For some reason now long forgotten, I once signed up to email bulletins from Frieze Magazine (“a leading magazine of contemporary art and culture ... essays, reviews and columns by today’s most forward-thinking writers”) and have not so far managed to unsubscribe. I really should unsubscribe, as Art Writing vies with Queer Theory Academic Writing for the genre that gives me the strongest cringe response, and it can’t be good for me (at my age) to still be chasing the cringe.
One of these email bulletins alerted me to a review of Shon Faye’s book The Transgender Issue in Frieze on 16 September 2021. The reviewer was Juliet Jacques, another man sheltering under the Trans Umbrella, and you won’t be surprised to learn that Jacques loved Faye’s book. I won’t burden you with the details, but I know you’ll be thrilled to learn that the book opens “with an epigraph from writer/performer Travis Alabanza about how the word ‘trans’ also means ‘escape’, ‘choice’, ‘autonomy’ and, above all, ‘wanting more possibilities’ than the ones available to us.”
Of course the editors of Frieze must choose any books they wish to be reviewed by whoever they choose. But have you noticed that there’s a sort of assumption that anything by a person under the Trans Umbrella is art, whether or not it actually is art or is about art? I looked at the list of books reviewed in Frieze during the twelve-month period before the Faye review and found the following.
On 15 September 2021, Frieze published Two New Novels Track UK Transgender Rights - Writers Juliet Jacques and Isabel Waidner recent books track the legal recognition of transgender people in the UK by So Mayer. So used to be Sophie. I bet you can’t guess which pronouns So prefers. “Tellingly, both books feature queer performance collectives … As well as being at the vanguard of contemporary queer and trans writing, Jacques and Waidner have both been instrumental as hosts, organizers and critics in creating a radically inclusive arena that brings together, per Waidner’s event at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2019, ‘class, queers and the avant-garde’.” Such fun!
On 31 August 2021, in Richard Porter Wants to Make ‘Queer’ Weird Again (which actually seems fair enough considering the bowdlerisation of queer) Chris Hayes tells us about Pilot Press’s hit ‘Queer Anthology’ series. Get ready, here comes the trans! “Most recently, this has included Last Night A Beef Jerk Saved My Life (2021), by D Mortimer, a writer interested in trans crip narratives.”
24 May 2021 saw an ecstatic review of The Art of Not Giving a Fuck According to Jayne County by Sam Moore (they/them). “The performer’s recently reissued autobiography, Man Enough to Be a Woman, offers an unapologetic blueprint for gender non-conformity.” Jayne/Wayne County is a sort of crossdressing Zelig, a man who has been on the fringes of art-school movements since the late 1960s and who was, of course, at the Stonewall riots, and who started to “identify as a woman” in 1979 after moving to Berlin. Isn’t the idea of a blueprint for any kind of non-conformity rather odd?
Then there seems to be a drought of trans books, until Bryony White’s ‘Everyone is Female and Everyone Hates It’: Andrea Long Chu’s Theory of Desire, a review of Long Chu’s Females on 7 November 2019. “In defence of Chu, it is important to understand that, when she is talking about femaleness, she is not talking about gender so much as she is talking about desire, or gender, as an erotic, sexual project. She writes: ‘The thesis of this little book is that femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation.’ She is clear, though: ‘I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.’ In this sense, Chu is not discussing ‘biological sex’, though she is not ‘referring to gender, either’.” Is that clear? So when you buy a guinea pig, and you tell the breeder you’d like a female, you are telling the breeder that you want a guinea pig who sacrifices herself to make room for the desires of another.
Being completely unable to resist a trans rabbit hole, I put the term “trans” into the Frieze search box and found more …
On 10 September 2021, LIVE 2021: A Programme of Performance Curated by Languid Hands - Frieze London's LIVE will feature performances by Rebecca Bellantoni, Ebun Sodipo and Ashley Holmes exploring themes of embodiment, transformation and grief. “Ebun Sodipo is a London based artist making work for those who will come after: the black trans people of the future. Her interdisciplinary practice narrates her construction of a black trans-feminine self after slavery and colonialism.” There’s a film of Sodipo’s performance here but I wouldn’t recommend watching it unless your threshold for cringe is very, very high.
How about these events notifications?
Walter Schels | TRANS* at a gallery in Berlin and Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) – I’m Jade. I’m a trans woman trans womxn trans femme two spirit human being. Life feels long even though it hasn’t been all that long. A brain tumor surgically removed, getting divorced, losing my dad, brain tumor resu at Kunsthaus Glarus Switzerland in the summer of 2021.
Lauren Elkin (she/her), in her review of the 2021 Liverpool Biennial on 17 June 2021, The Liverpool Biennial’s Blinkered Approach to Feminist Art, says that “… the show has a rather dated perspective on feminist art, as well as a somewhat blinkered approach to the aims of the biennial itself.”
I was interested enough to read on. What was dated about the perspective on feminist art?
“While the intersectional approaches of these video works (by Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson) overlap with histories of women’s liberation, they differ from other more self-consciously feminist pieces on show, like Judy Chicago’s ‘Through the Flower No. 2–4’ (1972), which – despite being seen as a foundational series in the field of feminist art – seems to suggest, reductively, that the female body is organized around a central absence.”
I’m not sure I agree with you 100% on your art critic work, there, Lauren. I don’t think that’s what Judy Chicago’s “Through the Flower” series suggest at all. But moving along.
“The punk photomontages on display by Linder are not her best or wittiest … Still, for Chicago’s central-core imagery and Linder’s pin-up girls, however subversive, to be the show’s most explicitly feminist artworks felt narrow and frustrating. Hanging nearby, the swoopy genital shapes in British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun’s paintings, such as Earth Process (1940) – which are much weirder and more explicit in their global, earthy message of seasonal cycles and energy taken from and given back to the earth – looked essentialist in their company.”
I had to look up the word “essentialist”, and found that it means the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. I wonder if, in this context, it’s short for the descriptor of death, bio-essentialist? Any art in any medium that hints at women having a particular sort of genital shapes, or being global, earthy, seasonal, cyclical, or taking energy from the earth is DEFINITELY 100% bio-essentialist and must therefore be condemned by the reviewers of Frieze.
“The final room speaks back to Chicago’s images with ironic, knowing intent. The German artist Jutta Koether’s A380 naked (2020) shows us an airplane with boobs against a sky of boobs, with a border made of boobs and beautiful, amorphous markings on the bottom, like scarves being waved in semaphore – all of it in the brightest shades of pink and orange. Building on the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the ‘creaturely’ aspect of inanimate objects, this feminization of a technology not widely associated with women is a defiant statement in favour of prettiness in art, and a redemption of colours and images associated with ‘femininity’. As the trans writer Andrea Long Chu writes in her 2019 book Females: ‘Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.’”
On 3 June 2021, Lauren Kane’s ‘We Do Not Dream Alone’ Seeks to Champion Representation for Contemporary Asian Artists - Part two of the Asia Society’s Triennial in New York reflects Asia’s prominence within the global artistic landscape … refers back to Part one and makes a special mention of “… Hamra Abbas’s Every Color (2020), a series of miniature portraits from the trans community in Lahore, their faces floating in white space.”
Finally, and this is far back as I can bear to go, on 28 April 2021 Gwen Burlington reviews Hatty Nestor (she/her)'s book Ethical Portraits which “examines portraiture’s central role in understanding the discriminatory nature of the US criminal justice system” in What Portraits of the Incarcerated Can Tell Us About Our Human Rights.
“As a result of the privatization of prisons, greater powers of arrest for minor criminal offences, and systemic racism, the US prison population has soared from 200,000 in 1970 to nearly two million today … Beginning with an examination of activist and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, Nestor lays bare how the brutal treatment of a transgender inmate is symptomatic of the widespread violence of the US justice system.”
It’s odd that a white man who committed a white-collar crime is held up as the sacrificial figurehead for a book pointing out the flaws in a system that disproportionately punishes black people, but trans is not only automatically art, it automatically confers most noteworthy, Best In Show, status in any given category. If someone was able to grow a trans pumpkin, it would automatically win the rosette for Biggest Pumpkin, even if it wasn’t actually the biggest pumpkin.
Shon Faye was reviewed by Juliet Jacques, and Juliet Jacques was reviewed by So Mayer. Andrea Long Chu was enthusiastically reviewed by Bryony White, and Long Chu’s book was referred to by Lauren Elkin as though it was already a foundational text, and that the maxim “everyone is female, and everyone hates it” would elicit a knowing chuckle from the always in-the-know Frieze reader. Although I can read the reviews and enjoy the cringe, actually reading the works is usually a step too far. I read a couple of pages of Faye’s book in Waterstones, and found it dogmatic and humourless and ranty, and in need of a good editing. Mere excerpts from Long Chu’s book left me needing a Silkwood shower. But I have sat through an entire iteration of CN Lester’s Transpose at the Barbican in December 2017 (thank you for coming with me, you know who you are), and my reaction to that experience was that the soft bigotry of low expectations was at work. The “everything trans is art” phenomenon stems from the same prejudice. Some of it may be good and interesting, but far too much not very good stuff is awarded a too-sympathetic critical response.