Just down the road at First Draft Gallery is another Mardi Gras associated exhibition called Brutal (until March 6). Like Wild Boys, we were a little trepidatious walking in but as soon as we had a gander at the art, we weren’t scared at all. Brutal is a show of art by artists who we’re guessing might be lesbians, but don’t quote us on that, it’s just a thought, and you can kind of tell from the works – all very nicely arranged and hung by the way – that clichéd definitions of gender and sexuality are passé so let’s all just move on from that.
Only we can’t. The works are proudly and defiantly queer and their success or otherwise depends entirely on whether you think transgressive gestures are in fact transgressive at all and whether they are more to do with genre than doing anything new. In one sense, attempting to do something “new” within a context like Brutal is a bit pointless – the works are a collection of gestures and poses that blatantly declare their intentions. To move away from the arena of the obvious would mean dropping the gestures and making art that was for all intents and purposes “straight” – and what would be the point of that? Subcultural art needs its signifiers otherwise it’d be mainstream. Right?
We have been for a long time been uncertain of why gay and lesbian art has centered so much of its proposed transgressions on the depiction of sex. While we can see that those depictions are in fact the very centre of certain constructions of identity – and how those constructions clash with what is allegedly mainstream – we can’t also help but wonder why one depiction is any more transgressive than the massive cornucopia of already exiting pornography? (Answers on a postcard please).
In practice, what this means is that at a show of what (might be) queer art you should prepare yourself for frank and earnest depictions of sex.
In two works using sequential photography, Cath Dowd’s Stand and Deliver has some female bushrangers getting more interested in bush than gold and Penelope Benton‘s Guerilla Girls has a topless woman in a guerilla mask carrying off another woman who doesn’t look all that interested in bananas. Both series of photographs were playful but Pandora Karavan’s Untitled series of a high heeled woman getting frisky with someone on the hood of a car was just too obvious to pay any dividends. In a similar vein of in-your-faceness, Rachael Hainsworth’s painting Cheryl and Beryl depicts two women au naturél posting letters for Christmas while Cavaliere Servente dropped all attempts at subtlety and had a bunch of poseurs in S&M gear sucking on a strap on dildo. For heaven’s sake – whatever happened to just kissing?
In less sophisticated times, other works in Brutal played with what was once termed “identity politics”. Kelly Ann Denton had some shots of a guy who we thought was Steve Kilby from The Church but it turned out it wasn’t Steve at all, it wasn’t even a man. Dr. X Stealth had a dress up sequence of photographs called Boi Beat Cruising which, as a period reconstruction, looks about as convincing as The Colony.
There were some works in the show that didn’t attempt this kind of foregrounding, and in reference to the overall gambit, we have to say we were confused by their inclusion. Reid has a painting called Red Raw that was a very mild mannered abstraction that looked like it would be more at home in a furniture showroom and Jo Q Lah’s paintings Death, Life and In Between were delightful, eccentric fantasies that seemed completely out of place in this aptly named show. Arlene TextaQueen’s portrait was simply what it was and as such stood miles above the rest of the show.
The biggest work in Brutal is also emblematic of its hammer blow approach. Kelli Drinkwater , is a massive woman who is seen in a huge photograph standing in a sky blue dress against a landscape of suburban houses in the work They Had It Coming. Wearing a red motocross helmet with her hands on her head, she looks like a pineapple trifle that’s been poured into a woman-shaped mold. The in-your-faceness of the work is explained thusly:
“The perception of fat chicks in this supped up, 16 cylinder, 4 to the floor, show us your motor delusion that is suburban Australia still clings too is one which this unashamed 21st century hyper slut is determined to subvert. So yes to excess, it’s time for payback.”
As unwitting fellow travelers and spongers off the patriarchy, we sincerely apologise and humbly ask that you remember, we’re the good Germans.
