On September 29, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter championed an exhibit of “queer” and trans art under the headline “When It Comes to Gender, Let Confusion Reign." The exhibit at the New Museum in Manhattan is titled “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.”
The museum boasted its exhibit “investigates gender’s place in contemporary art and culture at a moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists who explore gender beyond the binary to usher in more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity.”
Cotter explained:
As an exhibition, its brief is to break down, through art, the binary male-female face-off that gay and lesbian often represented, to stretch the perimeters of gender to the snapping point. The goal is to inject the disruptive power of not-normal back into the discussion of difference at a time when the edge of mainstream gayness has been dulled by the quest for assimilation.
The difficulty is that queer, and to some extent trans, are hard to capture, institutionally. Slipperiness is built into them; they don’t sit still. Trans by definition is the act of changing, going beyond the boundaries of gender (and race, and class). Those boundaries are porous, and crossings in any direction are negotiable. Queer is even more category-aversive. It’s not so much a personal identity as a political impulse, a strategy for thwarting assimilation and sowing constructive chaos at a time when culture wars are again escalating.
Cotter even championed the "trans-species" blurring: "Self-portraiture takes many forms in the exhibition, one of them being trans-species. During the show’s run, the artist Nayland Blake will periodically don a full-length bear costume and, as a character called Fursona, will stage hug-fests for visitors."
The museum website explained further: “Gnomen, a hybrid bear-bison that can change sex and gender, is the 'fursona' of artist Nayland Blake. A fursona is an avatar in the furry community, where personal expression is bound up with nonhuman identities and fantasies.”
Then there was "Vaginal Davis, originally from Los Angeles, now in Berlin, adds social class to the mix in small wall reliefs made from Dollar Store beauty supplies: Wet n Wild nail polish, Aqua Net hair spray and perfume by Jean Nate."
Again, the museum website adds a layer of explanation:
In the late 1970s, as the frontwoman for the punk band the Afro Sisters, Davis drew inspiration from Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. Her unique brand of punk drag aesthetics—deemed “drag terrorism” by the late scholar José Esteban Muñoz—revels in a refusal to be recuperated by the mainstream. “I was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays. I am a societal threat,” Davis recalled in a recent interview with Grace Dunham.
Cotter concluded:
Confusion may be the only reasonable response to the world at present. And creating confusion may be queer’s most useful weapon. Queer has no fixed fan base. Genders, races, classes: bring them on. But it has one broad political mandate: to foster instability as resistance to any status quo. Resistance is good exercise. It helps keep you young. And it can keep you alert. Even when you lose track of what “normal” is, you know you don’t want to be that.
