CALL FOR ART (APRIL 28): "After" Against Nature

For an Exhibition in 2014:

Call for Art for Major Exhibition (Emerging and Established Artists:

Deadline for Art Images + CV --> June 1, 2014

LOOKING FOR EMERGING, OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM, AND ESTABLISHED ARTISTS FOR A SHOW (LOOKING BACK, FROM THE PRESET) ON AIDS/HIV, SEX/GENDER, SEXUALITY, QUEER POLITICS & AIDS ACTIVISM (AESTHETICALLY), LGBT IDENTITY POLITICS, QUEER COMMUNITIES, AND QUEER KINSHIP(S).
THIS IS FOR A MAJOR EXHIBITION IN 2014. THE EXHIBITION IS A RE-EXAMINATION OF AGAINST NATURE: AN EXHIBITION BY GAY MEN (curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins at LACE in 1989): http://welcometolace.org/shop/publications/against-nature-a-show-by-homosexual-men/ THE EXHIBITION IN 2014 WILL BE CALLED "AFTER" AGAINST NATURE: 25 YEARS LATER.

PLEASE EMAIL ONE to TWO IMAGES + CV TO ROBERT SUMMERS, PhD @ afteragainstnature@gmail.com BY JUNE 1, 2014

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, THEN PLEASE EMAIL: afteragainstnature@gmail.com

Proposal for Exhibition:

"After" Against Nature: 25 Years Later (revisiting L.A.C.E.'s Against Nature), 2014, Curator: Robert Summers, e: afteragainstnature@gmail.com -- for info and submissions


The proposed exhibition "After" Against Nature will be a critical re-staging and a re-thinking of an earlier exhibition held at L.A.C.E. in 1989. It was titled Against Nature: A Show by Homosexual Men, which takes part of its title from Joris-Karl Huysmans seminal novel, and which was curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins; it was held from January to February of 1989. Both curators are supportive of this re-exhibition, and a number of the exhibition's original artists are willing to re-show their work (not included as artists requested). In addition to “After” Against Nature, a one-day conference will consist of various discussions of "gay” and “queer” art, “gay” and “queer” aesthetics, and AIDS and activism in the art world—then and now. There will also be an artists’ talk, and a catalogue similar to the original one.

Overall, Cooper and Hawkins’ Against Nature was a response to several interlocking political events that took place in the 80’s: the Reagan and Bush presidencies, the rise to power of the "Religious Right," legal discrimination against homosexuals (e.g., Bowers vs. Hardwick), the backlash against art (the “culture wars”), and, of course, the AIDS/HIV epidemic—with the murderous government non-response. The specific aim of Against Nature exhibition was to look, specifically, at artworks by "gay male artists" and how they reckoned with sexual identity and desire that was intertwined with AIDS/HIV, and, in general, how gay men were re-presenting themselves, their community, and their desires. The implied audience was gay men, gay artists, and their allies.

With these histories, theories, and political systems and trajectories in mind, as well as examining the concerns of younger gay artists—and also, importantly, all non-gender conforming and sexually other artists—over the past 25 years, the proposed exhibition "After" Against Nature asks: How would the artwork of the past be (re-)read in and for the "present"—and alongside current artwork that reckons with sexuality, gender and AIDS/HIV politics and activism? Has queer and trans theory changed the way art participated in identity politics? Does the most significant aspect of “gay art” still revolve around, as the original curators argued, "sexual desire [that] informs, distances, and empowers the recent history of art made by guys like us?" Do we still believe that art made by "guys like us" contains the intentions, identities, and desires the artists? Do we now read this as, important then, but exclusionary now? In other words, are the identity politics that framed Against Nature "mean" anything of significance today? What has changed, and what has remained? Finally, is a "gay aesthetic" and “gay art” now understood as theoretically naive?

I believe that by re-staging Against Nature as "After" Against Nature, we can re-open the artworks interpretations and assumptions in the original exhibition to what may have been unknown and unseen. Overall, I hope that by repeating, with a difference, Against Nature this new exhibition will surface historical blind-spots—not by scolding or fixing, but rather by adding to the necessary discourses and arts that aided in the emergence of queer theories, queer feminism, and what we may mean now by “gay” art, as well as “queer” art and public practices. Furthermore, the re-staging of the original exhibition will not be a repeating the "true" meaning of the original curators' “intentions” and the various artists' artworks, but rather art's untimely power: its power to disrupt the past and present. This will be an exhibition without conclusion or prescription: it will be a “producer exhibition”: allowing an every expanding discourse and production of arts. Finally, this re-staging will not be "against nature", which already participates in a certain closed binary system: the unnatural against the natural and the cultural against the natural; rather, "After" Against Nature will be, indeed, “after” (“post”) the historical phase of belief in the natural of any kind for the art(ifice) and fabricated, and “after” that is "for" becoming-queer, becoming-historical, becoming-art, and the queer deconstructive practice of welcoming the future—hence, other exhibitions that will add to this one.

As a postscript, I believe this exhibition to be extremely valuable, given the silence around issues concerning AIDS/HIV, sex/gender, and non-normative sexualities (especially practiced by people of color). With an explosion of HIV infection by the 20-something group, and the historical marginalization of discourses around (sexually) political art work in the art world (and its institutions at large) make this exhibition both necessary and timely. With the production of a panel and an artists’ talk will aid in other knowledge productions, and with the production of an affordable catalog, which copies will be donated to various gay/lesbian archives, and AIDS/HIV cultural institutions, such as Visual AIDS and The Body, various knowledges will be circuated, and finally, with the artwork as public practice by an artist such as Camilo Godoy, will give info on AIDS/HIV in “high-risk” spaces—such as gay bath house and clubs.

Foucault’s Laugh: A "Queer" Tactic Before Queer



“The Divine Comedy of [life] means we can retain the basic right to collapse into fits of laughter … an unexpected laughter which shame, suffering or death cannot silence." —Deleuze, Foucault, 25

In a photograph for The Advocate in 1982, Foucault is wearing a back, leather jacket, and he is taking about S/M (later he would specifically discuss fist-fucking) and theorizing on “inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of the body.” In France, he is wearing a turtleneck with a blazer, and he is lecturing on a hermeneutics of the self, a care of the self, and an aesthetics of existence—which is living and creating life as art and developing new modes of resistances and relations. This isn’t, as some have wrongly argued, Foucault’s “return” to the Self, the Individual, but rather a new way to look at and resist power, as well as a re-orientation and re-commitment to the forgotten Delphic Code: “care for thy self”—as opposed to “know thy self.” At both places he is joyous: smiling and laughing like a little boy who found new toys (for him, men’s fists, Crisco, and Greek and Roman texts). In both spaces of articulation, he is ecstatically articulating, exploring, and expanding upon his post-Discipline and Punish theories on power—now with more future oriented goals (but always without mandates, truth, blueprints) of creating resistances and life-styles (read: aesthetics) in relation to his re-readings of Ancient texts that opened him up to bios and aesthetics (not metaphysics), and creative lines of flight, which are tied to the histories and counter-memories of male-to-male sexual relations and friendship, as too the immediate vibrancies and virtualities of contemporary homosexuality; he articulates new inventions with the body/self: one can say an “updated” Delphic code of “(re-)invent your self.”

It is disappointing (but not surprising) that many philosophers, theorists, and historians have refused to explore Foucault’s ideas as a philosophizing through the body that were aided by his experiments with LSD and beautifully perverse pleasures—both of which he would indulge in while in San Francisco in the late seventies and early eighties. Without a doubt, he was performing the life of a “notorious man,” the “outcast,” the “criminal,” the “mad man” (the bodies/selves of his earlier works). Eventually, like so many explorers of the body, he came down with a “cancer” that, as the story goes, was nothing more and nothing less than the wrath of God—and one only for a select few. Foucault said, “A cancer that only gay men get!” He laughed at the idiotic mentality and the insipid and dull Christian-Euro-American moralism that fueled it (Eribon). He was right to laugh. His laugh, in this case, was a refusal of the Christian take-over and suppression of an aesthetics of existence and the invention of new modes of living in a vibrant word—instead of a religiousity that promoted ressentiment and damnation of the other: those godless fags. He laughed at the thought of a curse from God. He was performing a modern-day “mad” Nietzsche who knew the art of laughter.

It has been said that Foucault’s laugh, by those who knew him, was so loud in its bursting forth that it was like that unfurling of an ancient affect, and a perverse, mad, cunning joy in the form of noise (read: disruption). It was the kind of exploding laughter that would slice through conversations—erupting and rupturing and making heads turn: “its own exorbitant fist-fucking filled with exhalation and exaltation;” and “it was not the first, or even the last laugh, but the one that intrudes, unexpectedly” (Ricco). And in the eighties, like so many after him, there was laughter at the so-called punishment from the Divine, the damnation of the flesh and of acts, an interdiction against exploring the porous body with anonymous and multiple others. Foucault, much to the chagrin of many a gay and queer historians and theorists, neither wrote nor spoke about gay cancer, GRID, or, as we call it now, AIDS; rather, he laughed, and it is a laugh that can still be heard in dark alleys, sex clubs, unlit parks, public restrooms, and parked cars (and not too few hotel rooms after a “gay marriage”) today. Simply stated, laughter against moralism and power—be this power bio or religious (usually both).

Years after his (political) death, ACT-UP and Queer Nation would use humor to critique and short-circuit the moralisms of the church and/as state: placards read: “I am a shameless cocksucker!” “Wrap Your Candy!” and various kiss-ins and the continuation by many to explore anonymous and multiple sex acts. In laughter, sex continued as a joyous act, a refusal to power and its corollaries, and, what I call, a queer aesthetics of existence. Of course, there was rage and grief and an ever-widening array of affects, but it is laughter (rooted in joy) that I think we sometimes forget; we sometimes do not remember it as a refusal to power—which is such a gay-performative tactic: Laughing! Why is it that rage is privileged over joy? Yelling over laughing? Why not performatively reiterate Foucault’s laugh? Practice it and learn it, like so many of us do with his written work? And also, let us not forget that many of his books are filed with a joy, a laugh, a happy resistance to the matrices of power. Indeed, we may otherwise read and hear Foucault as doing a different, profound, and affective performative so that we too may play an-other, embodied enactment: laughter. I argue, through Foucault, that laughter can be a brilliant antidote to undermine the viruses of power and moralism. “Laugh, I tell you!” So, why only promote rage? Why only remember the anger? Is this not a kind of ressentiment—especially here and now? Why not joyously engage in the “sweetness of the fuck”—and laugh as we cum together (Haver)? Why not quote and think about the hilarious poems, essays, and books by people with AIDS in the eighties and nineties Celebrate what is under the “pinkwashing” or called “uncritical” by certain “queer” academics and activists! Why not say, “Fuck well, my dears, and laugh!” Why not sing “Married or poly-amorous, who cares the form, both can be restrictive in different lights, so let you porous body do what is wants to!”—a queer kind of Spinozism, an affectivity “materialized” by open mouth, showing teeth, and spastic (orgasmic?) vocal cords?
I think, in this era of homonormativity (which is not an entirely new phenomena—it is older than Stonewall) and the critiques by “radical queers” (as if “radical” was inherently progressive and political; it can be easily re-deployed to promote the most restrictive forms of law and order—and also half the time it is utterly boring and uncreative, but ironically in the name of “radicality”). Indeed, homonormativity and “radical queer” activism act righteously and seriously (“but, why so serious?”). I suspect, following Foucault, that it may do us well to remember to laugh—and one that is a loud, indecorous, sweaty, fleshy performance in the face of it all. Laugh like Foucault—and in doing so, perhaps, disrupt law and order and also enact a “queer differential with a difference”—as opposed to all the dullards on both sides of the binary that makes up the debates in gay culture, queer theory and studies, and current activisms and arguments from “gay marriage” to AIDS activism and beyond. I hope that all of the beautiful, perverse creatures that Foucault surfaced drown out the droning on with laughter! Finally, for now, I simply want to surface, but to be discussed at a later time, the necessity of Foucault’s laugh with what Sianne Nagai calls “stuplimity”—and see how an-other queer tactic, one engaged in joyous laughter as it mingles with a “sublime” stupidity (like when one is fucking, madly), may be of importance to escaping the binary machine that is dominating the discourses around gay or queer issues in Euro-America. (End of part 1)

— Robert Summers, PhD