Queer Contemporary Art: The Responsibility of Visibility
Abstract
This essay will look at queer art, media, and its impact (both positive and negative) on society. It will look at how these media have informed my art practice and explore ideas around the importance of providing queer representation and visibility within art and television. The first chapter looks as traditional media, TV, etc, the lack of queer or lesbian influences, and the damage this has caused to the understanding of lesbians within society. The second chapter looks at Contemporary Queer Art and representation, and how queer artists can decide to use this in their work, or not, and how lesbian and queer artists view the role of their art. The third chapter looks at why Queer Art is important, by analysing my own personal experience of struggling to find traditional media representation to relate to and then looking at the first piece of queer art I related to. I also look at how It is part of the way a society evolves, and the importance of this and where my artistic voice lands within this idea. Then I finally conclude my ideas on the importance of visibility, concluding that it will always be important in traditional media and art but, that it may not have to be as explicit as I once thought.
Introduction
In this Extended Essay, I will be discussing the responsibility that queer art has to produce representation for queer viewers. I have chosen to explore this topic because lack of positive visibility of lesbians is an issue that has affected me personally all through out my coming out process, and continues to do so now. The only difference is that now, I utilise my personal practice, of predominantly painting, to address issues of representation from a fine art perspective, creating works that address areas of the lesbian experience that I feel are less publicised and discussed for example, non-sexualised intimacy.
To discuss this topic, I will be using a few terms that have multiple definitions so I am going to explain how I mean them for the purposes of this essay.
Queer - People within the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer) community, and will be interchangeably used with the word lesbian.
GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) - An acronym which will be referenced when discussing Televisions place within the realm of queer visibility.
Traditional media - This term will be used to mean Television and TV Shows.
Queer Art - Artworks either made by a queer artist who has defined the works as queer, or containing explicitly queer content.
Within this essay I will be discussing: Queer Representation in Traditional Media and its Social Impacts as a starting point to understand the role that television (as the number one method for people to find queer stories they relate to) has played in creating problematic queer representation, and the widespread biases and stereotypes this has fostered within society. I will explore Contemporary Queer Art and Representation, looking at how queer art for representation could remedy some of the issues caused by televisions reliance on trope and stereotype to explore queer identities. Finally, I will explore why Queer Art is Important, to contextualise my previous chapters explorations in a real world context, exploring the ripple effects that positive, diverse representation can have on both a personal and societal level. In this essay I utilise figures for US television and media because from my research, US television had the most quantifiable data for examples of TV shows and charities monitoring figures surrounding representation data in Television and, this felt like the most compelling way to explore my topic.
Chapter 1: Queer Representation in Traditional Media and its Social Impacts
Queer representation in contemporary traditional media has involved a lot of not knowing ‘the writers and producers proximity to the cultures they’re representing ‘ (JADE FOX, 2021), resulting in a large majority of queer people ‘choosing what movies and shows are their representation’ (JADE FOX, 2021). While this forced attitude has resulted in a tremendous sense of unity within the queer community (my focus will be specifically on the lesbian community), allowing for discourse on social media about representation issues, as well as opportunity for lots of content creation around themes of lesbian characters or lesbian moments, and compilation videos of the limited screen time that lesbian couples get, it has in turn also left a large portion of people with absolutely no positive or explicit representation.
In GLAAD’s (a US media monitoring organisation focused on ensuring the erasure of defamatory coverage of LGBT people) 2020/21 report, entitled ‘Where are we on tv’, it was revealed that overall there would be 105 lesbian characters on TV through broadcast, cable and streaming platforms; Compared to the total amount of characters overall for this television season (June 1st 2020- may 31st 2021) this number is disproportionate to real life percentages of lesbians in the population and, has created a community wide attitude of thinking ‘how will people begin to accept queer people if they don’t know we exist’ (Are They Gay, 2016). This becomes an issue because, when ‘we live in a world where our culture and media go hand in hand’ (Are They Gay, 2016) this causes more than just isolation created by not seeing yourself in storylines; it can also lead to tremendous misunderstandings about sexualities. For example, in 2019, Melania Geymonat and her girlfriend were the victims of a homophobic attack by a group of men on a London bus who thought they had a right to see the two women kissing and being affectionate. Situations like this directly correlate to the issues of representation within media, as film and tv ‘portraying sapphism as inherently erotic has socialised a whole culture of men to view homosexual women as entirely for their own sexual gratification’ (Killoh, 2019) and ‘socialised these attitudes into society by regurgitating a narrative of lesbianism which is unrealistic and unrepresentative’(Killoh, 2019). To use an example, The TV show ‘The Walking Dead’ represents these on-screen issues for me. With 11 seasons and 478 characters, having 4 lesbian characters is firstly disproportionate to the amount of characters we meet (0.84% compared to national surveys numbers averaging around the 2% mark); Two of the lesbian characters (who were not traditionally feminine or the ideal female body type) are dead (see figure 1). (AMC Film Holdings, 2016), following the trope of “burying your gays”, and the other two lesbian characters figure 2. (Lee Davis, 2019), explore a relationship on screen that is limited to one sex scene between two feminine women (who then immediately after break up); it is these harmful tropes that perpetuate this notion that lesbianism exists in a solely feminine and hyper-sexual framework made for men to witness and, allows these attacks forged from misinformation and expectation to happen.
Figure 2- Yumiko and Magna
Figure 1- Denise and Tara
The book ‘Lesbians on Television’ by writer Kate Mcnicholas Smith explores this concept by quoting a writing by Lynn Joyrich and Julia Himberg that says:
“TV has had an intensely political history; as a domestic medium, located in the home, it has long provoked concerns about it’s influence on politics, social dynamics, and cultural values as well as it’s impact on the more minute politics of everyday life, personal relations, and intimate relationships.”
If we take this quote and apply it to the aforementioned show ‘The Walking Dead’ that amassed a viewership of 17.3 million world-wide at its most popular, these media giants have an opportunity unlike that of any other source of media to explore and experiment with representation and provide access to storylines and ‘LGBT projects that straight people won’t understand’ (JADE FOX, 2020) and push boundaries of societies understandings of the queer experience, but instead, media chooses to remain in outdated tropes that have been around since the days of lesbian pulp fiction books such as ‘Women’s Barracks’. Mcnicholas Smith goes on to explain that ‘as an everyday, intimate medium, with its accessibility and potential to reach large audiences, it remains a key site of public culture and its constitution’ (Mcnicholas Smith, 2020) ; if television and popular media are central to how we understand the society and cultures around us then I question why, when creating shows this television season, 63% of programs employed 5 or fewer women in behind the scenes roles (figures from womenandHollywood.com), bringing to question the validity of the stories about women and queer women being told, if they are not even involved in the creative process. Representation should be prevalent in every stage of the creative process because when this does not happen, we can see our storytelling falter and female, and especially queer female storylines become subject to trope or disregarded completely as exemplified above.
In Arienne Annati’s psychology thesis ‘The Frequency of Stereotypical Media Portrayals and their Effects on the Lesbian Community’ she quotes Renee Randazzo’s article ‘Queer women’s perspective on sexualisation of women in media’: ‘Queer women have reported feeling disempowered and marginalised at the invisibility of certain queer identities (e.g., masculine-presenting women, or butch lesbians) in the media (Randazzo et al.(2015) quoted in Anatti, 2020, p.6) and then reflects that ‘this finding is representative of a larger issue that seems to affect how minority populations become portrayed in media: invisibility leads to the push for more media portrayals, and those portrayals are often stereotypical, sexualised, and commodified to mirror “cookie-cutter” heterosexual relationships’ (Anatti,2020), and so, when we take a resource that is so widely accessed and express it in such limited ways, as discussed above, we commit ourselves to cyclical storytelling and reinforce harmful narratives that cause real issues within society; if someone’s reference point is that they have never seen a lesbian character or that the only lesbian characters they have seen have been feminine, sexual or quick to commit, that damages the attitudes of those outside the community by creating fear, misunderstanding and entitlement and within the community by leaving lesbians feeling like they are not seen as human, they are seen as porn and what people have seen online (TEDx Talks, 2014).
Chapter 2: Contemporary Queer Art and Representation
Within the above chapter, I have explored the issues surrounding lesbian representation within mainstream traditional media and the repercussions that poor or negative representation can have on society’s understanding of the queer female experience; I will now expand on these ideas by thinking about how contemporary art has confronted these same issues and to do this, I first want to explore how we prioritise the idea of representation within a queer piece of artwork.
Format magazine (online) asked 4 queer artists: do you feel compelled to represent your identities through your work, whether through personal motivation or the pressures of an exterior audience? … should we, as consumers, be compelled to read queerness into your work? (Luczynski, 2015) and even within a small group of four artists, the responses were so diverse. Photographer Adi Nes said: ‘The issue of sexuality is one layer in my art, but it does not overpower it - just as my personal identity is composed of a combination of identities.’ ((Nes, 2015) quoted in Luczynski, 2015), this idea spoke to me as it allows his works to be a personal reflection of how he experiences being queer, as stated, his queerness is part of his identity not the entirety of it, so it makes sense for his art to reflect this and to be his choice as to how prominent the queer element of his art is. When thinking about representation, Nes adds: ‘there are those who look at the soldiers I photograph to say this is just a typical Israeli experience, and another may be moved by the homoerotic lighting which illuminates them’ ((Nes, 2015) quoted in Luczynski, 2015) and this way of thinking fascinates me, because of the freedom it creates for Nes as an artist to create about whatever he wants, with total control over the prominence of queerness within his work however, this way of working can leave room for representation to slip to the back of the works as the queerness is not obvious but inferred. This way of working brings responsibility of creating representation to light, as representation could be argued to be prominent within Nes’ work but as it is more nuanced, the real issue could actually be the accessibility of the representation instead of just whether it is happening or not. Bruce benderson says: ‘I don’t think that just because a person is gay and creates art, that queer art has been created’ (Benderson quoted in Jeppesen, 2019) and I think this perfectly encapsulates the issue that could arise from creating non-explicit (by that I mean not overtly addressing sexuality or depicting queer imagery, not necessarily just sex scenes) queer art, the queerness and in turn representation come into question because the sexuality element of the works is being explored because of the makers sexual identity rather than the art speaking on the topic.
In the same article by Format Magazine, illustrator Catherine Graffam expresses that she feels compelled to create self portraits that openly explore her queerness because she feels she has ‘a responsibility to communicate … experiences as an intersex trans-woman and advocate through art’ ((Graffam, 2015) quoted in Luczynski, 2015), in comparison to Nes, this could be a more prominent need because as she states later in the article Graffam has struggled to find many other trans female artists to aspire towards, whereas even within his brief interview, Nes mentions other gay male artists/photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, indicating that the amount of imagery and voices already out there for other sexualities and gender identities can play into how an artist views the need for explicit representation within their work.
Even between the two opinions stated above, the issue of how we prioritise representation and define an artwork as such has proven its complexity in a way that we do not have within mainstream media. Within media you have queer representation through: your plot lines exploring queer issues (e.g. Queer as Folk and The L Word), your characters outwardly discussing their sexuality (through physical interactions or spoken dialogue)(e.g. Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught on Wynonna Earp), your characters having a coded queerness (e.g. Elsa in frozen) or you do not have any representation. In any of these cases, the delivery of the queerness has some element of televisions direct way of delivering narratives and facts about its characters, leaving less room for personal interpretations from the audience.
Within contemporary queer art however, there is the added debate around where the queer representation comes from: a queer artist making works (whether the works are intended to be read as queer or not, as for some queer artists their art could be totally separate from their queer identity), the works depicting scenes of queerness (often utilising the body within these depictions) or a queer artist creating queer abstract works where the representation is more nuanced and personal. Abstract artist Harmony Hammond writes on the topic:
“What is a lesbian artist? It’s natural to respond that she is one who makes lesbian art. But there is no agreement as to what constitutes lesbian art, so it is generally thought to reflect lesbian identity and to contribute to the development of that identity”
It is this fluid definition for queer art to begin with (not just the topic of representation) where I think Contemporary queer art can fulfil some of the needs of representation that traditional media lacks currently? To explore this idea, I want to firstly look at Harmony Hammonds work.
Figure 3 - ‘Inappropriate longings’ (1992) by Harmony Hammond
‘Inappropriate longings’ (Figure 3) is a work by Hammond that explores ‘the threat certain bodies face in rural America’ (Busch, 2018), the piece already discusses violence and overwhelming emotions but, the depths of this work are not felt until a close inspection of the yellow ochre panel on the left that has the words ‘goddamn dyke’ incised into it, an action that immediately queers the space and the work. I have chosen to look at this work because it has both a queer creator and a queer message, yet holds no concrete queer representation in terms of bodily imagery; in fact the work itself more accurately depicts the dangers of being queer that I discussed in Chapter 1 and depicts a different, more extreme area of queer experience. This work is interesting to use to explore representation specifically because in abstraction ‘the dynamic potential of queer stances can be manifested without recourse to the representation of bodies.’((Getsy, 2015) quoted in Erharter et al., 2015, p.45) and this means that the queerness within the work is abstract, yet still reads as relatable for queer viewers because the viewer is able to receive the queerness in their own personal way because, the narrative is not clouded by being specific to viewers that mirror the one particular body that the queerness is depicted through. The viewer can see themselves within that brutal, abstract idea because to some degree, every queer person can relate to that experience of negativity or aggression from someone regarding their queerness. This comes back to my earlier thoughts about whether the accessibility of the representation is in fact a more important element to consider, and that the lack of visualisation of queerness (through characters or bodies) and embracing the depiction of the concepts of experience and emotion instead, provides a totally different and more accessible kind of representation of being queer in a much more nuanced way, than trying to relate yourself to a set character within a television show.
The responses to the queerness within Hammonds work for me perfectly surmise how queer art may play differently into the realm of representation than TV and I believe that this is because, we allow ourselves to view art in a much different way to how we view characters and plots on television.
Television as a domestic, passive media feels very rigid, the viewer is told the plots and what the characters are like, and any thinking outside what is presented, especially if within an environment where queerness is not accepted, can be dismissed. Any alternative readings of characters or stories feels very vulnerable as, television ‘whether multiple and defuse in new arrangements of time and space, or diversified in content and form, is as durably and consistently located in the fabric of every day life’ (Wood and Taylor(2008) quoted In McNicholas Smith, 2020, p. 10). This leads to an association of conformity and in-disputability to be in the forefront of the mind, when thinking about how to respond to the media the viewer is actually seeing. This lack of flexibility of interpretation means that LGBT viewers who ‘utilise media sources to find individuals to whom they can relate’ (Gomillion and Giuliano, 2011), encounter a difficult task of finding these relatable characters because there is no media on the planet that will be representative of every viewer. This means that our preconceived ideas about how to respond to television in general, through accepting what the viewer is explicitly shown, is the only interpretation to a character or story. This limiting factor transfers into how to respond to queer characters and plot lines that viewers are shown. Leading to representation we must infer queerness from or where queerness is delivered through relative invisibility, by which I mean ‘the absence of rich, positive representations of a particular group’, (Gomillion and Giuliano, 2011). This is overlooked more than it would be in a more open mode of communication like art.
This research echoes my own personal experiences as a lesbian teenager, attempting to find someone queer to relate to and learn from within the media I was consuming, and coming up with very few examples that felt like solid representation for me. Prompting me to consider other forms of media to find what I was lacking.
Art was the next form of media where I chose to look for representation (after social media) because, it has a freedom of interpretation ingrained into its institution. The viewer is placed at a greater importance for understanding and forming the narratives of the work than in traditional media, as it ’is subjective: it will be received or interpreted by different people in various ways’ (Sachant, 2016) and involves more of a dialogue between artist and viewer, than the one sidedness of television. Above, Nas and Graffam explore these ideas of how readings of (queer) art are determined by the viewer by thinking of the differing understanding that a queer viewer will have of their work than other viewers; For example as Nas explains, a heterosexual viewer will be able to explore the cultural aspects of his photography whereas, a homosexual viewer will also be able to appreciate the homoerotic lighting that Nas utilises (Luczynski, 2015). This explores how even subtle differences in visualisation can result in a more nuanced and quiet method of representation compared to the obvious narratives that television utilises, however, because the viewer is so important to realising the meaning within an artwork, the representation may not even lie within an artwork at all.
The importance of interpretation has been explored by Freud when he analysed a drawing by Leonardo, criticising the ‘uncomfortable’ and muddled depiction of a sexual act wherein the viewer would not be able to tell if they should relate to either the man of the woman in the drawing this idea of sexual confusion (relevant for the thoughts of Freud’s time) leads Freud to conclude ‘the sexuality to lie less in the content of what is seen than in the subjectivity of the viewer’ (Rose (1984) quoted in Jones.A. (ed)., 2014, p.80). It is these theories that describe the fluidity and importance of viewership and understanding that a queer audience can bring to interrogate the representation that lies within contemporary art. This shows the depth of how audience interpretation can offer queer representation that is more diverse and personal within contemporary art to what viewers are offered within traditional media.
Chapter 3: Why Queer Art is Important
In the previous two chapters, I have explored the effects that lesbian representation in television has on society and I have looked at the ways in which I think that fine art could provide a different kind of representation; now in this chapter, I am going to take these ideas forward and examine the reasons why queer art is important.
I am going to begin by looking at my own personal opinion on this topic because as a teenager figuring out my identity, television and social media were imperative for helping me not only discover my identity, but also to feel comfortable within it. I curated a list of tv shows, YouTube series and Instagram ‘Influencers’ (that were all LGBTQ or discussed LGBTQ topics) that made me feel safe and seen, but what I was consuming never felt like enough, there were always gaps in the relatability of characters I was seeing or in the identities of people I was watching. Even though this is inevitable as ‘there’s no … on the planet that can be representation for everybody’ (JADE FOX, 2021), it still greatly affected my self esteem and understanding of myself. This fed into my early artworks in college where I first started exploring my identity in a personal way, rather than by outsourcing to other media. From this, my journey into exploring queer artists and artworks really began and I discovered the power that art had within the realm of representation.
My first encounter with a queer artist that spoke to me was figure 4. (Gluck, 1936) Glucks artwork ‘Medallion’ (1936). Her depiction of herself and her lover, Nesta Obermer, displayed not only as two women who did not conform to the styles of the time and instead looked exactly how they wanted to, but also as two women merged (in a way that could only connote as romantic) spoke to me in an extremely personal way. The image is defiant and powerful in both visual and feeling and offered me a kind of representation that I could not get from a character, an authentic representation that can only come from a person directly telling you their lived experience, with you as the viewer taking what you want (or need) from the work. This becomes so powerful because unlike television, the story is not diluted by other people or processes, Gluck was saying to the world, this is who I am, and in so doing, she gave me permission to do the same.
Figure 4 - ‘Medallion (YouWe)’ (1936) by Gluck
Now taking on the role of queer artist instead of viewer myself, I want to think about why queer art is important to me from this perspective. Within my work, inspired by artists like Gluck, I aim to create works around my own personal relationship, showing sides to my queer love that I feel have been ignored before (areas such as non-sexual intimacy), as well as critiquing media that depicts damaging narratives and tropes of lesbianism. This was born from my understanding that:
“What people see and hear in media – from television series to social media posts in advertising – impacts the decisions they make in the boardrooms, academia and institutions of higher education, court rooms, newsrooms, living rooms and at the ballot box. When they see and hear members of the LGBTQ community accurately and authentically included in media, they make decisions that advance equality for everyone.”
And I feel that as a lesbian artist personally, I have a responsibility to discuss and depict my sexuality in conjunction with other lesbian artists so that we as a community can build a more accurate portrayal of our identity to fight against the stereotypes we are trapped in by other medias and history.
These personal ideals that motivate the creation of my art are also reasons relevant to the point I outlined at the start of this chapter. Queer art is important because the communication between viewers of works and our responses which help ‘us identify with one another and expand our notion of we’ (Eliasson, 2016), mean that artists have the responsibility to ‘help people not only get to know and understand something with their minds but also to feel it emotionally and physically’ (Eliasson, 2016) and it is this that is so important to queer art. It combines these ideals of connection (both personal and interpersonal) to the works. As well as allowing the creator and viewer to have a more intimate connection to each other, through less people being between the giving and receiving of the message of the work. Fine art becomes a powerful and sometimes visceral way to make queer people and their issues visible and, ultimately opens up a societal dialogue around the topics of the works and the communities.
These dialogues have been opened up so much more since the intervention of social media in the art world, that more and more queer creators are connected to more and more queer and non queer viewers. This allows for the receiving of more accurate queer portrayals by the public and more understanding to be produced from this. If you ask any queer person, they will know at least one person who understood them better after seeing someone with the same identity in some form of media. Someone who understood ‘that visibility helps combat discrimination’ (Freakley, 2019) was Harvey Milk, who said ‘gay people, we will not win our rights by staying in our closets’ (Milk(1978) quoted in Freakley, 2019), which is not only a rally cry to the value of being seen for the community but a deep rooted understanding of the positive societal change that will come from being properly understood as well.
You can look at my Instagram Page to see the progression in my artistic practice overtime.
Conclusion
When I started writing this essay, I believed there would be a clear cut explanation for my opinion that queer art has a responsibility to create pieces that promote queer visibility. I assumed that because within art there is more diversity of creators, that art would be more likely to provide more good quality queer representation than Television does (a comparison being made because, television is one of the most common places people look for representation, and is the medium that has done the most harm perpetuating harmful narratives and stereotypes, that have caused real life damage to societal attitudes).
With my first chapter exploring these societal attitudes that television has solidified, I was able to consolidate my thoughts around why representation mattered; because when it was not delivered with care, there were real world implications. For example, people assume that you can demand intimacy (like Melania Geymonat and her girlfriend) from lesbians because those are the kinds of ideas we have been fed in TV shows, like ‘Friends’ (the most streamed television show in America) that utilise jokes that fetishise lesbians constantly.
From this thought, I assumed my second chapter would outline multiple queer practitioners and their work to explore the alternative modes of representation that could be offered. Instead, my conclusion is a new understanding of just how powerful queer art is in regard to representation, because of how much importance is placed on the viewer. The way we look at and experience artwork in comparison to Television is actually what puts less importance on explicit representation within art. We are far more open to putting our own experiences into an artwork than we are TV show, which allows for nuances and more subtle visual language to produce masses of queer representation if the viewer sees it.
My third chapter then built onto these ideas and explored why I personally chose to explore the area of lesbian representation and why queer art is specifically important to both myself and for society. I think what I have learnt most from writing this essay is that, where I thought explicit queer representation was the only way to create effective representation, that places the importance of representation in one dimension.
My conclusion is that for wider society, there is a responsibility to create explicit (and accurate) representation such as queer characters on TV, or bodily depicted scenes of queerness within art because it needs to be easily accessible for every type of viewer to understand. For those in the queer communities however, I conclude that explicit representation is not as necessary as I originally believed. While it is nice to see in works like Glucks, it is not the only way that queer viewers can see them selves and even have others see them, there is still representation in relating to an artwork whether bodily or abstract, obvious or nuanced.
Illustrations List:
Figure 1 - AMC Film Holdings. (2016) Tara and Denise. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/03/walking-dead-denise-dead-lesbian-trope-the-100 (accessed: 2nd October 2021).
Figure 2 - Lee Davis, J. (2019) Yumiko and Magna. Available at: https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a26175450/walking-dead-eleanor-matsuura-yumiko-magna-kiss-lgbtq-asian-representation-diversity/ (accessed: 2nd October 2021).
Figure 3 - Hammond, H. (1992) Inappropriate Longings [mixed media] Available at: https://artefuse.com/2018/05/18/harmony-hammond-inappropriate-longings-at-alexander-gray-associates-125535/ (accessed: 15th November 2021).
Figure 4 - Gluck (1936) Medallion(YouWe) [oil on canvas] Available at: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5369884 (accessed: 14th November 2021).
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