A Conspicuous Twist of the Right Wrist: Gestures of Queerness in Contemporary Intermedia Art

The greatest expression/is precisely confined/to a conspicuous twist/of the right wrist/a twist of the right wrist.
– Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012)

He don’t comb his hair like he did before
And he don’t wear those dirty old black boots no more
But he’s not the same, somethin’ about his kissin’ That tells me he’s changed, know that somethin’s missin’ inside
(Somethin’s gone)
Somethin’ died
(It’s still in the streets)
His heart is out in the streets.
– The Shangri-Las, Out in the Streets (1965)

About six and a half minutes into Elizabeth Price’s eighteen-minute HD video The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), the detailed still images of the architectural features of a church choir – illustrated with what look like encyclopedia pages and detailed with architectural diagrams, the images occasionally punctuated by a sharp snap like a camera (more likely a thumb and a finger) or brief monochromatic colour washes – are invaded by the choral chants of the Shangri-Las’ 1965 hit single “Out in the Streets,” chants soon accompanied by a series of distorted videos of singers and backup dancers videotaped from a computer screen. Two separate texts flash across the screen, in which the “choir” of the Gothic church is textually transformed into the “chorus” of the girl band. With heightened emotional tenor, this juxtaposition produces a rupture, the solemn spaces in the still images punctuated by a contemporary pop ballad about a boy who can’t be tamed.

The greatest expression/is precisely confined/to a conspicuous twist/of the right wrist/a twist of the right wrist. This phrase is part of a longer passage that, through flashes on the screen, is gradually composed. I am thinking about the twist of the wrist, here intended to describe the synchronized gestures of the backup dancers, and how it also carries queer connotations: the limp wrist as cultural signifier of effeminacy, when the wrist falls limp and forms a ninety-degree angle; the twists of the wrists in the genre of dance known as voguing, with its rigid, angular, model-like poses.¹ The Woolworths Choir of 1979 can also be plotted along a trajectory of experimental film and video, notably Kenneth Anger’s experimental short film Scorpio Rising (1963), the first to incorporate a pop-music soundtrack, filled with similarly syrupy sweet songs in heavy contrast with the slow pans of leather-clad bikers. Price, the former vocalist for the 1980s pop band Talulah Gosh, has been quoted elsewhere as saying that she was “interested in pop music because it’s utterly irresponsible ... it’s loud, it’s hot, you can smell other people’s bodies, if you’re at a gig, you feel the bass in an embodied way ...”²

The conspicuous twist of the right wrist seems an apt metaphor for the tension between the subtle and overt gestures that play out in the works in TEMPERAMENTAL. Before even entering the gallery, the viewer is confronted with Mark Clintberg’s Hair (2012–ongoing), inkjet prints on newsprint of pre-existing posters of youthful hair models as they would have appeared in barbershop windows. The prints are responsive to light, and fade and discolour when exhibited, as have the original posters in their respective barbershop windows when exposed to the sun. The models in Hair could be actors in the 1960s and 1970s experimental and homoerotic films of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol – films with similarly terse titles (as is the case with the title of this exhibition) like Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Heat (1972) (the image of a young Joe Dallesandro on the poster for Trash serving as early inspiration for the show).

TEMPERAMENTAL imagines a genealogy between contemporary intermedia practices and post-war avant-garde experiments with sound, music, dance, movement, textiles, film, video, and collage, such as those undertaken at Black Mountain College, within Fluxus, and in the meeting of Minimalism and dance. As the above examples suggest, the exhibition nods not only to this earlier period of radical emancipation from governing forms of artistic expression, but also to the complex “open secret”³ of queer life and non-normative sexualities, as well as socialities and expressions of affect during the pre–gay liberation era. While artists like John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns explicitly subverted the artistic standards of the time, they simultaneously resisted the inscription of their work with personal (read: queer) meaning, articulating new ways of enacting, as well as expressing, refusal; regarding Cage’s “queer silence” as a potentially political act, art historian Jonathan D. Katz has written, “Silence made a statement through the absence of a statement. It constituted an appeal to the listener for a new relationship to authority and authoritative forms in music and – this is very much the point – surely in other arenas, too.”⁴ According to Katz, queer silence, in Cage’s work, was to be read not as a form of passivity, but as a strategy for “resisting the status quo without opposing it.”⁵

The point here is not to attempt to draw direct parallels between the old and the new but to consider ways in which contemporary art might be organized in relation or resistance to the formal, social, and political strategies of the post-war avant-garde (figures like Anni Albers, Joe Brainard, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Simone Forti, Ray Johnson, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Dieter Roth, to name a few), works in which the employment of sound, collage, textile, movement, and dance produce a radical update of an art of the everyday. However, in maintaining the exhibition’s conceptual tension, the term “temperamental” is also invoked for its historical usage as a euphemism for homosexual, conjuring the more brashly defiant practices of artists like Kenneth Anger, Charles Ludlam, Paul Morrissey, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, whose works more explicitly referenced the bodily, homoeroticism, sexuality, and emotions. Employing the metaphor of musical temperament, in particular, the dissonance created by compromising pure intervals of just intonation, TEMPERAMENTAL plays with aural and perceptual dissonance, both repeating and queering histories of exhibition practices in its experiments with the blend of sculpture, theatricality, phenomenology, and movement.

A work like Clintberg’s Quiet Disco (2013), a thirty-minute sound piece that replicates the experience of listening to a house (or apartment, more accurately) party from next door, is an example of how the work in TEMPERAMENTAL bridges these two poles. Installed in the glass vestibule opening onto the gallery, the work, with all parts – including record player, record, and speakers – visible, takes on the form of a listening booth. Depending on the level of traffic and attending noise in the gallery, Quiet Disco might, at any moment, be at perceptual odds with the environment that surrounds it. The work looks out onto the 2005 mirror works by the late Will Munro, which feature the names, screen-printed in neon pink, of various legendary punk and queer clubs and dance parties from the 1970s to the 2000s, such as Max’s Kansas City and Danceteria, not to mention Munro’s own dance party creation, Vaseline/Vazaleen. The space between the muffled sound of Clintberg’s Quiet Disco and the brash silence of Munro’s mirrors opens up like a dance floor, with an air of queer musicality, as well as theatricality, only heightened as spectators are invited to pull open thick brown-and-orange tie-dyed drapes that comprise Hazel Meyer’s installation diarrhea (2015), which runs the length of a small alcove space. Tugging on an intricately braided black curtain rod shaped like a whip that hangs in the gap between the drapes, the viewer is invited into a pink space that is like a body turned inside out, a body that doesn’t occupy, but forms, the stage, introducing concerns for the public and private processes of the body and calling to mind the Postminimalist abject.

Thinking about theatricality and the inherent queerness of these objects is inspired by moments in a now-fifty-year-old art history, in particular American Minimalist artist and theorist Robert Morris’s The Plywood Show, his 1964 installation at New York’s Green Gallery, which consisted of polyhedron forms made of grey-painted plywood, structures that were in dialogue with the dance experiments of Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer and other dancers whose work emphasized the body as a means of self-expression, and on pedestrian and everyday movements (structures that, in inviting phenomenological encounter, resulted in charges of “theatricality” by Michael Fried).⁶ TEMPERAMENTAL engages and re-articulates histories of movement/movements and the necessarily political dimensions of an art of the everyday. The spatial interruptions in TEMPERAMENTAL – works that force the viewer to sensorily experience the gallery in seemingly counterintuitive ways – are proposed as ways to queer histories of Minimalism through the literal application of the body onto the surfaces of structures.

Emily Roysdon’s Sense and Sense (2010) is a two-channel video installation made in collaboration with the performance artist MPA, who is shown both close up and at a distance as she “walks” on her side across a pavement made of interlocking duotone triangles. This is Sergels torg, Stockholm’s central public square, the site of all political demonstrations in the city. While the installation reflects Roysdon’s ongoing interest in the dynamic space between movement and movements (political and social), as well as the politics of public space, the work’s phenomenological dimensions, I would argue, introduce a compelling tension in thinking, as well, about a queer relationship to Minimalism.

Kim Kielhofner’s Black Book Project (2004–ongoing) is a series of notebooks that both chronicle, in collage form, the artist’s life over the course of a decade (the different brands of notebooks reflecting the artist’s geographic crossings over that period). But in addition to the ephemera of the everyday – the ticket stubs and museum pamphlets, collages of film stills and photobooth portraits – the thousands of pages that comprise the ever-expanding series double as sculptural objects, reminiscent of the obsessive accumulation and repetition of Yayoi Kusama; the immensity of the work derives in equal part from the sheer number of objects and the intricate construction of each page. Kielhofner’s foursquare (2011), a four-channel video installation, pushes and blends the boundaries of narrative film and video genres through the frenetic pacing of film and video fragments set to a collage of musical scores and dialogue. But just as notable is the work’s structural support, a four-foot-wide, six-foot-tall plywood cube that seems to directly mimic the structural aspirations of Minimalism, but here boldly applying the deeply cavernous worlds of the videos onto the surfaces of the otherwise Minimalist cube.

Just as Clintberg’s Hair satirically calls to mind the beautiful beefcakes of 1960s experimental film, Brendan Fernandes’s The Call (2014), a vinyl wall work mimicking a call for dancers, challenges the ideals of beauty as they coalesce on and around the dancer’s body. Further fragmenting the conventions of the strength and beauty of the classically trained body held in tension, Fernandes’s Still Move (2014), a set of six C-prints, transforms the beautiful muscularity of the dancer’s body into something of a formalist grotesque. taisha paggett and Yann Novak’s collaborative three-channel installation A Composite Field (2014) engages a similar desire to engage and amplify the politics of historically formalist mediums and the ways in which the employment of the body in modern and experimental dance might respond and mould itself to and against political and social realities. Combining concerns for presence, movement, documentation, and witnessing with 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 visible when the three videos are watched simultaneously. Novak’s ambient score (originally field recordings of the MAK Center’s Mackey Garage Top in Los Angeles), played at conversation level, and his manual manipulation of the lighting in each iteration, further sculpts paggett’s dramatic movements as she performs for an audience in the room with her, tangling and untangling from a man’s blazer, which, in many moments, envelopes her completely. The three screens are subtly washed with high-tone colours that call to mind both the West Coast engagement with Minimalism through the Light and Space movement (fitting, given that both paggett and Novak reside in Los Angeles) and the effect of these colour transformations as they wash over paggett’s clothing and skin.

Alexandro Segade’s off-site performance Boy Band Audition, which leads the viewer into the loud, hot space of the dance club, where, in the words of Price, you can “smell other people’s bodies” and enter into social communion in a deeply embodied way, is inspired in part by 1990s boy bands, but also by Segade’s interest in queer science fictions. With his brother Mateo performing DJ duties, Alexandro takes on the role of a choreographer, directing the audience through a series of actions in order to form a boy band that will inspire people to change the past and, subsequently, the future. But like the conspicuous twist of the right wrist, Segade’s call to social communion has broader implications for notions of queer futurity and alternate realities; it might be argued that all of the artists in TEMPERAMENTAL show a comparable engagement with a radical politics of form, both adhering to and deviating from their predecessors in the pursuit of both implicit and explicit performances and constructions, both material and conceptual, of alternative processes of world-making. Engaging histories of both intermedia art practices and contemporary queer aesthetics is intended to prompt a radical perceptual rearticulation of each via their proximity. TEMPERAMENTAL works to tease out the implicit and potential loudness of earlier histories and the deep and lasting influences of these practices on contemporary art. The tension between the implicit and explicit enactments of queerness – that conspicuous twist of the right wrist – is intended to prompt thinking about where the queerness of contemporary art resides.