Good Fetishism? Not really

 

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. 

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Critically representing gender issues from feminist, queer, and queer feminist views has been a focus of artists, philosophers, and theoreticians of art history and visual culture for more than a half century. The specificity of contexts, be they temporal and  geographical, or be they collective or individual life trajectories within a given place and time, guarantees the urgency of reframing, revisiting, and renegotiating those issues anew. In my artistic practice, I was involved with questioning the stereotypes of heteropatriarchal constellations in relation to male bodies and their embeddedness in power dynamics since my studies in the early 2000s. 

 

My practice, which was solely that of painting, was inspired by the visuality of classical Hollywood and Screen feminist film theory. However, experiencing an internal coming-out as a middle-aged person posed a set of fascinating questions on the redefinition of my artistic practice. 

 

Artists such as Adrienne Rich, Barbara Hammer, Anna Daučíková, or theoreticians such as Sara Ahmed who experienced a similar turning point in the middle of their lives, changed radically both their personal lives and their work which reflected this essential re-orientation not only towards the subjects of their romantic desires, but also to the complex subject of non-normative queer existence in social contexts where oppression functions alongside multiple axes. The departure from heterosexual life could be, among other metaphors, described with Sara Ahmed as that of re-orientation towards different life milestones, away from those which define the normalized (middle-class) life trajectories; from goals which  Lauren Berlant characterizes as increasingly unattainable even for normative subjects living under the precarity of neo-liberal economies. They are departures from straight temporalities, geographies,  and ways of life. Frequently, contemporary artists or thinkers who experienced this profound change of understanding one’s self have translated this experience into a substantial redefinition of their creative output at the level of both content and form.

 

The trajectory of the artistic questions I have been asking myself since the moment of queer re-orientation was that of expressing this state of existence adequately, avoiding the pitfalls of stereotypes and objectification. In fact, I posited this question as the central issue of my artistic research. At that time, I was still working solely with the medium of figurative painting, but during the creative process and particularly during my study of sources covering queer theory, feminism, and posthumanism, I stayed with the same question but was heading towards more varied media, solutions, and perspectives. 


The coming out of heterosexuality and heteronormativity constitutes the act of coming into queerness, which is  both an internal psychological process and a complex social process especially to the imagined “queer community” which has its own histories, subcultures, political issues,  clusters of topics, questions, and viewpoints sensitive for groups of people with different identifications (lesbian, gay, trans, non-binary, bisexual, etc.). Queer experience differs across generations, geographies, political views and situations, etc.  “Learning” one’s queerness, socializing oneself into it is a never-ending process of both sensitisation towards different perspectives (i.e. how can a cis bisexual woman understand a trans man, or any other variations and constellations) and opening oneself much more radically to understanding that people experience their body-mind relationships on a vastly broader scale than heteronormativity teaches us. Queer socialization entails at the same time the building of alliances, searching for model stories, histories, personae and artworks that are relatable to one’s personal experiences. Issues on which one focuses during the initial stages of coming into queerness (in middle age or early adulthood) might be different to those which come later. While fascination with different body experience or newly found gender expression may be the focus of an artist who has queerly re-oriented themselves recently, social and political issues that come along with queer existence come to the fore later as well. 

 
Depicting queerness through eroticism might be seen as one of the most obvious trajectories; after all, the heteronormative eye conceptualizes queerness through the lens of (perverse) sex. Queer people sometimes protest the hypersexualization of our subjectivities, which are externally frequently reduced to the sexual aspects of our lives. Much of contemporary queer art actually explore not the straightforward expression of non-normative desire, but the alterity of embodied experience and its liminal expressions (seen from a posthumanist perspective), queer sociality in its present precarity and utopian futurity, queer affects, traumas, and joys. 




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On the other hand, myriads of queer artists have explored radical forms of representing non-normative eroticims and sex positivity; to name a few: filmmaker Barbara Hammer, the Ridykeulouse artistic duo, the lesbian zine On Our Backs, visual artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan,  painters Jenna Gribbon or Amberra Wellman, visual artist Anča Daučíková, and many more.  Audre Lorde famously lauds eroticism as the core of creativity, source of strength, meaningfulness, and beauty necessary in the drudgery of struggle against heteropatriarchy and white supremacism. In interviews I carried out with queer people, I heard on several occasions about the need to reconstitute one’s erotic strength and subjectivity as a response to trauma that is a strategy of building resilience. 


The “good fetishism” that I chose to be the title of my dissertation project was a reference to texts of Laura Mulvey and 1970s  - 1980s feminist film theory which was speculating on the psychological mechanics of the gaze as it is inherent in the dominant forms of cinematic apparatus, building its arguments upon Lacanian psychoanalysis. The objectifying gaze that fetishizes a women character’s body within a fluent classical narrative form produced by mainstream consumer cinema and TV should be contested by radical feminist artworks which experiment with form and give up the eroticized representation of women as well. In fact, women (lesbian) directors and artists who were making films  and artworks even in the 1970s were exploring the dynamics of joyful representation of the erotic which was defying the pop, sexploitation mainstream visuals. Barbara Hammer, Ulrike Ottinger,  Chantal Akerman, Tee Corine - these were just a few artists who were also pioneers in showing lesbian desire through an experimental art form as well. However, since I knew from personal experience that lesbian women can also lovingly consume  images of 1940s film divas such 

as Rita Hayworth, Talulah Bankhead, Jane Russel, or Joanne Crawford, I was wondering whether the critique of objectification might not in some circumstances be too narrow, too puritan? Where would that leave me as a visual artist?


I did not want to give up the sense of camp which for me is more than an aesthetic: the mixture of flamboyance, exaggeration, embarrassment, and seediness had been dear to my artistic expression so far and I was reluctant to give up the mode of irony and parody which is inevitably connected with camp. Along with researching a body of literature (predominantly analyses of films through the lens of queer studies and theory), during the first two years of my exploration, I created a series of paintings and illustrated a collection of lesbian poems by Andrea Vatulíková.