text by Asterios Touvlatzis
Many people have probably heard the term queer curating. Beyond the identity of queerness, there is also the methodology of queer curating as a form of activism. This does not only necessarily include the curation of works from queer artists, but also the challenging of the museum and gallery policies in order to have a queer orientation. Before we begin explaining what precisely is queer curation, we should first focus on what exactly the museums or the white cube promote, as well as the narrative that they produce: That of normalcy.
It was Michel Foucault who mentioned that museums work as a panopticon. In reality, it is not just the visitors gazing over the artworks, but the whole act of visiting a museum or a gallery, includes the process of gazing. Visitors of the museum gaze at the artworks and consume the narrative and the story of normalcy that global museums tend to (re)present. Historians and museums, through curation, promote the idea that historicity works in a straight line; oftentimes, we, as art historians, process things linearly too. This perception of history contextualises social and historical developments based on a linear temporal evolution; however, many times it does not allow us to understand in depth the parallel development of cultural existences. Queerness as a cultural identity is characterised by a condition in which popular trends ignore it, and for this reason, artistic production with queer characteristics, as it is found throughout the centuries, has either been eroded by researchers in order to serve their own political and moral agendas, or has been ignored and remained in the shadows. However, from the 19th century onwards, due to a multitude of reasons and not simply thanks to the evolution brought by the change of time, these seemingly parallel cultural existences due to historical and cultural shifts , find a common ground and touch each other, thus changing the cultural landscape, both on an artistic and museological level.
Yet, it is not only the visitor who is gazing, interpreting and forcing artworks to succumb to their gaze, but also they who are being gazed upon, from other guests and staff of the museum, by the artworks and by the narrative that the curator is sharing. In a way the curator also imposes his gaze upon the visitor through the narrative shaping of the curatorial storytelling. It is particularly interesting what Tony Bennett mentions in his work, The Birth of the Museum: museums were originally created as socialising places that would involve the lower classes and teach them the habits and proclivities of the noble classes. What was earlier inaccessible to the masses, meaning royal collections and wunderkammers, slowly became available to the middle and lower classes, in an attempt to shape the society in the image of its rulers. Historical narratives were rewritten, colonial collecting and Western imposition of narratives was normalised, and the linearity of cultural and art history was shaped, leaving people, communities, their stories and their subcultures unseen. Even queer objects were re-contextualised in an attempt to leave out any form or narrative that could potentially derail the mainstream idea of what museums did and sometimes still do as institutions, which is not passive, or simply in the service of cultural preservation, but rather in service of the shaping of the cultural fabric. Of the cultural narrative. Of taste-making.
It is for that reason that James Silk Buckingham, a social reformer in 19th century, saw the museum and the potential it had to provide a sanitised narrative, a public space in which both men and women would be able to come in contact with habits of the nobility. Naturally, curation of the art in those spaces also helped shape this narrative, and the more museums and art galleries grew in cultural relevance, the more the narrative mattered. Curation became a way of seeing, an omnipresent kaleidoscope, meshing and grinding human cultures in the exhibitions of the universal museum.
For many years the shaping of the cultural narrative was indeed formed by curators and museum directors, academies and the art market. They decided who is in and who is out. On the rare occasion an outsider was let in, their work was often undercover, a silent agent. An example of such art is that of J.C. Leydecker, the aesthetics of his art nowadays are clearly queer, however, he was not vocal about his orientation back then. An example is his work “Men Reading” In this work he portrays his partner Charles, who is included in a lot of his other works as well. What we now know to be a domestic scene between a gay couple, was considered to be a portrayal of two men in their club during the days of its production. Leyendecker creates these works by putting his desire out there for the world to see through his work to make a statement, to showcase his desire for another man. However societal canons changed the message of the painting and turned it into a work carrying an altered meaning. In her book “How we Desire” , Caroline Emcke explains how this sensitivity towards the societal habit of lying is not only a characteristic of homosexuals but of every person who has desired anything that is socially unacceptable, who were forced to remain silent and invisible, all those people who understand this almost physical happiness if you say the truth about yourself and who you are.
In many ways, as art historian Jonathan Weinberg also notes, art history among the other humanities was rather late in recognising the interrelationship between art and sexual orientation and it is safe to assume that that is true also for curatorial and museological practices, even when those instances did occur, it was often masked under the umbrella of ‘Avant Garde’. In fact as Christopher Reed mentions the avant-garde often exploited the visualisations of the physical and emotional bonds of the same sex, and it reappropriated it as an avant-garde spectacle.
Given that we understand that queer curating, goes beyond the subject of inclusion for the sake of inclusion, but rather is an active process of archiving and narrating stories of communities that were overlooked, or whose culture would conveniently be incorporated within the heteronormative structures of society, yet the makers, the communities they’ve built, and their lives would not fit in.
Having said that, it would be interesting to see how some of the first cultural shapers of queer curation and collection of artworks. Their practice suggests that queer curating is not simply about exhibiting queer artists but about creating alternative ways of organising the cultural experience itself. Chick Austin and Alexander Iolas, despite the fact that they come from different generations, they both developed practices that equally share common characteristics. And while their identity and orientation as queer people has certainly played a role in it, in many ways, they were curating in a queer mode before the term “queer curating” emerged as a cultural methodology.
Chick Austin was best known as the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Connecticut. He became the director only at the young age of 26, and in many ways while his personal collection wasn’t as grand as others, he completely transformed the way museums look at art and how they function as institutions. Austin was interested in bringing the American Public in touch with European Art, that mainly includes the Baroque period, however, as time progresses he is very interested in 20th century modernism. Despite the fact that the Wadsworth Athenium was an institution leaning towards traditional art movements, Austin manages to include new art movements and artists that were largely unknown to the American public. He organises the creation of a new museum wing for exhibiting contemporary art. He acquires a number of artworks from surrealists such as Salvador Dali, and does the first major Retrospective on Pablo Picasso. Most importantly, to celebrate the opening of the new wing, Austin arranged for a performance of Four Saints in Three Acts, the avant-garde opera written by collector and writer Gertrude Stein and composer Virgil Thomson. The event launched a national tour of the opera and inaugurated the dedicated theatre space of the Avery Memorial Wing, making the Wadsworth one of the earliest U.S. museums to house a performance centre.
Chick Austin understood the importance of a trans-disciplinary art museum and moved further away from the classical organisation of the museum. He involved theatre performance as an art form and situated it in an open dialogue with fine arts, thus opening the way for performance art, which was still developing at the time, through the form of “happenings” to be included in museum spaces. Perhaps the queer aspect in that approach is not the sort of art that was included, though the art movements he was interested in were largely marginalised, but the performative element that was included in the museum space, which was largely ignored. He brought new art forms into the museum (dance, cinema, theatre), expanding the museum experience from a simple visit to an immersive experience. And the way Austin did that was not through identity politics but rather through aesthetics. Aesthetics can be queer because they allow the subject to orient in a space, to feel comfortable, to feel included and seen. And the transformation of the museum space through the work of Chick Austin has these queer elements. It is important to quote Christopher Reed once more in regards to the queer aesthetics, public spaces and orientation of people in those spaces; Reed suggests that architects of the international style, like Le Corbusier, recognised the danger of aesthetics and further said that overly decorated buildings produced by architects were moth eaten boudoirs that threatened the masculinity of male dwellers, and that the danger that lay there was equal of that of the milkman carrying poisonous milk.
Ironically, Chick Austin had the new Avery wing of the Atheneum designed in the international architecture style, making it one of the first buildings to be built in the US in this style. To take a style that was largely developed as a masculine reaction to the threat of the overly-feminine, oriental, decorative styles that pre-existed and turn it into an exhibition space for fine arts, has to be, in my opinion, queer curating at its finest form. And while naturally, this is a conjecture, the re-contextualising of the space that is meant to affirm masculinity, to allow men to orient freely, in a more inclusive space, is the actual act of queer curation. As Sarah Ahmed says the way a body orients in space has to do with the phenomenality of the space, space is dependent on bodily inhabitance, and a space that is built to affirm the male persuasion is meant to exclude the other, to disorient it. By queering the public space through the aesthetics of Chick Austin, manages to allow other bodies, queer bodies, to feel comfortable orienting in those spaces. Granted, there is no evidence that Austin explicitly conceived of the Avery Wing in these terms; its recontextualisation of International Style architecture can be read through Sarah Ahmed’s notion of orientation and Christopher Reed’s critique of modernist masculinity.
Alexander Iolas, on the other hand, manages to bring those queer aesthetics into collecting art. Iolas was born in Alexandria, Egypt, with a recommendation letter from poet Cavafy; he came to Athens and socialised with poets like Angelos Sikelianos and Kostis Palamas. After a few years, he leaves and studies ballet abroad and becomes a leading dancer; however, due to an injury, he is forced to abandon ballet. When he sees an artwork of the then relatively unknown Giorgio De Chirico, he decides to become an art merchant, and during the next years, he develops a network of Galleries. Iolas had developed an eye for art; one of the first artists he discovered was Andy Warhol, and through his connections, he put pop art on the cultural map.
Perhaps the most impressive part of his legacy was his mansion in Athens. Located in the area of Hagia Paraskevi, during the 50s. It was his intention to build a village for the artists, a new place where he would not only place his large collection of antiquities, modern and contemporary art, but where he would also host and help artists as their patron. In essence, Iolas he created a museum where art from different centuries was in open discussion. Every artist that Iolas was particularly fond of had their own room. There was a room for Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, for Takis and Alexis Akrithakis. Iolas brought the sense of camp in curating, already before it was culturally mainstream. In many ways, his villa was filled with decorative artworks that were extravagant, and the setting was very theatrical. It is common ground, perhaps for queer curation to entail performance as a way to perceive art and history. Certainly, the fact that both Chick Austin and Alexander Iolas are attracted to these elements and utilise them in how they choose to showcase art is a significant indication. Another interesting element is that the house in Iolas’s case becomes an extension to the exhibition, so much so that even Iolas refers to it as a museum.
Both Iolas and Austin were determined to bring outsiders and establish them in the art world. And both of them delivered in that way, especially if we consider that they both helped establish surrealists, and Iolas helped to further establish art movements such as Arte Povera and Pop Art. By the end of their lives, both had contributed in the creation of new institutions, Chick Austin reshaped the Wadsworth Athenium and Iolas donated large parts of his collection to create the former Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Currently MOMus), the first museum of contemporary art in Greece.
So why is it queer curating? One could argue that the act of bringing an outsider and establishing them would be a queer or, at the very least, a subversive take on curation and collection of art. However it is also the aesthetics, the point of view and of course the theatrical aspect of the queer gaze. Both Austin and Iolas blurred the lines between curator, collector, performer, and tastemaker. But it is also the accusations of the extravagant theatricality and elitism that they had to face from conservative societies. In many ways, they were people outside their time period, which might explain their common love for the old and the new art movements. They opened up the narrow, linear understanding of art history by putting artworks of the past and contemporary times in an active discussion through their juxtaposition. The disruption of this historical linearity and the inclusion of outsider art is what makes this kind of curation queer. As time goes on and museums continue to explore the ways queer art and curation push traditional boundaries, we might also find parts of ourselves in these stories, in these visual languages that were ousted for the longest time in human history, and we might be allowed to access places that were originally not made for us, but those who history deemed as normative, as preservers of the past and future of human history, a history that in its linear narration did not include queer people. Queer curating is therefore not merely the recovery of forgotten queer artists. It is a challenge to the structures through which cultural narratives are produced. The practices of Chick Austin and Alexander Iolas demonstrate that long before the emergence of queer museology, alternative forms of collecting, exhibiting, and historical narration were already reshaping cultural institutions from within. Their legacy suggests that queering the museum begins not with identity alone, but with the reorganisation of space, time, taste, and historical memory.
Sources:
Ahmed, Sarah, Queer Phenomenology p.12
Bennett, Tony The Birth of Museum
Boate, Rachel, “Arthur Everett Austin, Jr. (called Chick),” The Modern Art Index Project (August 2018), Leonard A. Lauder Research Centre for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Emcke, Carolin How we desire p.35
Reed, Christopher, Art and Homosexuality