Queer art

Early queer-coded art In A Queer Little History of Art, art historian Alex Pilcher notes that across the history of art, biographical information about queer artists are often omitted, downplayed or else interpreted under the assumption of a heterosexual identity. For instance, "[t]he same-sex partner becomes the 'close friend.' The artistic comrade is made out as the heterosexual love interest", with "gay artists diagnosed as 'celibate,' 'asexual,' or 'sexually confused.'" In 1920s New York, speakeasies in Harlem and Greenwich Village welcomed gay and lesbian clients, and cafés and bars across Europe and Latin America, for instance, became host to artistic groups which allowed gay men to be integrated into the development of mainstream culture. Katz has further interpreted the use of iconography in Robert Rauschenberg's combine paintings, such as a picture of Judy Garland in Bantam (1954) and references to the Ganymede myth in Canyon (1959), as allusions to the artist's identity as a gay man. Noting Rauschenberg's relationship with Jasper Johns, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon interprets Johns' monochrome encaustic White Flag (1955) in relation to the artist's experiences as a gay man in a repressive American society. Stonewall riots (1969) A key turning point in attitudes towards the LGBT community would be marked by the Stonewall riots. At the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 in New York City, patrons of the gay tavern Stonewall Inn, other Greenwich Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighbourhood street people fought back when the police became violent during a police raid. This became a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the LGBT+ community, and the riots are widely considered to constitute one of the most important events leading to the gay liberation movement. The first Pride Parade was held a year after the riots, with marches now held annually across the world. Queer activist art, through posters, signs, and placards, served as a significant manifestation of queer art from this time. == Formulation of 'queer' identity ==

AIDS epidemic (1980s to early 1990s) In 1980s, the HIV/AIDS outbreak ravaged both the gay and arts communities. In the context of the US, journalist Randy Shilts would argue in his book, And the Band Played On, that the Ronald Reagan administration put off handling the crisis due to homophobia, with the gay community being correspondingly distrustful of early reports and public health measures, resulting in the infection of hundreds of thousands more. In a survey conducted on doctors from mid to late 1980s, a large number indicated that they did not have an ethical obligation to treat or care for patients with HIV/AIDS. Right-wing journalists and tabloid newspapers in the US and UK stoked anxieties about the transmission of HIV by stigmatizing gay men. Collective Gran Fury, which was established in 1988 by several members of ACT-UP, served as the organization's unofficial agitprop creator, producing guerrilla public art that drew upon the visual iconography of commercial advertisements, as seen in ''Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do'' (1989). Lesbian feminist art activist collective fierce pussy would also be founded in 1991, committed to art action in association with ACT-UP. |alt=|left|250x250px Keith Haring notably deployed his practice to generate activism and advocate for awareness about AIDS in the final years of his life, as seen with the poster Ignorance = Fear (1989), or the acrylic on canvas painting Silence = Death (1989), both of which invoke the iconic poster and motto. Beyond the framework of activist art, photographer Nan Goldin would document this period of New York City in her seminal work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which encompassed a 1985 slide show exhibition and a 1986 artist's book publication of photographs taken between 1979 and 1986, capturing post-Stonewall gay subculture of the time. In 1989, British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien would release his film work Looking for Langston, which celebrated black gay identity and desire through a nonlinear narrative that drew from 1920s Harlem Renaissance in New York as well as then-current contexts of the 1980s, with Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial photographs of black gay men shown in the film, for example. Félix González-Torres would create works into the early 1990s that responded to the AIDS crisis that continued to ravage the gay community. González-Torres' Untitled (1991) featured six black-and-white photographs of the artist's empty double bed, enlarged and posted as billboards throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens in the winter of 1991. Mapplethorpe's 1988 retrospective, The Perfect Moment, which exhibited the photographer's portraits, interracial figure studies, and flower arrangements, would be a catalyst for the debate. Known for his black-and-white celebrity portraits, self-portraits, portraits of people involved in BDSM, and homoerotic portraits of black nude men, the explicit sexual imagery of Mapplethorpe's work sparked a debate on what taxpayer's money should fund. Responding to Mapplethorpe's The Black Book (1988), a photographic series of homoerotic nude black men that failed to consider the subjects within broader histories of racialised violence and sexuality, Ligon created the work Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–1993). Activist group the Gay Liberation Front would propose queer identity as a revolutionary form of social and sexual life that could disrupt traditional notions of sex and gender. More recently, however, critics have questioned the effectiveness of an identity politics consistently operates as a self-defined, oppositional "other". Their groundbreaking Vancouver exhibition titled Drawing the Line (1988-1990) consisted of 98 images of lesbian sexuality. Opie's photography series, Being and Having (1991), involved capturing her friends in close-up frontal portraits, with assertive gazes against yellow backgrounds. In 1994, he would stage the performance art piece ''Fen-Ma + Liuming's Lunch'' (1994). The performance featured the artist assuming the persona of a transgender woman named Fen-Ma Liuming, who would prepare and serve steamed fish for the audience while completely nude, eventually sitting down and attaching a large laundry tube to her penis, sucking and breathing on the other end of the tube. Ma would be arrested for such performances, and in 1995, police forced the artists to move out of Beijing's East Village, with Ma beginning to work outside China. == The 21st century ==

Since the 2000s, queer practices continue to develop and be documented internationally, with a sustained emphasis on intersectionality, Her video work, WILDNESS (2012) constructs a portrait of a Latino Los Angeles LGBT bar, the Silver Platter, integrating elements of fiction and documentary to portray Tsang's complex relationship with the bar. It further explores the impact of gentrification and a changing city on the bar's patrons, who are predominantly working class, Hispanic, and immigrant. The final photographs depict Cassils in an almost primal state, sweating, grimacing, and flying through the air as they pummel clay blocks, placing an emphasis on the physicality of their gender non-conforming and transmasculine body. Another example includes New York-based artist, writer, performer, and DJ Juliana Huxtable, part of the queer arts collective, House of Ladosha, the artist exhibited her photographs with her poetry at the New Museum Triennial, with works such as Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) from her Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming series. Furthermore, while queer artists such as Zanele Muholi and Kehinde Wiley have had mid-career survey exhibitions at major museums, an artist's identity, gender and race are more commonly discussed than sexuality. Coming shortly after the Taiwanese High Court's decision towards legalising same-sex marriage in May 2017, this would be one of the earliest art exhibitions to specifically focus on LGBTQ issues in a government-run institution in Asia. The show exhibited 22 artists from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Singapore with a total of 51 artworks. It would feature over 50 artists such as Dinh Q. Lê, Danh Võ, and Ren Hang, with new commissions from Samak Kosem and Sornrapat Patharakorn, Balbir Krishan, David Medalla, Arin Rungjang, Anne Samat, Jakkai Siributr and Chov Theanly, with a greater emphasis of artists from Southeast Asia. == Relationship to public space ==

Queer practices have a noted relationship to public space, from the wheatpasted activist posters of the 1980s and 1990s, to murals, public sculpture, memorials, and graffiti. From Jenny Holzer's Truism posters of the 1970s, to David Wojnarowicz's graffiti in the early 1980s, public space served as a politically significant venue for queer artists to display their work after years of suppression. A significant example is the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt conceived by activist Cleve Jones. A continually-growing piece of public art, it allows people to commemorate loved ones lost to the disease through quilt squares. It was first displayed in 1987 during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., covering an area larger than a football field. Presently, people continue to add panels honouring names of lost friends, and the project has grown into various incarnations around the world, also winning a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and raising $3 million for AIDS service organisations. == Criticism ==

In attempting to conceive of queer art as a whole, one risks domesticating queer practices, smoothening over the radical nature and specificity of individual practices. == References ==