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Disclosure statement
One of the authors is employed at Monash University Museum of Art, which initiated two of the projects under discussion.
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2023.2265126
Notes
1 The event program and audio recordings are available from the Monash University Museum of Art website, ‘VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising’, https://www.monash.edu/muma/public-programs/previous/2023/vers-on-pleasures,-embodiment,-kinships,-fugitivity-and-reorganising.
2 Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), ix–x.
3 June Miskell and Bhenji Ra, ‘The “Women’s Show” After House of Slé: A Dialogue Between Bhenji Ra and June Miskell’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 22, no. 2 (2022): 172–186, DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2022.2143755.
4 The conveners were Dr Peter McNeil FAHA, Distinguished Professor in Design History, School of Design at UTS and Richard Perram OAM, Director, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. Invited guests included Clare Barlow, Dr Pawel Leszkowicz, Branden Wallace, Bill Zewadski, Michael Carnes and Robert Lavis, Assoc. Prof. Andrew Gormon-Murray, Assoc. Prof. Maryanne Dever, Dr Christine Dean, and Gary Carsley. Of the twelve participants, four were international, seven Australian. See https://aaanz.info/queer-curating-queer-art-queer-archives-uts-18-october-2017/ (accessed 10 February 2023).
5 For audio recordings of Queer Exhibitions/Queer Curating: A Cross-Cultural Symposium, go to the symposium’s archive on the Museum Folkwang website, https://www.museum-folkwang.de/de/blog/queer-exhibitionsqueer-curating (accessed 10 February 2023). The final roundtable participants included Jonathan Katz, Clare Barlow, Amelia Jones, Thom Collins, and Maura Reilly, with contributions from other symposium speakers and audience members.
6 Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 2.
7 Here we acknowledge our positions as white settler authors, working in the institutional contexts of the University of South Australia, Newcastle Art Gallery, and Monash University Museum of Art.
8 Vu Tuan Nguyen, ‘Queering Australian Museums: Management, Collections, Exhibitions, and Connections’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2018). See also Tuan Nguyen, ‘Co-Existence and Collaboration: Australian AIDS Quilts in Public Museums and Community Collections’, Museum & Society 16, no. 1 (2017): 41–55, and ‘Mediating Queer Controversy in Australian Museum Exhibitions’, Historic Environment 28, no. 3 (2016): 36–48.
9 Projects since 2016 include Day for Night, curated by Jeff Khan at Performance Space (2014–present); the ongoing exhibitions at Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, with the last several exhibitions curated by Kyra Kum-Sing; Staunch, curated Dominic Guerrera at Nexus Arts (2021); Friendship as a Way of Life, curated by José Da Silva and Kelly Doley at UNSW Galleries (2021); Here&NoPJ0: Perfectly Queer, curated by Brent Harrison at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery (2020); Queer Economies, curated by Abbra Kotlarczyk and Madé Spencer-Castle at Bus Projects, CCP and Abbotsford Convent (2018–2019); Queer Blak Futurism, curated by Alec Reade and Kalyani Mumtaz at Artspace and Black Dot Gallery (2018); WE ARE HERE, curated by Angela Bailey at the State Library of Victoria (2018); The Unflinching Gaze: Photo Media and the Male Figure, curated by Richard Perram OAM at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2017); and Pōuliuli (Faitautusi ma Fāʻaliga), curated by Léuli Eshrāghi at West Space (2017).
10 We use the abbreviation LGBTQIA + to reflect the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual/ally and ‘+’ (what cannot or cannot yet be labelled) identities addressed by WorldPride communication materials, but a local variation would be LGBTQIA + SB to acknowledge Sistergirl/Sistagirl and Brotherboy/Brothaboy gender identities in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. For this conversation, we have enlisted queer for convenience, out of an interest in investigating its use in the discussed projects, and to acknowledge our attachment to the Anglophone sphere as settler authors engaging with Western European–Northern American queer theory and politics. For a discussion of the global dissemination of queer, see Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, introduction to The Global Trajectories of Queerness: Re-thinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global South, ed. Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 17.
11 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 1997), 87.
12 ‘TateShots: Charlotte Prodger’, Tate, 17 September 2018, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize-2018/charlotte-prodger.
13 For further reading about Fayen d’Evie’s conceptualisation of ‘vibrational poetics’ and language see ‘Post-humanity’, Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, ed. Matthew Reason, Lynne Conner, Katya Johanson, and Ben Walmsley (London: Routledge, 2022).
14 Fluidity is a trope tethered to queerness that strongly informs its mainstream, celebrated understandings (e.g., ‘gender fluid’ identities). For a discussion of queer concepts in anglophone contexts see chapter 5, ‘Queer’, in Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 186–247.
15 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, ‘To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana’, in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 164.
16 Nayland Blake, ‘Curating In a Different Light’ (1995), PDF, https://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/InaDifferentLight/Curating_In_a_Different_Light_by_Nayland_Blake.pdf (accessed 19 May 2023).
17 Miskell and Ra, ‘The “Women’s Show” after House of Slé’.
18 Gott was curator of the seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994–1995, which brought together artists responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis.
19 ‘Australia: Melbourne to Bring an End to World’s Longest Lockdowns’, Al Jazeera, 17 October 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/17/australias-melbourne-set-to-end-worlds-longest-lockdowns (accessed 5 May 2023).
20 Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6, emphasis in original.
21 Among others, Heather Love has observed how ‘advances’ in rights or visibility can ‘threaten to obscure the continuing denigration and dismissal of queer existence. One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it’. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 10. Rosanna Mclaughlin provides a cautionary critique about queering art history in the article ‘Queer: Some Notes on Art and Identity’, e-flux Criticism, 9 April 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/326676/queer-some-notes-on-art-and-identity.
22 For more information about Parallel see https://parallelstructures.art/.
23 Frances uses the term ‘artist-cum-curator’ to describe one of the pathways her research took towards ‘queering the curator’. Frances Barrett, ‘Meatus: A Curatorial Passage’ (PhD diss., Monash University, 2021), 3.
24 The word meatus is both singular and plural.
25 ‘Frances Barrett: Meatus’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/frances-barrett-meatus/ (accessed 4 December 2022).
26 Not only does the use of the drenching red light across ACCA’s gallery district have kinship with the red lights used to attract customers to sex work premises—and so intervenes in the stigmatisation of the colour connotation (in a way not dissimilar to the large-scale 1980s reclamation of the slur ‘queer’)—red light itself is thought to be therapeutic. Sabrina Rohringer et al., ‘The Impact of Wavelengths of LED Light-Therapy on Endothelial Cells’, Scientific Reports 7, article 10700 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11061-y; ‘LumiCure Torchlight’ product page, Lifepro Fitness, https://lifeprofitness.com/products/lumicure-torchlight (accessed 4 December 2022).
27 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1973).
28 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
29 The other participants’ responses were also insightful and worthy of inclusion: ‘Improvisation is the accumulation of affect’ (V Barratt), and ‘Improvisation is going to the dressing up box to try something I’ve never explored before’ (Daniel Jaber).
30 EO Gill, ‘Screwball’, Volupté 5, no. 2 (2022), https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/volupte/article/view/1670.
31 EO Gill, Screwball, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Verge, 2022).
32 Frances Barrett, The Verses of Doctor Mother (2023), a series of five works of ink on paper.
33 Verónica Tello, ‘Screwball’, Memo Review, 9 July 2022, https://memoreview.net/reviews/screwball-at-verge-gallery-by-vernonica-tello.
34 ‘Boychild in Conversation with Wu Tsang, Wu Tsang in Conversation with Boychild’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2 December 2020, Vimeo, 1:01:32, https://vimeo.com/486397901 (accessed 13 February 2023).
35 For more information see https://dirtylooksla.org/about.
36 EO Gill, e-mail message to author, 15 January 2023.
37 Fulgora, Rayner Hoff Project Space, National Art School, Sydney, 3 February–5 March 2023.
38 Cait Kelly and Mostafa Rachwani, ‘What’s Behind the “Terrifying” Backlash Against Australia’s Queer Community?’, The Guardian, 25 March 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/25/whats-behind-the-terrifying-backlash-against-australias-queer-community.