Munich. The 1994 exhibition »Oh Boy, It’s a Girl« at the Kunstverein in Munich, curated by Hedwig Saxenhuber and Astrid Wege, which interrogated contemporary forms of feminism, gender politics and associated artistic practices along the lines of Anglo-American gender theories, took the work »Gender Trouble« by Judith Butler as a central point of departure. The reflexive strategies of parody, masquerade and performative subversion identified by Butler aimed partly to create gender confusion and depart from established politics of identity. This was also to have a profound effect on queer theory, whose emergence at the start of the 1990s parallel to the AIDS crisis gave rise to many critical artistic works that became part of a radical movement in (art) politics. Just 13 years later, the curators Stefan Kalmár, Daniel Pies and Henrik Olesen have reversed the title of that exhibition, making clever use of a binary gender logic whose resolution is still a visionary promise. According to the exhibition folder, »Oh Girl, It’s a Boy« uses a »present day whose politics of representation have changed« to try and discuss »the conflict between the struggle for recognition and integration on the one hand and the maintenance of difference of identity on the other«. The range of locations that are allowed to speak is geographically limited; most of the artists presented in the exhibition live and work in the Western cities of New York, Los Angeles, London and Berlin, i.e. in places where deviation from the so-called norm is more or less an integral part of co-existence and also represents a considerable economic factor. This concentration means that recent historical transformations such as the shift of the AIDS crisis to poor regions and the offensively hetero-normative organisation of sexual relations in the post-socialist countries that has emerged ever more clearly in the past few years are practically absent from the exhibition. Although this is an irritating omission at first glance, it makes sense in view of the question that is treated here, as politics of representation and identity take on very different forms away from Western metropolises. However, the concept turns out to be less than rigid, with videos by Akram Zaatari, »Red Chewing Gum« (2000), and Dorit Magreiter, »The She Zone« (2004), or Danh Vos’s installation »Good Life« (2007), laying traces to Beirut, Dubai and Vietnam. It is also surprising that recent shifts and re-positionings of gender politics in art are again sought in the works of historical figureheads, which also provide the (formal) vocabulary for many of the works. There are thus two films by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, »William Buys a Parrot« (1963) and »Bill and Tony« (1972), which use cut-ups, a metrical editing technique, to simulate identity shifts and at the same to highlight homosexual codes. Cerith Wyn Evans is featured with his film work »Pasolini Ostia Remix« (1998-2003), a reworking of »Firework Text« from 1998. Flaming letters mounted in wooden frames show a quote from the Pasolini film »Oedipus Rex«; they are installed at the Italian harbour of Ostia, the place where the filmmaker was murdered in 1975 in circumstances that have not been fully explained to this day. It was also in the mid-1970s that Felicity Mason, writing under her pseudonym Anne Cummings, published »The Love Habit: The Sexual Confessions of an Older Woman«. As the title suggests, this tells the story of a mature-aged woman who had a series of relationships with mostly young men. Ariane Müller takes this book as basic material and, in a glass cabinet, presents watercolours and drawings that on the one hand function as book illustrations, but on the other subvert the art-historical regime of the gaze, with its clearly gender-specific hierarchy. Tom Burr also makes use of historical material – a text by Jean Genet and film stills by Kenneth Anger – as points of reference to create queer spaces. An excerpt from the TV show »I Have Got a Secret« from 1960 is among the unexpected items in the exhibition: the founding father of electronic music, John Cage, celebrates the rich musical properties of kitchen utensils live in front of a broad audience. This is a very elegant way of reminding the viewers of a central work of feminist video art, »Semiotics of the Kitchen« (1975) by Martha Rosler, to which an intertitle also refers. Kaucyila Brooke takes a big step back in time with her work »Tit for Twat«, so far consisting of thirteen panels on the wall. In it, she arranges the Biblical creation myth in a new collage from a lesbian point of view. Madame and Eve, Adam and Steve are now the names of the paradisiacal figures that rebel against a system, already laid out in Genesis, that justifies sexist and racist practices. The naked (female) body, which has been the site of manifestation for social concepts and compulsions in many (historical) gender-based works, appears here with a pleasant sensual emphasis, as is the case in other works as well. It is no longer pain or violence that are inscribed here; rather, the body increasingly becomes a self-determined field for a game that is assertory yet tender, but still reflects the activist roots of the feminist and gay/lesbian movement. This can also be applied to the work »Normal Work« (2007) by Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz. Boudry and Lorenz reconstruct found photographs from the estate of Hannah Cullwick, a domestic servant who posed before the camera in the second half of the 19th century as people from various social positions – bourgeois woman, young man or black slave – and transfer Cullwick’s sometimes rather sado-masochistic relationship to a man from bourgeois circles into witty cinematic tableaux that operate beyond the hegemonic logic that usually dominates the field of sexual politics. Alongside historical references, the prevailing formal, aesthetic element in the exhibition is the collage technique, which is used in many of the works, some of them already mentioned. While Stephen Willats reconstructs the history of a London nightclub for women in a multi-facetted combination of flyers, everyday utensils, photographs and handwritten notes, at the same time casually exposing the punk movement as mainly hetero-normative, the works by Ray Johnson, Charles Henri Ford and Richard Hawkins are appealing in their formal, extremely attractive visual individuality. These works are closer to a formal vocabulary inspired by discourse than to the decidedly political gesture often used previously. The clearest commentary on an increasingly evident conservative present-day backlash is provided by the video »Just Say No to Family Values« (2005). Its makers, John Giorno and Antonello Faretta, unabashedly celebrate hedonism with emphatic charm and make fun of conservative attitudes in a lyrical speech act: a video that can also be found on YouTube.
Translated by Timothy Jones