Artists: Charles Atlas, Dawoud Bey, Joan Jett Blakk, David Bronstein, Willie Cole, Emory Douglas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ellen Gallagher, Bam Bam Garçon, Gerard H. Gaskin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Benji Hart, Juliana Huxtable, Arthur Jafa, Marsha P. Johnson, D’relle Khan, Crystal LaBeija, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Kalup Linzy, L.O.V.E. Lesbians Organized for Video Experience, Dorothy Low, Paul Maheke, MikeQ, Rashaad Newsome, Lorraine O’Grady, Paper Tiger Television, Adrian Piper, Carl Pope Jr., Pope.L, Qween Beat, Jay Jay Revlon, Marlon T. Riggs, Sylvia Rivera, Martha Rosler, Stephen Shames, Frank Simon, Lorna Simpson, Bruce W. Talamon, Terre Thaemlitz, Wu Tsang, James Van Der Zee, Jack Walworth, Andy Warhol, Cornel West, Ernest C. Withers, and a multitude of past and future voguing bodies

Venue: CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid

Exhibition Title: Elements of Vogue: A Case Study in Radical Performance

Date: November 17, 2017 – May 6, 2018

Curated by: Sabel Gavaldon and Manuel Segade

Note: A full press release is available for download here.

Click here to view slideshow

Joan Jett Blakk, Joan Jett Blakk announces candidacy for President, 1992, excerpt from footage shot by Bill Stamets; Courtesy of the artist and Media Burn Archive, Chicago

Full gallery of images, videos, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Videos:

Cornel West, excerpt from The Gifts of Black Folk in the Age of Terrorism, October 20 – 21, 2006, documentation of Inaugural Conference for the Toni Morrison Lecture Series, Princeton

 

Arthur Jafa, excerpt of Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, 2016, video, 7minutes 30 seconds; Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown, New York/Rome

 

Lyle Ashton Harris, Ektachrome Archives (New York Mix), 2017, single-channel preview of the multi-screen video installation; Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

 

Marlon T. Riggs, trailer for Tongues Untied, 1989, video, 55 minutes; Courtesy of Signifyin’ Works and Frameline Distribution

 

Rashaad Newsome, excerpt of Shade Compositions, 2012, performance documentation at SFMOMA, sound, 23 minutes 50 seconds

 

Benji Hart, Dancer as Insurgent, November 17, 2017, performance documentation at CA2M

 

The Fabulous Kiki Ball, January 20, 2018, JUDGES LSS: Inxi, Typhoon Angels, Kiara Mermaid; Organised by Silvi ManneQueen, performance documentation at CA2M

 

The Fabulous Kiki Ball, January 20, 2018, Commentator vs Commentator Demo by Matyouz Royalty & Typhoon Angel; Organised by Silvi ManneQueen, performance documentation at CA2M

 

The Fabulous Kiki Ball, Part 1, January 20, 2018, Organised by Silvi ManneQueen, performance documentation at CA2M

 

The Fabulous Kiki Ball, Part 2, January 20, 2018, Organised by Silvi ManneQueen, performance documentation at CA2M

 

D’relle Khan, Bam Bam Garçon & Jay Jay Revlon, London’s Ballroom scene vogues in solidarity with the victims of homophobic terrorist attack to Pulse nightclub at Orlando Vigil in SoHo, 2016, video; Courtesy of Zing Tsjeng

 

Note: A mix by DJ MikeQ, founder of the Qween Beat label, is available here.

Images, videos and audio courtesy of the artists and CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid. Photos by Pedro Agustín, Gerard H. Gaskin, Arantxa Boyero, and Patricia Nieto. 

Press Release:

Bodies are both agents and products of history. Bodies are history made flesh, as much as they are primary tools for interpreting the past, present and future. History is a choreographic sequence of gestures that make us legible to others. Each gesture is a link in a chain that binds us to gender, race and social class. Gestures solidify into identities. They speak to identities that are naturalised through the systematic repetition of identical gestures. And yet a pose is more than that. Posing implies an acute awareness of how a body makes history. To strike a pose is to pose a threat, as Dick Hebdige wrote in relation to the meaning of style in youth subcultures. That is why we need to trace the history of dissident gestures, and to reconstruct the genealogy of those poses that are bold enough to confront the norm. This modality of performance can be described as radical, as it opens up space to imagine other possible bodies and futures. Radical performance invokes subjectivities for which there is still no name and social choreographies that are yet to come.

This notion of radical performance is what defines voguing, a popular culture that unfolds around transgender pageants and spectacular dance battles between queens of Black and Latino descent. Vogue is a defiantly queer dance form whose roots go deep into the history of the Black LGTB community. It takes its inspiration from fashion magazine poses, appropriating the elitist imaginary of haute couture, as well as adopting the vocabulary of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Asian martial arts, and Afrofuturism. This transgender, multicultural hallucination turns the aesthetics of voguing into an emblem for an alternative, fiercely underground scene. We are referring to the so-called ballroom scene. A community that flourished in 1980s New York as a response to the AIDS crisis, although its history can be traced back to a century of fragile coalitions between minority subjects which dominant culture has again and again consigned to the margins, incarcerated, pathologised and punished throughout the modern period. In the stylised poses of voguing, the dancer’s hands do much more than simply draw figures in the air. These poses transcribe in the flesh a history of resilience and cultural struggles that go all the way back to the 1920s and the first massive drag balls held during the Harlem Renaissance. Today ballroom culture, with its elaborate rules, aesthetics and forms of social organisation, still provides a platform to articulate queer energies and dissident bodies in what constitutes a case study of radical performance.

This exhibition explores ways in which minorities use their bodies to produce dissenting forms of beauty, subjectivity and desire. These minoritarian poetics and politics are perceived as a threat to the normative world, yet at the same time coveted by mainstream culture (one only needs to think of the exploitation of voguing by artists like Madonna). Naturally, it would be impossible to offer a fixed, static portrait of such a complex and changing world as the ballroom scene. Instead, this exhibition delves into a political history of the body in order to map out the debates, conflicts and culture wars that intersect in the birth of voguing, while looking for its echoes and resonances in the history of performance and popular culture in the African diaspora. Under this lens, voguing reveals itself as a case study to understand the emergence of radical performance and its potential to articulate new social imaginaries.

Link: “Elements of Vogue” at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo

Tags: Adrian Piper, Andy Warhol, Arthur Jafa, Bam Bam Garçon, Benji Hart, Bruce W. Talamon, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Carl Pope Jr., Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, Charles Atlas, Cornel West, Crystal LaBeija, D’relle Khan, David Bronstein, Dawoud Bey, Dorothy Low, Ellen Gallagher, Emory Douglas, Ernest C. Withers, Frank Simon, Gerard H. Gaskin, Glenn Ligon, Group Show, Jack Walworth, James Van Der Zee, Jay Jay Revlon, Joan Jett Blakk, Juliana Huxtable, Kalup Linzy, L.O.V.E. Lesbians Organized for Video Experience, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O’Grady, Lyle Ashton Harris, Madrid, Manuel Segade, Marlon T. Riggs, Marsha P. Johnson, Martha Rosler, MikeQ, Paper Tiger Television, Paul Maheke, Pope.L, Qween Beat, Rashaad Newsome, Sabel Gavaldon, Silvi ManneQueen, Stephen Shames, Sylvia Rivera, Terre Thaemlitz, Willie Cole, Wu Tsang, Zoe Leonard

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