How do sex and sexuality have a place and take place in public art practice? This inaugural issue of Public Art Dialogue is the first edited collection of its kind to specifically interrogate the intersections of public art, sex (and, in extension, gender) and sexuality.1 Public artworks with visual, material and thematic content related to sex and/or sexuality may — depending on perspective — cause great amazement, astonishment, or dismay. This is especially the case when such public art is, among other avenues, (1) of sexually explicit nature and, hence, potentially largely deemed dissonant, or “other”; (2) situated in prominent public locales with strong visual or material presence; (3) widely mediated in the public sphere (through “offline” and/or online interactions); (4) exposed to large (and especially unconsulted) public audiences; and (5) of a permanent nature and/or making a lasting impact.
In contemporary public art history, the preceding compound qualities can be found in the controversial large-scale installations of Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner (2015) and Paul McCarthy’s Tree (2014), or inflatable “butt plug” — as I illustrate later, respectively. Foregrounded in such cases is the power of public artwork to question, or “que(e)ry,”2 norms about sex and sexuality. Particularly subject to critique in “queer(ing)” public art is hegemonic (white) heteropatriarchy, which still to date governs the human condition in most parts of the world.
“Anti-normative” public art, as presented by this edited collection, may particularly confer a “public pedagogy.”3 That is to say, public art can hold a mirror to society. The visual politics of public art can teach their engagers about the alternative and deconstruct binary gender and sexual values, such as straight/nonheterosexual and male/female. Such binary oppositions underpin norms — notably, heterosexuality, monogamy and coupledom — and, accordingly, the (ab)normalization of certain sex(uality) aspects that produce, and reproduce, everyday social and spatial relationships.
A connecting thread part and parcel of the remit of this issue is how public art practice may address, or redress, the role of power ( i.e., its simultaneous uses and abuses). This issue voices a concern with the dialogue between public art practices and the degrees to which power is taken, or taken away, in controlling “queer” (i.e., variant, deviant, oblique, off-center) expressions and knowledges of sex and sexuality.
Power and knowledge production, including the language of citizenship,4 have been key foci in critical studies revolving around social inclusions and exclusions of particular forms of sex and sexuality. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault imparted that “repression has . . . been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age.”5 Repression can be self-imposed and reciprocally controlled through gender and sexual norms. They have evolved as historically and socially constructed discursive patterns wherein both the practices and discourses around sex and sexuality are inextricably linked. As Foucault conveyed, “In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex. Not so much to sex as representing nature, but to sex as history, as signification and discourse.”6
Gender and sexual identity categories, drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology,7 can be rendered along different points where normative (i.e., “straight”) bodies and things appears to be “in line.” But this is the case only when there is alignment — that is, when points are brought in line with other lines. This is neither a linear nor coherent process. Ahmed explains the latter using the example of tracing paper:
When the lines on the tracing paper are aligned with the lines of the paper that has been traced, then the lines of the tracing paper disappear: you can simply see one set of lines. If lines are traces of other lines, then this alignment depends on straightening devices that keep things in line, in part by “holding” things in place. Lines disappear through such processes of alignment, so that when even one thing comes “out of line” with another thing, the “general effect,” is “wonky” or even “queer.”8
Similarly, the lines between sex and sexuality, and in this case their representation through public artwork, encompass a critical “process of alignment” — and they are a “wonky” nexus, indeed. The conceptual, methodological and creative engagements that co-constitute this journal issue reveal how public art — in its visual content and in its capacity as socially engaged practice and, relatedly, as community engagement approach — may attain its value as “queer(ness).”
In this context, the meaning of “queer” needs some unpacking. Rather than solely being construed as an identity category in itself, “queer” has become particularly associated with a critical disposition. Namely, queer has a propensity for challenging, or “que(e)ring,” gender and sexual identity categories. It gives all-embracing consideration to gender and sexual “others.” The latter usually comprise “nonheterosexual” people and identities, often labeled together under (the increasingly expanding acronym) LGBT+: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and all other nonheterosexual identities, including intersex, nonbinary, asexual and questioning people. “Queer” is sometimes integrated into the LGBT + initialism as an identity category. However, again, I think this may fail to distinguish “queer” from its aforementioned significance as a politicizing stance that puts identity, including the labels as part of the LGBT + gamut, in question. Accordingly, this issue aims to show the fluidity and incoherence of sex(uality) through the performative practices of making and engaging public art.
The ways in which art is situated in, and through, public space and how it is presented to, and communicated among, wide public audiences are fundamental levers for letting it become “public.” Accordingly, public art with sex(uality) content can play a potentially powerful role in bringing related stigmata, taboos and discriminatory and exclusionist processes to light. As such, it may promote interest in the value of public art to disclose and address social problems around marginalization.9
Sex and sexuality are matters that, across diverse geographies and temporalities, have been profoundly associated with the very personal, the intimate and the private realm. They have been seen as shameful, especially when “other(ed)”; as Foucault posited, “We must also ask why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin.”10 So, what happens when sexuality comes out of its “closeted space” so prominently through the makings and doings of public artwork?
Public discourse, and controversy, about public artwork with content associated with sex(uality) may revolve around interrelated matters, such as perceived explicit visuality and the problematized (time)scale of the artwork (e.g., large vs. small, permanent vs. temporary). Here, the level of public acceptance may also be coinformed by the ethics of commissioning, representation, consultation and communication.11
A notable case of a prominent, “very sexual” work of public art was Anish Kapoor’s 200-foot-long and 33-foot-high installation Dirty Corner (2015), placed in the Palace of Versailles.12 Commotion reached high levels, and the artwork soon became dubbed as the “queen’s vagina.” Kapoor’s response endorses an antipatriarchal critique: “The vagina of a queen . . . is taking power.”13 The controversy, nonetheless, reoriented beyond sexuality alone when vandals defaced the steel structure with anti-Semitic graffiti. And the debate was further fueled when the artist wanted to keep the “abominable words” as part of the artwork.14
Paul McCarthy’s 80-foot-high inflatable Tree, which was installed in Place Vendôme in Paris in 2014, met a similar fate.15 The public outrage was mainly targeted at what rather resembled a gigantic anal sex toy; a local resident slapped McCarthy in the face during the unveiling of this inflatable. A few days later, an end was put to the (albeit material) existence of Tree when vandals deflated the artwork. Yet, digital reproductions, such as memes and online discussions, lent a continued existence to Tree through public co-creations across social media networks16 — in the realm of what Olga Goriunova phrased as a “new media idiocy.”17
Do the location and the size or scale of the public artwork perhaps matter when it concerns sex(uality)? In what way does it matter when public art with a sex(uality) theme makes a fleeting appearance in public or produces a lasting legacy? The affordances provided by public art, including its size, the depicted content and its locale and temporality, among others, may demonstrate particular site-specific registers of engagement. In so doing, they may confer particular (counter-)identities of place and community. For instance, not only did some find Tree to be “anti-normative” or morally “improper,” others also considered it ill-suited to the French classical architectural aesthetic of the public venue where the work was on display.18
The destabilization of established normativities has been a both epistemic and empirical cornerstone of inquiry in critical studies around gender, sexuality and space across the geohumanities and social sciences.19 As a novelty of this journal issue, the collection attends to how such destabilizations work out in different conceptual and geographical real-world settings. It also addresses different historical contexts and multimedia representations of public art practices, straddling the bodily level, the street and, within the present-day context, the tweet.
Across diverse and intersecting positionalities as scholar, artist, commissioner, maker, viewer and everyday citizen, the contributors to this issue traverse multidisciplinary concerns with the use of commissioned, grassroots or unsolicited forms of public art to think through struggles over gender and sexual selves vis-à-vis “others.”
Davida Fernández-Barkan brings the reader to the Global South. Through the lens of public murals, this author’s feminist interrogation unpacks the representation of an explicit kind of pornographic performance, a so-called “money shot” (i.e., facial and body cum shot). The author analyzes the idiom of colectivo marcelaygina’s mural To Order Call Us or Dial 1800 the Pink Punks (2010) in Mexico City. The mural uses the depicted man’s ejaculation on the woman’s face and body to provide a critique of patriarchal hegemony that has been (re)producing female sexuality in the city and region. Against the backdrop of the prevailing and proliferating gendered violence against women in this area, Fernández-Barkan’s study critically discusses how public muralism has provided an ambiguous answer with regard to challenging but also sustaining such hegemony. Of interest, the activist public art practices of the collective foreground the body as a border site for critically renegotiating how patriarchy constructs womanhood (while dealing with elements of “audience hostility”). The author cites the collective’s rationale, reading that their artivist work engages “the body as border, the border of the mediated image, the space between process and the finished work, the border between reason, intuition and madness.”20
The (mis)use of power in politicizing and visibilizing/remembering but also invisibilizing/unremembering gender and sexual identities and relationships is important in this context.21 Jennifer K. Favorite and Marisa Lerer present an interview that they held with the feminist art collective fierce pussy, founded in New York City in 1991. Their discussion involves the tenet and practice of feminist resistance against patriarchal dominance and misogyny and the empowering potential of civil disobedience (including the gay and lesbian and women’s movements). The work of fierce pussy started at the time of AIDS (i.e., sexuality and health) activism and related hostility toward the gay (and in extension LGBT+) community (as also witnessed by the lack of basic government support to this community). The collective’s work involved a focused dedication to increasing lesbian visibility and tackling homophobia through activist posters in the then “offline” real world to reach “other like-minded people.’”22 The opportunities provided by digital culture over the years have somewhat expanded fierce pussy’s scope for mobilizing concerted action against systemic issues of gendered and sexual marginalization and exclusion (and resentment toward women and LGBT + people in particular). Indeed, interpretations and engagements can move (far) beyond the public artwork’s original location and the artists’ original intentions within digitally networked spaces.23
The poster as critical public art form also plays a prominent role in Andrew Wasserman’s study. In the aftermath of the fatal homophobia-fueled attack on the serviceman Allen R. Schindler in 1992, this author critically reads “selective inclusions” in the 42nd Street Art Project exhibition as part of the then redevelopment of Manhattan’s Times Square. The analysis pinpoints how the absence of design studio BUREAU’s commissioned and then cancelled poster project In Honor of Allen R. Schindler (1993) in this 42nd Street Art Project exhibition may be entangled with multilevel public and private interests and policies around civil rights. Problematically, this included the higher-order discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy ban (1994–2011) on openly LGBT + service members. Wasserman concludes, “We are again — or still — at a moment in which some straight white men arbitrarily police space and violently strike when full rights of citizenship are afforded to those who do not exactly comport with their own autobiography.”24
Kristen N. Racaniello provides an alternative, deep historical method of queer reconstructions of sexuality (i.e., hedonistic activity). The author draws from the politics of erasure, or inclusion, of homoeroticism in manuscript interventions during late medieval South Italy, known as the “Long Trecento” (i.e., the first decades of the 15th century). Racaniello develops an argument around haptic eroticism with a focus on medieval public bathhouses. The author imparts how “a period of heavy tactile viewer intervention, followed by a shift in style and a lack of rubbed or damaged images can indicate not only a conflict between the use of a privately owned book (i.e., the Glazier De balneis puteolanis), but also a conflicting cultural dialogue around public bathhouses, bathing, and sexuality.”25 In contrast with more contemporary contexts, the author conveys how most people did not have their own private spaces (i.e., bedrooms). It was the bathhouses that operated as sites for the enactment of public sexuality. They also served as sites of resistance against the then most dominant institution of the church, which rendered all sexual acts as “transgressive.”
I consider the issue in itself, after Ahmed,26 a tracing paper, too: the contributions can be read as distinct pieces, perhaps ordered through a “straight” line (as the table of contents might seem to suggest), whereas the storylines form a “wonky,” or “queer,” collage.27 The latter transpires in the two artists’ projects that this issue features.
Alison Cornyn and Kathleen Husler’s project “publicizes” a transmedia art project, in which, similar to Racaniello’s contribution, historical sources play a foundational part in epitomizing how queer identities have been traditionally “emphatically suppressed”28 by hegemonic social norms and institutional authorities. Drawing from archival data, the project interprets the challenges of emerging same-sex romances and queer identities of young incarcerated girls (who were often victims of sexual abuse) at the Hudson Girls Training School in New York, 1904–75. The project presents annotated, or “queeried,” archival documents and images. It demonstrates the tension between the girls’ claims on autonomy and institutional suppression. For example, the author references how the wearing of thick socks was coded as “butch” and, therefore, prohibited. Evasive secret expressions and language were therefore adopted by girls, such as the code phrase “HOLLAND” (Hope Our Love Lasts And Never Dies).29
Q’llage is an artist’s project by Nell Pierce, which in part adorns the cover of this special issue. This project uses the metaphor of the adaptability of a plant to emphasize the commonality with the resilience of queer communities. Pierce interviewed self-identified queer people and organized workshops in the Minneapolis area about their “coming in” experiences. On the basis of this practice-based work, Pierce’s project “fleshes out” an auto-ethnographic collage of the gendered and sexed self/“other” in relation to aspects of family, kinship, love and desire. By publicly sharing through a Minneapolis-based community space and social media outlets, Pierce wants to reach out to the “other” through the promotion of Q’llage as an “educational tool” on the pages in hand, too: “Sharing my story and work in this issue of Public Art Dialogue is one opportunity to expand from the ‘I’ to the ‘we,’”30 Pierce proclaims.
On the whole, the studies presented with this collection exhibit a representational paradox: How to (re)present something as performative, ephemeral, nonrepresentational, dynamic or fluid as sex and sexuality?31 This paradox also translates to the site of the issue. The inquiries covering this issue pinpoint nonlinear, nonhierarchical points of difference and intervention (which, e.g., is brought out by the use of the lowercase notation for colectivo marcelaygina and fierce pussy). Altogether, the contributions render non-normative dimensions of sex and sexuality through public artwork to challenge powerful norms and hegemonies. In other words, this issue speaks out a queer desire: an orientation toward nonalignment, which according to Ahmed involves a process of how bodies and things are not put and kept “in line,” thereby producing a “queer effect.”32
Hence, this collection indicates how sex(uality)-inflected public artwork may produce such queer effects. This takes place through social and spatial mediations of gender, sex and sexuality through different forms and avenues, including ideas, intentions, designs, craft and modes of public engagement. What would make such public art effective, as in “successful”?
Here, I revert to Ahmed, who adopts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the “successful” body as “being ‘able’ to extend itself (through objects) in order to act on and in the world”33 and thereby become a “full” citizen — here and there, now and then. The respective contributions, in part and to a certain extent, allude to social identity categories beyond gender and sexuality alone. I yet encourage further intersectional analysis34 on the role that public art may play in how identity aspects (including gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, age, belief, [dis]ability and geographical origin) intersect in oppositional or alliance/solidarity politics, along with formal and informal creative acts of citizenship35 — also beyond the Global North as public art’s dominant context for academic knowledge production. In reference to Frantz Fanon, Ahmed denoted such citizenship as “successful” in terms of “bodily privilege,” or “the ability to move through the world without losing one’s way”36 — while some may be stripped of, or may not be put in a position to enjoy, any of such privilege.
Traveling through this issue’s collection, I conclude by asking how public art’s affordances (i.e., object properties) may confer a privilege on certain bodies and things to be seen or get voiced. How might traditional, hegemonic (e.g., heteropatriarchal) public art underrepresent, misrepresent or “nonrepresent” gender and sexual variance or “others”? How might public art practices (re)claim space for the representation of the lives of sexually and socially marginalized or disenfranchised communities as well as provide scope for the above suggested critical intersectional analysis? With a wink toward the next issue of Public Art Dialogue: What are then the parameters indicative of the failure of public art practice as for its ethics of inclusive engagement and representation?
Special Issue Guest Editor
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Martin Zebracki
Martin Zebracki is an associate professor of critical human geography at the University of Leeds, UK. His research straddles the areas of public art, sexuality, digital culture, and social inclusivity and has been published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Urban Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Social & Cultural Geography. Zebracki is joint editor of the Routledge anthologies Public Art Encounters (with Joni M. Palmer; 2018) and The Everyday Practice of Public Art (with Cameron Cartiere; 2016) and he is an editorial board member of Public Art Dialogue. He is chair of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers. Moreover, Zebracki is the principal investigator of the multisite research project Queer Memorials: International Comparative Perspectives on Sexual Diversity and Social Inclusivity, supported by a grant awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Personal profile: https://www.zebracki.org.
Notes
1 Leaving aside ontological debates, “public art” can be regarded as any creative work situated and experienced in spaces that are free to access. Generally, “sex” refers to biological and physical characteristics as well as any sexual, bodily interpersonal contacts, acts or activities. “Gender” is commonly understood as the ways in which one’s sexual identity is expressed or performed, which is socially and culturally constructed. “Sexuality” is related to physical orientation and romantic attraction (see Sam Killerman’s popularized infographic of the “genderbread person” at http://www.genderbread.org).
2 See explanation of the use of “queering” in Martin Zebracki, “Public Artivism: Queering Geographies of Migration and Social Inclusivity,” Citizenship Studies 24, no. 2 (2020), 131–53.
3 Martin Zebracki, “Public Art, Sexuality, and Critical Pedagogy,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education, September 11, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2019.1661365.
4 See Diane Richardson, “Rethinking Sexual Citizenship,” Sociology 51, no. 2 (2017): 208–24.
5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 5.
6 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 78.
7 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
8 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 66.
9 See Zebracki, “Public Art.”
10 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 9.
11 See Martin Zebracki and Dirk De Bekker, “Public Art for an Inclusive City: Producers and Publics on the Social Potentials and Problems of Flagship Vis‐à‐Vis Community Art,” City & Society 30, no. 1 (2018): 14–44.
12 “Versailles: Vandals Target ‘Queen’s Vagina’ Again,” The Local, September 7, 2015, https://www.thelocal.fr/20150907/versailles-queens-vagina-anti-semitic-anish-kapoor.
13 “Versailles.”
14 “Anish Kapoor’s ‘Dirty Corner’: Can Vandalism Ever Add to an Artwork?,” The Independent, September 8, 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art /features/anish-kapoors-dirty-corner-can-vandalism-ever-add-to-an-artwork-10492129.html.
15 See the discussion on Tree in Dylan Gauthier, “Networked Monumental: Site, Production, and Distributed Publics — Online, and in Everyday Life,” Public Art Dialogue 5, no. 1 (2015): 17–54; and see the full-length case study dedicated to Tree in Martin Zebracki, “Queerying Public Art in Digitally Networked Space: The Rise and Fall of an Inflatable Butt Plug,” in The Geographies of Digital Sexuality, ed. Catherine J. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 247–71.
16 See Gauthier, “Networked Monumental”; and Martin Zebracki and Jason Luger, “Digital Geographies of Public Art: New Global Politics,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 5 (2019): 890–909.
17 Olga Goriunova, Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2012).
18 See Zebracki, “Queerying Public Art.”
19 For example, see Kath Browne and Catherine Nash, eds., Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research (London: Routledge, 2010); and Martin Zebracki and Tommaso Milani, “Critical Geographical Queer Semiotics,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 3 (2017): 427–39.
20 “El cuerpo como frontera, la frontera de la imagen mediatizada, el espacio entre el proceso y la obra terminada, la frontera entre la razón la intuición y la locura,” in Texto para catálogo de Expo Marcela y Gina Expo Carrillo, colectivo marcelaygina, Archive of Gina Arizpe, n.d., 28, translation cited in contribution by Davida Fernández-Barkan, Public Art Dialogue 10, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 21.
21 See Thomas Dunn, Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016); and Martin Zebracki, “Urban Preservation and the Queerying Spaces of (Un)Remembering: Memorial Landscapes of the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District,” Urban Studies 55, no. 10 (2018): 2261–285.
22 Jennifer K. Favorite and Marisa Lerer, “Out in the Streets: An Interview with fierce pussy,” Public Art Dialogue 10, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 30.
23 See Zebracki and Luger, “Digital Geographies.”
24 Andrew Wasserman, “Times Square Red, White and Blue,” Public Art Dialogue 10, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 58.
25 Kristen N. Racaniello, “Haptic Homoeroticism: Evidence of Queer Bathing Histories in the Glazier De balneis Puteolanis,” Public Art Dialogue 10, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 72.
26 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.
27 By analogy, see Martin Zebracki, “Queer Bricolage,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 3 (2017): 605–6, part of the collection “Critical Geographical Queer Semiotics,” edited by Zebracki and Milani. By considering this collection as a site of reflective interrogation, my “queer bricolage” resulted in an experimental mixed-media cover image, which “represents a textual-visual montage of imaginative associations and (self-)performative actions traversing the topics of the contributions. This bricolage, as such, stylistically plays with multimodality along the networked, more-than-human spaces of analogue, print, digital, academic and popular media. It wants to queery the subject matter and the matter of scrutiny” (605).
28 Alison Cornyn and Kathleen Hulser, “The Trouble with Troubled Girls,” Public Art Dialogue 10, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 83.
29 Cornyn and Hulser, “Trouble with Troubled Girls.”
30 Nell Pierce, “Q'llage,” Public Art Dialogue 10, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 93.
31 For a further explanation of this paradox, see my creative intervention in Martin Zebracki, “Queerly Feeling Art in Public: The Gay Liberation Mo(nu)ment,” in Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts, ed. Candice Boyd and Christian Edwardes (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 85–100.
32 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 83.
33 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 139; see also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002).
34 See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99.
35 See Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen, eds., Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed Books, 2008).
36 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 139; see also Fanon Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986).