.jpg)
Rudolf Schwarzkogler
Aktion 4 Sommer 1965 form Aktion Wein Portfolio
Gelatin Silver Prints
1965-1966
Gift of the Estate of Jay Chiat
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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
In 1969, when Rudolf Schwarzkogler died at age 29, a myth quickly developed that his demise was the result of self-castration as part of his “Aktion” works. This was not true, Schwarzkogler had not performed one of these notorious works i1965, four years before what appears to have been an accidental fall that ended his life. Along with Gunter Brus, Otto Muhl and Hermann Nitsch, Schwarzkogler defined Viennese Actionism, a movement, a movement characterized by grueling, often brutal body-centered performance that underscored the despair and disconnection of the Cold War era in Eastern Europe.
ReplyDeleteThe still images in this exhibition are from Swarzkogler’s 4. Aktion, of which Theo Altenberg writes, “In Schwarzkogler’s case, it is harder to imagine how his artistic practice might have evolved. Would he have become the monk of an unwritten Conceptual Art somewhere between Suprematism, philosophy of language, Tantric yoga and psychoanalysis?... Such speculations have been freshly fueled by the reappearance of a long-lost 8-mm film of Schwarzkogler’s 4. Aktion (4th Action) shot by Brus in late 1965 …. The film of 4. Aktion is a sensation fished from the waters of history. It contains the concentrated poetic mass of the language of objects and the male body as developed by Schwarzkogler. The film reel did not surface until the late 1990s, when the collector Philipp Konzett purchased Schwarzkogler’s estate from his partner, Edith Adam. Invited by the artist to be present at 4. Aktion, Brus quickly borrowed Muehl’s camera and brought it along. With Schwarzkogler’s consent, he filmed without being told what would happen or how to shoot it, with one exception: Brus recalls that Schwarzkogler did say that he was about to roll the papier-mâché ‘stone’ across the model Heinz Cibulka’s back and towards Cibulka’s head.” Altenberg later states that “Schwarzkogler’s work resonates with varying degrees of the victim-perpetrator relationship: he is a nurse, doctor, sadistic torturer, high priest, healer and, in the broadest sense, shaman…. While the other Actionists were committed to excess, to unknown and unconscious mental drives and to ecstasy, Schwarzkogler concentrated on ‘single-frame montage’ in the medium of photography. At the same time, he created sculptural events. Rather than using animals and their bodily fluids (blood, urine) as Nitsch did, Schwarzkogler makes mostly chemical substances and symbolic electric currents flow; he lights fires and dazzles with black mirrors…. Not until his final 6. Aktion (6th Action) did Schwarzkogler act as his own model. It’s logical that this action ends up dramatizing a process of healing and resurrection. In his subsequent work, consisting exclusively of drawings, texts and instructions, Schwarzkogler was interested in generating reality through language, in the sense of an extension of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, aiming purely for ‘art as life ritual’…. Many of his drawings reveal …the idea of art as a healing force. In this light, the rediscovered film reaffirms that Schwarzkogler, whose bisexual desires were unable to flourish in the bigoted petit-bourgeois atmosphere of his native Vienna, left behind an oeuvre of substance and intensity.”
Tony Whitfield
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI see firstly his beauty, and the impossibility of staging a certain masculine beauty. It is as if, at this stage in the evolution of the image, the boy can’t yet be the girl. He can’t be her in the way a Calvin Klein billboard of the boy is now just simply the girl, the figure of that which is supposed to be desire’s object, posed like living money next to the thing towards which its desirability is to be transferred – the commodity. None of that can be pictured yet. It can only come into being via a certain magical-surgical procedure, which cuts or ties or covers the eye and the agency of the body of the boy. These procedures fix within the frame that excess of coiled kinetics and co-opting gaze which prevent the male body from being the body of the girl, the body assigned to have none of these things but simply to be in its beauty. I see a certain getting-off on these constraints. The constraints gesture toward certain regimes of power and discipline, but as if they were chosen as props for some half-erotic scenario. As if the beauty of the boy as the girl could only be admitted to even exist if compelled to appear. As if this beauty could only be manifest once the head is severed, and where paradoxically even the head becomes a kind of erotic body, shorn of its ability to control a body.
Ken Wark