RE/GENDERED
CURATED BY LAURA CASTAGNINI
PRESENTED BY MIDSUMMA
You’ve got your mother in a whirl, ‘cause she’s
Not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.
Hey babe, your hair’s alright
Hey babe, let’s stay out tonight
(David Bowie, “Rebel, Rebel”, 1974)
Re/Gendered is an exploration of the ambiguous space ‘in- between’ gender and the
way it can be visualised by contemporary artists. Inspired by Judith Butler’s notion that
gender should be considered as an innately ‘unstable’ construct, Re/Gendered aims to
subvert or ‘trouble’ existing gender categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ identity.
Gender, as opposed to biological sex, is a social construction visually signified primarily
by costume and hair. The artificial nature of these signifiers is illustrated playfully
by 4evamore, the ‘all girl boy band’ whose tongue- in- cheek performances parody
clichés of masculine stereotypes enacted by male pop bands. Lineage of the Divine, by
Monika Ticachek, explores feminine construction and the impossibility of perfection
using the body of famous transvestite Amanda Lepore; “a living breathing pin-up, her
gender ambiguous, however obvious that no one could be born in that body.” 1 Gerard
O’ Connor and Marc Wasiak’s photographs of the late drag queen Vivien St James
pay homage to the role of fashion in drag culture, yet also suggest an obsession with
celebrity in the construction of femininity.
PLATFORM ARTISTS GROUP INC.
DEGRAVES ST SUBWAY(CAMPBELL ARCADE)
EXHIBITION RUNS: 25 JAN - 6 FEB 2010
OPENING NIGHT: 6-9PM MON 25 JAN
HOURS: MON - FRI 7-7 AND SAT 9-5
WWW.PLATFORM.ORG.AU
Re/Gendered brings together a number of high profile
international and Australian artists in a group exhibition
that celebrates the notion of fluid or ‘unstable’ gender.
These artists, including Monika Tichacek (Sydney), Tejal
Shah (India), Jake Wotherspoon (Melbourne), Drew Pettifer (Melbourne), Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore & Anastasia Zaravinos (Sydney), Liam Benson (Sydney), 4evamore
(Melbourne), Michelle Tran (Melbourne),
Gerard O’Connor and Marc Wasiak (Melbourne), all aim
to transgress and blur the boundaries of gender
performance. Often using drag as a technique to destabilise identity, these diverse artists disrupt and subvert
the traditional binary system of gender. In turns joyful,
disturbing, and deliberately ambiguous, these artworks
expose the theatricality involved in our everyday performance of gender roles.
The Opening Night includes queer drag performances
from guests including Mzzz Erin Tasmania, 4evamore,
Adonis, Agent Cleave, Godzilla and Mummy Complex.
Hair as a signifier of gender is a concept explored by many artists in Re/Gendered. In
Fiona Jake Wotherspoon presses real hair against the two-dimensional chin of female
portraits, repeatedly attempting to merge a masculine signifier with the female body.
Liam Benson emulates the signature hairstyle of Carrie Bradshaw from ‘Sex and the
City’ in his homage Thank You Carrie, which explores the affinity the male artist finds
between himself and this female character, despite their differing biological sex. Drag
Acts, a collaboration between Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore and Anastasia Zaravinos,
was originally inspired by the Christian story of Saint Wigerfortis, the martyr saint who
grew a beard overnight in order to deter the main she was promised to marry. Their
video displaying a lone, faceless character dancing alone in a hallway juxtaposed with
glamorous tinsel curtain confuses theatrical spectacle with darker and more meditative
moments of drag.
The artworks in Re/Gendered work to unsettle or ‘destabilise’ the viewer’s own sense
of gender identity. In their video Trans-, Tejal Shah and Marco Paulo Rosso present
themselves simultaneously crossing the border from one gender to its opposite through
the addition and subtraction of facial hair, makeup and jewellery. The categories of
male and female are blurred and transformed, unsettling the viewer’s recognition
of an original gender. The boundaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the human body are
disturbed by Drew Pettifer’s series Fluid in which he has poured viscous black gloss
paint over photographs of the male nude to obscure the subject’s genitals. The resulting
simultaneous eroticism and abjection of the body works to invokes a confused desire
in the viewer. Michelle Tran’s uncomfortable photographic arrangement of sexually
suggestive domestic imagery alongside a portrait of a Vietnamese transgendered subject
is similarly unsettling in its ambiguity. The work refuses to conform to both photographic
and gender conventions thereby opening up a liminal or ‘in- between’ space.
TROUBLING GENDER
In Gender Trouble Judith Butler assembled an argument
that the imposition of the sex binary of male and female
is an habitual and violent presumption about what
constitutes a legitimate life – and a legitimate body. It is important to note that while framed in a queer context, Re/Gendered is an exhibition
of artworks that engage with queer theory, rather than an exhibition of queer artists. The
exhibition refuses to restrict the concept of gender fluidity to a homosexual subculture.
Its presentation within a public space insists that issues of gender should not be hidden
‘behind closed doors’; the possibilities opened up by queer theory are presented as
something than every person passing through the subway can choose to embody or
‘engender’.
Butler described the anxiety that arises when bodies do
not comply with the strict male female binaries of sex (as
bodily) and gender (as cultural – what we do). This anxiety
stems from it not being possible with any certainty to as
she puts it: “read the body that one sees.” Laura Castagnini
Butler turns conventional thinking on its head. Rather
than asserting the biological origins of sex and the cultural
sources of gender Butler argues that it is the compulsory
normative nature of heterosexuality that demands that
the sexes must be determined at birth. 1. Monika Ticachek, Artist statement, 2004
The naming of a boy or a girl is the manner in which
this originates and is perpetuated: without this binary
there could not be heterosexuality, no traditional
marriages between a man and a woman. Butler refers
to the imposition of these sex binary norms and their
perpetuation from birth onwards as performativity – sex
and gender are performed on us – not by us. Naming is not always reductive and can be a powerful
political tool: naming the love that dare not speak its
name, naming the wrongs that are too often silenced ...
but naming can only do such much – words do not always
exist and if they do their meaning can be weighed down
by historical associations. Once meaning congeals even concepts like “queer” are no
longer guaranteed to have an ongoing liberatory meaning
– and the manner in which meaning congeals is not
always, or perhaps ever, ours to determine.
Front Image: Liam Benson Thankyou Carrie, 2009, Digital Pegasus
print on metallic.
Clockwise from top: Drew Pettifer, Fluid, 2009, Type c print and acrylic
paint. Michelle Tran, Vinh, 2009 Inkjet Photo (Courtesy of the artist
and Lindberg Contemporary Art). Tejal Shah / Marco Paulo Rolla,
Trans-, 2004 – 05 (Courtesy of the artists and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York). Monika Tichacek, Lineage of the Divine, 2002, Video
installation (Courtesy of the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery,
Melbourne). 4evamore, 2008, CD Poster. Gerard O’Connor and Marc
Wasiak, Home-maid, 2008, Digital photograph. Jake Wotherspoon,
Fiona, 2009, Inkjet print, hair, glass, wood. Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Anastasia Zaravinos, Drag Acts, 2008, video still.
Special thanks to all artists involved in Re/Gendered, to Din Heagney,
Rachel Feery, Erin Tasmania, Anthony Cleave, Taylor Kendall and David Donald, Kate MacNeill, Leon Van De Graaff, Jessie Scott, Ed Gould,
Anna Buchanan, Theresa Harrison, Roberta Rich, Tai Snaith, Anusha
Kenny, Angela Brophy and Molly from Midsumma.
Catalogue Design: Lara Thoms
The visual offers a way of presenting that which is not
yet named, not yet claimed by language and congealed
in meaning by prior use. Imaging offer the possibility of
undoing the work that language does on us and to us –
allows us to be in a state without names. Imaging plays a role in this performativity of sex and
gender – and can also disrupt these presumptions. Images
that resist the primacy of two sexes, or that refuse to
present resolved, unitary identities can unsettle the
repeated practice of sexing and gendering us all. Unstable
images, images that confuse and confound us can be
a potent tool - refusing the viewer the opportunity to
impose her/his own identity categories upon the work. Butler presents the contingency of identity as lying
at the heart of the political potential of her theory of
performativity, as it enables identity to become “a site
of permanent openness and resignifiability.” In this
framework, an artwork that presents a viewer with an
experience of a disidentification is a truly political act. Dr Kate MacNeill