A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria asks you to bring your best queer eye to the show.
Depending on who you speak to, the word “queer” can conjure a variety of meanings or responses: it can be a way to describe the peculiar or strange, or an insult thrown at the LGBTQ+ community that was defiantly embraced by the same community as a way to celebrate their difference. It’s political; denotes an aesthetic and sensibility. But maybe the most important aspect of the word is that, by nature, it is undefinable.
How then do you curate stories, works of art and artists within a category that by definition defies being defined? This is the challenge set up by the National Gallery of Victoria with its new free exhibition Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection, opening in Melbourne in March and running until August.
Rather than presenting an exhaustive history of queerness and queer art, the NGV is instead transferring the hard work onto the audience by asking viewers to look at familiar works of cultural importance through a “queer lens”.
If this process feels unfamiliar – a bit queer even – perhaps the best explainer for this way of viewing the world comes from the late bell hooks. Themselves queer, hooks defined the term as “Not about who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
“We’re not telling a full history of queerness or queer art, because there are gaps in our collection and there are areas that are underrepresented and many of the works in the show aren’t necessarily by queer artists,” explains Angela Hesson, the NGV’s curator of Australian art. Instead, she says, Queer is a retelling of art and stories from queer perspectives that are unknown, overlooked or adjunct to the original artwork or purpose.
Spanning art, myths and crafts that date from as far back as Ancient Greece, as well as Christian iconography, First Nations artists, fashion and iconic pop culture moments, Queer is more an excavation of the NGV archives built up over its 160 years than a traditional exhibition. And with more than 400 artworks and taking up the entire third level of the NGV International, according to the curatorial team behind it Queer will be the largest exhibition ever mounted by the NGV.
“We actually came up with the concept for the show nearly three years ago,” explains Myles Russell-Cook, curator of Indigenous art at the NGV and, along with Hesson, one of the five curators who oversaw the enormous task of pulling the exhibition together, along with finding the right way to tell the queer stories involved. “It was at the time of the marriage equality debate, which actually is probably even more than three years ago now.”
“We needed [the past] three years to actually get together the extent of content we’ve got in the show. It was a major research project that took this long.”
Most, if not all, of the pieces on display will probably be familiar to the viewer. They include the American Express card dress worn by Lizzy Gardiner as she accepted her Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Priscilla Queen of The Desert; the graphic work of Keith Haring; and Melbourne-born fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery. All with clear links to queer events, queer people or queer culture. But other artworks, names and people might raise an eyebrow as to their involvement or connection to the queer theme.
“So we have a lovely photo of The Queen Mother in Bourke Street Mall in the 1950s,” says Ted Gott, the NGV’s senior curator of international art. “People will look at that and say, ‘What on earth is that doing here?’.But when they read the label, they’ll discover that she was incredibly gay friendly. The courtiers at Clarence House were a gay couple, and they were her friends and devoted courtiers for decades. So, she is a queer icon within the Royal household for that detail … We have a full run here of British royals.
“We also have Richard the Lionheart through to James the First of England, and William of Orange and his boyfriend the Duke of Buckingham. Now some of these stories are challenged. There are those who say Richard the Lionheart had a homosexual affair and there are those who claim he didn’t. Whether he did or didn’t is not the point. The fact is we don’t have to prove that, we are simply presenting here that there is a queer story associated with Richard the Lionheart whether you like it or not.”
Are they expecting a few angry responses from visitors who don’t accept the gallery’s queering of their favourite royal, historical figure or celebrity? Yes, but Russell-Cook says this is to some degree part of the process. “There’s this kind of paranoia from people at the idea that maybe someone they look up to might be queer. That to me is the most exciting thing about the show, that people are going to have to deal with that.”
A sliding Kinsey scale wasn’t solely enjoyed by aristocracy. One of the important messages of the exhibition will be the retelling of queer lives of people who, despite living their lives openly back in the day, have had the details scrubbed clean by either puritans or societal niceties that ignored the obvious. “[Sidney] Nolan would refer to himself as ambidextrous,” says Angela Hesson, the NGV’s curator of Australian art. “That was his word for bisexual. It was absolutely known among his friends at the time. Also, the image that we used of him is the queerest image ever and taken at a spot that was a well known beat at the time.” (“The men’s public baths at St Kilda Pier was a nude, male only cruising site,” Gott kindly explains.)
“Nolan was not an obscure choice really, but it’s interesting because Nolan is such an Australian icon and I guess associated with a particular version of Australian masculinity,” adds Hesson. “That’s something people take exception to. I think we are quite happy to, I won’t say provoke, but I guess broaden people’s understanding of those kinds of figures, because in a way it broadens our idea of who our icons are as well.”
Another interesting facet of how the queer theme is applied to the exhibition is through the hidden stories, or queer-adjacent narratives, that sit just behind the more commonly known versions. An example of this anecdotal queerness can be found in Richard Hamilton’s illustrations of James Joyce’s opus Ulysses that attendees will eventually come across. Although the work itself contains sexual references, it isn’t queer per se.
“The queer story that most people won’t know is that Joyce couldn’t get a publisher,” explains Gott. “Ulysses was considered obscene and was banned from publication, and its first proper publication was in fact by two lesbian women in Paris: Sylvia Beach, an American expat, and her Paris girlfriend Adrienne Monnier. They ran the Left Bank bookshop called Shakespeare and Company.”
While the exhibition leans more towards depictions of Western and European culture purely due to the number of acquisitions, Russell-Cook – whose area of expertise is Indigenous art – says that the presence of First Nations and Black artists plays an integral role in the collection on display. “I think there are also going to be some specific works that will be quite a surprise for people to learn about the extraordinary sexual and gender diversity that has existed in first nations communities around the world,” Russell-Cook tells WISH.
“Works that reference Fa’afafine, who are known by many names throughout the Pacific and are an incredible story of gender diversity that has existed prior to colonisation and that continues today, that very few people will have ever heard of. Most of the Indigenous and First Nations works in the show are by contemporary artists who are using their art to draw out stories either about love or about their own identity.”
One such artist is Dylan Mooney, a Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander man from Mackay in North Queensland and the youngest artist to be included in the exhibition. Mooney’s work – a combination of graphic art depicting First Nations figures in poses and pop colour normally used for superheroes in comic books – sits at an intersection of broader cultural interests and personal introspection.
“Queerness for me from an Indigenous perspective ... I like to think of it as walking between both worlds of culture and a new age,” Mooney explains. “I always think of my past and history and am very conscious of the idea that our culture is surviving, thriving. We’ve always adapted to this ever-changing world: I’m Indigenous, queer and I am building my own path.”
The discussion with Mooney raised an interesting point was raised about whether exhibitions such as this can pigeonhole an artist. In fact, back in 1994, a story in The Weekend Australian by art historian Joanna Mendelssohn asked this same question, about the growth of artists who were becoming associated with the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and whether they should be worried that this affiliation might “ghettoise” them as gay artists as opposed to simply artists. The answer then, by those interviewed, was a resounding no. Today, the answer might be more nuanced.
While his art conveys a strong queer identity along with Indigenous and Black heritage, Mooney offers an interesting perspective on his involvement in the collection. “I think that the exhibition is a great way to celebrate the LGBTQI+ community and the work people have done throughout the years to where we are now,” he says. “Being queer and being a First Nations artist are two different things. One is my sexuality, and the other is my heritage and culture. The only overlap between the two is identifying myself as both. Like most artists, my artworks are an expression of my identity and provide an insight into who I am and the stories I want to tell.”
On the opposite end of the generational spectrum, Australian painter Vivienne Binns has a similar philosophical response when asked about her involvement in the new exhibition. “I know so many people are going to just find this a kind of cop-out but I just feel as a person I don’t want to be totally tagged,” says Binns. “Yes, I’m female, but I don’t necessarily always feel a woman. I feel a person. And I don’t feel a man, but I feel an individual.”
Now based in Canberra, Binns entered the art scene with a bang in 1967 with her first show at Sydney’s iconic Watters Gallery. Her three paintings Suggon, Vag dens and Phallic monument were considered so obscene for their sexual nature they invited complaints from other artists. While it is her later works, made with ballpoint pen but no less sexual in their imagery, that appear in the collection, Binns says the purpose of her work is to explore and observe the human condition rather than creating as a queer, or lesbian, or even a woman, artist.
The NGV’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Pip Wallace says that this sense of remaining undefined, or beyond defining, is one shared by many of the contemporary artists involved in the show: “It’s definitely positioned and shared strongly by a number of the living artists in the exhibition … people like Vivienne Binns who don’t want to use language in that kind of declarative way.”
“I recall a conversation I had with [Indigenous photographer and artist] Destiny Deacon,” adds Russell-Cook. “I imagine if I’d approached her and said, ‘We’re doing a show of queer women about queer women artists’ she wouldn’t have been as comfortable doing the show. Whereas approaching her and saying, ‘We’re doing a research project where we’re looking at the collection through a queer lens and we’re drawing queer stories from works’ – that was something that she was completely excited to be involved in.
“I can imagine there are a lot of artists who, if you’d ask that same question, ‘Do you consider yourself a queer artist or a woman artist or an indigenous artist?’ that they would have had the same response.”
Which ties in perfectly with the ways in which the term queer remains defiantly undefineable.
Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection will be at The National Gallery of Victoria from March 10 to August 21 Entry is free.
