Knowledge & Networks III

Networking Histories/Queer Art Histories: Invisibilities, Illuminations

Moderator: Johanne Sloan, Deputy-Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute

In opening this session, moderator Johanne Sloan began by suggesting that the “process of uncovering, rediscovering, [and] reinforcing networks is crucial when it comes to describing queer art history in Canada.” Sloan’s provocation was taken up throughout the workshop, as subsequent panelists addressed, from a variety of perspectives, the significance of networked thinking, cultivating resilience through community, and horizontal collaborations in creating queer art and researching queer art histories in Canada. Questions related to archives that had been raised in the morning’s panel were also re-examined through queer theoretical lenses.

Erin Silver (Assistant Professor, Art History, Graduate Advisor, Critical and Curatorial Studies, UBC) took up the theme of networks in her discussion of her new SSHRC Insight Grant, Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Art Histories. Itself a collaborative project, Queer Operatives seeks to understand, according to Silver, how queer art and visual cultures of queer activism have been “queerly operating” within Canadian art spaces and dominant art historical discourse since the 1950s. The “conspiratorial, camp, and disidentifying nature” of queer art practice must be understood, Silver argues, as strategies for “hiding in plain sight” in the face of the historical marginalisation and criminalisation of LGBTQ2S+ communities. For Silver, the unique historical context in which queer artistic practice has developed means that existing frameworks for interpretation in art historical scholarship are insufficient, and that Canada’s history of queer creativity must be understood on its own terms. Developing queer methods for archival research is an important aspect of this project of defining queer Canadian art history. Silver contends that efforts in archiving queer visual culture, whether in the form of curating exhibitions or through institutions like Toronto’s ArQuives, can be understood as “de facto political acts” and assertions of presence and visibility. At the same time, Silver argues, existing queer archives must consider the responsibility they hold in creating queer histories through the records they choose to preserve, and to continue to address the under-representation of marginalised communities within queer spaces.

Julie Hollenbach (Assistant Professor, Craft History and Material Culture, NSCAD) continued to explore the troubled relationship between queer histories, queer creativities, and archives in her presentation, “Queer Crafted Material Culture as Shadow Archive.” Beginning with queer feminist Ann Cvetkovich’s critique of institutional archives for failing to capture the everyday experiences and feelings that constitute queer life,1 Hollenbach provided context for her excavation of alternative archives in search of queer creativity. Hollenbach suggested that craft constitutes a kind of “shadow archive” for western art history, a repository of creative productions from marginalised communities whose work has not been captured or recognised within the narrow conceptual boundaries of fine art. She theorises queer craft, including tools for body modification, gender affirmation, and sexual intimacy, as material practices of queer world-making, wherein makers “forge intimacies and dream queer worlds through craft.” While these artifacts of craft provide powerful testimony to the creativity of queer worlds, Hollenbach contends that they also speak to their essential fragility: given the “taboo” nature of some queer-crafted objects, and even of queerness itself, queer craft risks being hidden, eluding documentation and recognition.

In their presentation “Trans Representation and Conditional Welcomes,” Kyle McPhail (Colville Fellow, Mount Allison University) examined the challenges trans artists face in mainstream Canadian art venues. McPhail’s concept of the conditional welcome speaks to the limits and constraints that are placed on visibility for trans artists, who are expected to make “the” trans experience legible to their audiences. The terms of this legibility, McPhail argues, include an emphasis on trans bodies, and the oppression, trauma, and medical interventions these bodies are believed to experience. McPhail analysed Vivek Shraya’s photographic series, Trauma Clown (2019), as a response to the stereotypical representations of trauma that are expected from trans artists. By presenting these tropes of trans visibility in highly theatrical, explicitly commodified images, Shraya could be said to be “queerly operating,” to borrow Silver’s phrase, within the expected vocabulary of transgender art by engaging with it subversively. McPhail contends that Shraya’s photographs invite viewers to question, as McPhail puts it, just whose idea of the trans experience is reflected in images of these “trauma clowns.”

In their twin roles as president of the Queer Heritage Initiative of New Brunswick and as an archivist with the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Meredith J. Batt’s presentation reflected on the work of a queer grassroots community archive operating within an institutional context. Batt made the important observation that the impetus for the formation of the Queer Heritage Initiative of New Brunswick, founded in 2015/2016, by Dusty Green, was Green’s childhood experience – one also shared by Batt – of the absence of queer histories in New Brunswick schools. Efforts like the Queer Heritage Initiative, as well as Batt and Green’s recently published monograph, Len & Cub: A Queer History (2022), which presents some of the oldest photographic records of a same-sex couple in the Maritimes, attempt to rectify these gaps in historical narrative by making queer histories visible, particularly to queer and trans youth in New Brunswick. During the discussion period, it was also suggested that Len & Cub can be thought of as an example queer world-building, to return to Hollenbach’s presentation, in making an archive of queer historical presence visible where none had previously existed or been acknowledged.

Gemma Marr’s (SSHRC postdoctoral fellow and educational developer at the University of New Brunswick) presentation also explored her own experiences confronting the absence of queer histories, as well as pointing to collaboration and networking as important methods for “queerly operating” within archival institutions. Marr reflected that she has struggled to find pathways through institutional archives that yielded relevant sources for her postdoctoral research on shifting discourses of sexuality in New Brunswick between 1870 and 1930. Histories of queerness and sexuality, Marr observed, must often be recovered by reading historical records against the grain. She has found working with prison records related to crimes of a sexual nature, for example, has enabled her to think about how particular acts and particular bodies were criminalised to varying degrees in different periods. Marr also noted that cultivating working relationships with archivists and librarians has proven to be essential in gaining access to relevant records, and in making institutional archives more accessible to her as a queer researcher.

The discussion period explored issues of queer representation in archives, scholarship, and creative spaces from a variety of angles. Gary Weekes questioned whether one’s identity (along a variety of axes of identification, including race, class, and gender, as well as sexuality) should necessarily determine the perspective one brings to scholarship or creative work. Conversation regarding the expectations that granting agencies place on BIPOC and queer scholars and artists to tell stories about identity through a set of constraining cultural scripts ensued. Thandiwe McCarthy problematised the group’s critiques of tokenistic representations of queer experience by suggesting that even flawed artistic and scholarly creations can do important work to elevate public consciousness of queer topics and open doors to better understanding. A question from Heather Igloliorte regarding how she should address the historical invisibility of queer Inuit artists with her Inuit students, and whether it would be appropriate to read some artists’ lives and works through a queer lens, prompted robust debate regarding the ethics of recovering queer histories in certain cultural contexts.