Queer Relations

QUEER RELATIONS collective, forms of living as queer are caught up with fundamental questions about what we do with each other. In all its many and varied DAVID J. GETSY forms, that is, queer existence takes relation- ality as the matrix in which difference and . . wavering line defiance become manifest. between two solids themselves immersed I’m being somewhat stark in my characteriza- – Stephen Jonas, “Exercises for the tion of both form and relation in order to draw Ear” (1968)1 out what I see as the most promising potential of a queer attention to their dynamics. Rather There is nothing intrinsically queer about a than expecting that we might find some form, form. Rather, queer capacities are engendered formality, or format that is queer anywhere or by activating relations—between forms, against everywhere, we need to engender a queer for- an opposition or context, or (in the case of malism that can pursue the intercourse of forms. complex forms) among the internal dynamics There is both subversive and utopian poten- of their components. Queer counternarratives tial in attending to the ways in which forms and sites of otherwise identification can be and their components get on. This is not an located in the associations, frictions, and bonds iconographic task. Rather, there is potential between and among forms. in striving to see the uses of formal relations beneath, beyond, in consort with, or against After all, one cannot be queer alone. Whether ostensible “content.” Historically, we should in the embrace of another or against the ground remember, there have been many times when of a hostile society that seeks to enforce nor- mativity, a life is thrown into relief as queer through its commitment to unauthorized or unorthodox relations and the transformative “ There is nothing intrinsically potential they represent. (Of course, the orga- queer about a form. Rather, nizing synecdoche for this commitment is queer capacities are engendered a set of sexual relations that refuse “natural” by activating relations—between rites of procreation and, by extension, pro- pose new modes of desire, pleasure, family, forms, against an opposition or and kinship.) Even those theoretical mod- context, or (in the case of complex els that assert negativity and the antisocial forms) among the internal thrust of queer existence come to emphasize dynamics of their components. relationality as a locus of refusal and redefini- tion. Whether lone sexual outlaw or utopian ” ASAP/Journal 254 / ASAP/Journal vol.2, no.2 (May 2017): 254-57.  “ “straight” readings. There is queer potential in insurrections of form, shape, and pattern, as Rather than expecting that we well as in their uses. might find some form, formality, An attention to the queer dynamics of forms or format that is queer anywhere does not mean that we should abjure or ignore or everywhere, we need to engender ostensible “content.” Rather, it allows us to a queer formalism that can pursue investigate how form can be mobilized in the intercourse of forms. relation to content as a way of fostering such ” queer tactics as subversion, infiltration, refusal, or the declaration of unauthorized allegiances. We shouldn’t think of formalism as turning formal manipulation has been the only vehicle away from content or context but rather as the through which queer insubordination could focused pursuit of queer potential through the be conveyed. Its proponents escaped censure questioning of how content is shaped, trans- by means of this dissemblance and coding mitted, coded, patterned, undermined, and through forms, and they mobilized formal invested by means of form.2 In the capacious traits and relations as metonymies of unautho- and un-technical sense in which I am propos- rized desires and positions of queer resistance. ing it here, formalism is less a method than a In effect, they relied on how something was belief in the politics of form and the unruly said or imaged rather than the purported what. potential of form’s relations.3 Any queer formal reading must itself be relational, par- With its invested attention to the relations ticular, and contingent on its situation and between and within forms, a queer formal- context. This is a strength, not a weakness. It ism can offer a heuristic counterpart to such echoes the tactical mobility of queer refusals coding through its cultivation of ways to read of normativity. against the grain, beyond intentionality, and in pursuit of inadvertent potential. It can be a This brief essay is my first attempt at owning a means for mobilizing formal relations in order sentence I wrote in the conclusion to my book to call forth counternarratives, to challenge on gender assignment and abstract sculpture given taxonomies, to attend to unorthodox in the 1960s: “Relations are meaningful, eth- intimacies and exchanges, and to subvert ical, and political, and it is in its syntactical “natural” and ascribed meanings. Such sub- staging of relations that abstract art produces versions can come from examining how forms its engagements.”4 In the book, I took it as interact with each other, the patterns such axiomatic that genders are multiple, that bod- relations adopt, the differential effects of con- ies are transformable, and that personhood is text, or the ways in which form contradicts successive. I tracked moments where binary Forum 255 / and dimorphic assumptions about genders and However, I want to emphasize here that this their forms broke down. This was facilitated by ethical and political capacity of form does not focusing on a historical period in which formal require abstraction. That is, while my own dynamics and abstraction became priorities, guiding examples have been shapes, patterns, and I reinvestigated canonical art histories of conjunctions, and other visual forms and for- the 1960s where divergent accounts of gender malities, my intention has been to use these were debated through abstract sculpture. The simplifications to call for a greater attention mapping of gender onto abstract forms often to formal relations in more complex repre- resulted in contention, reprisal, or discovery. sentational systems, socialities, performances, Alternative or inadvertent accounts of gender’s and texts. We need to hold close the recog- multiplicity emerged out of these debates. nition that formal dynamics themselves can In this way, I made a case for the method- offer the basis for cultivating such positions of ological urgency and broad implications of resistance and counter-narratives—the coun- transgender studies and its refusal of binary ternarratives that must be sought as models of and dimorphic presumptions. In support of survival for trans and queer lives facing daily this, allied queer methods and, in particular, their attempted erasure. a queer attention to forms and their dynamics became crucial to the aim of denaturalizing Queer existence is always wrapped up in an and derailing the binary and normative tax- attention to form, whether in the survival onomies for personhood. This approach also tactic of shaping oneself to the camouflage allowed me to examine the unintended effects of the normal, the defiant assembling of new of intentionality and to move beyond a reli- patterns of lineage and succession, or the pic- ance on one-to-one equations of artists’ own turing of new configurations of desire, bodies, identities with their work (an ad hominem fal- sex, and sodality. A queer formalism can lacy that many critics continue to propagate). track issues of shape and relation such as the Sculptural abstraction—with its avoidance of erotics of sameness, refusals of conformity, representation and its opposition to anthropo- non-monogamous couplings, defiant non-re- morphism—served as an enabling matrix for producibility, the encouragement of misuse, the eruption of inadvertent counter-narratives the vexing of taxonomies, achronological of successive genders, non-dimorphic bod- temporalities, and the creation of self-made ies, and acts of transformation. Abstraction kinships. It might examine the ways in which does this by distilling formal relations, thus forms exceed boundaries; how they behave allowing one to track how form itself prompts differently in different contexts; how they are divergent attempts at recognition. What being deployed against their intended use; or became clear through the writing of the book how they disrupt the ostensible meaning of was how much rebellious potential there was a text or an image’s claims to naturalism (in in the identification with form’s dynamics. style or content). In short, a queer formalism ASAP/Journal 256 / attends to the ways in which insubordinate differentiation of transgender and queer histories and relations can be proposed through form’s issues, see also “Appearing Differently: Abstraction’s dynamics, and it strives to identify those con- Transgender and Queer Capacities; David J. Getsy figurations from which queer defiance can be in Conversation with William J. Simmons,” in Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices, ed. C. cultivated. After all, it is relations themselves Erharter, D. Schwärzler, R. Sicar, and H. Scheirl that queer politics seek to open and remap. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 38-55; and David J. Getsy, “Seeing Commitments: Jonah Groeneboer’s Notes Ethics of Discernment,” Temporary Art Review, I am grateful to Ramzi Fawaz, Gordon Hall, March 8, 2016, http://temporaryartreview.com/ and the journal and issue editors for their helpful seeing-commitments-jonah-groeneboers-ethics- responses to a draft of this text. of-discernment/. 1 From Stephen Jonas, “Exercises for the Ear, LVI,” in Stephen Jonas: Selected Poems, ed. Joseph Torra (Hoboken, New Jersey: Talisman House DAVID J. GETSY is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Publishers, 1994), 47. Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the 2 A text I have found particularly helpful in Art Institute of Chicago. He writes about art’s histories of the human form and its alternatives, and his research focuses thinking through these questions is by the painter on queer and transgender tactics in modern and contemporary Amy Sillman, “AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense art and in art history’s methodologies. His most recent books of Abstract Expressionism, II,” Artforum 49, no. are Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded 10 (Summer 2011): 321–25. Indeed, it is often Field of Gender (2015) and the anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (2016), a 2017 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. the writings by artists that address most directly the queer or trans potentials of formal dynamics and formal decisions. Here, I am thinking of contributions like the important recent text by Gordon Hall, “Reading Things: Gordon Hall on Gender, Sculpture, and Relearning How to See,” Walker Art Gallery Magazine, August 8, 2016, http:// www.walkerart.org/magazine/2016/gordon-hall- transgender-hb2-bathroom-bill/. 3 For further on this, see “Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation,” Art Journal 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 58-71. I am indebted to many conversations with Jennifer Doyle before and after this published exchange that have informed my thinking about these issues. 4 David J. Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 277. For related arguments about abstraction and for a Forum 257 /