Queering Sex is a performance and video exhibition that features the work of artists who are dealing with gender and sexuality. This cross-generational, trans-historical video program explores sex and sexuality via ideas and actions related to performance, and thereby highlighting a relationship between performativity and identity. The exhibition includes the participation of over 40 artists from Los Angeles, New York, and abroad.

A word from co-organizer and artist Kathryn Garcia:

Nowadays everything is queer; there are very few new frontiers of queer-dom yet to be explored. Probably because we’ve been there already. Masculinity, femininity yeah we got that; we know the two from top to bottom, left to right, up down all around, and from both sides. Men adopt the feminine, women adopt the feminine, men adopt the masculine, women adopt the masculine – and now we’ve finally gotten to the point where we are adopting children. Milk won the Oscar, James Franco kissed Sean Penn and probably Klaus Biesenbach as well or so the rumor goes. The Kids are All Right is all anyone could talk about for a while (although the film retreats safely back into heteronormative stereotypes). Until A.L Steiner dropped the bomb and shot a Community Action Center art “porn” and showed it at a Chelsea gallery, then THAT was all anyone could talk about. AA Bronson curates a “queer ” Film Series at MoMA with no womyn in it and dykes start grumbling, then we have the queers fighting amongst themselves for inclusion and so on and so forth, a not-so-welcome throwback to the F.H.A.R . To make a very long story short – we’ve made some progress, we’re doing it – we’re here and we’re queer. But perhaps the only thing queer about being queer at this point is the actual word “queer” and what does that mean anymore anyway when uh, it’s all supposedly okay now?!! The kids are all right, let’s go bare back in the mountains — We’re mainstream folks! G A S P — Normalcy oh N to the O. PANIC — Should dykes start fucking men and queens vice versa to break out of the neat little categories we’ve been placed in (or created for ourselves) and regain our queer-NESS? Because at this point with all of the stereotypes in place, a queer fucking the opposite sex is what really seems queer. The point is what we’re doing today is no longer just queer (yes there’s a little bit of that ) but let’s be honest, queer has become so prevalent that even my straight friends qualify. What we are as a whole is POLY: meaning more than one, and that’s really all we’ve ever been, because honestly it’s about inclusiveness, not separation, not binaries, we’re not Queer because they’re Normal, to us it is all valid (as long as it’s dirty). So we hope that you will join us at Human Resources to explore the multifarious meanings of the word SEX.

Sincerely,

KG

AMAZING PERFORMANCE LINE-UP:

June 24   FINE ART UNION (Norway)

June 25   MATT GREENE (Los Angeles)

                TALL PAUL

                 U.S. Premiere of “9 Days of Cry Out” by TOSHINORI TANAKA

June 26   SPHINX (New York)

July 2      DAWN KASPER (Los Angeles)

PLUS MANY MORE SURPRISES and VIDEOS by:

Theo Adams, Skip Arnold, CHOKRA, Coco Dolle, Zackary Drucker, Juan Pablo Echeverri, Fine Art Union, Gordon Flores, Kathryn Garcia, Paul Gellman, Katy Grannan, Wynne Greenwood, David Jones, Dawn Kasper, Brian Kenny, Rosalie Knox, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Lars Laumann, Bruce La Bruce, Danielle Levitt, Lovett/Codagnone, Manon, Nadja Verena Marcin, Lucas Michael, Slava Mogutin, Tameka Norris, ORLAN, Maria Petschnig, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Hunter Reynolds, Natalie Rodgers, Michael Rudnick, Ira Sachs, Rafael Sanchez, Carolee Schneemann, Scottee, Michael Sharkey, Jack Smith, Matthew Stone, Toshinori Tanaka, Tobaron Waxman, Marnie Weber, Samuel White, Martha Wilson, Rona Yefman… and more!

Queering Sex considers how artists across generations are using sex as a way to understand and explore what lies at the core of one’s identity. Among the works included are a select group of videos created during the sexual revolution of the 1970s and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s- both extremely significant decades that propelled the advent of identity and queer politics. We are intent on bringing together a disparate group of artists to open up the critical and institutional discourses surrounding these ideas. Instead of proposing one strict agenda, the exhibition’s inter-generational and cross-cultural approach allows there to be room for numerous points of view. Inherent to the very nature of the content, oftentimes the works in this exhibition directly or indirectly challenge normative binaries, patriarchal institutions and other systems of control that consciously or unconsciously affect us.

The title of the exhibition is meant to expand upon queer notions of sex and challenge the idea of queer vs normal. For years, the word could not have been used without derogatory connotations. Even before it was reclaimed by the gay community as a sign of defiance, it was also used to define anything that was considered deviant, outsider and/or abnormal. According to Judith Butler, queer is “a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings”. In Queering Sex, with its inter-generational approach, we are positing that queer exists on multiple planes of non-linearity and is beyond hetero and homo-normative distinctions. Queer is an idea that is constantly evolving, changing, and adapting to its current climate.

As a whole, Queering Sex proposes the question, what does it mean to be “queer” nowadays?

 

Left: Tall Paul (Gellman), curators Sarvia Jasso and Kathryn Garcia, artist Matt Greene, and Human Resources cofounder Eric Kim. Right: Fine Art Union.

ON THE EVENING of June 24, as lawmakers legalized same-sex marriage in New York, a group of artists and activists on the opposite coast were instigating a less normative (though perhaps no less traditional) celebration of sexuality: the opening night of “Queering Sex,” a weeklong performance and video series at the downtown Los Angeles nonprofit Human Resources. While the event-cum-exhibition didn’t start any fires with the boilerplate press-release “positing” that “queer exists on multiple planes of non-linearity and is beyond hetero and homo-normative distinctions,” the lineup itself comprised a group of folk whose varying practices demonstrate a happily nuanced take on sex (as a critical and aesthetic tool), with special emphasis on historical constructions of queerness, the hyperbolic performance of “outness,” and our (hopefully) evolving relationships to genders and identities. True to form, the sizable crowd that spilled out of the gallery (a former movie theater in Chinatown) resembled the young, aggressively polysexual (trans)demographic that curators (and Vicemagazine “power couple”) Kathryn Garcia and Sarvia Jasso aimed to represent: women in tailored blazers and work boots; men in girdles and Fluevogs; dads with babies; babes with daddies; femmes, womyn, twinks, dykes, beards, “straights,” a lady in a vagina costume—but mostly typical arty Eastsiders. People comfortable with quotation marks.

The exhibition commenced (after a successful Kickstarter campaign) with a screening to set the feel: works by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Orlan, Skip Arnold, Nadja Verena Marcin, Marnie Weber, and Lovett/Codagnonem, among many others. But I missed all that. So I jumped into the fray via a performance by the Norwegian collaborative Fine Art Union (artists Synnøve G. Wetten and Annette Stav Johanssen). The masked, bald-capped glamazons crooned, screamed, toppled a cardboard monolith, simulated fighting and fucking, hurled turdlike rubber wads at the audience, and smeared “menstrual-y” crimson paint onto each other’s faces. Against a backdrop of Freudian projections (a black hole, a snake), Fine Art Union performed what could be considered a “girling” of femininity, or id-like primitivism, or the resignification of sexual subjectivity . . . but maybe it was all just a drag. After the performance, artist Brian Getnick—the only viewer to throw turds back at the performers—whispered, “I wish it was as cathartic for us as it was for them.”

Left: Sphinx in performance. Right: Artist Bobbi Woods and Joe Deutch with Semiotext(e)’s Hedi El Kholti

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Matt Greene’s performance the following night was a comparatively repressed affair. As the audience found their seats, two severe-looking women in black—artists Lisa Anne Auerbachand Jennifer Cohen—appeared carrying trays of meatballs (veggie and beef) to satiate the crowd. As a black-clad Greene joined them, they took to a table at the center of the gallery and proceeded to read a hypnotizing narrative of dislocated desire: “There are those who in soft eunuchs place their bliss and shun the scrubbing of a bearded kiss [. . .] beautiful, take-charge type females believe in loving but old-fashion type methods when dealing with haughty husbands [. . .] cuckoldry is not all that it is cracked up to be.” Playing the joyless ballbusters, the women riffed on Greene’s self-deprecating delivery by subtly altering their vocal range from monotone to snobbish taunt, at times almost panting. “I’ve been researching castration anxiety, which Freud called the root of all fetishes,” Greene offered after the action. “I also recently watched The Empress Dowager, and the plot involves a fake eunuch. There’s a lot of comedy potential with a fake eunuch.” Slapstick may have been a more appropriate term.

Speaking of terms, there was a lot of chatter all weekend around the word “queering”: “The queerest thing about the idea of queer is the word itself,” summed up artist Spencer Douglass, who then added, “Why is queer so gay?” More clues came Sunday afternoon at a release party at a private home in Los Feliz (unrelated to Human Resources) for the fifth issue of writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s zine Pep Talk, a collection of brilliant wordsmith Bruce Hainley’s writings and letters. The issue’s introduction offered a list of keywords for “getting in the mood”: ANAL, LANA, WARHOL, FAGGOTRY, ENGENDER, (DIS)EMBODIED, RAMIFICATIONS, (GET A) LOAD, BLEW (MY MIND), BLUELY, BEAUTY, AVITAL RONELL, WITHDRAWAL . . . As I caught up with partygoers, it seemed that just about everyone had their own publication to talk about: artist Brian Kennon’s latest 2nd Cannons release Alice Cooper/Suzi Simpson; artist William E. Jones’s Halsted Plays Himself; books in the works by Semiotext(e)’s Hedi El Kholti, ZG Press’s Rosetta Brooks, and art historian Jane McFadden; and more to come from Hainley on Sturtevant. Reflecting on the cool, relaxed scene, writer Jennifer Krasinski and artist Jeff Burton observed that only in LA do intellectuals sit around a swimming pool, smoke pot, and talk literature. “People in New York just don’t believe that this is what a typical party is like out here,” mused Krazinski. And she was right—this was the third pool party I had stopped by over the weekend (and, sadly, the only one without skinny-dippers).

Left: Artist Dawn Kasper in performance. Right: Artist Jennifer Cohen.

I slipped away from the bookishly chic affair and cruised back to “Queering Sex” in time to catch the last jewel tones of Jack Smith’s Normal Love flickering in lapidary complexity, reflecting that parallel world where curiosities shape-shift into conventions. Garcia gave props to Gladstone Gallery for facilitating the loan of the film. “The fate of Jack Smith’s archive was so uncertain.” The rarely screened, never-finished follow-up to the infamous/infectious Flaming Creatures was a wise inclusion in the program. Its decadent denizens and simulated screen sirens delivered the perfect filmic appositeness of (and also, strangely, escape from) so much queering. Alongside the many inclusions of “Queering Sex”—absurdist rock-’n’-rollerblader Tall Paul (Gellman); New York femdom-metal band Sphinx; the frenetic, abstrusely feminist, and gravity-defying actions of Dawn Kasper; the hypnotically hetero stoner slowness of Joel Kyack’s band Street Buddy; and countless other videos—Normal Lovestands out as a touchstone for generations fighting against sexual conformity in all its articulations. Let’s just hope the next generation of polysexuals, et al., can plug a little realness into the new “normal.”

— Catherine Taft