Within a queer context, there is nothing more public than privacy. On the institution’s role today in representing queer intimacy today:
It is my intention for this work to take up space, for the larger-than-life, almost monstrous figures to have a place where they fit, and for myself and the viewer to feel the mental, emotional, and physical labor that brought them-and these spaces-to life. So, working at this scale is my way of creating an all-encompassing, rigorous experience-an experience relived or new-for myself and the viewer. We are extremely in tune-we notice the way our muscles move or look, how our shoulders line up with our hips (or lack thereof), how much space we take up, how our chests look in our clothes, etc. Through figurative painting, found objects, mixed media, and photography, they walk uncharted or blocked paths with determination that salutes their queer ancestors. The seven contemporary artists below reflect on the emotional, bodily, and political heft of public intimacy today through the intricate frames of their diverse practices.
Artists reclaim the notion of the archive by peeling back false or biased imagery in order to rebirth history.
Still others turn to photography to distort and re-envision reality, whilst reminding us of the medium’s slipperiness in history books or museum walls. For other artists, everyday materials can embody memory, the present, and the future, whether it’s tightened in woven braids or stitched onto surfaces lush textures and absorbing patterns broadcast narratives of resilience. While anchoring their work within the frame of a body, many painters dive beyond the discernible, and they take us with them. Through painting, artists utilize the physical likeness of the body and dismantle it, conveying ample versions of corporeality, sex, reverie, and devastation. Artists today tap into the nuances through their deeply personal yet community-driven experiences. The road ahead however is still lengthy, brutally further for some communities, and more complex for others. Undeniable lengths have been taken in queer liberation since Gonzalez-Torres seeded heart-aching reminders of loss and love in attempts of poetic disobedience. Today, public intimacy for the queer community is a cosmos interwoven with issues around geography, class, race, desirability, and self-fashioning. Against the fleeting moment and the perishing body, the gesture carved out moments of contemplation amidst the city’s urban chaos. A massive but subtle expression of a kind of love largely deemed unnatural and deadly at the time, given the harsh anti-AIDS research politics of the 1980s, the work was a gentle artistic act of anarchy it spoke to the gruesome struggles against the stigmatization of a pandemic and the marginalization of individuals for simply being. The bed-shared by the Cuban American artist and his long-term lover Ross Laycock until the latter’s passing in 1991-is a silent monument of gay sex and bonding, imprinted with the bodies of two lovers who would eventually both pass due to AIDS-related illnesses. The photo exuded unabashed intimacy, in public, and at a scale exclusively reserved for consumerist promotions.įelix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (billboard of an empty bed) has since stood as a beacon of queer intimacy made public through art. Though the black-and-white image of an anonymous couple’s love nest may sound demure, the two dented pillows and a freshly folded blanket pierced passersby’s attention. In the early 1990s, when waves of change in identity politics swept through the art world, dozens of billboards featuring an unmade bed sprouted up across New York.