virtualbiennale2017-artfog

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фото с выставки

Итак, первая выставка с моим участием (сбивчивая презентация блога о non-binary) случилась в Петергофе (КвартаРиата), теперь это существует.

Фотоотчет

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Introduction

Oscillation is an important idea for the contemporary state of our world. Identities are the pivot for each person living on this planet. And today we can feel the pivot’s oscillation. 

Identities have always been one of the important themes for people. Who am I? Am I female or male? – this is one of the first human questions for all the times. What is considered masculine or feminine changes over time and varies by culture but it always has been very important. Actually, the gender identity is a very hard thing (most people suppose the easiest one)  to analyse and to understand. Today gender question becomes more actual and thrilling as ever.

Since 1990-s the gender studies became academic ones. But I think  Dr Freud was the person who actualized the gender question first. His studies attempted a lot of fields of human knowledge and among them, there was a gender. He made a gender visible and it became a problem. Since then people have to think about their place at the feminine-masculine scale, they began to worry about their gender. Now, while we entering the posthuman society, we can ask a new question: do I need a gender identity?

In this blog, I look into a contemporary human gender identity and explore how the gender is blurring in nowadays artists’ lives and works. I collect and analyse three non-binary artists’ statements which were realised as different art-projects. My goal is to show the relevance and importance of this theme and to explore the non-binary art practices. 

Image by Brittany Rutt

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once upon a time

Humans have always had a gender. Since the ancient times, there was a division between two genders – female and male – which were linked to the biological bodies and actually wasn’t called the gender but sex.

Ancient Greeks tell us a story about Androgyny who was both female and male (or male-male and female-female).  

“The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word 'Androgynous' is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle, and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their parents”.

/ The Dialogues of Plato in Five Volumes. 3rd ed. Oxford University, 1892. Vol. 1, pp. 558–563.)

There were myths about sex-changing. Tiresias - a blind prophet of Apollo who was transformed into a woman for seven years. According to Ptolemaeus Chennus’ version, he was transformed into a woman and then back into a man for several times. 

In the Zapotec civilization (southern Mexico), there were three genders: male, female and muxe (also spelled muxhe). Muxe is a third gender, not male, not female. They are biologically men but behave and dress as women. This gender has the same rights as other two and totally incorporated into the society’s life.

In many eastern traditional cultures, there is a place for the third gender: hijras of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan; the Indigenous Māhū of Hawaii; the traditional Dineh of the Southwestern US an so on.

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Hierophant's grid and Dr Freud

In Western society, the gender question is very problematic and a kind of struggle for the rights. It is not easy not to choose any gender identity or to move between binarity of male-female. 

Dr Freud

In the beginning of the XX century, Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis. And since then the world has changed. As he said himself, there were three traumatic blows to the self-esteem of human in all of the mankind history. There were Copernicus's theory, Darwin’s theory and his own psychoanalysis. 

Sigmund Freud contemplates a bust of himself, sculpted for his 75th birthday by O. Nemen, centre, and presented to him in 1931 in the garden of his village home in Potzlein, near Vienna.

And since Freud, sex and gender became a problem and a worrisome theme for everybody.

Hierophant's grid

I use an extremely symbolic thing - Tarot card - to emphasise the power of this illusion which combines old archetypical images with nowadays mysticism and esoteric beliefs.  The Major Arcana cards are the most powerful images of the Tarot. They are universal themes that affect our lives on very personal levels.

Hierophant – is the Major Arcana of the Tarot (№ 5) and it represents the Keeper of the "sacred law”. This card makes us do the right things to establish order and structure. And it is more about society and groups as opposed to something individual.

Each person has it’s own Hierophant inside oneself and builds the grid of unspoken rules since childhood. In these rules clearly defined how the gender is assigned to a person and it’s something social rather than an individual. In the western world the gender theme is one of the most strictly guarded  "sacred law” and any attempt to break the sacred grid is perceived by society as a nightmare and faces furious resistance.

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Notes on gender and pronoun usage

Sex

The classification of a person as male or female. At birth, infants are assigned a sex, usually based on the appearance of their external anatomy. (This is what is written on the birth certificate.) A person's sex, however, is actually a combination of bodily characteristics including: chromosomes, hormones, internal and external reproductive organs, and secondary sex characteristics.

Gender Identity

A person's internal, deeply held sense of their gender. For transgender people, their own internal gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth. Most people have a gender identity of man or woman (or boy or girl). For some people, their gender identity does not fit neatly into one of those two choices (see non-binary and/or genderqueer below.) Unlike gender expression (see below) gender identity is not visible to others.

Gender Expression

External manifestations of gender, expressed through a person's name, pronouns, clothing, haircut, behaviour, voice, and/or body characteristics. Society identifies these cues as masculine and feminine, although what is considered masculine or feminine changes over time and varies by culture. Typically, transgender people seek to align their gender expression with their gender identity, rather than the sex they were assigned at birth.

Transgender (adj.)

An umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from what is typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. People under the transgender umbrella may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms - including transgender. Some of those terms are defined below. Use the descriptive term preferred by the person. Many transgender people are prescribed hormones by their doctors to bring their bodies into alignment with their gender identity. Some undergo surgery as well. But not all transgender people can or will take those steps, and a transgender identity is not dependent upon physical appearance or medical procedures.

Non-binary and/or genderqueer

Terms used by some people who experience their gender identity and/or gender expression as falling outside the categories of man and woman. They may define their gender as falling somewhere in between man and woman, or they may define it as wholly different from these terms. The term is not a synonym for transgender or transsexual and should only be used if someone self-identifies as non-binary and/or genderqueer.

In 2015, The Washington Post updated its style guide to include the singular they to describe people who "identify as neither male nor female." It is increasingly common for people who have a non-binary gender identity to use they/them as their pronoun.

https://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender

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Tobaron Waxman:  “The 71st Face”

Tobaron Waxman is a curator and a multi-media artist who sings. Their work contextualizes gender as a system of an inscription, incorporating elements of traditional Jewish texts. Tobaron frequently uses their body and voice in their works. They research different identities among them: the gender identity and the Jewish identity. They also works with architectural sacral spaces. Tobaron defines themselves as Post-Identity, Post Jewish, Post-Zionist. 

“The 71st Face” (translation, vocal performance)

A live, site specific vocal performance in which I sing a cappella using the acoustics of the architecture. I shave my head and beard, and then carrying my hair in a bowl, I walk to different locations of unique sound quality in the museum, singing a repertoire of songs, poetry and liturgy in Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic, about eros, death and transformation. / Tobaron Waxman

This performance was held in January 2012 in Toronto, “Red Food: songs of eros, death and transformation”, in October 2012 in  Austria (at Lentos Museum, in the exhibition “Vollmilch – the beard as signifier’), in  2014 in Hong Kong (at The Wandering Scholar, Videotage/Cattle Depot.), and in  2015 in Hamburg (at Kampnagel: Festival of Choreography and Protest: “Hamammness”).

The 71st face is the reference to the Torah. In Judaism, texts are very important.

In Judaism we don’t have a personified god or figure on which to project our desires, anxieties, and so forth. We have the text, and we have the body: either our own bodies as individual Jews or the nation as a body. / Tobaron Waxman at Post/Porn/Politics Symposium

The 71st face refers to a famous dictum in the Jewish tradition – that there are shivim panim laTorah, there are 70 faces or facets to Torah. It means there are 70 ways to read the Torah (according to the alphabet specifics and grammar rules). No one is more valuable or significant or legitimate than the other 69. And TW adds the 71st one.

The Orthodox Jewish Diaspora as any other religious diaspora has its gender discourse and gender-based rituals.

Along with many others of my generation, consider that to be self-­‐hating and a distortion of Jewish history. But this is explicitly a male expression of nation. The hero/victim stuff, especially post-­‐Holocaust, is usually portrayed as a heroic, athletic Zionist man versus a pale, intellectual, Diaspora Jew less­than­man. This paradigm has to be heteronormative, and also points out an erasure of the girls. Because the girl is replaced by the effeminacy of the ‘diaspora-boy’, and for the ‘Israel–man’, the feminine is the land (Ha’aretz) itself. // Shawn Syms interviews Tobaron Waxman

I’m singing in my mother’s first language: Yiddish. My interpretation of the songs engage queer utopia in relation to Jewish concepts of destiny, longing and the messianic. // TW

THE 71st FACE - live a cappella vocal performance with electric clippers.  recorded live at Dixon Place NYC

The 71st Face, Hong Kong, May 29, 2014

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Bios _1_2_3_f_

_1_ Cassils

“Our bodies are sculptures formed by society’s expectations…My body is my medium” Cassils

They is a Canadian (based in Los Angeles, California) performance and visual artist working with their body as a social sculpture. Cassils is a gender nonconforming transmasculine bodybuilder who uses art to explore gender in non-binary terms.

Education:

- 2002 MFA Art and Integrated Media, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, CA

- 1997 BFA Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, NS, Canada

- 1996 Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris, France

Since 1999 Cassils took part in different group exhibitions in the USA and Europe and since 2013 there were some solo exhibitions. Recently Cassils curated the 2017-2018 Artist Performance & Lecture Series at Stanford University in California, titled “Vital Signs”.

Cassils is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, a California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, several Canada Council for the Arts grants, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship.

The main themes in Cassils researchers are histories of violence, representation, struggle and survival, transgenderness as a process of becoming but not a crossing from one sex to another. 

_2_Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst

Zackary Drucker is an independent American multimedia artist, cultural producer, trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender and sexuality. In 2008 she met Rhys Ernst and they began their  “Relationship” project. 

Education:

- 2007 M.F.A. California Institute of the Arts

-2005 B.F.A. School of Visual Arts, NY

She has performed and exhibited her work internationally including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series “This Is Me”, as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning “Transparent”.

Today Zackary reads lectures at UCLA, USC, Cal Arts, SVA, Columbia, Cooper Union, NYU, Carnegie-Mellon, Colgate, Duke, Northwestern, U of Chicago, and U of Oregon. And she also continues her art practice, working on film and photography projects.

Rhys Ernst is a Los Angeles based transgender artist and filmmaker who studies transgender identity in the context of larger narratives. He seeks for the representation of transgender people in media. 

Education:

- 2004 B.A. Hampshire College

- 2011  M.F.A. in Film/Video from CalArts

Ernst was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award for directing and producing the webseries “Transparent: This Is Me”. In 2016 he teamed up with Focus Features to create the online series “We’ve Been Around”, short films about transgender pioneers. Ernst has also shown work in the Oberhausen Film Festival, Rushes Soho Shorts, Brisbane International Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, MIX Brazil, Indie Memphis, REDCAT, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, MOCA Los Angeles, The New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and The Hammer Museum. 

_3_Tobaron Waxman

Tobaron Waxman is another Canadian visual artist, who compose performances for photograph, video and site-specific installation, and is also a trained vocalist in Jewish liturgical music. In their works, they consider flesh as a working material of mutable meanings. The important works are linked with the voice and traditional Jewish texts. 

“Beyond fixed notions of body, gender, and ‘home’, my practice contextualizes gender, embodiment, and the physical experience of time as systems of inscription. My work includes elements of Diaspora experience and traditional Jewish texts, music, and philosophy, as well as politics and desire.” TW

Education: - 2003–2007 Immersive study of Jewish law, sacred texts, liturgy, music and vocal technique, various Yeshivas, NY - 2003 M.F.A., Performance, School of The Art Institute of Chicago - 1998 B.A. Hons., Humanities, University of Toronto, Canada

Tobaron has been exhibited at Palais de Tokio, Videotage Hong Kong, Kunsthalle Vienna, CEPA Buffalo, New Museum NYC, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New Museum NYC and Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music. 

https://soundcloud.com/tobaron/shechechyanu

_f_Cyber Duo

Cyber Duo is a Russian body-artist who works with body, installations and Internet-based platforms to represent the new kind of human beyond the gender or biological existence. They transform their body real-time implanting new virtual or real parts into it (sometimes in D.Cronenberg’s manner). 

Education:

- 2013 M.F.A., The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) of St.Petersburg State University

-  20011 B.F.A., Ural State University of Architecture and Art

Cyber Duo has performed in different Russian art galleries and festivals in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. They also was a member of several virtual festivals held in 2014 and 2016 and played an episodical role in the AUJIK film.

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Interview by Maria Kolotovkina

This is the first tumblr-based curatorial project presented by the first-year student from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) of St. Petersburg State University - Artur Konstantinov. The theme of the virtual exhibition is quite provocative and we asked Artur to answer some questions about it.

Maria Kolotovkina – the interviewer

Artur Konstantinov – the author of the blog

MK: Why did you choose this topic for your blog? Is not the non-binarity in art discussed as often as feminism, for instance?

AK: Well, actually I’m not engaged in feminism theory and I think it is more about XX century. I’m not saying feminism is not actual anymore, but as you mention, it is something common now, everybody knows about feminism. And feminism is a part of gender studies but it is not about non-binarity because that discourse totally inside the “masculine-feminine” problematics. I think non-binary art as it realised in last maybe 5 years is something about the human future and it is a thrilling question.

MK: In the first paragraph, you say that today the topic of identification has become even more important than ever, for all people. Why?

AK: Today the paradigm is shifting. Some contemporary philosophers tell about “Metamodernism” as a new state of the world after postmodernism. And what is important is oscillation, new sensuality and authenticity. After postmodern games and flirting with everything there comes a time for new seriousness. Postmodernism was a powerful shaking for human and it was very important. Today people have to re-answer old fundamental questions and the most significant are about identities.

MK: Why do you refer only to Freud, because non-binary has both a physiological origin and a psychological one?

AK: I mention Freud because I think he was the person who actualised the human sexuality, made it visible and openly discussed. Gender is not about a sexual orientation but it is about sexuality in broad context, more about social sexuality. There were other researchers who explored social gender since Freud for sure. I think it’s a good idea to mention their works in my project, thanks.  As for the physiological origin of gender identity I don’t think it really needs to be restated. Biological sex and social gender do not always coincide.

MK: How do you think it's right that artists explore this topic, after all in some cases it is pathology?

AK: Well, it’s another binary opposition “normal - pathology” and if you look back in history you will see how the meaning of the “normal” and the “pathology” has changed. I would like to remind you Michel Foucault’s “Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age” and anti-psychiatry movement (Jacques Lacan, Thomas Szasz, Giorgio Antonucci, R. D. Laing, Franco Basaglia, Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti, and David Cooper ) who carried out great research about it. Besides, I think there is no sense to use such definitions in exploring art. If we do so we can stigmatize almost all the XX-century art as a pathology. What would common people say about Wiener Aktionismus or Francis Bacon’s paintings? Pathology, for sure! 

MK: Or so they shock the public?

AK: Well, art has always shocked the public, hasn’t it? At least throughout the 20th century. I am sure it is not an aim anyway. When an artist do his/her/their research (and contemporary art is a research) it’s just because they need to analyse themselves, they can’t stop asking questions.

MK: What is the main objective of your blog?

AK: The main objective is to study this phenomenon of the contemporary world – non-binarity of gender – and introspections of contemporary artists who looking for new answers to old questions.

MK: In my opinion, it would be necessary to add historiography. What do you think about it?

AK:  Yes, maybe I will add more theoretical information about the history of gender studies, thanks for your suggestion.

MK: What artists did you choose to continue?

AK: I am at my start now. I’ve found Cassils – an outstanding Canadian artist, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), who interprets their body as a social sculpture and addresses their issues to the history (“Thiresias”). At Whitney Biennial 2014 there was a section curated by Stuart Comer where the gender oscillations were discussed. And first of all, I am going to study it more thoroughly. There are a lot of other artists who work with non-binarity in different ways. So maybe I’ll add to my blog musician-singer because the voice is a very gender-coloured thing.

MK: What can you say about the future society? Will it be actual amoung people?

AK: For sure it will be actual, it’s just a question of time. It is getting more and more actual right now, I can see it! I don’t think it will be important in the faraway future but it’s definitely the near future question.

MK: Thank you for asking my questions.