, performances, and a virtual artist residency program.’4 But the web, which was, at an early point, adopted by queers as a site of community and mobilisation, confronts similar challenges and limitations to physical space with regard to precarity and preservation. Media theorist T. L. Cowan has articulated the notion of ‘transmedial drag’ to refer to the ‘processes involved in moving across media/​mediums (for example: from live performance, to video documentation, to digital archive to online platform), which creates a sort of pastiche of the “original,” denaturalizing its status as “originary” and teaching us something new about the excesses and limitations of each media form.’5 Cowan cautions about the ethical dimensions of research deriving from

149

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

Taking place

digital archives, which include ‘previously out-​of-​reach’ materials, demanding an accountability, on the part of researchers, to the individuals and communities who inform their research. I began writing this epilogue in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; over 4,000 km away from my home in Vancouver, and where I lived for seven years in the 2010s. When the pandemic hit, my partner and I, who were in a long-​ distance relationship at the time, decided it would be prudent to shelter in place together, and since my campus had shut down, and our familial and friend networks were back east (not that we could easily see them, due to lockdown measures, but comforted, nonetheless, by their proximity), my cat, dog, and I got on a plane, arriving in Toronto late at night on 18 March 2020 and staying for five months in my partner’s one-​bedroom apartment on Dupont Street in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. While our cramped living quarters were doing double duty as our office space and movement studio, we read about acts of mutual aid and fundraising, virtual innovations allowing art programming to continue and institutions to keep afloat. Most of it happened from the confines of the screen, our architectures transformed into the one-​dimensional space of our virtual worlds, our faces and rooms organised into grids, our social lives reduced to representation. One silver lining was the way by which our geographies not only contracted, but also extended –​space was nowhere and everywhere; queer innovations abounded, such as Club Quarantine, the nightly Zoom party, complete with guest DJs and drag performances, connecting club-​goers across the globe. Socialities spread their surfaces virtually. As our bodies and cultures adapted to new constraints, we devised new ways to move our bodies, and entrenched in our muscle memory the act of scrolling our newsfeeds. But a contradiction emerged between our lives in the matrix and the lives of those whose corporealities are threatened by unequal power dynamics and discrimination, making abstract conceptions of inequality concretised by the starkly disproportionate effects of COVID-​19 on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. In the midst of the pandemic we also witnessed global protests against the racial profiling and brutality of police in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, as activists devised new strategies for protesting amid the pandemic, a critical mass forming both virtually and in person, with social media platforms taking the place of the physical platforms of sites of protest, used at best as spaces in which to mobilise, obtain information, and educate (and, at worst, to virtue signal). Black activists risked their lives doubly in the streets, confronted by the threat of police brutality and an invisible deadly virus, the high stakes of survival outweighing the threat of the disease.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

151

Epilogue: enter the virtual

The crisis intersection revealed the limits of representation, further evidenced by the demand for real, sustained structural overhaul within cultural institutions, beyond glitzy programming, beyond tokenistic hires. In both Canada and the US, well-​meaning culture workers researched gallery demographics and exposed representational inequalities, yet few scratched the surface of thick and historical layers of structural inequality, the process of reconciling such inequalities remaining seemingly out of reach. The quickly adapted strategies for sustaining community and building new ones echo what, at the beginning of this book, I pointed to with regard to historical instances of building spaces in the gaps; on the occasion of the 2012 symposium Institutions by Artists, convened by the Pacific Association of Artist-​ Run Centres (PAARC), Fillip, and the Artist-​ Run Centres and Collectives Conference /​La Conférence des collectifs et des centres d’artistes autogérés (ARCA) in Vancouver, and in reflecting on his 1983 essay ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-​run Centres and Museums by Artists,’ AA Bronson produced a 2012 update, ‘The Transfiguration of the Bureaucrat,’ noting critical changes in the landscape of artist-​run and artist-​initiated institutional practices. However, what he observed is that, in a sense, the more things have changed with regard to artist-​run culture, the more things have stayed the same: The true artists among us are those travelling invisibly beneath the bureaucratic radar. They are mostly of a younger generation. They don’t need galleries, museums, or artist-​run centres in order to be artists, because it is their daily practice that marks them. Theirs is a practice of exchange, of community, of a creative formation of culture, the culture that binds them to each other, on a daily basis. They do not model their lives on the requirements of the Canada Council [arts funding agency]. And when they gather, it tends to be in ephemeral shifting groups more reminiscent of the early ’70s than the corporate structures of today.6

Although this book would attest that I agree with Bronson’s observations, the decade that has transpired since Bronson’s 2012 text was presented incites new reservations. Precarity, burnout, and a commonly expressed perception of the senselessness of cultural production in the face of overwhelmingly bleak world conditions are carried more heavily by the art world’s most vulnerable members. In a survey conducted by the Artist-​Run Centres and Collectives Conference (ARCA) in 2020, it was determined that while nearly 75 per cent of the 74 participating artist organisations had implemented alternative delivery formats, more than one third of them also anticipated financial strain due to

151

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

Taking place

the pandemic, with newer spaces (those that opened in the 1990s and 2000s) the most vulnerable due to a lack of stable core funding.7 It is useful to return here to Martin Beck’s observation that ‘the physical condition of that space is less important than the social inclusion and exclusion processes that regulate access to and representation within it. Thus the main purpose of an alternative space is ability to produce visibility.’8 Foregrounding an idea of the purpose of alternative space as serving the central purpose of producing visibility can inarguably be applied to some of the earliest instances of formation of alternative feminist spaces, such as the Woman’s Building, when, in the early 1970s, the fever pitch of what had been a simmering feminist movement promoted a political and social agency that allowed women artists to work in the gaps in representation left open by patriarchal art world structures and art history. Nevertheless, these early movements, occurring too early to gain from theoretical and political developments in subsequent waves of feminist activism and theorising, promoted their own exclusionary practices, many of which have yet to be reconciled in historical writing about the era. The continued promotion of historical methods intended to mimic the political strategies and positions of the original movement risks delegitimising the very ways in which ‘alternative’ denoted a radical political stance. The slippage into ‘alternative’ as simply denoting ‘another possibility’ without necessarily carrying emancipatory goals is easy to make, the idea being that once recognition is achieved, a previously political identity is dropped in order to assimilate into the very structures that historically served to exclude. It is only so long before underlining visibility and representation without concurrent attention to structural change and financial and environmental sustainability reveals the fragile scaffolding underlying an exhibition’s good intentions. Over time, a rotting foundation will ultimately take down with it the various initiatives it was originally intended to support. A year after leaving Toronto to return to Vancouver, my partner and I travelled by car across the country with our ‘COVID-​mobile’: a 1982 Burro trailer hitched to the back of the car. We had not been back to Toronto since August 2020; what was most striking about returning to the city after a year away is how much has changed in just a year, and how much is gone. Favourite haunts buckled under the financial strain incited by the pandemic, while galleries, artist-​run centres, and large-​scale institutions revealed their political and social vulnerability via practices of social media virtue signalling as the solution to addressing inequality (and subsequently finding themselves in the hot seat when revelations came to light that they were not practising the virtues they were signalling). At the same time, tenants and art space leaseholders fought back against development and gentrification, which were important

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

351

Epilogue: enter the virtual

victories in cities made increasingly unliveable by rent inflation not keeping in time with liveable wage increases, and by pandemic job losses and furloughs. I remain curious to see what, if anything, will come in the places we have lost, and if what came before will be hard to call to memory. The particular amnesia that develops when an organisation closes or a building is demolished works unfortunately and powerfully, as well, to break intergenerational chains of knowledge transmission. Founder’s syndrome In the midst of the pandemic and the global call not only to recognition of, but also to action against structural racism, a friend and I spoke on the phone; my friend, who runs a prominent Canadian art criticism periodical, talked about the responsibility of cultural organisations to respond to this moment in the form of actual, tangible changes to our organisations, and the challenges for cash-​strapped organisations to do so, exacerbated by the pandemic. We discussed the notion of founder’s syndrome, the inability of an organisation to change due to a view that it has always proceeded in a certain way, resulting in the perpetuation of the same oppressive practices that were in place at the time of a space’s founding. As I hope this book has attested, knowledge of the material and systemic structures in which our art worlds operate can be mobilised to forge new pathways and new ways of doing things that reflect a learning from the past in forging these new futures. It may seem contradictory to end this book, which is so deeply grounded in physical space, advocating for a space beyond; but I am ultimately arguing for a shift in thinking about what form these material dimensions may take, against a view to the material world as limited to that we can see and touch, and towards thinking our material structures, otherwise, outward, beyond. I continue to think about the space the web has afforded queer young people in forging communities extending beyond regional borders, beyond physical spaces, beyond financial constraints. Kathleen Stewart has articulated a notion of ‘ordinary affects’ –​what could be conceived of as the grout that holds our institutions together –​as ‘rooted not in fixed conditions of possibility but in actual lines of potential that a something coming together calls to mind and sets in motion.’9 To be part of an emerging generation of scholars and culture workers offers the opportunity to yet again imagine new ways of doing things and making space; as a student (of a generation younger than my own) reminded me in the spring 2020 semester, right before we abruptly retreated into our homes, this imagining need not always translate into the realm of the material; indeed, imagining, in particular for marginalised subjects who are

153

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

Taking place

often denied physical space as part of the visible fabric of art ecologies, is often the realm of potential that these subjects are afforded.10 Notes 1 Cait McKinney, Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020), 3. 2 Queering the Map website description, accessed 21 November 2021, www.que​ erin​gthe​map.com/​. 3 Lucas LaRochelle, quoted in Alastair Boone and Martin Echenique, ‘A Crowdsourced Map of the Queer World,’ Bloomberg Citylab, 14 February 2018, accessed 15 November 2021, www.bloomb​erg.com/​news/​artic​les/​2018-​ 02-​14/​-q ​ ueer​ing-​the-​map-​vis​uali​zes-​lgbtq-​spa​ces-​worldw​ide. 4 MOTHA ‘About,’ www.motha.net/​about. 5 T. L. Cowan, ‘The Internet of Bawdies: Transmedial Drag and the Onlining of Trans-​Feminist and Queer Performance Archives, a Workshop Essay,’ First Monday, Vol. 23, No. 7 (2 July 2018), accessed 15 November 2021, https://​firs​ tmon​day.org/​ojs/​index.php/​fm/​arti​cle/​downl​oad/​9256/​7459. 6 AA Bronson, ‘The Transfiguration of the Bureaucrat,’ Institutions by Artists website, accessed 27 June 2020, http://​arcp​ost.ca/​artic​les/​the-​tran​sfig​urat​ion-​ of-​the-​bur​eauc​rat. 7 ARCA COVID-​19: Impact Survey: Analysis of Survey Data, prepared by Mariane Bourcheix-​Laporte, ARCA, 13 May 2020, accessed 15 November 2021, www.arca.art/​en/​files/​COVID-​19_​S​urve​y_​Co​nclu​sion​s_​e.pdf. 8 Beck, ‘Alternative Space,’ 267. 9 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 10 I thank Reiko Inouye for this important intervention.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

ACT UP NY Website. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​actu​pny.com/​. Agamben, Giorgio. ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Ahmed, Sara. ‘Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2006): 543–​74. —​. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. A.I.R. Gallery. Lease Expiration Notice. No date. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries B, Box 1, Folder 57. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. A.I.R. Gallery members. Letter to Lucy Lippard. 13 November 1972. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 1. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. —​. Letter to unspecified recipient. 23 April 1981. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 4. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. Al-​Saji, Alia. ‘Creating Possibility: The Time of the Quebec Student Movement.’ Theory & Event, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2012) Supplement. Accessed 14 November 2021. Online. Alcoff, Linda. ‘Cultural Feminism versus Post-​Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.’ Signs, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring 1988): 405–​36. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 1991. ARCA COVID-​19: Impact Survey: Analysis of Survey Data. Prepared by Mariane Bourcheix-​Laporte, ARCA, 13 May 2020. Accessed 15 November 2021. www.arca. art/​en/​files/​COVID-​19_​S​urve​y_​Co​nclu​sion​s_​e.pdf. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Armstrong, Elizabeth A. and Suzanna M. Crage. ‘Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.’ American Sociological Review, Vol. 71, No. 5 (October 2006): 724–​51. Artforum, ‘Yvonne Rainer Accused Marina Abramović and LA MoCA of Exploiting Performers.’ 11 November 2011. Accessed 20 November 2021. www.artfo​rum.com/​ news/​yvo​nne-​rai​ner-​accu​ses-​mar​ina-​abram​ovi-​263-​and-​la-​moca-​of-​exp​loit​ing-​ per​form​ers-​29348.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

Bibliography

Art Metropole. ‘About.’ Accessed 18 September 2021. https://​artme​trop​ole.com/​about. Artists for Social Responsibility (ASR). Letter to unspecified recipient. 10/​24/​82. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 5. Downtown Collection, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. Atkins, Robert. ‘How to Have Art (Events) in an Epidemic: A History of Visual AIDS from Day Without Art to the Red Ribbon.’ Address delivered at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1 December 1992). Adapted for Disrupted Borders, ed. Sunil Gupta. London: River Orams Press, 1993. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​ vis​uala​ids.org/​eve​nts/​det​ail/​how-​to-​have-​art-​eve​nts-​in-​an-​epide​mic. Atluri, Tara. Uncommitted Crimes: The Defiance of the Artistic Imagination. Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2018. Ault, Julie. Cultural Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement. New York: Drawing Center, 1996. Ault, Julie, ed. Alternative Art, New York, 1965–​1985. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Balducci, Temma. ‘Revisiting Womanhouse: Welcome to the (Deconstructed) Dollhouse.’ Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall/​Winter 2006): 17–​23. Banes, Sally. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962–​1964. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Beck, Martin. ‘Alternative Space.’ In Alternative Art New York, 1965–​1985, ed. Julie Ault. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Bell, David. ‘Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy.’ In Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine. London and New York: Routledge, 1995: 304–​17. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bergdoll, Barry. ‘Curating History.’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 57, No. 3 (September 1998): 257–​356. Berger, Martin A. Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Berlant, Lauren. ‘68, or Something.’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn 1994): 124–​55. —. ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue.’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2, Intimacy (Winter 1998): 281–​8. Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. ‘Sex in Public.’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2, Intimacy (Winter 1998): 547–​66. Berry, Scott Miller. Email to author, 26 March 2012. Berson, Amber. ‘A Case for Utopian Dreaming: Feminisms within Canadian Artist-​ Run Centres.’ PhD diss. Kingston: Queen’s University, 2022.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

751

Bibliography

Bey, Hakim. ‘T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.’ The Anarchist Library, 1985. Accessed 13 November 2021. https://​thea​ narc​hist​libr​ary.org/​libr​ary/​hakim-​bey-​t-​a-​z-​the-​tempor​ary-​aut​onom​ous-​zone-​ onto​logi​cal-​anar​chy-​poe​tic-​terror​ism. Bilge, Sirma. ‘Developing Intersectional Solidarities: A Plea for Queer Inter­ sectionality.’ In Beyond the Queer Alphabet: Conversations in Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality, ed. Malinda Smith and Fatima Jaffer. Alberta: University of Alberta, 2012: 19–​23. Bishop, Claire. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.’ October, Vol. 110 (Fall 2004): 51–​79. —. ‘Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention.’ TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Summer 2018): 22–​42. Blake, Nayland. ‘Curating In a Different Light.’ In In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice, ed. Blake, Lawrence Rinder, Amy Scholder. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995: 9–​43. Boone, Alastair and Martin Echenique, ‘A Crowdsourced Map of the Queer World.’ Bloomberg Citylab, 14 February 2018. Accessed 15 November 2021. www.bloomb​ erg.com/​news/​artic​les/​2018-​02-​14/​-​queer ​ing-​the-​map-​vis​uali​zes-​lgbtq-​spa​ces-​ worldw​ide. Bordowitz, Gregg. The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–​1993, ed. James Meyer. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004: 43–​67. Bourgeois, Gail, Carole Brouillette, Barbara McGill Balfour, Suzanne Paquet, ‘Silence as a Vigil.’ In Feminism-​Art-​Theory: An Anthology, ed. Hilary Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001: 123–​4. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bronson, AA. ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-​run Spaces as Museums by Artists.’ In From Sea to Shining Sea, ed. AA Bronson with René Blouin, Peggy Gale, Glenn Lewis. Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987: 164–​9. —​. ‘The Transfiguration of the Bureaucrat.’ Institutions by Artists website. Accessed 14 November 2021. http://​arcp​ost.ca/​artic​les/​the-​tran​sfig​urat​ion-​of-​the-​bur​eauc​rat. Brown, Kay. ‘The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York.’ The International Review of African American Art, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998): 45–​58. Bryan-​ Wilson, Julia. ‘Repetition and Difference: Julia Bryan-​ Wilson on LTTR.’ Artforum, Vol. 44, No. 10 (Summer 2006): 109–​10. —. ‘We Have a Future: An Interview with Sharon Hayes.’ Grey Room, Vol. 37 (Fall 2009): 78–​93. Burgess, Marilyn and Maria De Rosa. ‘The Distinct Role of Artist-​Run Centres in the Canadian Visual Arts Ecology.’ Canada Council for the Arts, 13 October 2011. https://​ canada​coun​cil.ca/​resea​rch/​resea​rch-​libr​ary/​2012/​05/​art​ist-​run-​cent​res-​in-​the-​vis​ ual-​arts-​ecol​ogy.

157

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

Bibliography

Burnett, Richard​ . ‘Montreal’s Sex Garage Raid: A Watershed Moment: How an Infamous Police Raid Two Decades Ago Irrevocably Changed the Nation’s Gay Politics.’ Xtra!, 23 October 2009. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​xtram​agaz​ine. com/​power/​montre​als-​sex-​gar​age-​raid-​a-​waters​hed-​mom​ent-​30924. —. ‘Montreal’s Pervers/​cité Festival Raises Finger to Divers/​cité, Black & Blue and Gay Pride.’ Gazette, 5 August 2011. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​mont​real​ gaze​tte.com/​entert​ainm​ent/​montre​als-​perv​ersc​ite-​festi​val-​rai​ses-​fin​ger-​to-​div​ersc​ ite-​black-​blue-​and-​gay-​pride. Burt, Ramsay. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Butler, Cornelia H. and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, eds. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 1993. —. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. —​. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Butt, Gavin, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–​ 1963. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Campt, Tina M. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Carlomusto, Jean and Every Ocean Hughes, ‘Radiant Spaces.’ Corpus, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2006): 72–​9. Carson, Juli. ‘On Discourse as Monument: Institutional Spaces and Feminist Problematics.’ In Alternative Art New York, 1965–​85, ed. Julie Ault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002: 121–​57. Case, Sue-​Ellen and Erica Stevens Abbitt. ‘Disidentifications, Diaspora, and Desire: Questions on the Future of the Feminist Critique of Performance.’ Signs, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Spring 2004): 925–​38. Casel, Gerald. ‘Gerald Casel on Responding to Trisha Brown’s Locus.’ Hope Mohr website, 2016. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.hopem​ohr.org/​blog/​2016/​11/​1/​ger​ald-​ casel-​on-​res​pond​ing-​to-​tri​sha-​bro​wns-​locus. Casey, Edward S. ‘Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History.’ Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2007): 507–​12. Chaleff, Rebecca. ‘Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance.’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3 (December 2018): 71–​84. Chave, Anna. ‘Normal Ills: On Embodiment, Victimization, and the Origins of Feminist Art.’ In Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, ed. Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg. Hanover and London: Dartmouth College Press and University Press of New England, 2006: 132–​57. Cheah, Pheng, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell. ‘The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell.’ Diacritics, Vol. 28, No. 1, Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference (Spring 1998): 19–​42.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

951

Bibliography

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Cheng, Meiling. In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Chicago, Judy​. Through the Flower: My Struggles as a Woman Artist. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975. —. The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. Chicago, Judy and Miriam Schapiro. ‘Womanhouse Catalogue Essay.’ Exhibition catalogue. Valencia: Feminist Art Program, California Institute of the Arts, 1972. Online version accessed 14 November 2021. https://​ocmato​urs.net/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​ 2016/​11/​Origi​nal-​Exh​ibit​ion-​Essay-​Wom​anho​use.pdf. Chisholm, Dianne. ‘The City of Collective Memory.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2001): 195–​243. —​. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ‘ChromaZone /​Chromatique: A Brief History 1981–​1986.’ The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (CCCA). Accessed 14 November 2021. http://​ccca.concor​dia.ca/​chr​ omaz​one/​chr​omaz​one_​hist​ory.html. Coleman, Rebecca. ‘“Things That Stay” Feminist Theory, Duration and the Future.’ Time & Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2008): 85–​102. Condorelli, Celine and Gavin Wade with James Langdon. Support Structures. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009. Cooley, Alison, Amy Luo and Caoimhe Morgan-​Feir. ‘Canada’s Galleries Fall Short: The Not-​So Great White North.’ Canadian Art, 21 April 2015. Accessed 20 November 2021. https://​cana​dian​art.ca/​featu​res/​cana​das-​galler​ies-​fall-​short-​the-​not-​so-​great-​ white-​north/​. Cornell, Drucilla. Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Cotter, Holland. ‘The Art of Feminism as It First Took Shape.’ New York Times, 9 March 2007. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.nyti​mes.com/​2007/​03/​09/​arts/​des​ign/​09w​ ack.html?pag​ewan​ted=​all. Cowan, T. L. ‘The Internet of Bawdies: Transmedial Drag and the Onlining of Trans-​ Feminist and Queer Performance Archives, a Workshop Essay.’ First Monday, Vol. 23, No. 7 (2 July 2018). Accessed 15 November 2021. https://​firs​tmon​day.org/​ojs/​ index.php/​fm/​arti​cle/​downl​oad/​9256/​7459. Crenshaw, Kimberle. ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.’ Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (July 1991): 1241–​99. Cronin, J. Keri and Kirsty Robertson, eds. Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. Crosby, Christina, Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Floyd, Miranda Joseph, Heather Love, Robert McRuer, Fred Moten, Tavia Nyong’o, Lisa Rofel, Jordana Rosenberg, Gayle Salamon, Dean Spade, Amy Villarejo. ‘Queer Studies, Materialism,

159

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

Bibliography

and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2011): 127–​47. Curtis, Penelope. Sculpture 1900–​ 1945: After Rodin. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Day, Pip. ‘Sovereignty.’ SBC Gallery, Montreal, Quebec. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.sbc​gall​ery.ca/​souv​erai​net?lang=​en. D’Emilio, John. ‘Not a Simple Matter: Gay History and Gay Historians.’ The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 2 (September 1989): 435–​42. Davies, Jon.‘Props to the Fairy People.’ C: International Contemporary Art, No. 98 (Summer 2008): 28. —. ‘Exhibition statement.’ Coming After. Toronto: The Power Plant, 10 December 2011– 4 March 2012. Accessed 24 May 2012. www.thepowerplant.org/Exhibitions/2011/ 2011_Winter /Coming-After.aspx. —. ed. Coming After. Exhibition catalogue. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2012. Davis, Ben. ‘The Yams, on the Whitney and White Supremacy.’ Artnet News, 13 May 2014. Accessed 24 February 2022. https://​news.art​net.com/​art-​world/​the-​yams-​on-​ the-​whit​ney-​and-​white-​suprem​acy-​30364. Davis, Colin. ‘État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.’ French Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 3 (2005): 373–​9. de Bretteville, Sheila. Letter to A.I.R. Gallery. 29 November 1973. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A. Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 8. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988. Debord, Guy. ‘Definitions,’ trans. Ken Knabb. Internationale Situationniste, No. 1 (June 1958). Accessed 6 March 2022. www.cddc.vt.edu/​sionl​ine/​si/​defi​niti​ons.html. Debord, Matthew. ‘A Thousand Words: Zoe Leonard Talks About Her Recent Work.’ Artforum, Vol. 37, No. 5 (January 1999): 100–​1. Delany, Samuel. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996. Deutsche, Rosalyne, Aruna D’Souza, Miwon Kwon, Ulrike Müller, Mignon Nixon, Senam Okudzeto. ‘Feminist Time: A Conversation.’ Grey Room, No. 31 (Spring 2008): 33–​67. Deutsche, Rosalyn and Cara Gendel Ryan. ‘The Fine Art of Gentrification.’ October, Vol. 31 (Winter 1984): 91–​111. Dewsbury, John David, Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose and John Wylie. ‘Enacting Geographies: Introduction.’ Geoforum, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2002): 437–​40.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

161

Bibliography

Dimitrakaki, Angela. ‘Researching Culture/​s and the Omitted Footnote: Questions on the Practice of Feminist Art History.’ In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Amelia Jones. New York: Routledge, 2010: 360–​8. Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Feccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang. ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2–​3 (2007): 177–​95. Downey, Anthony. ‘Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics.’ Third Text, Vol. 21, No. 3 (May 2007): 267–​75. Doyle, Jennifer. Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. —​. ‘Feminism: Three Views.’ Frieze, No. 105 (March 2007). Accessed 14 November 2021. www.frieze.com/article/feminism- three- views. —. Hold It Against Me: Difficult and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Dubin, Steven C. Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Dubin, Zan. ‘Prejudice Back, Chicago Charges at Arts Awards.’ Los Angeles Times, 21 October 1986. Lesbian Legacy Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, CA. Dymond, Anne. Diversity Counts: Gender, Race, and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2019. Echols, Alice. ‘The New Feminism of Yin and Yang.’ In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983: 439–​59. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. English, Darby. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Esterberg, Kristin G. ‘From Accommodation to Liberation: A Social Movement Analysis of Lesbians in the Homophile Movement.’ Gender and Society, Vol. 8, No. 3, This Issue Is Devoted to: Sexual Identities/​Sexual Communities (September 1994): 424–​43. Farquharson, Alex. ‘I Curate, You Curate, We Curate.’ Art Monthly, No. 268 (September 2003): 7–​10. Fernandes, Brendan. ‘Artist Statement.’ Free Fall 49 (2017). Accessed 14 November 2021. www.brend​anfe​rnan​des.ca/​free-​fall-​49/​. Fields, Jill, ed. Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists. New York: Routledge, 2012. Fink, Marty. ‘Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, and the Reclamation of Disease.’ PhD diss. The City University of New York, 2010. —, Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020.

161

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Bibliography

Finkelstein, Avram. ‘AIDS 2.0.’ POZ (10 January 2013). Accessed 14 November 2021. www.poz.com/​artic​les/​avram​_​fin​kels​tein​_​267​6_​23​355.shtml Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-​Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.’ In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984: 76–​100. Franko, Mark. ‘Dance/​Agency/​History: Randy Martin’s Marxian Ethnography.’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2016): 33–​44. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1967). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Gadoua, Bernard. ‘Appel aux GLBT et à leurs ami-​e-​s pour participer au Défilé de la Fierté avec le contingent contre la hausse des frais, la loi 12, la brutalité policière et le néolibéralisme.’ Facebook. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.faceb​ook.com/​eve​ nts/​3072​7683​9368​795/​?ref=​ts. GALAS Guidebook. Lesbian Legacy Collection: GALAS (Great American Lesbian Art Show). ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, CA. Getty Research Institute. Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–​1980. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.paci​fics​tand​ardt​ime.org/​exhi​biti​ons?view=​list. Getty Research Institute. Pacific Standard Time online archive. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.getty.edu/​paci​fics​tand​ardt​ime/​expl​ore-​the-​era/​archi​ves/​i143/​. Giaroli, Pamela. Interview by author. Brooklyn, NY, 22 February 2012. Giddens, Anthony. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan, 1979. Gieryn, Thomas F. ‘What Buildings Do.’ Theory and Society, Vol. 31 (2002): 35–​74. Goldie, Terry. ‘Queer Nation?’ Eleventh Annual Robarts Lecture. York University, Toronto, Ontario, 4 March 1997. Goodden, Sky. ‘Interview: Paul Petro on Becoming the Legacy-​ Building, “Bent Identity Politics” Gallerist of Toronto.’ Momus, 9 August 2016. Accessed 15 April 2022. https://​momus.ca/​interv​iew-​paul-​petro-​on-​becom​ing-​the-​leg​acy-​build​ing-​ bent-​ident​ity-​polit​ics-​galler​ist-​of-​toro​nto/​. Gopnik, Blake. ‘National Portrait Gallery Bows to Censors, Withdraws Wojnarowicz Video on Gay Love.’ Washington Post, Tuesday 30 November 2010. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​wp-​dyn/​cont​ent/​arti​cle/​2010/​11/​30/​ AR20​1011​3006​911.html. Gourlay, Sheena. ‘Feminist/​Art in Quebec, 1975–​1992.’ PhD diss. Concordia University, 2002. Grant, Catherine. ‘Fans of Feminism: Re-​writing Histories of Second-​Wave Feminism in Contemporary Art.’ Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2011): 265–​86. —​. A Time of One’s Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2022. Gratland, Paige, Onya Hogan-​Finlay, and Hannah Jickling (The After Party collective). Press release, 2008.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

361

Bibliography

Gray, Mary L. ‘“Queer Nation is Dead/​Long Live Queer Nation”: The Politics and Poetics of Social Movement and Media Representation.’ Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 26, No. 3 (August 2009): 212–​36. Greenberg, Reesa. ‘The Exhibition as Discursive Event.’ In Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby. Exhibition catalogue. Site Santa Fe: Distributed Art Pub. Inc. 1995: 118–​25. Greer, Bonnie. Letter on behalf of Artists for Social Responsibility (ASR). 2 November 1982. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 5. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. Groat, Maggie. Email to author, 7 September 2015. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Bodies-​ Cities.’ In Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992: 241–​54. —. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. —​. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. —​. ‘Unfound.’ In Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–​1980, ed. Sarah Kessler and Mia Locks. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, 2011: 158–​61. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Hale, Sondra. ‘Power and Space: Feminist Culture and the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, A Context.’ In From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, ed. Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton. Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011: 38–​81. Hale, Sondra and Terry Wolverton, eds. From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture. Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011. Hammond, Harmony. Email to author, 18 May 2012. —​. Interview with Carlos Motta. We Who Feel Differently. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.wewho​feel​diff​eren​tly.info/​interv​iew.php?interv​iew=​109. Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575–​99. Harper, Paula. ‘The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s.’ Signs, Vol. 10, No. 4, Communities of Women (Summer 1985): 762–​81. Harrell, Trajal. ‘Artist Statement.’ Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, 2010. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​bet​atra​jal.org/​artw​ork/​2284​457-​Twe​nty-​ Looks-​or-​Paris-​is-​Burn​ing-​at-​The-​Jud​son-​Chu​rch-​XS.html. Harris, Laura Alexandra. ‘Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle.’ Feminist Review, No. 54, Contesting Feminine Orthodoxies (Autumn 1996): 3–​30.

163

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

Bibliography

Hashmi, Aneessa and Felicity Tayler. ‘Performative Gender: Art, Activism and Community at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse.’ Women & Environments, No. 72/​ 73 (Fall/​Winter 2006): 22–​4. Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. —​. ‘The Power of Place: A Proposal for Los Angeles.’ The Public Historian, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer 1988): 5–​18. Hayden, Malin Hedlin and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, eds. Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Hays, Matthew. ‘Fierté Montréal Marches Forward: The City’s Pride Parade Continues to Expand.’ Xtra!, 14 August 2012. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​xtram​agaz​ ine.com/​cult​ure/​fie​rte-​montr​eal-​marc​hes-​forw​ard-​31990. Heidegger, Martin. Ontology –​the Hermeneutics of Factivity (1988), trans. John van Buren. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. Hogan, Mél. ‘Radical Queers: A Pop Culture Assessment of Montréal’s Anti-​Capitalist Ass Pirates, the Panthères Roses, and Lesbians on Ecstacy.’ Canadian Woman Studies/​Les cahiers de la femme, Vol. 24, No. 2,3 (Spring 2005): 154–​9. Hollibaugh, Amber. ‘Lesbian Leadership and Lesbian Denial in the AIDS Epidemic: Bravery and Fear in the Construction of a Lesbian Geography of Risk.’ In We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan. New York: Routledge, 1997: 669–​77. Hubbard, Phil. ‘Here, There, Everywhere: The Ubiquitous Geographies of Heteronormativity.’ Geography Compass, Vol. 2, No. 3 (May 2008): 640–​58. Hughes, Every Ocean. Interview with Carlos Motta. We Who Feel Differently. Accessed 20 November 2021. www.wewho​feel​diff​eren​tly.info/​interv​iew.php?interv​iew=​112. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1969), trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. London: Allen and Unwin. Institutions by Artists. ‘The Convention.’ Accessed 14 November 2021. http://​arcp​ost. ca/​con​fere​nce. Jagose, Annamarie. ‘Feminism’s Queer Theory.’ Feminism & Psychology, Vol. 19, No. 2 (May 2009): 157–​74. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jay, Martin. ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism.’ Poetics Today, Vol. 9, No. 2, The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (1988): 307–​26. Jeppesen, Sandra. ‘Queer Anarchist Autonomous Zones and Publics: Direct Action Vomiting Against Heteronormative Consumerism.’ Sexualities, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2010): 463–​78. Jessup, Lynda, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson, eds. Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2014.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

561

Bibliography

Johnson, Imani Kai. ‘Battling in the Bronx: Social Choreography and Outlaw Culture Among Early Hip-​Hop Streetdancers in New York City.’ Dance Research Journal, Vol. 50, No. 2 (August 2018): 62–​75. Jolly, Margaretta. ‘Confidantes, Co-​Workers and correspondents: Feminist Discourses of Letter-​Writing from 1970 to the Present.’ Journal of European Studies, Vol. 32 (2002): 267–​82. Jones, Amelia. Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. —. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. —. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. —. `1970/ 2007: The Return of Feminist Art.’ X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Summer 2008). Accessed 14 November 2021. www.x-traonline.org/ article/19702007-the-return-of-feminist-art/. Jones, Amelia, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. —. ed The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2010. Jones, Amelia and Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Karras, Maria. The Woman’s Building Chicago 1893, the Woman’s Building Los Angeles 1973–​, 1975. Woman’s Building ephemera, Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building. Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA. Katz, Jonathan D. ‘Lovers and Divers: Interpictorial Dialog in the Work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.’ Frauen, Kunst, Wissenschaft, Vol. 25 (June 1998): 16–31. —. ‘ “Committing the Perfect Crime”: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art.’ Art Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 38–53. Kazymerchyk, Amy. ‘Catching up to the Past Catching up to the Present: A Response to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution 1967–​1980.’ No More Potlucks, No. 2 (March-​April 2009). Klein, Jennie. ‘The Lesbian Art Project.’ Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2–​3 (2010): 238–​59. Korczynski, Jacob. ‘Experimental Dance: Histories, Politics, Presence.’ Panel discussion. The University of Toronto Scarborough, 9 February 2015. Kotkin, Joel. ‘The Hollow Boom of Brooklyn: Behind Veneer of Gentrification, Life Gets Worse for Many.’ Forbes, 25 September 2012. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.for​bes.com/​sites/​joe​lkot​kin/​2012/​09/​25/​the-​hol​low-​boom-​of-​brook​lyn-​beh​ ind-​ven​eer-​of-​gen​trif​i cat​ion-​life-​gets-​worse-​for-​many/​. Kraftl, Peter and Peter Adey. ‘Architecture/​Affect/​Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-​ in Buildings.’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 98, No. 1 (2008): 213–​32. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field.’ October, Vol. 8 (Spring 1979): 30–​44.

165

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

Bibliography

Krishtalka, Sholem. ‘We are Queercore: Toronto Punks /​A “Porntastic Fantasy” Made Flesh.’ Xtra!, Thursday 4 January 2007. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​xtram​ agaz​ine.com/​cult​ure/​art-​essay-​we-​are-​queerc​ore-​39260. Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. Langer, Cassandra L. ‘Feminist Art Criticism: Turning Points and Sticking Places.’ Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 2, Feminist Art Criticism (Summer 1991): 21–​8. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991. Ley, David. ‘Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification.’ Urban Studies, Vol. 40, No. 12 (November 2003): 2527–​44. Liepe-​Levinson, Katherine. Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Lim, Jason. ‘Queer Critique and the Politics of Affect.’ In Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices, and Politics, ed. Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007: 53–​67. Linton, Meg. ‘Foreword: Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building.’ In Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, ed. Meg Linton, Sue Maberry, and Elizabeth Pulsinelli. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design, 2011: 10–​17. —. ‘Otis College: Doin’ It in Public: Tour of the Exhibition.’ Doin’ It in Public video herstory interview. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​2igb​ nE_​6n ​ 0U. —​. ‘WB Exhibition Checklist: Guide to the Exhibition.’ Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building website. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.otis.edu/​ sites/​defa​ult/​files/​WB_​Che​ckli​st_​F​inal​_​012​312.pdf. Linton, Meg, Sue Maberry, Elisabeth Pulsinelli, eds. Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011. Lippard, Lucy. `Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution to Feminism to the Art of the 1970s.’ Art Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1–2 (Winter 1980): 362–5. —. Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson. Women Art Revolution: videotape interview by Lynn Hershman Leeson for film, 1987. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution/catalog/vf083vh2 549. —. The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art. New York: New Press, 1995. Logue, Deirdre and Allyson Mitchell. CAN’T/​WON’T artist statement, 2012. —​. ‘Feminist Art Gallery: Description.’ Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) website. Facebook. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.faceb​ook.com/​Fem​inis​tArt​Gall​ery/​info. Lopez, Margarita. Letter to Nancy Spero. 29 November 1982. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Box 1, Folder 5. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. Lord, Catherine and Richard Meyer, eds. Art & Queer Culture. London and New York: Phaidon, 2013.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

761

Bibliography

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Lynes, Krista Geneviève. ‘Poetic Resistance and the Classroom without Guarantees.’ Theory & Event, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2012) Supplement. Accessed 14 November 2021. Online. Lyons, Steve. ‘Disobedient Objects: Towards a Museum Insurgency.’ Journal of Curatorial Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018): 2–​31. —. ‘Rezoning the Alternative: Art and Politics in New York at the Dawn of the Reagan Era.’ PhD diss. Concordia University, 2018. Maberry, Sue. ‘Woman’s Building History.’ Doin’ It in Public video herstory interview. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​82i0​BG40​TSA. Manning, Susan. ‘Modern Dance, Negro Dance and Katherine Dunham.’ Textual Practice, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2001): 487–​505. McKay, Ian. ‘The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History.’ The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 81, No. 4 (2000): 616–​45. Magagnoli, Paolo. ‘Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester.’ Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2011): 97–​121. Malik, Sarah. ‘2-​QTPOC Brings New Spirit to Divers/​cite.’ Cult MTL, 10 August 2012. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​cult​mtl.com/​2012/​08/​2-​qtpoc-​bri​ngs-​new-​spi​ rit-​to-​div​ersc​ite/​. Manning, Erin. ‘Propositions for Collective Actions –​Towards an Ethico-​Aesthetic Politics.’ Theory & Event, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2012) Supplement. Accessed 14 November 2021. Online. Maranda, Michael. Waging Culture: A Report on the Socio-​Economic Status of Canadian Visual Artists. Toronto: Art Gallery of York University, 2009. Marchessault, Janine. ‘The Women’s Liberation Front of Québec.’ Public, No. 14: Québec (Fall 1996): 36–​49. Mars, Tanya and Johanna Householder, eds. Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004. Martin, Randy. ‘Overreading The Promised Land: towards a narrative of context in dance.’ In Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster. London: Routledge, 1995: 183–206. —. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Frederic L. Bender. New York, W.W. Norton, 2013. Massicotte, Geneviève. ‘Grande noirceur et Révolution tranquille: réflexions sur quelques jalons identitaires.’ Histoire Québec, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2000): 4–​8. McKinney, Cait. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. McMillan, Uri. Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. New York: NYU Press, 2015. Mendieta, Ana. Introductory essay from the catalogue for Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States. Reprinted in Dialectics of Entanglement catalogue, 2018. Accessed 10 November 2021. https://​stat​ic1.squa​

167

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

Bibliography

resp​ace.com/​sta​t ic/​5 74dd​5 1d6​2cd9​4 208​5f12​091/​t/​5b6cb​5cba​a4a9​92cb​aac2​23c/​ 153385​1141​682/​AIR​_​DOE​_​pub​lica​tion​_​sin​gle-​vers​ion.pdf. Meskimmon, Marsha. ‘Historiography/​Feminisms/​Strategies.’ n.paradoxa online, No. 12 (March 2000): 29–​31. Meyer, Laura and Faith Wilding. ‘Collaboration and Conflict in the Fresno Feminist Art Program: An Experiment in Feminist Pedagogy.’ n.paradoxa, Vol. 26, Feminist Pedagogies (July 2010): 40–​51. Meyer, Richard and Michelle Kuo, with Thomas Crow, Andrew Perhuck, Maurice Tuchman, Ali Submotnick, Helene Winer, John Baldessari, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Liz Larner. ‘L.A. Stories: A Roundtable Discussion.’ Artforum (October 2011). Accessed 14 November 2021. www.artfo​rum.com/​inpr​int/​id=​29043. Miller, Earl. ‘File Under Anarchy: A Brief History of Punk Rock’s 30-​Year Relationship with Toronto’s Art Press.’ C: International Contemporary Art, No. 88 (Winter 2005), 30–​5. Mills, Sean William. ‘Québécoises deboutte! Le front de libération des femmes du Québec, le centre de femmes et le nationalisme.’ Mens, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2004): 183–210. —​. ‘The Empire Within: Montreal, the Sixties, and the Forging of a Radical Imagination.’ PhD diss. Queen’s University, 2007. Milstein, Cindy. ‘ “Queer & Feminista! Anticapitalista!” Montreal, Nights 53 & 60.’ Coop média de Montréal. Accessed 14 November 2021. http://​montr​eal.mediac​oop. ca/​blog/​cindy-​milst​ein/​11480. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Molesworth, Helen. This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s. Exhibition catalogue. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Monahan, Torin. ‘Los Angeles Studies: The Emergence of a Specialty Field.’ City & Society, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2002): 155–​84. Monk, Philip. Picturing the Toronto Art Community: The Queen Street Years. Insert in C: International Contemporary Art, Vol. 59 (September–​November 1998). Montag, Warren. ‘Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida’s Specters of Marx.’ In Ghostly Demarcations: a Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinkler. London and New York: Verso, 1999: 68–​82. Moore, Shannon. ‘The Lacey Prize: Recognizing Artist-​Run Centres in Canada.’ The National Gallery of Canada Magazine. Accessed 21 July 2021. www.gall​ery.ca/​magaz​ ine/​in-​the-​spotli​ght/​the-​lacey-​prize-​reco​gniz​ing-​art​ist-​run-​cent​res-​in-​can​ada. Moravec, Michelle. ‘Fictive Families of History Makers: Historicity at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building.’ In Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, ed. Meg Linton, Sue Maberry, and Elizabeth Pulsinelli. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design, 2011: 66–​93. —. ‘Toward a History of Feminism, Art, and Social Movements in the United States.’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, Special Issue: Feminist Art and Social Movements: Beyond NY/​LA (2012), 22–​54.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

961

Bibliography

Moravec, Michelle and Sondra Hale. ‘ “At Home” at the Woman’s Building (But Who Gets a Room of her Own?): Women of Color and Community.’ In From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, ed. Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton. Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011: 162–​89. Morehead, Allison. ‘The Radical Healing Possibilities of Witchcare.’ The Polyphony (1 March 2022). Accessed 15 April 2022. https://​thepo​lyph​ony.org/​2022/​03/​01/​the-​ radi​cal-​heal​ing-​possib​ilit​ies-​of-​witchc​are/​. Morris, Catherine and Rujeko Hockley. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–​85. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2017. MOTHA. ‘About.’ Accessed 14 November 2021. www.motha.net/​about. Muñoz, José Esteban. `Ephemera as Evidence.’ Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1996): 5–16. —. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. —. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.’ Accessed 14 November 2021. www.moca.org/​exh​ibit​ion/​wack-​art-​and-​the-​femin​ ist-​rev​olut​ion. National Gallery of Canada. ‘Builders: Canadian Biennial 2012. An exhibition that showcases some of the most provocative and important art being made in this country today from 2 November 2012 to 20 January 2013.’ Press release. 31 October 2021. Accessed 20 November 2021. www.gall​ery.ca/​for-​profes​sion​als/​media/​press-​ relea​ses/​build​ers-​canad​ian-​bienn​ial-​2012-​an-​exh​ibit​ion-​that-​showca​ses. Nestle, Joan. ‘The Will to Remember: The Lesbian Herstory Archives of New York.’ Feminist Review, No. 34, Perverse Politics: Lesbian Issues (Spring 1990): 86–​94. Nochlin, Linda. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ ARTnews, January 1971. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.artn​ews.com/​2007/​11/​01/​top-​ten-​artn​ews-​ stor​ies-​expos​ing-​the-​hid​den-​he/​. Nochlin, Linda and Maura Reilly, eds. Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Merrell, 2007. Nyong’o, Tavia. Afro-​Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York: NYU Press, 2019. Osman, Suleiman. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Osowska, Slava. Interview by author. Brooklyn, NY, 22 February 2012. Oswin, Natalie. ‘Critical Geographies and the Uses of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space.’ Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 32 (2008): 89–​103. Otis College of Art and Design. Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building website. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.otis.edu/​publ​ic_​p​rogr​ams/​ ben_​ma​ltz_​gall​ery/​wom​ansb​uild​ing.html.

169

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Bibliography

paggett, taisha. ‘Experimental Dance: Histories, Politics, Presence.’ Panel discussion. The University of Toronto Scarborough, 9 February 2015. Paikowsky, Sandra. ‘The Girls and the Grid: Montreal Women Abstract Painters in the 1950s and Early 1960s.’ In Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–​1970, ed. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2012: 259–​81. Patton, Cindy. ‘AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community.’ Feminist Review, No. 30 (Autumn 1988): 105–​11. Pindell, Howardena. ‘Art (World) & Racism: Testimony, Documentation and Statistics.’ Third Text, Vol. 2, No. 3–​4 (1988): 157–​90. Piontek, Thomas. Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Piper, Adrian. ‘The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists.’ In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Amelia Jones. New York: Routledge, 1990, 2010: 273–​82. Podmore, Julie​ . ‘Lesbians in the Crowd: Gender, Sexuality and Visibility along Montréal’s Boul. St-​ Laurent.’ Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2001): 333–​55. —. ‘Gone “Underground”? Lesbian Visibility and the Consolidation of Queer Space in Montréal.’ Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2006): 595–​625. Portwood, Jerry. ‘Dumbo’s Lusty Loft: The final days of the DUMBA collective.’ New York Press, Wednesday 1 November 2006. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​web.arch​ive.org/​web/​200​7 101​3172​518/​http://​nypr​ess.com/​19/​43/​news%26 colu​mns/​featu​re3.cfm. Pourtavaf, Leila, ed. Féminismes Électriques. Montreal: Les Éditions du remue-​ménage & La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, 2012. Preziosi, Donald, ed. ‘Anthropology and/​as Art History.’ In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 2nd edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009: 151–​212. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York: Routledge, 1996. Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Reckitt, Helena, ed. Art and Feminism. London: Phaidon, 2006. —. ‘My Fuzzy Valentine: Allyson Mitchell.’ C: International Contemporary Art, No. 89 (Spring 2006): 14–17. —. ‘GENDER ALARM! Queer Feminist Exhibitions in the “Year of Feminist Art.” ‘In Féminismes Électriques. Montreal: Les Éditions du remue- ménage and La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, 2012: 26–41. —. `Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics.’ In Curated Under a Glass Ceiling: Exhibiting Art by Women and Feminists, ed. Angela Dimitrakaki

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

171

Bibliography

and Lara Perry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Accessed 14 November 2021. http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/7103/. Reed, Christopher. Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ricco, John Paul. ‘Jacking-​off A Minor Architecture’ (1993). Reprinted in Keep It Dirty, Vol. a., Filth (2016). Accessed 20 November 2021. http://​keep​itdi​rty.org/​a/​jack​ing-​ off-​a-​minor-​archi​tect​ure/​. —. The Logic of the Lure. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–​ 1985. New York: Norton, 1986. Riot, Coco. ‘Montréal est un grand pink bloc: queers antiautoritaires dans la métropole québecoise.’ À Babord, No. 34 (April/​May 2010). Accessed 14 November 2021. www. abab​ord.org/​Montr​eal-​est-​un-​grand-​pink-​bloc. Rizk, Mysoon. ‘Constructing Histories: David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York.’ In The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright. New York: Routledge, 1998: 178–​94. Roberson, Michael. ‘Ballroom: The Trans Sounds of Black Freedom.’ ArtsEverywhere. Accessed 10 November 2021. www.art​seve​rywh​ere.ca/​ballr​oom/​. Roberts, Rosemarie A. ‘Dancing with Social Ghosts: Performing Embodiments, Analyzing Critically.’ Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2013): 4–​14. Robertson, Clive. ‘Movement +​Apparatus: A Cultural Policy Study of Artist-​Run Culture in Canada (1976–​1994).’ PhD diss. Concordia University, Montreal, 2004. —. Policy Matters: Administration of Art and Culture. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2006. Robertson, Kirsty. Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2019. Roelstraete, Dieter. ‘The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art.’ e-​flux, No. 4 (March 2009). Accessed 14 November 2021. www.e-​flux.com/​jour​nal/​ the-​way-​of-​the-​sho​vel-​on-​the-​archeo​logi​cal-​imagin​ary-​in-​art/​. —. ‘After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings.’ e-​flux, No. 6 (May 2009). Accessed 14 November 2021. www.e-​flux.com/​jour​nal/​after-​the-​hist​orio​grap​hic-​ turn-​curr​ent-​findi​ngs/​. Rogoff, Irit. ‘Gossip as Testimony: A Postmodern Signature’ In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock. London and New York: Routledge, 1996: 75–​85. Rosati, Lauren and Mary Anne Staniszewski, eds. Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces 1960–​2010. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press in collaboration with Exit Art, 2012. Rosenberg, Avis Lang. ‘Women Artists and the Canadian Art World: A Survey.’ Atlantis, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 1979): 107–​26. Ross, Kristen. May ‘68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Roth, Benita. Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

171

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

172

Bibliography

Rounthwaite, Adair. ‘Split Witness: Metaphorical Extensions of Life in the Art of Felix Gonzalez-​Torres.’ Representations, Vol. 109, No. 1 (Winter 2010): 35–​56. Rushbrook, Dereka. ‘Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1–​2 (2002): 183–​206. Sachs, Ira. Interview by author. New York, NY, 23 February 2012. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Salamon, Gayle​. ‘Boys of the Lex: Transgenderism and Rhetorics of Materiality.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2006): 575–​97. —. Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. SBC Gallery. ‘A Problem So Big It Needs Other People.’ Accessed 14 November 2021. www.sbc​gall​ery.ca/​cheya​nne-​turi​ons-​fr-​c1bbn?lang=​en. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. Schor, Mira. ‘Patrilineage.’ Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 2, Feminist Art Criticism (Summer 1991): 58–​63. Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2012. Schwartz, Joan M. and Terry Cook. ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.’ Archival Science, Vol. 2 (2002): 1–​19. Schwartz, Therese. ‘They Built Women a Bad Art History.’ Feminist Art Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1973): 10–​11, 22. Sears, Alan. ‘Queer Anti-​Capitalism: What’s Left of Lesbian and Gay Liberation?’ Science & Society, Vol. 69, No. 1 (January 2005): 92–​112. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. —​. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Shapiro, Barbara, ed. Parallelogramme Retrospective, 1976–​7. Vancouver: ANNPAC/​ RACA, 1977. Shields, Sienna. Interview by author. Brooklyn, NY, 22 February 2012. Shirazi, Sadia. ‘Returning to Dialectics of Isolation: The Non-​Aligned Movement, Imperial Feminism, and a Third Way.’ Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 2021). Accessed 13 November 2021. https://​editi​ons.lib.umn.edu/​panor​ama/​arti​cle/​asian-​ameri​can-​art/​dia​lect​ics-​of-​ isolat​ion/​. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Simon, Sherry. Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2006. Smith, Patti. Just Kids. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Smith, Patti and Jonathan Lethem. ‘Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem in Conversation.’ PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​pen.org/​mul​time​dia/​patti-​smith-​and-​jonat​han-​let​hem-​in-​conve​rsat​ion-​2/​.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

371

Bibliography

Smith, Roberta. ‘A New Pin on the Art Map.’ New York Times, 10 November 2011. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.nyti​mes.com/​2011/​11/​13/​arts/​des​ign/​paci​fic-​ stand​ard-​time-​art-​exhi​biti​ons-​in-​la-​rev​iew.html?pag​ewan​ted=​all. Smith, Terry. ‘The Provincialism Problem.’ Artforum, Vol. 13, No. 1 (September 1974): 54–​9. Smith, Valerie. ‘Abundant Evidence: Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 70s.’ In WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 2007: 400–​13. Smithson, Robert. ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-​Sites’ (1968). Reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996: 364. Sofia, Zoe. ‘Container Technologies.’ Hypatia, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2000): 181–​201. Soja, Edward and Allen J. Scott, eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Sontag, Susan. ‘Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ (1962). In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics, 2009: 263–​74. Sorkin, Jenni. ‘Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building.’ In Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, ed. Meg Linton, Sue Maberry, and Elizabeth Pulsinelli. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design, 2011: 36–​64. Spear, Athena Tacha. Letter to Feminist Art Journal. 8 February 1973. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 1. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. Spero, Nancy. Letter to unspecified recipient. 10/​20–​82. A.I.R. Gallery Archives, Series I, Subseries A, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 5. Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. Spillers, Hortense J. ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.’ Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The ‘American’ Connection (Summer 1987): 64–​81. Spivey, Virginia B. ‘The Minimal Presence of Simone Forti.’ Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring/​Summer 2009): 11–​18. Springer, Kimberly. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–​1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Staniforth, Jesse B. ‘“Cultural genocide”? No, Canada committed regular genocide.’ Star, 10 June 2015. Accessed 14 November 2021. www.thes​tar.com/​opin​ion/​com​ment​ary/​ 2015/​06/​10/​cultu​ral-​genoc​ide-​no-​can​ada-​commit​ted-​regu​lar-​genoc​ide.html. Stein, Arlene. ‘Sisters and Queers: The Decentering of Lesbian Feminism.’ Socialist Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (January 1992): 33–​55. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

173

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

Bibliography

Steyerl, Hito. ‘The Institution of Critique’ (2006). Reprinted in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009: 486–​92. Stoner, Jill. Towards A Minor Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein. That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004. Taormino, Tristan. ‘Pucker Up: Queer Co-​Ed Lust.’ The Village Voice, Vol. 46, No. 35 (4 September 2001): 128. Temple, Kevin. ‘Toronto needs freakier rich people.’ In The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, ed. Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio, and Johnny Dovercourt. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006: 74–​81. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. ‘Reflections of a Real-​Life Feminist Killjoy: Ball-​Busters and the Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-​Feminist Life.’ In Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings, ed. Cait McKinney and Allyson Mitchell. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019: 143–​58. Thompson, Becky. ‘Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism.’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2, Second Wave Feminism in the United States (Summer 2002): 336–​60. Thompson, Margo Hobbs. ‘DIY Identity Kit: The Great American Lesbian Art Show.’ Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2–​3 (2010): 260–​82. Thrift, Nigel. ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.’ Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 86, No. 1, Special Issue: The Political Challenge of Relational Space (2004): 57–​78. Tongson, Karen. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Trebay, Guy. ‘Queers in Space: DUMBA Takes Off.’ The Village Voice, 11 May 1999. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada website. www.trc.ca/​. turions, cheyanne. ‘A Table for Negotiation, Mediation, Discussion, Difference.’ Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​chey​anne​turi​ons.wordpr​ess.com/​2014/​03/​21/​ a-​table-​for-​nego​tiat​ion-​mediat​ion-​dis​cuss​ion-​dif​f ere​nce/​. —​. ‘Learning to Prepare Food is Not Unlike Learning a Language.’ Accessed 14 November 2021. https://​chey​anne​turi​ons.wordpr​ess.com/​tag/​a-​prob​lem-​so-​big-​it-​ needs-​other-​peo​ple/​. Vallerand, Olivier. ‘Home Is the Place We All Share: Building Queer Collective Utopias.’ Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 67, No. 1 (2013): 64–​75. Verrall, Krys. ‘artscanada’s “Black” Issue: 1960s Contemporary Art and African Liberation Movements.’ Canadian Journal of Communication, No. 36 (2011): 539–​58. Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2006. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005. —​. ‘Queer and Then?’ The Chronicle Review (1 January 2012). Accessed 14 November 2021. http://​chroni​cle.com/​arti​cle/​QueerT​h en-​/​130​161/​.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

571

Bibliography

Weinberg, Jonathan. Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. White, Hayden​. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. —. ‘Interpretation in History.’ New Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 2, On Interpretation: II (Winter 1973): 281–​314. —. ‘The Historical Event.’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 2008): 9–​34. Wilding, Faith. By Our Own Hands. Santa Monica: Double X, 1977. —. ‘Don’t Tell Anyone We Did It!’ Accessed 14 November 2021. http://​faith​wild​ing.refu​ gia.net/​dontt​ell.pdf. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies, And Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Wilson, William. ‘Lair of Female Creativity.’ Los Angeles Times, 21 February 1972: 4–​10. —. Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002. Wolverton, Terry. Letter to Yolanda Retter, Lesbians of Color. 12 February 1980. Lesbian Legacy Collection: GALAS (Great American Lesbian Art Show). ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, CA. —​. Interview by Amelia Jones. 12 May 2010. Interview transcript, Los Angeles Goes Live archive. Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. —​. Interview with Jerri Allyn. ‘The Woman’s Building.’ Doin’ It in Public video herstory interview. Accessed 21 May 2012. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​I9Ls​6Ohw​frM&list=​ PL9​BF2A​6F54​0F23​156. Yancy, George. ‘Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism: A Philosophical Analysis.’ Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 8 (2008), 843–​76. Yoon, Soo Ryon. ‘Clean Labour by Brendan Fernandes.’ ASAP Journal (1 March 2018). Accessed 14 November 2021. http://​asap​jour​nal.com/​clean-​lab​our-​by-​bren​dan-​ fernan​des-​soo-​ryon-​yoon/​. Zemans, Joyce. ‘A Tale of Three Women: The Visual Arts in Canada /​A Current Account/​ing.’ RACAR: Review d’art canadienne /​Canadian Art Review, Vol. 25, No. 1/​2, Producing Women /​Ces femmes qui produisent … (1998), 103–​22. Zemans, Joyce and Amy Wallace. ‘Where are the Women: Updating the Account!’ RACAR: Review d’art canadienne /​Canadian Art Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2013), 1–​29.

175

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

1080Bus (gallery) (Toronto) 49 112 Workshop/​112 Greene Street 5, 42, 43 2-​qtpocmontréal (exhibition) 117–19 A Lesbian Show (exhibition) 42, 43 A.I.R. Gallery (New York) 14–15, 39–2, 46–7, 62, 74 Abramović, Marina 146 ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) 80–1, 87, 115 ACT UP Oral History Project 66, 81 Acts of Art Gallery (New York) 46 AfriCOBRA 45 Ahmed, Sara 9, 105–7 Ailey School 126, 134 Akerman, Chantal 87 Al-​Saji, Alia 98 Alston, Charles 45 AlZeri, Basil 106 Anarchopanda 116 Anderson, Benedict 114 Angelou, Maya 46 Anti-​Capitalist Ass Pirates (collective) (Montreal) 115 Arab Spring (2010) 98–9 Arendt, Hannah 107 Art Metropole (Toronto) 48 articule (Montreal) 117 Artist Homeownership Program (New York) 40–1

artist-​run centres (Canada) 7, 12, 15, 30–2, 34, 48–9, 99, 117, 121, 151–2 Artist-​Run Centres and Collectives Conference /​La Conférence des collectifs et des centres d’artistes autogérés (ARCA) 32, 151 Artists for Social Responsibility (New York) 41 Artists Space (New York) 40 artscanada (Canadian periodical) 145 and the ‘Black’ issue 145 Ashbee, Daina 106, 107 Atkins, Robert 81, 96 Attie, Dotty 39 Ault, Julie 68 Austin, John Langshaw 27, 114, 124 Automatistes (artist group) (Montreal) 58 Baca, Judith F. 47 Baker, Vincent 74 ballroom culture 136–7, 147 Baltrop, Alvin 84, 86 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) 137 Bas-​Cohain, Rachel 39 Bearden, Romare 45 Beck, Martin 5, 39, 152 Berger, Martin A. 103 Berlant, Lauren 73, 77 Bernstein, Judith 39 Berry, Scott Miller 73–5 Berson, Amber 57, 59

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

771

Index

Bertoldi, Elizabeth 34 Bertrand, Anne 32 Beuys, Joseph 9 Bey, Hakim 115 and temporary autonomous zones 115 Bishop, Claire 113, 131 Black Arts Movement 45 Black Emergency Cultural Coalition 61 Black feminist art 46 Black Lives Matter (2013) 99 Black Power movement 45 Blackwell, Adrian 108 Blank, Carol 46 Blocton, Lula Mae 44 Bohnan, Blythe 39 Boltz, Maude 39 Borden, Lizzie 118 Bordowitz, Gregg 81 Bourriaud, Nicolas 113 Bowie, David 116 Boye, Seika 126, 134 Braidotti, Rosi 105 Brainard, Joe 86 Brancusi, Constantin 107 Bronson, AA 31, 151 Brooks, Gwendolyn 46 Brown, Kay 46, 60 Brown, Trisha 134–5 Browne, Vivian 46 Bryan-​Wilson, Julia 109 Buchanan, Beverly 47 Builders (exhibition) 13 Burt, Ramsay 137 BUS Gallery (Toronto) 49 Busch, Leslie 34 Butler, Judith 27, 54 Butt, Gavin 19, 70–1, 93 Byrne, Gerard 90

Campt, Tina M. 3 Canada Council for the Arts 31, 56 Carlomusto, Jean 84 Carson, Juli 39 Casel, Gerald 135 Centre homophile de Montréal 119 Chaleff, Rebecca 135 Charest, Jean 97 Chen, Mel Y. 133 Cheng, Meiling 27 and multicentricity 27, 55 Chicago, Judy 12, 14, 29, 35–6, 162 Chisholm, Dianne 3, 58, 64, 97 choreography 137, 139 Chromaliving (exhibition) 63 ChromaZone (artist collective) 53, 63 Clausen, Barbara 108 Club Quarantine 150 Coburn, Wendy 111 Coleman, Rebecca 9 Combahee River Collective 47 Condorelli, Celine 101 Conrad, Ryan 82 Contemporary Black Artists in America (exhibition) 46, 61 and the ‘Whitney Fiasco’ 46 Cook, Terry 22 Cooley, Alison 46 Co-​op femmes (Montreal) 119 Corinne, Tee 44 Cornell, Drucilla 54 Cowan, T.L. 149 and transmedial drag 149 Crimp, Douglas 81, 146 Crow, Thomas 26 Crump, Iris 46 Cunningham, Merce 131 Cvetkovich, Ann 22, 69, 71

Café Cléopâtra (Montreal) 121 Cahun, Claude 116 California Institute of the Arts 29 Callieri, Maria-​Rose 74 Campbell, JC Honey 118

D’Souza, Aruna 62 Damon, Betsy 44 dance 4, 17, 134 experimental dance 126, 144 in galleries 17

177

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

Index

postmodern dance 131, 135–6 social dance 18 Dare-​Dare (Montreal) 121 Davies, Jon 49, 81–2 Davis, Pat 46 Day With(out) Art 91, 96 Day, Pip 102 de Bretteville, Sheila Levrant 36 de Certeau, Michel 3, 72, 128, 138 and oppositional tactics 138 Dean, Tacita 90 Deitch, Jeffrey 146 Delany, Samuel R. 3, 16 Deleuze, Gilles 127, 128 Denes, Agnes 39 Derrida, Jacques 78–9 and hauntology 79 Deutsche, Rosalyn 66–7 Dewsbury, John David 69 Di Prima, Diane 137 Dialectics of Entanglement (exhibition) 62 Dialectics of Isolation An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists (exhibition) 46–7 Diederichsen, Diedrich 114 Dimitrakaki, Angela 10 Dinkins, David 16 Doin’ It in Public (exhibition) 12, 21–3, 25–6, 28 Donaldson, Jeff 45 Dorosh, Daria 39 Doty, Robert M. 46, 61 Douglas, Stan 90 Dowler-​Gow, Isobel 34 Downey, Anthony 113 Duchamp, Marcel 9 dUMBA (Brooklyn) 4, 16, 64–5, 67, 71–8, 86, 92 and Lusty Loft Parties 75–7 Dunkelman, Loretta 39 Edelman, Lee 6 Edwards, Adrienne 136

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art 12 Ellis, William 51 English, Darby 61 Fabius, Roxana 62 Fabo, Andy 63 Farquharson, Alex 114 FASTWÜRMS (Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse) 49 Feinberg, Leslie 116 Féminismes Électriques see La Centrale (Montreal) Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) (Toronto) 51 feminist art histories 54 feminist art movement 1, 14, 23–5, 29, 32, 34, 36, 45–6, 53 critical engagement with 25 historicisation of 8, 11, 22–5, 29, 30, 148 and inclusion 44, 46 Feminist Art Program 14, 28–9, 34–6, 56 and Fresno State College 35 Feminist Art Residency (FAR) (Ontario) 51 Feminist Studio Workshop (Los Angeles) 36 Fernandes, Brendan 17, 126, 129, 134, 138–43 Ferron, Marcelle 58 Fillip (journal) 151 Fishman, Louise 44 Flaming Apron (Montreal) 33 Fleshtival Film Festival (Montreal) 118 Floyd, George 150 Forti, Simone 131 Foster, Hal 131, 132 Foucault, Michel 27 France, David 81 Franklin Furnace (New York) 40 Freeman, Elizabeth 6 Fried, Michael 133 Fried, Nancy 44 Front Commun des Québécoises 33

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

971

Index

Front de libération des femmes du Québec 33 and Centre des femmes (1971) 33 Front de libération de Québec 33 Front homosexuel québécois de libération (Quebec) 119 Gaduoa, Bernard 119 Galerie SBC Gallery (Montreal) 102, 108 Garner, Eric 136 Garrels, Garry 96 gay liberation movement 42, 99, 111, 119 Gay McGill (McGill University) (Montreal) 119 Gay Montréal Association 119 General Idea (artist collective) 48 and FILE Megazine 48 gentrification 4, 14–16, 40–1, 66–8, 71–5, 77, 80, 84, 91, 152, 166 Geyer, Andrea 108 Ghent, Henri 61 Giaroli, Pamela 64 Gibson, Jeffery 48 Giddens, Anthony 28 Giovanni, Nikki 46 Girling, Oliver 63 Giuliani, Rudolph 16, 72–3 Global Feminisms (exhibition) 12 Goldstein, Sybil 63 Gonzalez-​Torres, Felix 86–7, 141 Gourlay, Sheena 32 Gran Fury (artist collective) 87 Gray, Mary L. 107 Great American Lesbian Art Show (exhibition) 44, 45 Greenberg, Reesa 114 Greer, Bonnie xiii, 41 Greyson, John 117 Griffin, Margaret 34 Grigoriadis, Mary 39 Groat, Maggie 102–8, 122 Grosz, Elizabeth 28, 138 Guattari, Felix 127, 128

Guerrilla Girls 46 Gutsche, Clara 34 Halberstam, Jack 6, 9 Halbwachs, Maurice 15 Hale, Sondra 21, 36, 44–5, 53 Halt and Catch Fire (television series) 148 Hammond, Harmony 39, 42–4 Haring, Keith 86 Harper, Stephen 106 Harrell, Trajal 17, 136–7 Harrison, Paul 69 Harwood, Andrew 49 Hayden, Dolores 26, 36 Hayden, Sophia 30 Hayes, Sharon 81–2, 108, 109, 111 Healy, Anne 39 Heidegger, Martin 105–6 Henry, Janet Olivia 47 Heresies (journal) 47 and ‘Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other’ 47 Herko, Fred 137 Hernandez, Patricia M. 62 Hilliard, David 136 HIV/​AIDS crisis 47, 66, 80–2, 84, 86–7, 90–1 Hogan, Mél 116 Holman, SD 48 Holstad, Christian 81–2 Hong, Robbie 48 Hope Mohr Dance 135 Hoszko, Sheena 120–1 HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? Collective (YAMS Collective) 92 Hubbard, Jim 66, 81 Hughes, Every Ocean 16, 67, 82–8, 90–1, 95 Hughes, Langston 118 Hujar, Peter 86 Hunter, Agnes 106 Husserl, Edmund 105

179

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Index

Idle No More (2012) 99 institutional critique 113, 114, 139 Institutions by Artists (2012 symposium) 151 Irigaray, Luce 54 Iwaasa, Rachel Kiyo 48 Jackson, Nigel 46 Jacob, Mary Jane 113 James, Laurance 39 Jarrell, Jae 45 Jarrell, Wadsworth 45 Jay, Martin 131 Jeppesen, Sandra 115 Johns, Jasper 9, 19, 70 Johnson, Imani Kay 131 Johnson, Rae 63 Johnston, David 106 Jones, Amelia 2, 3, 6, 55 Jones, Debbie 44 Jones, GB 50 Jones-​Hogu, Barbara 45 Judson Dance Theater 131, 136, 137 Kahlo, Frida 116 Kapasheshit, Marlene 106 Karras, Maria 30 Káteri Tekahkwi:tha 117–18 Katherine Mulherin Gallery (Toronto) 49 Katz, Jonathan D. 19, 70, 81 Kitchell, Nancy 39 Klein, Jennie 43 Klintberg, August 128 Koch, Edward Irving 16 Koester, Grant 90, 91 Korczynski, Jacob 126, 130 Kramer, Louise 39 Krauss, Rosalind 132, 141 La Centrale (Montreal) 7, 12, 14–15, 32–5, 59, 99 LaBruce, Bruce 50, 51

Lacy, Suzanne 113 Lakich, Lili 44 LaRochelle, Lucas 149 Leabua, Mai Mai 46 Lee, Yaniya 145 Leonard, Zoe 16, 67, 84, 87–8, 90 Lesbian Art Project 43, 44 Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York) 47 Leslie, Charles 47 Leslie-​Lohman Gay Art Foundation 48 Lethem, Jonathan 65 Lew, Jeffrey 5 Lewis, Norman 45 Ley, David 68 Liepe-​Levinson, Katherine 73 Lim, Elisha 117 Linton, Meg 21 live-​work spaces 4 Livingston, Jennie 136 Loft, Ange 117, 118 Logue, Deirdre 51 Lohman, Fritz 47 Longoni, Samantha 74 Longval, Gloria 44 Lorde, Audre 46 Love, Heather 6, 8, 10, 11 Lower East Side Joint Planning Council (New York) 41 Ludlum, Charles 86 Lukin Linklater, Tanya 106–7 Luo, Amy 46 Maberry, Sue 21 Macdonald, John A. 104 McCannon, Dindga 46 McDonald, CeCe 116 McKay, Ian 104 McKinney, Cait 149 McMillan, Uri 133–4 Magagnoli, Paolo 88, 90, 91 Manning, Chelsea 116 Manning, Erin 98 Manning, Susan 140

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

181

Index

Mapplethorpe, Robert 86 Marchessault, Janine 32–3 Mars (Rosenberg), Tanya 34 Marti, Hans Peter 63 Martin, Randy 132–4 Martin, Trayvon 136 Marx, Karl 78–9, 90, 94 Maureemootoo, Kama 117 Mauve (artist group) (Montreal) 147 Mayer, Marc 13 Mayer, Rosemarie 39 Mendieta, Ana 47 Mericle, Billie-​Joe 34 Meskimmon, Marsha 54 Meyer, Hazel 128 Meyer, Richard 81 Mikiki 116 Millar, Onnie 46 Miller, Earl 48 Miller, Milo 149 Millett, Kate 44, 111 Milstein, Cindy 99 minor architecture 127–8, 130 Mitchell, Allyson 50–1 Mitchell, John Cameron 65, 77 Miyamoto, Kazuko 47 Mohanty, Chandra 17, 105 Montréal Feminist Association 33 Montréal Gay/​Women/​Labyris 119 Moravec, Michelle 25, 44–5, 56 Morgan-​Feir, Caoimhe 46 Mueller, Cookie 86 multiculturalism 55 Muñoz, José Esteban 6, 69–71, 79, 133 Munro, Will 128, 130 Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) 149 National Gallery of Canada 13 Nengudi, Senga 47 Newbold, LeRoi 117–18 Newman, Barnett 132, 134 Nixon, Nicholas 81

Nomi, Klaus 86 non-​site 4, 17, 100, 107 Norvell, Patsy 39 Novak, Yann 129 Nyong’o, Tavia 133, 137 and afro-​fabulation 137 O’Grady, Lorraine 60, 136 Occupy Wall Street (2011) 98–9 Ogden, Thomas 101 Okumura, Lydia 47 Olander, William 96 Omnlaye 46 Osman, Suleiman 72 Osowska, Slava 64, 74–8 Pacific Association of Artist-​Run Centres (PAARC) 151 Pacific Standard Time Art in L.A. 1945–​1980 (exhibition) 25, 26 LA/​LA (exhibition) 55 paggett, taisha 17, 126–7, 129, 134–5, 144, 146 Paikowsky, Sandra 57, 58 Palmer, Berthe Honore 30 Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto) 49, 50 Paul Petro Special Projects Space (Toronto) 49–1 Pendleton, Adam 135, 136 Pervers/​cité (Montreal) 115–17, 119, 120 Petro, Paul 49, 50 Pindell, Howardena 39, 46, 47, 60 Plantenga, Stasje 34 Polytechnique Massacre (Montreal) 34, 58 Portwood, Jerry 77 Pourtavaf, Leila 7 Preziosi, Donald 26 Price, Elizabeth 129 Probyn, Elspeth 17 Pulse Nightclub shooting (2016) 142, 143

181

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Index

Qteam (collective) (Montreal) 115 Qteam (Montreal) 124 Quartier des Spectacles (Montreal) 121 Quebec student movement (2012) 3, 97, 98, 100, 102, 115, 119–21 and Bill 78 97, 98, 119 and Printemps érable 98, 99 Queer Arts Festival (Vancouver) 48 queer autonomous zone 4, 115–16 queer feminism 6, 7, 11, 18, 25, 83 and queer feminist art history 1, 8, 11, 12 and queer feminist histories 1, 3, 69 Queer Nation 115 Queer Shame 115 Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) 149 Queeruption 64, 75, 115 Quiet Revolution (Quebec) 97 radical juxtapositions 135–7 Rainer, Yvonne 131, 134–6, 146 Rainey, Ma 118 Rauschenberg, Robert 9, 19, 70 Raven, Arlene 36, 43 Reckitt, Helena 123 Reed, Christopher 42 Reinhardt, Ad 145 relational aesthetics 101, 113–14 René, Norman 86 Retter, Yolanda 45 Ricco, John Paul 70, 71, 128 Rich, Adrienne 17, 105 Richardson, Anthony 64 Richardson, Charlotte 46 Rimbaud, Arthur 83–4, 90 Ringgold, Faith 46, 60 Roberson, Adee 117–18 Roberson, Michael 136 Roberts, Rosemarie 126, 127, 137, 141 Robertson, Clive 32 Robertson, Kirsty 100, 102, 111 Roelstraete, Dieter 78–9, 88, 91 Rogoff, Irit 93

Ronald K. Brown/​Evidence, a Dance Company 126 Rosati, Lauren 65 Rose, Mitch 69 Rosenberg, Avis Lang 46 Russo, Vito 86, 96 Ryan, Cara Gendel 66, 67 Ryner, Denise 145 Saar, Betye 46, 60 Sachs, Ira 2, 16, 67, 86–8, 90–1, 96 Sandoval, Chela 11 Saulnier, Kesso 117 Schapiro, Miriam 29 Schneider, Rebecca 132 Schor, Mira 9 Schulman, Sarah 66, 68, 80–1, 91 Schwartz, Joan M. 22 Scott, Walter K. 117, 118 second-wave feminism 1, 7, 19, 23, 25, 32, 44 and decolonisation movements 32 and essentialism 23, 54 and race 44 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 27 Segade, Alexandro 129, 130 Sex Garage raids (Montreal) 115 Sex, John 86 Shakedown Angels 143 Shields, Sienna 64, 74–7, 86, 92, 93 Shirazi, Sadia 47 Siebers, Tobin 130 Silton, Susan 2 Simon, Sherry 97 Slut Walk (Toronto) 111 Smith, Jack 86 Smith, Patti 65 Smith, Valerie 60 Smithson, Robert 17, 100, 107 Sofia, Zoe 101 Sokolowski, Thomas 96 Sontag, Susan 135 sovereignty 102, 104–5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

381

Index

Spence, Chief Theresa 106 Spero, Nancy 39, 41 Spillers, Hortense 133 Spiral Group 45 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 54 and strategic essentialism 54 Staniszewski, Mary Anne 65 Ste-​Emilie Skillshare (Montreal) 118 Stein, Julia 30 Stewart, Kathleen 153 Stewart, Susan 90 Steyerl, Hito 113 Stoner, Jill 127, 128 Stonewall riots (New York) 70 SUM Gallery (Vancouver) 47, 48 and Pride in Art 48 Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein 64 Tan, Fiona 90 Tannahill, Jordan 51 Tanskley, Ann 46 Taormino, Tristan 76, 77 Taylor, Cecil 137, 145 TEMPERAMENTAL (exhibition) 127 Textaqueen 117 The Beaver (Toronto) 130 The Body Politic (Toronto) 48 Thompson, Becky 19, 44 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana 11 Tongson, Karen 3 Trapper, Lillian Mishi 106 Trisha Brown Dance Company 126 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 104, 122 and Indian Residential Schools 122, 123 Tsang, Wu 143 turions, cheyanne 102, 104, 106 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 141 Vargas, Chris E. 149 Videofag (Toronto) 51

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (exhibition) 12 Wade, Gavin 101 Walsh, Pat 34 Warhol, Andy 9, 70 Warner, Michael 73, 77 Weber, Bill 81 Weinberg, Jonathan 95 Weinraub, Leilah 143 Weissman, David 81 West Side Piers (New York) 76, 83–6, 95 Where We At: Black Women Artists (exhibition) 45–6, 60 Whitefeather, Selena 47 Wilde, Chris 149 Williams, Gerald 45 Williams, Raymond 27 Williams, Susan 39 Wilson, Fred 138, 141 Wilson, Tony 63 Winnicott, Donald Woods 101 Wojnarowicz, David 82–4, 86, 90 Wolverton, Terry 22, 24, 28, 43, 45 Woman’s Building (1893) 23, 30, 56 and Board of Lady Managers 30 Woman’s Building (Los Angeles) 2, 14, 21–5, 28–30, 32, 34, 36, 43–5, 53, 56, 74, 152 Womanhouse (Los Angeles) 14, 36, 39 Women’s Liberation Cinema 111 Woodruff, Hale 45 Woolf, Virginia 23, 29, 45 Wylie, John 69 Yancy, George 126 Yoon, Soo Ryon 140 Youdelman, Nancy 56 Zarina 47 Zemans, Joyce 46 Zoumboulakis, Johnny 121 Zsa Zsa Gallery (Toronto) 49, 51 Zucker, Barbara 39

183