That’s So Gay! The Review

by Paddy Johnson on July 13, 2010 · 14 comments

An image from the opening of That's So Gay on display through July 18th. Image via: That's So Gay flickr

Despite Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper’s unexpectedly long stay in Parliament Canadian culture still looks wildly liberal next to the U.S.  Take the TD Bank Canada Trust ads picturing a house hunting gay couple papering Toronto’s subways: I’ve not once seen a bank create a similar ad campaign in New York, a city so left leaning relative to the rest of the country that it’s often described by its inhabitants as “separate”.

For all the annoying “do-goodie” identity politics art I described last week, there are some very big upsides to a nation obsessed with fostering an inclusive culture. This was perhaps best demonstrated two weekends ago on Pride weekend, and event which sent the heavy beat of dance music throbbing as far as the ear can hear. I’ve never noticed the Pride Parade on the tip of all New Yorker’s tongues, but in Toronto, the entire city practically closes down for the event. It’s amazing and worth any travel to attend.

Amongst the many Pride-timed events I visited, That’s So Gay at The Gladstone fared best.  Appropriately described as a “cheeky re-appropriation” of a phrase meaning anything uncool, the show’s curator Sholem Krishtalka clearly writes of his conceit, “The exhibition assembles work that deals with the queer experience and is knowing, assertive and even aggressive about it.”

As it turns out, the queer experience is not one long line of Tom of Finland cocks and asses, though sculpture gets the short shrift in this show through its notable absence. Still, the show isn’t a stereotype of itself, which sadly is refreshing.

A slightly awkward space complete with hallways and tiny auxiliary show rooms, small to medium sized drawings, collages and photographs hang from the wall. Themes present themselves easily; Sharon Switzer’s Soft Pink Explosion, a digital rendering of a firecracker-cum-orgasm, and Logan MacDonald’s So Faggy Marilyn Monroe celebrate gay identity and culture. So does Kyle Tryhorn’s Ryan McGinley-meets hippy eco-commune, an aerial photo of a nude lying on a bed in the wilderness, but its reference is vaguely distracting.

Jim Verburg, Surface #1, 2006, Image via: That's So Gay flickr

Handle is about as graphic as this show gets, a photograph of two fists filling a red transparent rubber by Chris Curreri, though Jim Verburg, photograph of lithe youth underwater is similarly erotic. Humor is provided by Grant Heaps, a furry mustache on top of furry collaged paper and the strange, by Claire Egan. Hair faces do not make happy nudes.

In a small couch filled room at the front of the gallery hangs Anthony Easton’s photocopied reproductions of Jasper Johns Target images, each riddled filled with bullet holes. The shots were fired by friends from the notoriously conservative province of Alberta. The piece speaks to the ugliness within the culture of the right, but also suggests a trace of self-hatred. I suspect Easton may simply have been asking for the community to push past old legacies (Johns himself is gay), but you don’t put bullet holes in the work of another gay man without also bringing other issues to light.

Installation shot from the show That's So Gay. Memorial for Will Munro, Image via: AFC

The heart of this exhibition though rests at the opposite end of the gallery in a room Krishtalka dedicates to the now deceased artist Will Munro. A cornerstone of the Toronto queer community, the memorial includes a grid of Polaroids Munro shot of men in their underwear, and several mirrored pieces displaying printed gay symbols such as Ziggy Stardust. By the very nature of its materials the installation captures a man described by Krishtalka as a “perpetual common denominator of the city’s disparate scenes”.  The mirrors, Polaroids and Lori Newdick’s rooting photographs of the artist integrate the viewer, the artist and the gay scene. A deeply moving portrait, the memorial advocates for precisely kind of community Munro helped to build.

Tagged as: Anthony Easton, Grant heaps, Logan MacDonald, Sharon Switzer, Sholem Krishtalka, that's so gay

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  • http://www.pinkmoose.blogspot.com anthony

    patty:

    other issues i was brining to light:
    a) the homophobic erasure of queer discourse about Johns work. (see
    b) an extending and deepening of the violence that marks the bodies in the original targets
    c) issues of apportion, and copyright,
    d) the still extant concerns that surround form and function (if they are targets, and not pictures of targets, what are the y targetting, what are the implications of this)
    e) a semi-oedipal fury at the geneteel, often hidden, sometimes closeted quaility that marks much of Johns work.
    f) interest in absence and erasure, much of Johns and Rbergs work is about poking holes in things, in order for the light to come in.
    g) and in an interpersonal level–how do the aesthetics of the place of my birth infect my life here–i love alberta in a lot of ways, and the shooting thru is less of a fagbashing aspect–johns called these targets, and where I am from, targets are used for something.

    Thanks so much for the kind review. Hope this response does not seem churlish,

  • http://www.pinkmoose.blogspot.com anthony

    patty:

    other issues i was brining to light:
    a) the homophobic erasure of queer discourse about Johns work. (see
    b) an extending and deepening of the violence that marks the bodies in the original targets
    c) issues of apportion, and copyright,
    d) the still extant concerns that surround form and function (if they are targets, and not pictures of targets, what are the y targetting, what are the implications of this)
    e) a semi-oedipal fury at the geneteel, often hidden, sometimes closeted quaility that marks much of Johns work.
    f) interest in absence and erasure, much of Johns and Rbergs work is about poking holes in things, in order for the light to come in.
    g) and in an interpersonal level–how do the aesthetics of the place of my birth infect my life here–i love alberta in a lot of ways, and the shooting thru is less of a fagbashing aspect–johns called these targets, and where I am from, targets are used for something.

    Thanks so much for the kind review. Hope this response does not seem churlish,

  • http://www.pinkmoose.blogspot.com anthony
  • http://www.pinkmoose.blogspot.com anthony
  • http://www.artfagcity.com Art Fag City

    I’d consider the response churlish if the implication behind it is that I didn’t do your piece enough justice, but since many of these points seem connected to your own relationship with Johns, I’ll assume otherwise.

    Interestingly, I actually read the article you link to as part of my research on your piece. I suppose I should have linked that piece up with when I spoke of pushing past old legacies, but nobody’s perfect.

    Out of curiosity, in what way do you think copyright issues is made prevalent by this work? I thought about the possible implications of using reproductions as targets when I was writing about the piece, but since a practicality of making the work dictates reproduction of this nature, the issues of copyright and apportion seemed like a tacked on concern. For this reason, I also feared the discussion would feel like a forced attempt ride the wave of a popular contemporary art interest.

  • http://www.artfagcity.com Art Fag City

    I’d consider the response churlish if the implication behind it is that I didn’t do your piece enough justice, but since many of these points seem connected to your own relationship with Johns, I’ll assume otherwise.

    Interestingly, I actually read the article you link to as part of my research on your piece. I suppose I should have linked that piece up with when I spoke of pushing past old legacies, but nobody’s perfect.

    Out of curiosity, in what way do you think copyright issues is made prevalent by this work? I thought about the possible implications of using reproductions as targets when I was writing about the piece, but since a practicality of making the work dictates reproduction of this nature, the issues of copyright and apportion seemed like a tacked on concern. For this reason, I also feared the discussion would feel like a forced attempt ride the wave of a popular contemporary art interest.

  • http://www.pinkmoose.blogspot.com anthony

    Paddy:

    i think that most queer artists are appropriation artists, because they have to recast narratives from mainstream culture–so Rberg and Johns used newspaper, transfer prints, mimeograph and collage as a way of finding a haven for their bodies, and their sex. (as did in their ways, Twombly, Pierson, Serrano, David Wojnarowicz, Warhol, Jack Smith, etc etc etc) Being a queer artist is to figure out these competing, multi valent, often abusive signals.

    By using a historically minded appropriation of an appropriation, it is a way of recognizing that this narrative while heavily mainstreamed is still v. much a way of conveying (our) history. (Sholem’s agreeing to use this work, is a way of recognizing this naturalized samzidat form of communication–see Jon Davies review of Munro’s last show in Fuse this month, the Daryl Volcat print, Logan McDonald’s v. funny and v. angry anti-Andy Monroe piece, et. al)

    I often print, hang, and construct work via very mainstream forms. My photographs are printed by drugstores, for example. The pieces were photocopied at Grand and Toy, and they those big copy right stamps on the work. I could have printed them at home, or I could have gone to a couple of other shops that did not include the stamps–but if the piece was about how queer discourse becomes mainstreamed, and hidden, so it becomes a house of mirrors, then the state taking a fee for fair use, and indicating what was allowed and what was not allowed added something to some of the questions the work was posing–what is allowed, and what is forbidden.

    I know that digital work has become really fashionable of late, and so it might be cautious to be too fashionable, but those red stamps, and photo-copying them, were v. deliberate art historically minded choices.

  • http://www.pinkmoose.blogspot.com anthony

    Paddy:

    i think that most queer artists are appropriation artists, because they have to recast narratives from mainstream culture–so Rberg and Johns used newspaper, transfer prints, mimeograph and collage as a way of finding a haven for their bodies, and their sex. (as did in their ways, Twombly, Pierson, Serrano, David Wojnarowicz, Warhol, Jack Smith, etc etc etc) Being a queer artist is to figure out these competing, multi valent, often abusive signals.

    By using a historically minded appropriation of an appropriation, it is a way of recognizing that this narrative while heavily mainstreamed is still v. much a way of conveying (our) history. (Sholem’s agreeing to use this work, is a way of recognizing this naturalized samzidat form of communication–see Jon Davies review of Munro’s last show in Fuse this month, the Daryl Volcat print, Logan McDonald’s v. funny and v. angry anti-Andy Monroe piece, et. al)

    I often print, hang, and construct work via very mainstream forms. My photographs are printed by drugstores, for example. The pieces were photocopied at Grand and Toy, and they those big copy right stamps on the work. I could have printed them at home, or I could have gone to a couple of other shops that did not include the stamps–but if the piece was about how queer discourse becomes mainstreamed, and hidden, so it becomes a house of mirrors, then the state taking a fee for fair use, and indicating what was allowed and what was not allowed added something to some of the questions the work was posing–what is allowed, and what is forbidden.

    I know that digital work has become really fashionable of late, and so it might be cautious to be too fashionable, but those red stamps, and photo-copying them, were v. deliberate art historically minded choices.

  • http://www.artfagcity.com Art Fag City

    Reproduction rights are those of the artist, so the state isn’t taking a cut out of Johns’ work. Johns’ estate, which is far as I know is currently controlled by the artist himself, would receive a fee for the reproduction of the image should he request it. I just don’t see how this connection makes sense when the artist himself determines what is allowed and what is forbidden.

    Plus, while we’ve all seen mainstream media gloss over the sexual orientation of both Johns + Rauschenberg, the idea that a dominant concern in their art making was to subvert this false narrative — merely through the use of those materials — is a bit a stretch.

    I like your pieces in the show but I worry that there are some holes in the narrative you’ve presented here.

  • http://www.artfagcity.com Art Fag City

    Reproduction rights are those of the artist, so the state isn’t taking a cut out of Johns’ work. Johns’ estate, which is far as I know is currently controlled by the artist himself, would receive a fee for the reproduction of the image should he request it. I just don’t see how this connection makes sense when the artist himself determines what is allowed and what is forbidden.

    Plus, while we’ve all seen mainstream media gloss over the sexual orientation of both Johns + Rauschenberg, the idea that a dominant concern in their art making was to subvert this false narrative — merely through the use of those materials — is a bit a stretch.

    I like your pieces in the show but I worry that there are some holes in the narrative you’ve presented here.

  • Ben

    So what you do and don’t like about Toronto both had something to do with The Gladstone?

  • Ben

    So what you do and don’t like about Toronto both had something to do with The Gladstone?

  • http://www.artfagcity.com Art Fag City

    In this case yes but I also wrote about the Power Plant (that’s a don’t). I liked the MOCCA show, so I hope to write about that shortly.

  • http://www.artfagcity.com Art Fag City

    In this case yes but I also wrote about the Power Plant (that’s a don’t). I liked the MOCCA show, so I hope to write about that shortly.

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