A "Queer" Art Exhibition: "After" Against Nature

"After" Against Nature: 20 Years Later, Spring or Summer 2008 Curator: Robert Summers, ABD/PhD, Art History, UCLA e: robtsum@ucla.edu e: robtsum@aol.com e: rsummers@otis.edu The proposed exhibition "After" Against Nature: 20 Years Later (which will require the if not the entire exhibition center, then the "Store-Front Windowns" and the "Main Gallery") will be a critical re-staging and a re-thinking of an earlier exhibition held at L.A.C.E. It was titled Against Nature: A Show by Homosexual Men, which was curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins, and it was held from January to February of 1988. Currently, Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins is extremely interested in being involved ("in some way"), and several of the exhibition's original artists are willing to re-show their. Visits to established and emerging artist's studios are still taking place. A two-day conference (still being organized) will consist of various discussions of "gay art" then and now, “gay” aesthetics, the influence of feminism, and “queer theory and studies. There will also be an artist's talk (participants: TBA), a performance by _______, and a catalogue, similar to the original one, will be produced, which I hope creates a dialogue amongst writers. Overall Cooper and Hawkin's Against Nature was a response to several interlocking political events that took place in the 80s: e.g., the Reagan/Bush presidency, the rise of the "Religious Right", legal discrimination against “homosexuals” (e.g., Bowers vs. Hardwick, et al.), the backlash against art, and the discovery-spread of AIDS/HIV. The specific aim of Against Nature exhibition was to look at artworks by "gay male artists" and how "they" reckoned with sexual identity and desire that was intertwined with AIDS/HIV. And, how "gay" men "represented" themselves. Indeed, if there was an "audience" for such "representations", then it was "gay men", "gay artists", and their "allies". With these histories, theories, and political systems and trajectories in mind, as well as examining the concerns of younger "gay" artists over the past 20 years, the proposed exhibition "After" Against Nature asks: What may happen if a re-staging -- with a difference -- of Against Nature took place, today? How would the artwork of the "past" be "(re-)read" in/for the "present" -- and alongside current artwork that reckons with sexuality and/or politics? How are "homo-" and "hetero-" sexuality conceived, today? Do (current) artists working on/with sexuality still think along the "hetero/homo" binary, which was the binary that enabled Against Nature to make sense both politically and sexually? Or, has transgender and other related studies deconstructed the "hetero/homo" binary into a multiplicity -- into "nonce-taxonomies"? If so, then do the identity politics that framed Against Nature "mean" anything of "significance", today? More curatorial questions: Is the most significant aspect of "gay" art (and life) still revolve around, as the original curators argued, "sexual desire [that] informs, distances, and empowers the recent history of art made by guys like us?" Do we still believe that art made by "guys like us" (read: "gay men") contains the intentions, identities, desires, and politics of the artists? Or, is this ideology now fully understood as a metaphysical fiction, which was been passed off as an empirical "fact"? Does art "really" have the ability to create a community and (group) identity denoted by the seemingly "commonsensical" phrase "guys like us"? Finally, is the/a "gay aesthetic" now understood as theoretically naive? In the “aftermath” of Against Nature, as well as 80s identity politics, what is to be done? I believe that by re-staging Against Nature, as "After" Against Nature, we can "re-open" the artworks and assumptions in the original exhibition to what may have been unknown and unseen. Overall, I hope that by re-peating Against Nature -- with a difference -- this new exhibition will surface the demand within any repetition, which here means all the infidelity and perversity to "context" that operated in the 80s. Indeed, the re-staging of the original exhibition would not be re-peating the "true" meaning of the original curators' intentions and the various artists' art, but rather art's untimely power: its power to disrupt the "past" and "present". This will be an exhibition without conclusion and proscription: it will be a “producer exhibition” (i.e., constantly open to multiple meanings and subjectivities -- none of them stable, all of them relational). Furthermore, this re-staging will not be "against nature", which already participates in a certain closed binary system: the unnatural against the natural and the cultural against the natural. Rather, "After" Against Nature will be "for" becoming-queer, becoming-historical, and the deconstructive and the "future-to-come".