Art & Art History
fag-o-sites
Artists: Shonagh Adelman, Stephen Andrews, Bastille, Sadie Benning, Christa Black, Robert Clarke, Pierre Dorion, Iran do Espirito Santo, Paul Evans, Jose Gabriel Fernandez and Martin Zogran, John Greyson, G. B. Jones, Deborah Kass, John Kramer, Clifford LeCuyer, Nina Levitt, Micah Lexier, Glenn Ligon, Jeffry Mitchell, Mark Niblock-Smith, Ria Pacquee, Mary Patten, Marco Paulo Rolla, Collier Schorr, Joe Smoke, Edgard de Souza, Margaret Stratton, Ann Torke, and Millie Wilson and Jackie Goldsby
Fag-o-sites is an exhibition curated by Doug Ischar and John Paul Ricco that brings together works produced by thirty contemporary cultural workers (painters, film and video makers, architects, photographers, etc.).
The hyphenated and neologistic title of this exhibition, in its resonance with the term phagocyte, references a lexicon of AIDS discourse, micropolitics of desire, and the consumption or destruction of discrete units. It thereby begins to cite counter-strategies of queer cultural practice, and the multiplicity of spaces, geographies, and architectures that they fabricate, disrupt, re-invent, and appropriate as fag-o-sites. These discrete units may be understood as spaces created by strictly identity-based and often ghettoizing practices. Fag-o-sites, on the other hand, are non-ghettoizing, de-domesticating, survival fabrications of queer everyday life, through which spaces are temporarily claimed and dislocated for purposes of queer resistance and future survival.
Through deterritorializing logics, fag-o-sites are fabricated and dispersed across a queer geopolitics and thereby constitute some of the critical sites and escape-routes of queer movement today.
Fag-o-sites are materializations of temporary, mobile, and collective social-sexual relations articulated across contested cultural terrains by radical queers today. Out of this queer movement one might begin to imagine the possibilities of an insurgent queer geopolitics. Through deterritorializing logics, fag-o-sites are fabricated and dispersed across a queer geopolitics and thereby constitute some of the critical sites and escape-routes of queer movement today. The materialization of these transitory events and practices generate a multiplicity of effects, and combine to form various networks of relations in which social-cultural differences are neither assimilated into a singular unity, nor equalized across a liberal plurality, nor caught in the trap of a binary, either/or logic. Queer geopolitics operate via a spatial logic of “where” instead of a ontologic of “what,” and in this way provoke the need for a queer spatial theory and practice that is based upon locally situated, material conditions that at the same time remain open and tactically mobile.
The queer cultural workers, who were assembled here, work on or across purifying definitions, exclusionary resolutions, absolute certainties, and various forms of cultural assimilation, reform, and rehabilitation. As active producers of queer movement, these artists and architects dislocate the borders distinguishing public/private, grief/ecstasy, safety/risk, violence and visual modes of evidence, abjection and subversion, fantasy and reality, childhood-adulthood, work and play, machine or body, and cultural supremacy versus political supremacy. In the wake of these critical traversals come levels of ambivalence, contradiction, and conflict; anti-normative positions and oblique or anamorphic points of view; and sites that are difficult to map or circumscribe in the name of control. As non-apologetic, often in-your-face, hyper-sexual spatial practices and formations, fag-o-sites neither operate under imperatives of heteronormativity, nor obey bourgeois sensibilities of privacy, interiority, and propriety, nor support the urge for “positive images” and the accompanying hopes for tolerance of queer cultural practices as they mobilize for survival rather than acceptance.
The works assembled for this exhibition demonstrate the many ways in which these practices, spaces, and bodies may be visualized, without being forced to comply to any single theme. It is neither a historical survey nor a retrospective, nor is it a showcase of only the most familiar names and works of queer cultural production. Rather, this exhibition provokes a rethinking of many popular assumptions, as it points toward a number of possible future paths that may trace unexpected yet crucial modes for queer social-cultural production.
Through the forms of queer cultural production dispersed across a single gallery space, this exhibition visualizes some of the un-mappable maps, and architectures-without-definite-plans, which constitute the possibilities of a highly sexualized, radically dispersed, and thoroughly contested queer geopolitics: a geopolitics mobilized through micropolitics of desire and materialized as fag-o-sites.
Related Materials:
Related Events:
Panel discussion with artists and curators
Doug Ischar is a Chicago-based artist who explores the themes of voyeurism and the position of the spectator. In his well-known 1985 photographs of Chicago’s Belmont Rocks gay beach, Ischar throws the viewer into the scene with the up-close perspective of the sun bathers. In 1987, at a San Francisco gay leather bar called the Eagle, Ischar took many other photographs that conveyed public sexuality and representations of masculinity. Today, these images also stir reflection on the 1980s AIDS crisis that so greatly affected the gay community. Since 1990, Ischar has taught in the photography department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is presently an associate professor. Ischar earned an MFA from Cal Arts in 1987.
John Paul Ricco’s work often focuses on the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy ’s thoughts on politics, aesthetics, and ethics, as well as late-twentieth-century art history, visual culture, and architecture. Ricco is also interested in the representation of homosexuality in contemporary art. He has followed the work of Doug Ischar and continues to research debates in queer theory. Ricco received a BA in art history from New York University (1988) and an MA in art history from the University of Chicago (1991), where he is pursuing a PhD in art history.
EXHIBITION ESSAY
fag-o-sites
Doug Ischar and John Paul Ricco
The hyphenated and neologistic title of this exhibition, in its homologous resonance with the term phagocyte, references a lexicon of AIDS discourse, micropolitics of desire, and the consumption or destruction of discrete units, and thereby begins to cite counter-strategies of queer sociosexual, cultural practice, and the multiplicity of spaces, geographies, and architectures that they fabricate, disrupt, re-invent, and appropriate as fag-o-sites. Fag-o-sites are materializations of temporary, mobile, and collective, social-sexual relations articulated across contested cultural terrains by radical queers today. Out of this queer movement one might begin to imagine the possibilities of an insurgent queer geopolitics. Through deterritorializing logics, fag-o-sites are fabricated and dispersed across a queer geopolitics and thereby constitute some of the critical sites and escape routes of queer movement today. The materialization of these transitory events and practices generate a multiplicity of effects and combine to form differential networks of relations in which socio-cultural differences are neither assimilated into a singular unity, nor equalized across a liberal plurality, nor caught in the trap of a binary, either/or logic. Queer geopolitics operate via a spatial logic of “where” instead of a ontologic of “what,” and in this way provoke the need for a queer spatial theory and practice that is based upon locally situated, material conditions which at the same time remain open and tactically mobile. Fag-o-sites are non-ghettoizing, de-domesticating, survival fabrications of queer everyday life, through which spaces are temporarily claimed and dislocated for purposes of queer resistance and future survival (an activist utopics).
The queer cultural workers assembled here, work on or across purifying definitions, exclusionary resolutions, absolute certainties, and various forms of cultural assimilation, reform, and rehabilitation. As active producers of queer movement, these artists and architects dislocate the borders distinguishing: public and private; grief-ecstasy; safety-risk; violence and visual modes of evidence; abjection and subversion; fantasy and reality; childhood-adulthood; work and play; machine or body; cultural supremacy versus political supremacy. In the wake of these critical traversals come levels of ambivalence, contradiction, and conflict; anti-normative positions and oblique or anamorphic points of view; and sites that are difficult to map or circumscribe in the name of control. As non-apologetic, often in-your-face, hyper-sexual spatial practices and formations, fag-o-sites do not operate under imperatives of heteronormativity, nor obey bourgeois sensibilities of privacy, interiority, and propriety, nor support the urge for “positive images” and the accompanying hopes for tolerance of queer cultural practices, as they mobilize for survival rather than acceptance.
Through the forms of queer cultural production dispersed across a single gallery space, this exhibition visualizes some of the un-mappable maps, and architectures-without-definite-plans, which constitute the possibilities of a highly sexualized, radically dispersed, and thoroughly contested queer geopolitics: a geopolitics mobilized through micropolitics of desire and materialized as fag-o-sites.
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Shonagh Adelman
Asshand, from the series Skin Deep, 1993
Cibachrome, 4 x 4 ft.
Stephen Andrews
Safe, 1992–93
Photocopies on rubber latex installations
Bastille
Rub-A-Dub, 1989
Gouache on board, 8 3/4 x 16 1/2 in.
Christa Black
Draw Blood for Proof, 1994
Silkscreen on adhesive paper, each 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 in.
Draw Blood for Proof, 1994
Silkscreen on paper, 17 x 17 in.
Robert Clarke
Untitles, 1992–95
Photo copies on adhesive paper, 4 x 3 in. and box
Pierre Dorian
Museum of Purgatory (Passage), 1995
Oil on linen, 24 x 16 in.
Iran do Espirito Santo
Untitled, 1990
Iron, 10 1/2 x 4 x 4 in.
Viewpoint, 1995
Mixed media, 14 x 20 in.
Paul Evans
Afro Cat, 1994
Collage on paper, 7 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.
Bubble Pig, 1994
Collage on paper, 9 x 12 in.
Catapult Dog, 1994
Collage on paper, 9 x 12 in.
Jump, 1994
Collage on paper, 6 x 9 in.
Pig Fun, 1994
Collage on paper, 18 x 12 in.
Jose Gabriel Fernandez and Martin Zogran
Sketches for a Natural History of Paradise, 1995
Pre-fabricated and hand-painted wallpaper installation
G. B. Jones
Wanna Go for a Ride, 1995
Pencil on paper, 8 1/2 x 7 in.
Mean Jean, 1994
Pencil on paper, 8 1/2 x 7 in.
Shoplifter, 1994
Pencil on paper, 8 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.
Deborah Kass
Chairman Ma #22, 1993
Silkscreen on canvas, 46 x 42 in.
John Kramer
Crisco Cat, 1995
Fabric and Crisco, 12 x 10 x 2 in.
FF, 1994
Fabric, 6 x 8 ft.
Clifford LeCuyer
Untitled, 1994
C-print, 24 x 20 in.
Nina Levitt
Submerged (for Alice Austen), 1991
Colored prints and shelf, 30 x 24 in.
Micah Lexier
City of Night by John Rechy, 1989
Laser-cut steel and florescent tubes and fixtures, 19 in. diameter x 2 in.
Glenn Ligon
Untitled, 1994
Photo albums, photographs, and text, dimensions variable
Jeffrey Mitchell
Donkey and Daisy Chain, 1994
Ceramic, 20 x 14 x 14 in.
Mark Niblock-Smith
Best of Luck, 1992
Hand-forged steel and rabbit feet, 11 x 25 x 6 in.
Ria Pacquee
Untitled, 1994
Black-and-white photograph, 28 x 40 in.
Mary Patten
Untitled (Names and Addresses), 1994
Mixed media, 6 1/2 x 9 in.
Marco Paulo Rolla
Con, 1992
Pastel and graphite on paper, 9 x 12 1/2 in.
de . . . , 1992
Pastel and graphite on paper, 12 1/2 x 9 in.
Multi, 1992
Pastel and graphite on paper, 12 1/2 x 9 in.
PA, 1992
Pastel and graphite on paper, 9 x 12 1/2 in.
Untitled, 1992
Pastel and graphite on paper, 12 1/2 x 9 in.
Collier Schorr
33 Inches of Pure Muscle, 1979-1994
Wood and bees wax, 33 x 3 in.
Go the Way Your Blood Beats (J.B.), 1980–94
Paper, ink, and graphite, 11 x 8 1/2 in.
Joe Smoke
Come and Get It, 1993–95
Leather, two engraved brass bells with plastic handles, and photograph
Edgard de Souza
John, 1994
Leather on wood, 10 1/2 x 8 in.
Pierced Dora, 1994
Leather on wood, 10 1/2 x 8 in.
Ann Torke
Inside/Out, 1994
Three months of bike maps and three bags of debris installation
Millie Wilson and Jackie Goldsby
White #1, 1992
Framed letters, each 17 x 14 1/2 in.
Exhibition Support
Fag-o-sites is supported by the College of Architecture and the Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago.
PRESS RELEASE
Curated by Doug Ischar and John Paul Ricco
fag-o-sites
Gallery 400
Chicago, IL
February 13–March 11, 1995
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 15, 1995, 4–8pm
Panel Discussion: Tuesday, February 14, 1995, 5pm
Fag-o-sites is an exhibition that brings together works produced by thirty contemporary cultural workers (painters, film and videomakers, architects, photographers, etc.), who materialize sexual-social cultural practices across the contested terrains traversed by queers today. The title of this exhibition, in its resonance with the term phagocyte, references a lexicon of AIDS discourse, micropolitics of desire, and the consumption or destruction of discrete units. These discrete units may be understood as spaces created by strictly identity-based and often ghettoizing practices. Fag-o-sites on the other hand, are local yet mobile strategies and sites that do not support the urge for “positive images” and hopes for tolerance of queer cultural practices, as they mobilize for survival rather than acceptance. The works assembled for this exhibition demonstrate the many ways in which these practices, spaces, and bodies may be visualized, without being forced to comply to any single theme. This is neither a historical survey or retrospective, nor is it a showcase of only the most familiar names and works of queer cultural production. Rather, this exhibition provokes a rethinking of many popular assumptions, as it points toward a number of possible future paths that may trace unexpected yet crucial modes for queer social-cultural production.
The participating artists are:
Shonagh Adelman
Stephen Andrews
Bastille
Sadie Benning
Christa Black
Robert Clarke
Pierre Dorion
Iran do Espirito Santo
Paul Evans
Jose Gabriel Fernandez and Martin Zogran
John Greyson
G. B. Jones
Deborah Kass
John Kramer
Clifford LeCuyer
Nina Levitt
Micah Lexier
Glenn Ligon
Jeffry Mitchell
Mark Niblock·Smith
Ria Pacquee
Mary Patten
Marco Paulo Rolla
Collier Schorr
Joe Smoke
Edgard de Souza
Margaret Stratton
Ann Torke
Millie Wilson and Jackie Goldsby