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Defined generally by identity and subject matter, queer art frequently interrogates patriarchal binary gender distinctions, homophobic oppression, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, as well as complex senses of "other" identity under a anti-queer culture western culture. Queer art, much like its name, is encompassing a wide range of identities and experiences. The activism of the gay liberation front begin gin in the 1960's would be the foundation of activism and progress still taking place today.
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Claude Cahun
Self-portrait as a young girl
7 x 9
Silver gelatin print
Jersey Heritage Collections With much of their work destroyed by nazis, what we have left of Claude Cahun is ironically and appropriately fragmented. In this self portrait, there is a clinical essence, with Cahun laying in a white sheet cot with their hair exploding around them. This work reminds me of corrective anti-gay medical interventions, or victorian treatments of hysteria. They affront the viewer with their gaze. -
FIGURE AT A WASHBASIN
Francis Bacon
1976
Oil and dry transfer lettering on canvas
78 x 58 in. (198 x 147.5 cm) Bacon’s uses pink and blue to enhance the surreal fleshyness of this bent figure over a sink. This work reflects a deep sense of grief and loss after Bacon’s partner George Dyer suddenly passed. The liminality of the bathroom with a rising (or setting) sun peeking through the blinds conveys a sense of frozen time, like a night spent up into the wee hours ruminating. -
"Untitled" (Perfect Lovers)
Félix González-Torres
Wall clocks
Dimensions
13 in. diameter
Dallas Museum of Art In this intensely romantic and tragic ready made, Gonzalez-Torres pairs two clocks that start out entirely in sync, but inevitably, much like two lovers, fall out of sync, wit one or the other running out of battery first. This piece is so intensely evocative and is perhaps one of the most successful ready-mades. The artist watched their partner slowly succumb to HIV/AIDS -
Glenn Ligon
Notes on the Margin of the Black Book
Offset prints and text
11” x 11”
Guggenheim, New York In this art-as-critique, Ligon recontextualizes Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book, joining the photographers disjointed images of black men’s faceless bodies with political commentary. This showed how the white gaze can objectify black men’s sexuality, minimizing a human being entirely to an over-sexualized-anatomy, reinforcing racist stereotype s of black men as animalistic and hyper sexual.