Brian
Tolle
Threshold
Fiberglas
and acrylic paint
2006
Commissioned
by the Committee for the University Art Collection
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What it means to be queer has become a frequent discussion not only among my students but also among my peers who had long ago embraced LGBT identities. Reclaiming the term “queer” from the realm of pejoratives, which had once signified the right to and pride in living lives unfettered from heteronormativity, suddenly held new possibilities, particularly in the context of a tide driving LGBT people into normalcy. While no one regretted the demise of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act, the prospect of a new normativity raised issues about the desirability of that status.
In a Spring 2013 course I taught at Parsons called “Homonormativity and the American Ideal,” art historian and artist Catherine Lord visited my class, to speak about “To Whom It May Concern…”a site-specific installation she had created at the One Archives in Los Angeles. That project focused on dedication pages in the books the archive had collected. She talked about the color of the pages, the typeface, the bleeding print, the telegraphing of indecipherable massages that conveyed biography, politics, intentions, passions, fears, and other qualities. She talked about the power and “queerness” of those pieces of paper. Often those pages were not only different in design and content from the rest of the book, they possessed an autonomy that often inflected readings of the texts that followed. It was about that time that I began thinking about grounding future queer as a project would de-stabilize the ways in which we see our environment, and foreground approaches that demand, in some cases, attention to the details of the worlds they critique and the visions they present; in others an openness to the spirits they embody.
The works on view in grounding future queer represent a mining of The New School Art Collection for works by artists whose work and lived experience present options to heterosexual norms. From more than a two thousand works in The New School Art Collection, spanning a period of 85 years, these works were made by an international group of practitioners between the period 1929 to 2012 who have experienced changing political circumstances and cultural responses to issues pertaining to sexuality and gender.
The works run the gamut from the 1929 allegorical work of Russian émigré Pavel Tchelitchew to the 2012 work of Aziz & Cucher responding to the complexities of their responses to turmoil in the Middle East, from the minimalist image of a poem about a young man’s abuse by John Giorno to works by Frank Moore, David Wojnarowicz and Ross Bleckner that are direct responses to the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, from the work of Joan Snyder who calls out the names of Biblical women to a photograph by Catherine Opie recording performance artist Ron Athey creating scarification on the back of Divinity Fudge (a.k.a. Darryl Carlton.) Together, they lay bare the contradictions and ambiguities of defining queer experience while simultaneously peeling away the assumptions that underlie our world.
Tony Whitfield, Curator of grounding future queer
This blog has been created to provide an ongoing context for discussion of the individual works in grounding future queer as well as other related works in The New School Art Collection. Please contribute any thoughts you have about the ways in which these works inform our understanding of queer culture as well as any information you might have about these works.
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ReplyDeleteIn January of 2007, a press release from The New School announced the commission of Threshold, a site-specific work by acclaimed artist and Parsons alumnus Brian Tolle in the Dorothy H. Hirshon Suite in Arnhold Hall, a meeting room for university receptions with visiting dignitaries. In that release, then University President, Bob Kerrey stated, “The Hirshon Suite is an intimate place where we bring together students, faculty and special guests with leading intellectuals in the areas of design, social sciences and politics for lively conversations about some of the most pressing issues facing the world today,” said New School President Bob Kerrey. “Threshold makes physical the impact and power that words uttered within these walls have on the intellectual life beyond it.” Consisting of two fiberglass panels set into one of the walls of the suite, Tolle used simulation technology to predict how the wall would behave if its skin were pliable. As it pulls both toward and away from the wall’s flat surface, it provides a constant reassessment and interplay of readings suggesting archeological layering, memory, history and the passage of time. The wall and what lies behind it is frozen in a moment of drawing back and pushing forward, as though holding and releasing its breath, rendering the room itself a character in the conversations taking place within this space. “Throughout his career, Brian Tolle has engaged the public with works that draw on memory and perception,” said Beth Rudin DeWoody, New School Trustee and Chair of the Committee for the University Art Collection. “Combining history with the latest production techniques, his striking and subtle works provoke viewers to reexamine their surroundings, crossing the line between fiction and reality.*”
Looking back on the work in the context of grounding future queer, Tolle ruminated with this writer on how this work might be understood as a particular reflection of the artist’s queerness. In some ways this segment of the Hirschon suite’s structure became “the other,” alive and different from the impassive resolution of the rest of the structure, alive and conscious and intensely responsive to the what might go on within that room’s walls that could have deep impact on perhaps silent members of the The New School’s community. “From my perspective, as a gay man, the record of both my response and vulnerability as a living being seemed critical in that space. In some ways, this piece claims a place in the room for me and others as conscience, as surrogate, as witness.”
Tony Whitfield
* Quoted from a press release issued by The New School, New York, January 30, 2007