panel 5
Deviant Aesthetics and Gestures of Care: Reading Contemporary Visual Art, Film, and Performance
Chair: Jillian Hernandez
This panel joins scholar-artists who locate and examine cultural practices of care produced in spaces of gender, racial, and sexual dissidence.
Cannibalistic Cuts and Care: Enrique Chagoya, Candice Lin, and Yinka Shonibare
Leticia Alvarado
This paper groups contemporary artists – Enrique Chagoya, Candice Lin, and Yinka Shonibare – and follows shared aesthetic gestures characterized by the cannibalistic cut in mixed media collage and installation in order to offer a parallel cut from hegemonic avant-garde teleologies and therein offer a reorientation of the aesthetics of care. Their performative cut is mapped onto a political artistic Latin American tradition that mobilizes tropes of cannibalism (as in Brazilian anthropophagy), alive across an Asian diaspora, and opening out through the Black Atlantic to consider the shared specter of the barbaric that marks populations as less-than-human and deservant of colonization. In his work Chagoya’s line drawings intermingle with collage in arrangements of pre-Columbian images, popular culture icons, and doctored masterpieces of western art. Featuring US hemispheric iterations of European aesthetic traditions, the contemporary legacies of these traditions in the United States, and the colonial encounters that forged his birthplace, Mexico, Chavoya brings into relief the histories of global circuits of empire. Paralleling the aesthetic gesture that cuts across colonial traditions suggested by Chagoya, Shonibare’s haunting installations offer further sites of reflection on colonial encroachment. Shonibare’s installations present familiar compositions of famous 18th century paintings achieved with dynamically posed headless mannequins whose period clothing has been cut from African (Dutch wax-print) fabric. Bold and vivid in color and captured movement, the installations display the reliance of cultures of taste and distinction on the concurrent development of empires. The installation however, puts on display an aesthetic cut that dismembers the bearers cloaked in this tradition setting the scene for alternate organization. In her etching of the birth of nations and its matriarchies, Candice Lin evokes gendered and racialized specters of cannibalistic savagery. Navigating specters of white womanhood and traditions of servitude, she underscores the erotics of care and reveals them as reshaped by the cannibalistic. Together, these artists fill our visualscapes, highlighting circuits of empire past and present while exhibiting nuanced curative gestures facilitated by the performative cut.
Leticia Alvaradois is Associate Professor of American Studies at Brown University. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian, Ford Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. She is the author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2018) as well as numerous publications in academic journals, and exhibition catalogues including Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A, Firelei Baéz (ICA Boston), and Scientia Sexualis (ICA Los Angeles). Her current book project,Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation, received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant
A Gaze on Black Joy: Everyday Black Matter and Con-Artistry Theory
Chaz Antoine Barracks
This paper lays out my theory of con-artistry as a queer Black joy practice that claims relational and material abundance in the face of tropes of deviance and conditions of austerity. My paper draws on auto-theory and describes how media making can foment Black pleasure and institutional critique. “A Gaze on Black Joy” includes a discussion of the 2020 film Everyday Black Matter as a documentation of radical Black gathering in Richmond, Virginia. The film centers nuanced conversations about Black joy as critical practice and the subversive efforts some are willing to undergo to secure it. This work theorizes mundane experiences in Black life to recognize practices of care and joy passed down from Black women onto femmes and queers raised by Black women, who make the matter/ing of Black life something more than navigating survival and oppression.
Chaz Antoine Barracks (he/they) is an artist-scholar, mixed-media filmmaker, and host of Black Matter podcast. Chaz is invested in interdisciplinary research and a creative practice that centers Black joy and uses storytelling to bridge knowledge gaps in the things we seldom learn about in academe when it comes to Black life in America. Chaz is currently working on a book project entitled, Con-artistry as Black Joy, a multimodal project that uses autoethnography and media analysis to contextualize the intellectual contributions of Black queer femmes who live beyond the rule to secure joy by any means necessary.
High Maintenance: Radical Femininity as an Aesthetic of Care
This paper examines how cultural producers in the US are demanding care for vulnerable populations in a post-Trump context through feminine aesthetics. I argue that femininity has emerged as a politicized aesthetic strategy in the wake of increased public discourse on immigration, gender, and race-based violence. Cultural workers are redefining “high maintenance” to connote both a demand for care and a context of difficult social conditions. The term “high maintenance” is rife with negative feminized connotations. It is a phrase typically used to describe a vain, demanding, and calculating woman who requires considerable resources from a romantic partner. The denigration of high maintenance is steeped in gendered notions about women being and remaining undervalued providers of care and service. In high maintenance feminism, women refuse exploitation and demand care. Following the political and pandemic upheavals of the past several years in the US and sparked by how contemporary artists have responded to them by using signifiers of femininity, the term has assumed a new meaning that motivated me to posit it as a central category for interpreting recent cultural production. My paper extends high maintenance’s definition as “needing a lot of work to keep in good condition” to describe the strains placed upon vulnerable populations, and the considerable care work required to survive these strains. I will read works by visual artists and performers Yvette Mayorga, Pamela Council, Chaz Barracks, and City Girls. These artists are finding the aesthetics and tropes of femininity to be a rich site from which to critique existing forms of oppression and envision new realities. Although their works center on the experiences of marginalized communities, their popular culture vocabularies invite participation from wide publics.
Jillian Hernandez (she/her/ella) is a curator and scholar of gender and sexual politics in Black and Latinx cultural production. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment was published by Duke University Press and her most recent exhibition, Liberatory Adornment: Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, Kenya (Robinson), was on view in 2021 at the Flaten Art Museum. She is currently working on a second book project, High Maintenance Feminism: Tracing a Cultural Movement that examines how cultural producers are demanding care and value in a post-2020 context through feminine aesthetics. A public-facing scholar, Hernandez has launched the video podcast FEM STUDY on her YouTube channel and has published art reviews and culture articles for Refinery29, Intervenxions, and Latina magazine. She has recently contributed to the exhibition catalogues for Christina Quarles: Collapsed Time at Hamburger Bahnhof and The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida.
Doll Closets: Access Intimacy and Animacy in the iDollator Community
Amber Hawk Swanson
This paper emerges from my long-running involvement in and artistic collaborations with a community of silicone Doll-loving men known as iDollators, whose investments in the community range from advocacy for “Organik/Synthetik relationships” to an interest in living with Dolls as gender surrogates, and both embraces and critiques mainstream interpretations of iDollators as cis-masculine misogynist outsiders. Influenced by queer and trans cross-disability coalition building, this paper additionally considers Dolls as an embodiment of disability and, by extension, lingers in networks of care between and among iDollators and Dolls. Taking my own collaborative durational performance work as an object of study, this paper articulates my work’s relationship to collaborative and anti-extractive approaches to art-making and articulates how romantic pairings between iDollators and Dolls challenge contemporary understandings of consent. I do so using an excerpt of Doll Closet (2014), during which I constructed a replica of the secret room anonymous iDollator “Jesse” built in his home to hide his 1998 model Doll, Heather. Jesse called in to the livestreamed performance to provide guidance on manual operations and to discuss his relationship to a transfeminine spectrum and Heather’s role as a gender surrogate and psychic prosthetic. Jesse and I connected over our shared embodied experience of classed closetedness while also making legible to one another the skills we acquired in our respective blue collar neighborhoods as we were conditioned as the genders we were assigned at birth. Through a close reading of our conversation and of other collaborations, I argue that, while recent scholarship on iDollators has focused on the community engaging in antifeminist nonconsent, the access intimacy demonstrated by Jesse and others in the iDollator community is a learnable (and feminist) alternative to transactional consent formations.
Through performance, Amber Hawk Swanson’s work explores care, animacy, and desire as they function in the context of queerness and disability. Her complementary scholarly interests focus on investigations of enabling objects and actions; technologized, roboticized, and transpeciated bodies and selves; animacy and animal intimacy; and worldmaking in the online forums and livestream channels that have served as the primary platforms for her work. Hawk Swanson’s practice has embodied these concerns through a material and conceptual engagement with captive marine mammals, silicone Dolls, and networks of care among the community of silicone Doll-loving men known as iDollators. Hawk Swanson has exhibited internationally for the span of her twenty-year career, with recent venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), PS2 (Belfast, UK), Denny Gallery (New York, NY), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY) and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). Hawk Swanson is the Creative Director and one of three Co-Creators of The Harmony Show. She teaches in the sculpture department of Rhode Island School of Design and is currently a doctoral student in performance studies at Brown University.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman