The Mysterious Selfies of Marcel Bascoulard

Marcel Bascoulard was 19 when he witnessed the murder of his father by his mother. Soon after he became homeless, living in precarious shelters in the Avaricum district, in Bourges. He would spend the end of his life in the cab of a truck offered by an owner of a breakage. He learned by himself how to draw.  He regularly represented the streets of his city, in a wide angle and completely empty, emanating a kind of realistic vertigo.

Admired and outcast at the same time, asocial and eccentric, he liked to dress as a woman, in dresses that he sometimes made himself. In one of his letters, he confided: “If I walk around in a feminine outfit, it is because I find it more aesthetic. For the sake of art, when I wear a women’s dress, I take with me my camera and I ask people I know to take a picture of me. ”

Living near the Morlet photo studio, Bascoulart began to be photographed in the 1940s. In these photographs with notched edges and in small formats, the expression of his face is always the same: the face slightly leaning to one side and without makeup. His waist is accentuated, the skirt blown up by petticoats, he resembles a young girl ready to be married. Sometimes he looks like a housewife in an apron, before transforming himself, later on, into an elegant bourgeois. Fashion changed, his silhouette shrank down and his hair became white. In 1970, he wore black skai apron to resemble a samurai warrior. A broken mirror he held in each shot is an additional strange detail.

Marcel Bascoulard staged himself, creating a gallery of disturbing characters – echo of his murderous mother (?) – a marginalized figure, he was accepted by the society thanks to those who took his picture. On January 12th, 1978, he was assassinated in Asnières-lès-Bourges, in an area called Les Gargaudières, strangled by a 23-year old homeless.

art brut   collection abcd

Several  works of Marcel Bascoulard  from the Pinault Collection are included in the exhibition ‘Dancing with Myself’ at the Punta Della Dogana, Venice, Italy, until 16 December 2018.

Forty years after his murder, Marcel Bascoulard remains something of an iconic curiosity for the people of Bourges. He was seen as a wandering visionary, an erudite outsider known for his highly detailed drawings of the town. He was self-taught and was the only character ever to appear in his work, as his photographs, taken over a thirty-year period from 1942 onwards, testify. These full-length photographic self-portraits show Bascoulard wearing dresses he designed himself and holding a piece of broken mirror, alone, in both interior and exterior settings.

Palazzo Grassi,Dancing with myself

The Pinault Collection

The exhibition ‘Dancing with Myself’ opened at Punta della Dogana, in Venice. The show curated by Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner, stems from the collaboration between the Pinault Collection and Museum Folkwang in Essen.

The exhibition, presented in a first version in 2016 in Essen, proposes a revisited path with over 56 artworks not featured in the German museum. ‘Dancing with Myself’ faces the primordial importance of the artist’s role as actor and material of his/her own creations, from the 1970s to today.

The exhibition brings together a great range of artistic practices and languages (photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation…), cultures, geographic origins, generations and experiences, to establish a tension between extremely different artistic approaches: melancholy of vanity, ironic play with identity, political biography and existential questioning, the body as sculpture, effigy or fragment of its symbolic substitute.

The exhibition revolves around four themes – Melancholia, Identity Games, Political Autobiographies, Raw Material - that develop evenly through the spaces of Punta della Dogana with over 140 works. 116 works from the Pinault Collection, of which more than 80 have never been exhibited in Venice, establish a dialogue with a selection of works from Museum Folkwang in Essen. On view 32 artists, including Marcel Bascoulard, Marcel Broodthaers, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst , Urs Lüthi , Claude Cahun, John Coplans, Urs Fischer, LaToya Ruby Frazier,  Rudolf Stingl, Nan Goldin, Gilbert & George, Lily Renaud-Dewar and Giulio Paolini. 

Reviews of the exhibition :

But after passing through Félix González-Torres’s symbolist “Untitled (Blood)” (1992) strands of red beads at the exhibition’s entrance, it was encouraging to see the curators Bethenod and Florian Ebner digging deeper into the ‘self’ with emotional sub-themes of melancholia, political autobiography, materiality and identity games, best exemplified by the incognito poly-identities presented by Urs Lüthi, Claude Cahun, Marcel Bascoulard, and Cindy Sherman. Their self-masking thematic struck me the deepest as it reminds us that automated artificial intelligence facial recognition is soon destined to have a monstrous effect on our lives. 

(…)

The chimeric Sherman probably is the central artist of the exhibition, with 45 of her works included, which may have been too long a march through the female unconscious, considering there are none by Carolee Schneemann or the great hybrid poseur Pierre Molinier. In their absence, Cahun, Lüthi and Bascoulard take full advantage of the use of nuanced cultural façades that indicate an interest in signal ambiguity within the semiotic field. When looking at their work, desire can take us by surprise, leading us toward disguised hybrid-people we hadn’t imagined we would ever love or trust. Certainly, their impertinent masks within the look-at-me premise of the show can be reconsidered as culturally prescient in lieu of the psychographic politics that have dowsed the internet ego-rush of freely sharing selfie data — a rush that has remade unmasked masses into raw commodities.

The Alluring Dance of Selfies and Self-Portraits. By Joseph Nechvatal. Hyperallergic , May 23, 2018. 

A series of recently discovered photographs by Marcel Bascoulard, a talented autodidact who lived in a state of vagrancy in a rural French town, offers an unexpected portrait of an artist over time. Bascoulard designed feminine costumes for himself, commissioned from a seamstress using scraps of fabric bought in a local thrift shop. He appears posing proudly and elegantly in a long flounced skirt in 1944. Both the artist and his outfits evidence the dilapidation of time and an uptick in calculated eccentricity: by the early 1970s he appears hunched and gray, in a series of skirt suits stitched from thick leatherette. Apparently, he would throw his self-portraits at people’s feet, by way of provocation.

In the Age of the Selfie, Self-Portraits Are More Powerful Than Ever. By Hettie Judah. Garage, April 18, 2018.

You will dance better tomorrow thanks to the Pinault Collection. By Thibaut Wychowanok.  Numéro , April 23, 2018. 

   

These two images are amongst the earliest of a series of self-portraits Marcel Bascoulard made compulsively until his death (in 1978 at the age of 64), in or around the town of Bourges, in central France. During war-time occupation, Bascoulard was arrested at least twice by Nazi soldiers, only to be released without charge; accounts suggest they may have been unnerved by his strangeness, a prominent aspect of which was his seeming indifference to them. Bascoulard lived always on his own idiosyncratic terms, apparently unconcerned with the opinion of others.

Though the subject of these two photographs, Bascoulard is also their maker; the camera is his own (though a friend is operating it for him), and the intentions likewise. Six months elapsed between them being taken and Bascoulard’s sense of what he wants these images to address, and how, appears to have evolved. While his stance in the earlier picture is self-consciously feminine – a performance, in a private space – the later photograph is unapologetically of a man in a dress, out in the countryside for all the world to see. He seems more concerned now with straightforwardly recording a moment than with conforming to an established (gendered) aesthetic. ‘This is me, in this dress,’ Bascoulard seems to be saying. And nothing more.

This approach – directly addressing the camera, devoid of posturing – was to prove characteristic. Though the costumes change over the decades (Bascoulard designed them himself and had them made) the form of the photographs doesn’t, suggesting that, while something is being developed, something else is stuck in reiteration, both seeking and resisting resolution. Denying himself money and possessions, Bascoulard lived as a clochard – a vagrant – in a succession of slum lodgings or improvised shacks (the last of which was a rusting lorry-cab in the corner of a field), never washing or changing his clothes. In this way he spent his whole life in the one small community, known to everyone while remaining insistently alone.

He had trained as an artist and been exhibited once, in Paris. Known for his landscape drawings – which, at their best, are vital with the commonplace – he chose to sell only the most conventional: souvenir pictures of the town’s cathedral and mediaeval streets. He showed his photographic self-portraits to his friends, some of whom still live in the area. ‘Monsieur Bascoulard’ they call him reverently, even lovingly, as they explain to me that he only dressed up for the camera. According to an official report of an incident in 1952, when he was arrested for walking the streets in the ‘wrong’ kind of clothing, he told the police: ‘It’s an artistic necessity.’ He was seeking to avoid charges, but in the process provided his one explicit statement as to what he considered the photographs to be: Art.

They fall into three distinct phases. In the first, made during the 1940s, the youthfully lean and bright-eyed Bascoulard is radiantly self-assured, dressed as his grandmother might have been when she was his age and on her way to a party.

In the second (from the 1950s to ’60s), a more matronly Bascoulard continues to emulate an earlier generation: a middle-aged schoolteacher; a shopkeeper; a spinster aunt. Dutiful domestic service is evoked by aprons, sometimes worn incongruously over satin. While these images celebrate the mundane respectability of pre-war small-town life, the man who made them lived in squalor and stench. Looking at us quizzically, a piece of mirror always in hand – reading variously as a fan, a book or a machete – he is in his 40s now and bulking up. A bourgeois housewife prize-fighter.

Often, in this middle phase of the photographs, he seems too tightly wrapped – a chrysalis – and in the final phase (which takes us into the 1970s) emerges as a massive gravity-bound butterfly. He had always liked materials with a sheen and now it’s vinyl, the folds of which take on increasingly structural forms (sometimes as stiff and as gleaming as samurai armour). And the man himself? He looks a little doubtful at times, or a little impatient, his head and shoulders often dipping in a kind of curtsey. Is it a supplication? Or is he poised to go in for the kill? He has the battered and embattled look of a boxer.

In one picture (it’s undated but looks to be from his final years) he’s wearing a simple white smock, standing in an interior doorway. The wallpaper is unprecedented; it feels like someone’s home rather than a studio. I have the surprising sense of another person’s presence (he’s always seemed alone before, even though someone was operating the camera), and this suggests a narrative. It’s as if he’s asked a question and awaits our answer: it might be whether we want a cup of tea. I don’t think it’s whether we want a fuck: Bascoulard’s self-portraits are resolutely asexual. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he seems to be saying, ‘however transgressive this might appear.’ In 1932, when Bascoulard was 19, his mother shot his father dead. She spent the rest of her life in a lunatic asylum. Does the paradoxically reassuring atmosphere of these images mask an intimation that women may not necessarily be as benign as convention suggests, or men necessarily as dangerous?

In the final photographs the juxtaposition of an undisguisedly male person with clothing conventionally regarded as female has evolved so that both the person and the costume seem imbued with a mix of masculine and feminine qualities. (Unless this is to observe only how we all, in ageing, tend to reassume the androgyny of adolescence.)

Bascoulard struggled to emerge from a traumatic childhood into a singular adulthood. In making these images is he seeking to ameliorate a sense of discomfort or to examine it? Is he trying to reconcile his mother and his father, or the masculine and feminine aspects of himself? And if so, does he succeed? In the early images his presentation to the camera seems a victory in itself, but the later ones are increasingly shadowed by a sense that the weariness of compulsion has overtaken the energy from which compulsion springs.

That his mother killed his father suggests a couple overly preoccupied with one another and unlikely to have much time for their children. Ultimately, for me, these mysterious self-portraits read as images of self-sufficiency. ‘I am all I need in one,’ he seems to be saying, ‘You offer nothing. I only want you to see. To know I’m here. And not to forget.’

The Mysterious Selfies of Marcel Bascoulard. By Philip Myall.   Frieze,  September 20, 2018.  

More : 

Two interesting French documentaries :

Bascoulard, le destintragique du dessinateur-clochard.  France 3 Centre-Val de Loire. Published  on November 7, 2017

Bascoulard et nous.   In 2017, eight students from different classes at the Lycée Jean Mermoz de Bourges made a documentary film retracing the life of an emblematic figure of the city of Bourges: Marcel Bascoulard. Lycée Jean Mermoz de Bourges / CICLIC - 2017

A book on his life and work :  

Bascoulard : Dessinateur virtuose, clochard magnifique, femme inventée.

texte de Patrick Martinat.  Editions Buchet/Chastel, Les Cahiers  Dessinés, 2017. 

A Brief History of Drag in the Art World

Drag has a rich cultural history, spanning cross-dressing performances and deliberate parodies of fixed roles of gender and sexuality. Men have been performing on stage as women since the Ancient Greek tragedies, Shakespeare famously cast men as women, and Baroque operas featured early examples of drag.The term “drag queen” was first used to describe men appearing in women’s clothing in Polari—a type of British slang that was popularized among gay men and the theater community in the late 19th and 20th centuries. And while drag has long maintained a powerful presence in popular culture, more recently, it has developed a strong foothold in the art world as well.Today, in the wake of the popular television program RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag queen Conchita Wurst winning the Eurovision Song Contest, and new drag-themed club nights popping up across London, New York, and L.A., one could say that drag is in the midst of having a mainstream moment. Riding this wave of popularity are art galleries and museums. Recently, drag has been identified as an influence among major art exhibitions, like the Whitney Biennial in New York, and performance programs, like “Contemporary Drag” at NADA New York this past March. It also serves as one of the themes in the new show “Queer British Art” at Tate Britain.

Artists have historically created work that might not be considered or intended to be “drag,” but nonetheless similarly challenge and deconstruct rigid social and sexual archetypes. Take, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, who first appeared in 1920. The character’s name was a pun on “Eros, c’est la vie” (meaning “eros, it is life”) and she appeared in several portraits taken by photographer Man Ray. Sélavy was an expression of Duchamp’s love for subversion and enigma. Similarly, the artist Claude Cahun was the male alter ego of the Surrealist Lucie Schwob, who took self-portraits dressed in male garments.Cahun was a forerunner to contemporary feminist artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, and Gillian Wearing, among many others, who have played with elements of drag, often to critique the expectations placed on their gender. Hershman Leeson created a fictional character named Roberta Breitmore between 1973 and 1978, who even had her own therapist; Mendieta photographed herself with male facial hair to challenge gender signifiers; Sherman’s conceptual portraits have seen her disguise herself as fictionalized characters; and Wearing has manipulated her self image with masks.Elsewhere in history, major artists have famously documented the practice of drag. Andy Warhol filmed drag queens like Candy Darling and Mario Montez. The video artist Charles Atlas filmed famous London nightlife star Leigh Bowery; photographer Nan Goldin captured drag queens in her hometown of Boston as a teenager, and New York’s drag communities in the 1980s and early ’90s; and later, Mario Montez collaborated with the photographer Conrad Ventur.

Atlas continues to work with drag, evidenced by his recent video, Here She Is…v1 (2015), which was included in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition in 2015. He featured the famous New York drag queen Lady Bunny lip syncing to camera. One could also argue that the colorful characters depicted in Ryan Trecartin’s works of the 2000s had a proto-Drag Race aesthetic about them.Trecartin’s work was included in last year’s Berlin Biennale curated by the team behind DIS Magazine. The Biennale was titled “The Present in Drag,” and the DIS curators intended it to be a space for artists to reflect contemporary culture onto itself, rather than expose it. Also featured was the work of Amalia Ulman whose self-portraiture sees her enact a fake character she has cultivated via social media.

The recent drag programming at NADA New York was focused on more traditional ideas of drag, influenced, in part, by the recent explosion of a new generation of drag queens in Brooklyn. “[We brought them] out of the bars and into the streets—or rather into the art fair,” says Sam Gordon, who co-curated the performance program with Jacob Robichaux (together they run Gordon Robichaux, a curatorial agency seeking to surface under-recognized artists).That same Brooklyn drag scene was given gallery air-time at the end of last year in the show “Coney Island Babies: Visual Artists from the Brooklyn Drag Scene” at Bureau of General Service — Queer Division on West 13th Street in Manhattan. Curated by Director of the Fire Island Artist Residency Program, Chris Bogia, and drag performer and visual artist Montgomery Perry Smith, the show took stock of the vibrant community of contemporary visual artists in New York’s drag scene today. Prominent among the scene are the performance groups Chez Deep and Bushwig.

Meanwhile, across Europe, a renewed interest in drag has seen a slew of young artists incorporating it into their performance work. In the U.K., for example, Victoria Sin uses her drag persona to critique the expectation of feminine labor; and Samuel Douek, a drag performer, filmmaker, and artist who recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, has presented his work in both cabaret venues and galleries, as part of his work around queer spaces.In Berlin, events on the city’s underground scene have recently been hosted by artists like Parker Tilghman, who enacts a drag persona as part of his work.

When asked why drag was a relevant subject choice for the NADA lineup this year, Gordon explained that within the current political climate, drag could address an urgent need. “Everyone really needed some drag right when we served it up,” Gordon told me, describing the events as joyous, defiant, and inspirational.  

While emphasizing the contemporary moment, Gordon and Robichaux also acknowledged the evolving conversation around drag over time. Through a multigenerational group of drag artists—from the famous Lady Bunny and Tabboo! to younger performers like Sasha Velour, who has been hosting Nightgowns (a drag cabaret) in Bushwick for the last few years—they highlighted the deep history of drag’s presence in gallery spaces. 

The main difference when you put drag performance in a gallery, Penney explained, is the crowd. “To be in a gallery setting where nobody is talking and they don’t even know if they should clap because they don’t want to interrupt things, it can be really intense,” he said. And in that sense, drag gets taken seriously by the art world, but Penney believes it’s still somewhat marginalized. “I think a lot of performance art still gets de-legitimized because its drag,” he said.

At this year’s Whitney Biennale though, drag—in some interpretation—has been given credence. Work relating to the practice is present across the show wrote co-curator Christopher Lew in the exhibition catalogue’s introductory essay. Collective Puppies Puppies, for example, presents Liberty (Liberté) (2016), what they’ve described as “a drag performance and sculpture,” where a performer dons a Statue of Liberty costume and stands in public. Lew pointed to works by Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Cauleen Smith, as well as Tommy Hartung’s video The Lesser Key of Solomon (2015), as all dealing with identity and emancipation, and in that sense speaking to the practice of drag. He cited these works as examples of how “in these recent times of escalating strife and partisanship, artists have taken it upon themselves to bridge divides.”

If one thinks about drag as the practice of performing gender, sexuality, or other fixed societal roles, then in a way, we’re all doing drag, all of the time. So long as it deconstructs identity categories, it’s still drag. And according to curators like Lew and Gordon, today, amid an oppressive political climate, it’s a more relevant means of expression and creativity than ever.For example, artist Alexis Blair Penney was inspired to start the drag collective Chez Deep following a performance at MoMA PS1 in 2011 with Cody Critcheloe, Colin Self and Mykki Blanco. “If this is what a drag super-group looks like, I might just have to start one,” he thought. Penney noted that Chez Deep’s performance has run the full gamut of venues, from bars to white cube spaces. In 2014, the artist Spencer Sweeney flew them out to Glasgow to perform at The Modern Institute’s gallery space. Gordon emphasizes that the current moment is just the latest iteration of drag. “Drag moves in cycles,” he says, “but it’s interesting to see how quickly the mainstream is finding the alternative.” If anything, he believes taking drag out of its traditional contexts and into the art world is helping it continue to evolve.

If one thinks about drag as the practice of performing gender, sexuality, or other fixed societal roles, then in a way, we’re all doing drag, all of the time. So long as it deconstructs identity categories, it’s still drag. And according to curators like Lew and Gordon, today, amid an oppressive political climate, it’s a more relevant means of expression and creativity than ever.

Artsy, By Amelia Abraham, April 14, 2017

Sasha Velour won season nine of "RuPaul's Drag Race" on VH1 and Logo, and she's unique: Velour, the stage name of Sasha Steinberg, was a Fulbright scholar and has a master's degree, and takes an intellectual approach to drag.

On her intellectual approach to drag performance

"The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that — to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.""I went to Vassar College for undergraduate and studied literature and queer theory, and all of the above. And then I took a Fulbright scholarship in Russia. And that's really where my direction shifted a little bit, because I became really interested in what kind of work actually helps to change things for queer people. And I became really fascinated with drag because it's such an accessible and joyful art form. I wanted to create beautiful images in drag that would not just inspire queer people who need to see some beauty and need to experience some joy, but also would engage people politically."

On the role of drag in LGBTQ advocacy

"We need to talk about representation for queer people in the media and also in law. And there's a long history of drag queens leading those discussions in marches on the street and even in bars going back to the time of Stonewall and before. Gay bars have always been spaces of getting angry about politics and about legal situations, and we need that now more than ever.""Drag is so much more than gay men dressing up as women. It's about creating space and creating validity for people who want to express gender differently and by their own rules. And drag queens, drag kings, need to be at the forefront of pushing for rights and protections and safe spaces for the entire spectrum of gender non-conforming and trans people."

On how young people can get their start in drag"It's the simplest thing. You just go and you find whatever you can find. If it's a simple pair of heels or if you have to strap some cans of food to the back of your shoes so you have that little lift, if you want to go and get some mascara or if you want to use a little Sharpie on your eye, you can make drag out of absolutely anything. And if that is what inspires you, I say everyone should go out and do it." 

Sasha Velour On Why Drag Is A 'Political And Historical Art Form'.  wbur, July 24, 2017

It’s Time To Change The Definition Of “Drag”  By Eric Shorey, Nylon,  April 4, 2017.

“You're born naked and the rest is drag,” RuPaul has famously quipped for decades. But the phrase has been so oft-repeated, it's hard to say it aloud without the nearest drag queen rolling her eyes. Despite the whimsy of the quote, many people's definition of drag has remained rather stagnant: It's when a man dresses up as a woman–or something–right?

But as the very concept of gender explodes, perhaps we should reconsider the accepted definitions of the word “drag.” The term originated in Shakespearean times as shorthand for “dressed as a girl,” or so the story goes because back then women were not permitted to be actors. Whether or not that tale has any validity now is beside the point; drag slowly morphed into its own art form over the past few hundred years, and only recently have we begun to rethink the word so completely.

If the post-Tumblr generation of millennials has taught us anything, it's that gender is a social construction; there are never-ending possibilities of gender expression and identity. The idea that "drag" could be defined as “clothing typical of one sex worn by a person of the opposite sex,” which is actually how it's defined in Merriam-Webster, now seems almost laughable to those who spend their lives in gay bars. Isn't the idea of an “opposite sex” itself obsolete? As we reconsider the vast complexities of gender, it's about time we threw out the idea of gender as a spectrum (with male on one end and female of the other) and start doing better with our explanatory metaphors. Gender is closer to (if you can forgive the hippie turn of phrase) a mandala than a spectrum, with maleness and femaleness knotting eternally in interlaced spirals. But gender is more than any 2-D image—gender has a smell, a feel, a taste; it exists in time and space.

If drag has nothing to do with the now-defunct concept of “opposite sex,” then what the hell is it? A semiotics professor of mine once quipped that after Marcel Duchamp, “anything can be art, but not everything is art.” Could the same be said of drag? Has the word become as nebulous and confusing as “art” itself? Post-modern theory aside, a simple visit to a Brooklyn, New York, nightclub would immediately relieve one of their assumptions about drag as an art form of illusion based on binaristic ideas of anatomical difference. Bearded queens have become common, as are fashionable, alien-esque club kids in the tradition of great artists like Leigh Bowery. Plenty of trans women do (and probably always have) performed as queens, with many realizing they were trans as they played with their own expression through art. We reached out to a handful of trans and non-binary drag performers to get their takes on the subject: "For me, [drag] was the beginning of learning to navigate spaces as someone who isn't read as 'boy,'" says Daphne Sumtimez, a Brooklyn-based transgender drag performer. "It’s taught me how much agency we all have in forging our identities."

"I’d say that the number of definitions is increasing," Sumtimez adds. "I’m sure drag still means the same thing it always has to a lot of people, but there are as many definitions of drag as there are people thinking about drag, and that number is certainly on the rise… Drag is just dressing up as someone or something other than what you are currently dressed up as." 

Drag is one of the world’s greatest forms of escapism because of its capabilities in transcending identity beyond reality – in this realm, artists can become whoever they desire to be. With the use of excessive visual markers, performers break free from the social constructs that oppress them.

Tracing how this freedom has existed as an art form across history is London’s Hayward Gallery with their upcoming show, Drag: Self Portraits and Body Politics that will run from August 22–October 14. Through a lens of artist self-portraits from the early 1920s–today, the show explores how drag is an act of rebellion that goes far beyond its perception as an act of gender performativity. While drag is an essential act for driving the future of gender forward, its capabilities go far beyond this.

Through the works of Ana Mendieta, Robert Mapplethorpe, Victoria Sin, Cindy Sherman, Samuel Fosso, and more, the Hayward’s Drag show reveals that drag resists all social constructs – race, class and sexuality included. “Drag is an act of resistance that emerged from systems of oppression,” explains the Hayward Gallery’s senior curator Vincent Honoré. “Drag performances, as seen in visual arts, resist binary systems and norms, challenge oppressive structures, and echo social changes: in the exhibition, drag and the way it is used reflects on societal debates including feminism, civil rights, gay rights, Aids crisis, anti-consumerism, and post-colonialism.”

Eight artists who use drag as a political tool of rebellion.   By Lexi Manatakis, Dazed , August 14, 2018.

Drag, by definition, is ephemeral, transitional and transformative. It’s the act of temporarily inhabiting a character to break through the gender binary, challenge the status quo, and perhaps even live out a political truth. In 2018, drag seems to be going through a kind of global renaissance — not only in the mainstream, with shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and Dragula, but in bars, galleries, cabarets and venues around the world. The misconception of drag as a Las Vegas stereotype has all but dissipated, and vibrant performers of all ages, genders and backgrounds are creating a new artistic community.But how would you represent this community? How could you do all these artists — who are cultural warriors in their own right — justice within a traditional art institution? These are the questions that Drag: Self-Portraits and Body Politics, opening at London’s Hayward Gallery today, tries to answer, with works from over 30 artists exploring drag through their respective lenses. When we spoke with Drag’s curator, Vincent Honoré, a week before the show’s unveiling, his vision for the exhibition was clear. “The concept of the exhibition is to address drag and how drag has been used as an art form, via the work of visual artists from the ’60s onwards,” he explained. “We are including emerging artists as well as historical ones, and looking at how all these artists use drag to address cultural shifts, from many different angles — from feminism to post-colonialism to civil and gay rights.” Taking inspiration from their own bodies, alter-egos, identities and environments, the artists showcased in the display range from heavy-hitters like Leigh Bowery, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, to newer, but just as important, drag practitioners like Victoria Sin and Samuel Fosso.

“While researching the exhibition I spoke to a lot of drag performers, sociologists, and people from different backgrounds,” says Honoré, speaking to the wide range to experiences represented in the show. “I realised that it was absolutely crucial to offer a diversity of expressions. Actually, I believe about 50% of the artists we have are drag kings, with a lot of feminist artists included, for example Eleanor Antin or VALIE EXPORT. I think it was very important to speak from different cultural perspectives, so looking at Asia, African and South America. South America had so much political drag art in the ’70s, especially in Chile, where it was forbidden to have any personal expressions other than the binary one. Doing drag, or being a crossdresser, was illegal. So there’s this fantastic artist in the exhibition called Francesco Copello who is dancing in drag with a Chilean flag. That was extraordinary for people at the time.”

To preserve an authentic outlook on drag culture, the exhibition purposefully shines a light on more underground and subversive drag scenes. “We are only addressing self-portraiture, therefore I excluded everything that has to do with documentation,” states Honoré. “I really wanted to present something that has to do with self-performativity and the own voice of the artist. We are not showing mainstream culture, apart from a video by Leigh Bowery of a performance from 1988, and a painting by David Hoyle — he usually does these when he does drag cabaret, and they’re rarely exhibited. In terms of the breadth of all the different kinds of drag, we are including drag queens, drag kings, and biodrags, and we are including very different narratives of drag. Drag originated and is mainly rooted in mainstream culture. It’s really coming from that culture, and that’s why it’s so critical because it embraces it — it embraces cabaret, music, fashion, balls, everything.”

10 Radical Self-portraits serving Ultimate Drag Realness. By Cameron Cook. Sleek Magazine,  August 22, 2018. 

Also of interest :

Drag is an art form. By Emilia Slupecka. Artefact , March 1, 2018 

Who Says Drag Can't Be Fine Art? By Emily Colucci.  Vice, October 14 2016

Girl on scooter

I am sixty years old. “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost”, to quote the poet. Health prevailing.

I must admit this last year I’ve experienced something I’ve not known before. No, no one could forget  such an experience. I’ve known melancholy, sadness for loss. But this sadness is a totally new experience. The sense of not knowing what to live for. What’s ahead.

It happened a week ago. Tears came to me. Whilst I was riding my bike, on my way home. It was a hot day in June. One girl on a scooter passed me, then another.  Two girls on a scooter, later on.

These are images dear to my heart.

Independent, graceful, canty.  All qualities I lack. They know where they are going.  Look at their stature, absorbed in thought, how they sit, backs straight, their knees almost touching, their hair blowing in the wind.

[Four stages of a Dream : Behold Appropriate Transform Escape]