Billy Quinn: an Artist for a Time of Plague Work from the 1990S

Billy Quinn: An Artist for a Time of Plague Work from the 1990s Patrick Anthony Caffrey MPhil in Irish Art History 2017 University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin 1 Declaration I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university and is entirely my own work. I agree to deposit this thesis in the University’s open access institutional repository or allow the Library to do so on my behalf, subject to Irish Copyright Legislation and Trinity College Library conditions of use and acknowledgement. Patrick Anthony Caffrey 2 Acknowledgements This has been nothing if not a collaborative effort. First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Catherine Lawless, for her encouragement and guidance. Second, my thanks to the staff of the Department of History of Art and Architecture, in particular Laura Cleaver and Yvonne Scott of TRIARC. My thanks also are owed to Catherine Marshall, who was instrumental in introducing me to Billy Quinn, without whose generosity and patience this effort could not have come to fruition. Thanks also to my friend Martin McCann who introduced me to John McBratney, Alan Phelan, Tonie Walsh, Mick Wilson and Aengus Carroll. For assistance in gaining access to the IMMA archive, my thanks to Seán Kissane and Olive Barre, both of IMMA. Thanks also to Seán Hughes, Subject Librarian at TCD, for his advice and patience with my grappling with Endnote. There are others to whom I am indebted, in particular my cousin Margaret who patiently read and commented on everything I wrote. Lastly, my thanks to my fellow candidates and other postgraduate students whose encouragement and advice was invaluable. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 5 Theoretical Framework, Literature Review, Thesis Plan Chapter One 13 Billy Quinn in New York and AIDS. Irish Art in New York. Chapter Two 24 Dublin, IMMA, Family and Leaving Again. Chapter Three 36 London Revisited. Identity and the Continuing Fight for Place. Conclusion 48 Bibliography 54 Archival and Unpublished Sources List of Figures 62 Figures 70 Appendix One 117 Interview with Billy Quinn, Amsterdam, August 15, 2017 Appendix Two 140 Billy Quinn, PhD Dissertation, London, 2000 4 Introduction Theoretical Framework, Literature Review, Thesis Plan 5 This thesis concerns the work of the artist Billy Quinn during the decade of the 1990s. It was a very productive time for him, and a period during which he returned to a much-changed Ireland having spent a number of years in London and New York. On first looking at Billy Quinn’s work, it does not surrender any suggestion of Irish roots but rather of the artistic and intellectual environments of London, New York City and specifically the gay-AIDS support community in New York during the 1980s and early 1990s. It also displays his deep familiarity with Western art, literature and philosophy. Since childhood, Quinn, as he emphasised in his interview, has had a love of reading and ideas. This was the time of AIDS and its devastation. It was a time when Michel Foucault’s ideas were discussed and reviewed in the New York Native1 along with statistics about infections and T-cell counts. Foucault’s ideas were used as a way of making sense out of the chaos in which the gay community found itself. It provided strategies to combat institutionalised indifference and homophobia. Aiding in that battle was the work of Eve Sedgwick (Sedgwick, 1994, p. 3) and Judith Butler (Butler, 1999). Their writings on gender worked out Foucault’s ideas in a way that had immediate relevance for the gay community and its survival. Quinn’s work is about AIDS but also about faith and family. It addresses more issues than what a paper of this size allows time and space for. Billy Quinn was born in Dublin in 1954. In 1973 and 1974 he attended the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) Foundation Year Programme. Before finishing he left Ireland and moved to London. Between 1977 and 1979 he studied for a diploma in fine art at City and Guilds in London. He continued his studies at North East London Polytechnic, gaining a BA in Fine Art and Film in 1982. In 1984 he started an MA in Theatre at the University of London. Shortly after, he went to New York where he lived until his return to Ireland in 1995. In New York, he supported himself with interior design projects and became involved in community activism as an early member of Act Up.2 By 1990 he was back making art. From 1990 to 1995 he participated in a number of group and individual shows in New York, Chicago and Atlanta. All these shows were of works mostly concerned with the AIDS crisis and how people responded to it. His work was his response to the crisis. On his return to Ireland he was an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) 1 The New York Native was biweekly newspaper published by Charles Ortleib in New York City from December 1980 until December 1997. It published extensively on AIDS and HIV. 2 Act Up, AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power, is an organisation engaging in direct action to influence legal and medical practices that have a bearing on HIV-positive people. 6 and displayed work with Out Art3 and at the Temple Bar Gallery in 1996 and 1998. During his stay in Dublin he worked on material that contributed to his PhD at East London University. The following year he returned to London and completed his PhD in Fine Art in 2000. The title of his dissertation is ‘More Life: Towards a Vitalist Manifesto or Bifurcation, Pseudopodia and the worm, Jane Seymour and me, even’. Since then he has lived and worked in the Netherlands. In this thesis, I will use three terms to describe people who express their sexuality with their own gender, namely, homosexual, gay and queer. Before going further, it is worthwhile to define how I use these words or terms. The Oxford Dictionary of English online defines a homosexual as one who is attracted to people of one’s own sex. It also states that the word has its origins in the nineteenth century. In current use it has a vaguely disparaging sense, homo has been used as a term of disparagement, and the word gay is generally preferred (Peters, 2014, pp. 158-160). Gay is defined, by the same dictionary, as a homosexual male. The definition further explains that the word grew in popular usage to mean homosexual male during the sixties to the point where the traditional meanings of the word have largely been lost. Again, from the same dictionary, the definition of queer is ‘denoting or relating to a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially homosexual norms’. The word was used pejoratively at the end of the nineteenth century, about the same time as the word homosexual was entering the language. In the 1970s and 1980s the word was appropriated as a form of asserting the right to space and to protest against being denied that space. Unless specifically required in a title or classification, I do not use the word homosexual, preferring either gay or queer (Peters, 2014). Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French academic whose work crossed a number of disciplines including history, philosophy and psychology (Kelly, Mark). Michel Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality (Foucault & Hurley, 1979) is a foundational text upon which Queer Studies are built and on which I will draw to provide an intellectual framework for the art discussed herein and to explain why it is relevant to understanding Billy Quinn’s work. Quinn is gay and that fact forms how he experiences the world and why he challenges what is still considered ‘normal’. Foucault’s work analysing and deconstructing common understanding and assumptions around sexuality opened up new ways of seeing 3 Out Art was an organisation of gay and lesbian artists who organised art exhibitions in conjunction with pride festivities at various locations in Dublin between 1996 and 2004. 7 how and why these assumptions came to be held. He argued that they were not immutable facts but cultural accretions. Through his analysis, and in particular with his definition of power, and its uses, he created the possibility of changing our understanding of what is normal and of gender itself. His focus became those who are excluded and whose lives are not considered to be ‘normal’ (Bernal, Orozco & Molinares, 2016, pp. 113, 114). He died of AIDS in 1984. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault continued his cultural archaeology, which he applied in previous works to prisoners and the insane. He sought to understand how our understanding of what sexuality is was arrived at and how society maintains and controls that understanding. His focus was homosexuality although his intention was to explore other areas of sexuality; but his untimely death did not allow this to happen (Gutting, 2005, p. 92). He wanted to show how society arrived at a set of rules that, once established, opened up the possibility to transgress. Transgression causes a defensive response, problematising actions that do not conform to the so-called norm, in this case heterosexuality. Foucault asked the question, through what process did homosexuality become a problem (Bernal et al., 2016, p. 115)? He found that over the past few centuries there had been a growth in sexual repression and at the same time an expansion in analysis of sexuality. Subsequent to the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563 and ushered in the Counter-Reformation, confession practice demanded exhaustive detail, not only of actions but of desire itself (Foucault & Hurley, 1979, pp.

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