queer art at kraak review

An epic review of this year's Queer Art show at Kraak. I don't know why I do this to myself - I love to share my thoughts on things that fascinate me - but they do tend to grow out of control.

On the other hand - all from memory!

There's been a brief hiatus here while I've concentrated on getting my journal underway and typed it up in work when I have the chance. This is down to the continuing lack of internet at home.

There were two exhibtions last week I wanted to review. The Queer Art show at Kraak, and From Queer to Eternity with work from Paul Harfleet and David Hoyle at 4 Piccadilly Place. I'll take Queer Art here.

The exhibits fell into three categories for me: art by people I know (which thankfully I liked); art that I thought was really good; and art that just didn't work for me.

I'll start with the art that just didn't work for me, and move on from there to some of the general misgivings I had about the show, which I enjoyed. After that I'll discuss the art I liked and what worked for me in the show. Finally I'll talk about the work by people I know.

There were what looked like pastels, but might have been paintings, of men in leathers. Cocks and arses visible in a couple of pictures. They were not badly executed but I had trouble discerning a point.

The images were mostly coy, the kind of thing you might have printed on a T-shirt or jacket. In fact they might have been more subversively interesting had they been presented that way. Perhaps one of the images of two men printed on a clock face and highlighted with glitter as if it were designed for a teenage girl's room.

Without that subversive charge the images remained inert. More like simple wish-fulfillment than anything more expressive.

Further along the same wall by a different artist were works that also failed to work for me. Like the pastels they also suffered from what felt like a lack of ambition, and perhaps from being on too modest a scale.

From memory there were four pieces, two paintings and two installations. I liked one of the installations and I'll come to it later, the other pieces didn't grab my attention.

One painting showed an ornate building in the centre under a coloured sky. The other showed a side view of a man pissing. The installation was a basket of oversized banknotes.

The materials - paint, gold leaf, diamond dust, blown-up colour copies of banknotes were good.

The techniques - paint applied thickly and raised in furrows above the surface, gold leaf and diamond dust jabbed and smeared onto the paint, or glued thickly to the banknotes were exactly the kind of thing I like.

The subject matter - engaging with the discussions swirling in the Homocult works about the gay economy and the emphasis on consumption isolating the working classes was fascinating. I disagree with the argument in some ways, and I'll come to that disagreement later, but debate and political engagement are welcome in art.

And yet despite this the pieces failed to communicate anything much to me. I find it tricky to say why.

A series of collages and paintings bookended by two varients on a piece called 36 Internet Cocks managed to be a lot tamer than the title, subject matter, and some of the photographic images from the internet actually promised. Perhaps that was the point - that familiarity removes the shock element from art?

Although saying that it suddenly occurs to me that there might also have been a debate about what makes pornography. Whether the context, or intended usage of an image makes it pornographic. Whether labelling it so makes an image pornographic.

Again the work seemed relatively unambitious, smaller and less attention-grabbing than it could have been, and in some ways inert.

Finally, back on the wall I began with was a decently-sized brightly-coloured abstract painting. There were no real points of interest within the painting. Compositionally it wasn't bad, and I probably could have spent a long time looking over the surface of it, but like the pastels it felt empty.

While the exhibition as a whole didn't feel empty, it did feel subdued, insular and unambitious. Much of the work appeared to be having a monologue with itself rather than reaching out to a wider audience.

That's not to say that it should have been more mainstream or attempted to please a broader audience - on the contrary I felt most of it could have been more uncompromising. For instance most of the works I liked had very personal components to them, and yet also reached out to the audience.

Of the art that I really liked the Homocult pieces had the most dominant presence. A different set of pieces were also a large part of last year's show.

I like the aesthetic of these - a rough post-punk xeroxed bricolage appropriation of fine-art and aspirational images juxtaposed with text. The text itself varying between slogans, confrontational words or phrases thrown back in defiance, and longer texts engaged in what sometimes seem to be self-contradictory debates.

One prominent strand of argument is that with an emphasis on consumption and hedonism the gay scene is alienating to the working classes. As I mentioned earlier I'd argue with this. Even setting aside older and ancient rural (and urban) customs that range from begging with menaces to more elaborate dressing-up, music and dance - the post-second world war generations of working class youth have a history of dandyism, ostentation and overindulgence.

Although you might make the more sophisticated argument that allowing, even encouraging these outlets, is a method of controlling the working classes and keeping them in place.

I suspect that the intention of including these arguments in the work is to start a debate around the subject, not to have the last word.

The works are visually striking and well put together. For me they pull of the trick of being uncompromising but engaging even to an audience who might be put off by them.

There was a series of three photographs reminiscent in finish of the ghastly bleached-looking Venture portraits that cost a fortune, but thankfully much more interesting.

They showed a large hairy man naked except for a pair of pants and apparently covered in white foundation or paint. Covering his head he wore white geometrical shapes - I remember a pyramid and a sphere. He stood half squatting in the two end photos and sat on a space hopper in the central image.

The unexplained nature of the images, and the similarity of each to the other that fell apart the more you looked at them was compelling. I think I also liked that they resembled Venture photographs ('Your Story') so much while subverting the subject matter - 'cute' kiddies and pets.

One of the more modest works was also one of my favourites. By an artist who I think is Iranian by descent it was a projection of a series of still images juxtaposing Pride Festival with an Iranian religious festival. The images were selected so that sometimes compositionally, sometimes in terms of colour, at other times by the presence of some dominating object (for instance a tank) each echoed the one before.

But there was more to it than that. The longer you looked at the photos the more you noticed. The religious festival had a number of gory icons - some of body parts - that reminded me of Catholic icons, but perhaps also had echoes of BDSM.

There were some amazing faces of the subjects of the photos. I could have spent a lot longer than I actually did looking at this work.

Then there was work by people I know.

I missed Rosanne Robertson's performance piece - mainly because I didn't have any cause to use the toilet, where it was taking place - but also because I'm a bit of a pussy when it comes to other people's performances that require any involvement by me. By all accounts it was good, and I believe there are images online.

Her photograph and accompanying text at the top of the fire escape, dealing with addiction, was impressive and raw. That I also have trouble with heights and struggled to stay long enough to take in details of the photo and read the text added something strangely appropriate to the experience. Not the self-destructive connection to something but a powerful fear that made me want to withdraw from what I was afraid of.

Debbie Sharp had a large photo of one of her In Memorie plaques that she started leaving on benches during Manchester Art Crawl. I think this is a brilliant project, and again quite personal. It seems to relate to an older photographic project of hers I've seen where she photographed public benches with a particular resonance for her, and the view from that bench.

This externalising of memory in the physical circumstances of places associated with particular people or times but without the presence of the memories is reminiscent of some of Helen Shanahan's recent work. I'm thinking particularly of her Abandonments project in which surrogate figures of people who are important to her are abandoned. Or her portrait videos in which the subject is absent.

There was a different but equally personal work by Helen in the exhibition. Her film of Dungeness showing the area, her grandparents, and their house inside and out, with extracts of handwritten text superimposed over parts of the image at different times. All overlaid with a sparse, melancholy soundtrack.

All these works that I liked - both those by people I know and those by people I don't had the quality of being uncompromising in dealing with personal and/or political concerns, a clarity of purpose, and an obvious desire to draw people in and engage with them.

But with the exception of the Homocult pieces they were also relatively 'quiet'. To the extent that I thought this year's show was less impressive than last year, until I started to write about the works I enjoyed.

This year's show was less attention-grabbing, less obviously confrontational than year. But on closer inspection it was probably more rewarding with some incredibly strong work.

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