Just a few more notes and thoughts regarding the subject:
- Richard Meyer: The word queer = means of opposition to normative heterosexuality
- Nina Levitt’s image entitled submerged “hovers between visibility and erasure, resolution and apparition”
- Emily Roysdon reimagines Rimbaud in New York original here and Roysdon’s here.
Thoughts
The work here challenges dominant ideologies through representation of the present and by referencing other artists who are well known as gay. The images can reference sex and masculinity but do not have to. The queer connotation can be made either within the image of by the artist positioning the image into a particular context such as Roysdon did with her work.
So these artists appear to me to face almost exactly the same issues I face in terms of making statements that challenge dominant views: they either have to make rather obvious gay visual references within images or use contexts to position them so that the intended meaning can be evoked. Without reading the texts that has driven me to view some of the work of these artists I would probably have been puzzled by the images rather than have been able to interpret them.
Indeed it is in that way that I can now see that my researching this area is wholly different to my previous research into gender and race as they were both about dominant representations and this area is clearly looking the other – oppositional – way. If I were to treat the subject similarly to the way I have explored gender and race I would be looking for dominant representations of gayness.
anomiepete 