Trans / position

Kiss My Genders
Hayward Gallery, London
12.06.19 – 08.09.19

     
I’m a fountain of blood
In the shape of a girl
You’re the bird on the brim
Hypnotised by the whirl
– Björk, ‘Bachelorette’ ( 1997 )

Bodies. We each have one that we inhabit, perpetually. They are gifted to us at birth and cocoon us, transport us through this so-called life.

We assume – indeed, we rely on – their constancy, their permanence. Yet, a body is fundamentally transient, always: shifting, moving, becoming, mutating, dying.

An artist perhaps has two bodies: a body of work, an oeuvre, beside – surrounding? – their organic one. One grows out of the other; they inhabit both. Perhaps they reproduce the latter, endlessly, in the former: mitosis, a doubling, of phantoms, penumbrae.

We all have bodies: I, the subject; you, my object; and that, our abject, too.

Me and you and her. You, I, they.

Them.

One of the things I noticed, walking around Kiss My Genders at the Hayward Gallery, was the lack of bodies, by which I mean, three-dimensional artworks embodying the human form. I guess I expected more performance, more presence.

Instead, the artists’ bodies – there are many works of self-portraiture – as well as those of their subjects, are flattened to printed images or film: photography, perhaps unsurprisingly, dominates the show. Any sculpture emphatically and wholeheartedly rejects anthropomorphic form. A dress, silk-screened with names of people who died of AIDS, hangs on a headless, limbless mannequin.

One of the effects of this was more emphasis, an increased focus, on my own body, the bodies of those around me, and our relations to each other, the space, the art. I became aware of how I was presenting myself – as a queer person, especially – and how I was relating to the art, in both physical and metaphysical ways.

All but one of the video pieces are presented as part of a larger installation: Hannah Quinlan’s and Rosie Hastings’s Something for the Boys ( 2018 ) and Silent ( 2016 ) by Pauling Boudry/Renate Lorenz both direct the visitor into a darkened, secluded space. The former constitutes a monstrous black spiral with a television screen at its centre, alternating between films of two performances in Blackpool, a drag queen in a cabaret club and a go-go dancer at a men-only sex bar: you feel at once transported to a different place, submerged in another time, liberated yet isolated, equally joyous and melancholic. Meanwhile, the latex walls and floor of the latter required the viewer to don oversized slippers and shuffle awkwardly around the partitioned space, somewhat ruining the subtlety of the piece’s eponymous silence.

The star of the show is undoubtedly Victoria Sin’s A View from Elsewhere, Act 1, She Postures in Context ( 2018 ): their image hangs from the ceiling, ephemeral, projected onto translucent cotton curtains. Their practice utilises the language of drag – lip-sync performance, exaggerated make-up, prostheses, etc. – in a provocative manner, interweaving the personal – heritage, identity – with the political, the universal. Their work is preoccupied with that which is lacking, utilising a thoroughly Lacanian lexis; this piece, in particular, hopes to address and expose ‘both the transformative potential and dissociative threat of desire’.

Without wanting to get bogged down in queer theory, it seemed inevitable that I should quote Judith Butler in this piece; far easier to oblige than to object. ‘Is there a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender?’ she asks at the opening of Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ ( 1993 ). This study seeks to answer that question, positioning ‘sex’ as ‘a constrained production’ that regulates and ( re )constructs identities, genders. But what about the disruptive body, the queer body?

Here, feel the weight of one’s body, compared to the images floating in the gallery, the captured instants, instances of performance. Consider the litany of photography here: from one photograph – a moment in time captured, punctured – to the next, the singular self has changed, becomes plural. Isn’t this always the case? asks the exhibition.

The artists – Lyle Ashton Harris, Martine Gutierrez and Juliana Huxtable, for instance – who present self-portraits give us legendary singers, colourful and surreal masks, and alien creatures, respectively; they decorate, detach from, and adorn themselves. Those who offer us several subjects – Peter Hujar or Catherine Opie – expand this procedure, making it collective, social. And, then, the photomontages of Pierre Molinier further complicate matters, collapsing photographs from different decades into single artworks: a personal palimpsest, a kaleidoscope of the self. The painters serve similar ends, constructing their assemblages in pigment atop canvases, on walls.

We have our body, material, and its surface, transitory: identity and expression, substance and superficies. I don’t want to suggest a Cartesian dualism, another false binary. It is the intricate interplay of these opposites, rather than the primacy of one over the other, that generates meaning here. Gender is but a mask, part of a performance, something that merely rests on our skin; our skin, a site for experimentation and play.

Butler uses a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto as an epigraph, which seems eminently relevant here: ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?’ These bodies – our bodies – become a network, an idea, iterative and unstable.

What this exhibition does so well is make such abstract concepts – namely, the fluidity and performativity of gender – salient yet, oxymoronically, graspable. Fluidity in a more literal sense percolates through the catalogue, a gorgeous and important volume that will likely long outlast its exhibition. Liquid imagery and aqueous metaphor infuse the essays and the texts included; Travis Alabanza writes in their poem, ‘The Sea’, of ‘A body of water, potential to do so much, yet eventually bottled.’

On the topic of water, a brief aside: two of the sinks in the gender-neutral toilets were replaced with Elmgreen & Dragset’s Marriage ( 2010 ), a pair of basins with conjoined drainpipes, seemingly emptying endlessly into one another; a subtly queer work that, with its placement and framing, affirmed the Hayward’s dedication to queering its spaces.

Queerness – queer bodies, queer ideas – often becomes aligned with abjection, in a philosophical, rather than fundamentally negative, sense. The abject, as per Julia Kristeva, is that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order… does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’ It is something other, something that belongs beside rather than within: to bring it in, to incorporate the queer, would threaten the integrity of the whole. The abject exists beyond a simple subject– object relationship: it lies beside, beyond.

In Looners ( 2019 ), Jenkin van Zyl tackles this idea head on. It is a confused and confrontational work that takes both time and effort to reveal its substance: a bizarre world populated by genderless beings, driven repeatedly towards abject, libidinal desire. In the cacophonous, convoluted construction that both houses and forms the piece, we are impelled to forgo traditional binaries – ‘real and virtual, front and back stage, male and female, self and other, ruin and repair, time and space, fantasy and rationality’ – and instead to embrace ‘instability and deviance’. Everything – gender, borders, selfhood – starts to break down; but within the chaos, motifs and themes repeat themselves. Everything starts to break down…

The title of the exhibition is derived from a song, ‘Transome’, by the artist Planningtorock, whose portrait is included in the show. ‘Kissing my genders / In our bedroom light’, they coo in a wildly wavering, digitally distorted voice, ‘With my body all femme / And my face all masc’.

I remain unconvinced by the show’s title: it requires context, but in providing such explanation, the meaning changes. The shift to the imperative – as in, Kiss my ass! – relinquishes the tenderness of the lyrics, becoming order rather than invitation, still affective but differently so.

Interesting, eclectic shows are what the Hayward tends to do best: Space Shifters or Light Show, for instance. There’s no single idea, besides the vastness of gender, that ties every work together; instead, there are several threads, a veritable web of matter and meaning.

All the work dates from the past fifty years – that is, since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the watershed moment for LGBT rights both in America and globally. This point is not made within the show and most of the work is from this century; as such, this cut-off seems almost ambient, yet excludes several artists who would provide valuable counterfoils to included works. Claude Cahun immediately comes to mind, whose collages seem intimately related to those of Molinier; as does Brassaï’s Sodom and Gomorrah, remarkable portraits of female drag from interwar Paris.

Kiss My Genders feels incomplete – but perhaps it should. It serves part of a grander story, a perpetual, amorphous narrative that is constantly being written and rewritten: on the walls of galleries, in art, with bodies. It would be impossible to come out of this exhibition precisely the same person that went in. That’s its point – and its magic.