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Sumed Corruptibility and Sexual Innocence. on the Other Hand, If We Step Back from the Localized Politics of Any One Curator Or

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Sumed Corruptibility and Sexual Innocence. on the Other Hand, If We Step Back from the Localized Politics of Any One Curator Or nomic value to certain objects that can remain in the cate- gory of “high art” or “histor- ical.” Especially when an object references the pleasure and politics of the experi- ences of women, people of color, and transgender artists, these are the pieces that are most frequently attacked as “offensive,” “pornographic,” and “obscene.” For this rea- son, Irreverent emphasizes artwork by women, trans artists, and people of color as these artists often experience the most intense backlash against their work, at times, even within the mainstream gay community. Thus, the ex- hibition is not positing cen- sorship as an “us” versus Kent Monkman, Duel After the Masquerade, 2007. Collection of Jennifer Dattels. “them” dynamic wherein we can clearly delineate two bi- sumed corruptibility and sexual innocence. On the other hand, nary camps of sex positive versus sex negative publics or if we step back from the localized politics of any one curator or straight publics or even politically Right publics against the institution, these spaces and people, whether they realize it or GLBT community. Queer theoretical scholarship has finally not, are also operating under larger macroeconomic and histor- caught up to what queer artists and activists have long known: ical contexts that mold and massage bias, prejudice, and stereo- that there exists a politics of homonormativity, as well as het- types into these parameters and questions of “fit,” “genre,” and eronormativity, against which artists interested in queer sexual- “personal taste.” ities must also contend. For instance, let’s consider censorship in the case of the For example, consider the story of trans artist Tobaron Wax- multi-disciplinary artwork of Toronto-based Cree/British/Irish man and the censorship of his work: After seeing Portrait of artist Kent Monkman. Monkman challenges romanticized de- Severin on Waxman’s website, specifically the central panel pictions of European colonization and of First Nations peoples “Severin Changing His Bandages (My Olympia),” the artistic in Canada through homoerotic and two-spirit interventions. For director of the Amsterdam-based arts festival that was organ- the 2007 Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) exhibition Shape- izing a Jewish cultural exhibition removed an entirely different shifters, Time Travelers, and Storytellers, the artist and curators artwork by Waxman (Techiat ha Metim, or “Revival of the Kerry Swanson and Candice Hopkins proposed to display a Dead”) from the display. Waxman was not informed that his Monkman painting in the First Peoples’ Gallery, a space desig- work would not be shown as scheduled. Years later, Waxman nated as historical and controversially dominated by Anglo ex- discovered that after seeing Portrait of Severin online, this plorer-artist Paul Kane. When the curators of the First Peoples’ same artistic director, who happens to be a cisgendered gay Gallery refused, Monkman created Duel after the Masquerade man, became extremely agitated and aggressive, exclaiming [shown above], which interrupts the history of North American that “photographs of a transsexual changing his bandages has colonization and landscape painting through the insertion of his nothing to do with being Jewish,” and therefore, the director genderqueer alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Depicting must have reasoned, the artist’s entire body of work had no Miss Chief vanquishing Paul Kane in a painterly duel, the paint- place in his exhibition. In this instance and in others, Waxman’s ing responds to the scenario of censorship and the history of experiences evidence the myriad ways in which censorship colonial portrayals of First Nation’s peoples, as in Jean-Léon happens. Gérôme’s painting of the same name and Paul Kane’s Medicine Mask Dance. And yet, Monkman’s work was ultimately rele- CL: Can you tell us about your criteria in choosing the artists gated to a contemporary art wing, thus marginalizing his specu- for this exhibition? lative fiction of two-spirit First Nations people to be considered JT: I chose artists and censorship scenarios that would draw only as “art” and not as informative when questioning the pa- out this complex approach to censorship. Sex—queer, dissi- rameters of a largely whitewashed, “historical” archive of paint- dent, explicit—is central to the exhibition, as it was for the cen- ings created by white settler colonialists in Canada. sors who put the plunging necklines of queer sexual appetites Censorship arguments based on “fit,” “genre,” and “taste,” on the art historical map. But as much as the exhibition revels as Pierre Bourdieu has shown, reproduce class hierarchies, and in queer erotic pleasures, so too is Irreverent fascinated by how I would add gendered and raced hierarchies, as they assign eco- the defamers of queer life have consistently used sex to pro- 48 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE.
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