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External News and Events

'Troubling Desire(s) in Art': Queer Symposium

The SHOUT festival draws together Queer Theorists and Practitioners to discuss 'Troubling Desire(s) in Art'. The symposium asks whether different conceptualisations of desire might find common ground through visual methods. Speakers Del LaGrace Volcano, Jonathan D Katz, Dominic Johnson, David Dibosa and Mandy Merck.

Saturday 14th November.

Birmingham City University Department of Art, Margaret Street. 09:30 – 16:30.

£5.00 (includes lunch)

www.getreadytoshout.org

tel: 0121 773 0633

Book tickets at: http://www.theticketsellers.co.uk/buy_tickets/events/?id=10008191&elId=1093&ref=btnfact

Abstracts

Jonathan D. Katz - ‘Art, Eros and the Sixties’

In the historical moment immediately before human differences were particularized, named, embodied and made over into what we now call identity, a single universal human capacity-Eros-was elevated to defining status and declared the ground for a wholly new politic of social liberation. As defined by one of its leading theorists, Herbert Marcuse, the political potential of Eros turned on its ability to free the mind through a return to the body and its disruptive pleasures. This talk uses the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the painting of Richard Hamilton, and the performance art of Carolee Schneemann-a gay man, a straight man and a straight woman-- to explore the politics of Eros from the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s. In this visual prehistory of the sexual revolution, my central claim is that, ironically, the highly self conscious attempt to erase signs of categorical gender and sexual difference in fact engendered the very social categories like feminist and queer that now obscure its formative and foundational role.

Biography: Jonathan D. Katz, a scholar of post war art and culture from the vantage point of sexual difference, is Director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the Univerity at Buffalo and the Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the Courtauld Institute this year. Katz was the founding director of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, and served as the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the US, at City College of San Francisco. He co-founded the activist group Queer Nation, San Francisco, and founded the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association, and the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco. It was at City College in 1989, that Katz founded and chaired the very first Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United States. Katz is currently researching the book from which this talk is drawn, as well as curating two groundbreaking exhibitions: the first,
entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, will open at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in October 2010 as the first queer exhibition at any major American museum.

The second exhibition, entitled Art/AIDS/America will open at the Corcoran and Tacoma museums a year later.

Dominic Johnson - 'Intimacy and Risk: Performance After Operation Spanner', which is part of a chapter that I have been working on.

Since the 1980s, live art has been exemplary in its pursuit of volatile bodily experiences. In work by Kira O’Reilly, Franko B, Ron Athey, Mehmet Sander and others, the body is put at risk in situations that stage singularly difficult intimacies. I argue that the recent social and cultural history of the UK has involved idiosyncratic crises, which have crucially influenced the development of live art. In the culmination of Operation Spanner, in 1990, 15 men received sentenced for carrying out consensual sadomasochistic acts. By focusing on this notorious (yet historically marginal) legal event in some detail, with reference to developments in recent visual art and performance, this paper explores the cultural politics of British live art, arguing that its impact is informed by contingencies at both the local and global scale.

Biography: Dominic Johnson is a Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. He is the editor of Franko B: Blinded by Love (2006), and Manuel Vason: Encounters (2007), and publishes widely on the cultural politics of performance and visual culture. His performances have been presented in the UK at National Portrait Gallery, SPILL Festival, Chelsea Theatre and Gay Shame (London), Fierce! Festival (Birmingham), and National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), and internationally, in Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, France and the US.

Mandy Merck -  ‘Unnatural Women: Sarah Bernhardt, Alice Mitchell and a Troubling Story of Celebrity’

The French actress Sarah Bernhardt stands at the threshold of modern celebrity culture. Her career can be charted by the development of the mass media, from the Nadar photographs that purvey her beauty as a young demimondaine in the 1860s to her appearance as the cinema’s first Hamlet in the dueling scene recorded for the Paris Exposition of 1890. Unlike her characters, typically figures of thwarted desire and final act death scenes, Bernhardt became a model of female success. In 1892 she sought out a woman of nearly equal celebrity, the lesbian murderess Alice Mitchell, whose sensational story was compared to Bernhardt’s own melodramas when the actress tried to visit her in a Memphis jail during her American tour. Both were ‘wild, bold, willful’. Both were perceived as unnatural women and both saw their departures from the norms of femininity turned into commodified spectacles. But Bernhardt owned and (to a remarkable extent) controlled the display of herself and Mitchell did not …

This presentation will feature still and moving images of both women.

Biography: Mandy Merck is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her last book was ‘Hollywood’s American Tragedies’ (Berg, 2007) and her next is ‘Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex’ (Palgrave, 2010).

David Dibosa - 'Eye-to-Eye: the transmissibility of the black male gaze. The photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst’

Homoerotic encounters between black men and white men have sometimes played an unacknowledged role in contemporary black visual cultures. The relationship between the African-born black photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode and his white English partner, novelist Alex Hirst, provides an exception to the rule. It has been recognized that the two men collaborated on key artworks. How that collaboration worked and what its implications were demands further exploration.

In this paper, David Dibosa generates an understanding of Fani-Kayode’s work and its pivotal role in the development of contemporary photography. The exchange of Fani-Kayode’s ideas with Hirst suggests that complex understandings of black culture are not only shared between black peoples but can also be disseminated to those who live outside contemporary black experience.

Del LaGrace Volcano - ‘Hermaphroditic Desires and the Impossible Dream’

How are intersex bodies and lives represented in art and culture? What accounts for the disparity in status between the hermaphrodite in art and literature and the intersexed in contemporary society? As the current gender trouble (Caster Semenya) in the Olympic Sports Association demonstrates we are no closer to consensus on what constitutes the "truth" of the sexed body than we have ever been and perhaps this is a good thing.