Art Journal

ISSN: 0004-3249 (Print) 2325-5307 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcaj20

Queer Art / Queer Failure

Tina Takemoto

To cite this article: Tina Takemoto (2016) Queer Art / Queer Failure, Art Journal, 75:1, 85-88,
DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2016.1171547

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2016.1171547

Published online: 06 May 2016.

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Tina Takemoto
Queer Art / Queer Failure Carland conjures up a comedian’s worst nightmare in her series
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Tammy Rae Carland, I’m Dying Up Here
(Bent Banana), 2010, color photograph, 30 x
38 in. (76.2 x 96.52 cm) (artwork © Tammy Rae
Carland; photograph provided by the artist and
Jessica Silverman Gallery)
85
Alone on stage in the heat of the spotlight, she is sweating and her heart is
pounding as she strains to detect any signs of laughter beyond the layers of
cheap polyester and foam encasing her body. This act was a bad idea. Perhaps
the drunken flight attendant routine would have been funnier. Now she is stuck
on her hands and knees wearing a banana suit. Shit . . . For the
queer stand-up comic, it doesn’t get much worse. Tammy Rae
of photographs I’m Dying Up Here.
Within the harsh, exhilarating world of stand-up comedy, the task of the
performer is to keep audience members laughing by any means necessary, regard-
less of whether they are laughing with you or at you. In Carland’s photographs,
queer and feminist comedians are caught bombing on stage while their faces
remain hidden amid ridiculous props and awkward poses. These stark pictures
remind us how quickly the energy in the room can turn from exuberant laughter
to crushing silence. Carland pays tribute to the female stand-up comedians Moms
Mabley, Phyllis Diller, and Joan Rivers, who plumbed the depths of racism and
sexism by performing their signature roles as a toothless cantankerous bag lady, a
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1. Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 106, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 461.
2. See Michael Warner, The Trouble with
Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999); and Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
3. Juana María Rodríguez, “Queer Sociality and
Other Sexual Fantasies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies 17, no. 2–3 (2011): 332.
4. See Cary S. Leibowitz’s sculpture Kick Me
(Green Pants), 1990; Jibz Cameron and Hedia
Maron’s video The Quiet Storm, 2007; and Tracey
Moffatt’s photograph Fourth, 2001.
5. See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The
Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York:
New York University Press, 2009); and Judith
Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2011).
6. Randy Kennedy, “His Nonlinear Reality, and
Welcome to It,” profile of Ryan Trecartin, New
York Times, January 28, 2009, at www.nytimes.
com/2009/02/01/arts/design/01kenn.html, as of
December 16, 2015.
crazed incompetent housewife, and an unabashed plastic surgery addict, respec-
tively. While these divas of comedy deliberately embodied abject caricatures of
race and gender for the audience’s enjoyment, they also defy conventional models
of racial propriety, femininity, and sexuality through the spectacle of their non-
compliance and failure. By thematizing the indignity of failure within what Ann
Cvetkovich calls the domain of “public feelings,” Carland reveals comedy as a site
of public exposure and vulnerability, especially for women and queers of color
who deploy self-effacement for laughs and recognition.1
I evoke Carland’s bent banana as a poignant (albeit flaccid) point of depar-
ture for discussing failure as a prominent theme in contemporary queer art and
theory. For the purpose of this conversation, I use “queer failure” to describe a
constellation of diverse artistic practices and theoretical perspectives exploring a
broad spectrum of same-sex intimacies, homoerotic desires, and nonnormative
gender identity expressions. Queer failure can engage the psychic and emotional
dimensions of loss, failure, disappointment, and shame that accompany LGBTQI
existence as well as the utopian potentialities of failure as a mode of resistance,
intervention, speculation, and queer world making. Despite distinctions among
these perspectives, this turn toward failure marks a significant move away from
what Michael Warner and Sara Ahmed have criticized as the narratives of happi-
ness, success, and acceptance that are promised by the marriage equality move-
ment, idealized by the nullification of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and giddily enjoyed
through the shimmering spectacles of Glee, The L Word, and RuPaul’s Drag Race.2
Regarding our current cultural and political climate, Juana María Rodríguez
observes that “the Right deploys a rhetoric of perverse sexuality to silence, cen-
sure, and criminalize sexualized and racialized subjects, and the mainstream gay
and lesbian movement responds by disavowing these same subjects and project-
ing an image of hypernormative domesticity worthy of political respect and
validation.”3 Queer failure offers one mode of responding to the dual forces of
homophobia and homonormativity by foregrounding the internal and external
structures of social violence and exclusion that continue to threaten the legibility
and viability of queer lives. What is at stake in the artistic practice of queer failure?
In this essay, I offer a brief meditation on some of the ways queer failure func-
tions as a theme, style, practice, and mode of reflection in queer art production.
Self-deprecation, inadequacy, and the humiliation of losing are vividly ani-
mated by the artists Cary S. Leibowitz (a.k.a. Candyass), Jibz Cameron (a.k.a.
Dynasty Handbag), and Tracey Moffatt. When Candyass shares warm cookies with
viewers of his giant XXL pair of polyester pants featuring “kick me” in bright let-
ters across the butt, when Dynasty Handbag shoves a cork in her mouth to keep
from reacting to the plethora of enticing online images, and when Moffatt takes
photographs of Olympic athletes at the precise moment they realize they came in
fourth place, these artists display the awkward, pathetic spectacle of losers.4 Their
artworks not only thematize the tragicomedy of failure, they also, as José Esteban
Muñoz and J. Jack Halberstam suggest, deliberately defy the logic of mastery and
success associated with capitalism and normativity.5 Queer failure also appears as
an aesthetic style in the manic work of Ryan Trecartin, whose garish brand of
“hysterical realism” rebels against the flailing economy by imagining postgender
worlds of “nonlinear reality” and cyber-hybrid “personality trannies.”6 Together,
this motley crew of queer artworks can be understood as successful failures, to
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7. Practice More Failure, LTTR 3 (2004), at http://
lttr.org/journal/3, as of December 16, 2015.
8. QIY: Queer-It-Yourself—Tools for Survival, exhibi-
tion, SOMArts, San Francisco, June 4–24, 2011.
9. Kalup Linzy, Conversations wit de Churen II: All
My Churen, 2003, video, and Conversations wit de
Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005, video.
10. Muñoz, 178.
11. Douglas Crimp, “Gran Fury,” Artforum
International 41, no. 8 (April 2003), at, http://
artforum.com/inprint/issue=200304, as of
December 16, 2015.
12. Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,”
in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and
Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002),
149.
13. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the
Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 21.
14. A four-minute edited excerpt of David
Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1986–87) was
censored and removed from the presentation
of Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery,
October 20, 2010–February 13, 2011. See www.
hideseek.org, a comprehensive website docu-
menting and archiving responses to the exhibition.
15. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004), 29. For a collection of perspectives on
queer sociality, see the “Queer Bonds” special
issue of GLQ: A Lesbian and Gay Studies Journal 17,
no. 2–3 (2011).
the extent that they simultaneously fail to succeed and succeed in failing to
comply with dominant cultural scripts that aspire for perfect bodies, self-control,
athletic excellence, and the rewards of capitalist consumption.
Practice More Failure appears as the title and theme of the third issue of LTTR, an
independent feminist genderqueer art journal “dedicated to sustainable change,
queer pleasure, and critical productivity.” In this issue, the LTTR art collective
explores failure as mode of queer art production that “emphasizes process and
practice over product.”7 This do-it-yourself approach to queer art making and
social networking is also evident in the curatorial vision for the exhibition QIY:
Queer-It-Yourself—Tools of Survival. Inspired by the 1960s counterculture resource
guide Whole Earth Catalog, QIY features projects, proposals, and workshops that cre-
ate “active and meaningful tools” for negotiating contemporary queer existence.8
This queer-it-yourself strategy also emerges in the work of Kalup Linzy, who
expresses his fascination with TV soap operas through his low-budget, low-tech,
self-produced YouTube performances of All My Churen and Da Young and Da Mess writ-
ten, directed, and often starring Linzy in drag.9 While these projects forge alterna-
tive venues for the production and circulation of queer art practices, they also
aspire to what Muñoz calls a “queer futurity” that embraces the poetics of failure
as well as a “virtuosity that is born in the face of failure” by imagining alternative
modes of being in the world.10
How can we hold on to the utopian dimensions of queer possibility and fail-
ure without forgetting or acquiescing to the devaluation, marginalization, and
exclusion of queer individuals in modern life? This question challenges us to con-
sider the bleaker side of queer failure that bears witness to the enormity of queer
loss, social injury, and grief. “When was the last time you cried?” was one of the
final four questions that Gran Fury printed on posters and flyers before the AIDS
activist art collective disbanded in 1994.11 In this work, Douglas Crimp’s call for
“mourning and militancy” resonates as a moving expression of the psychic and
political impact of grief resulting from the queer community’s rage, terror, guilt,
and profound sadness over the HIV/AIDS pandemic.12 Heather Love uses the
phrase “feeling backward” to describe the ways that queers and same-sex desire
are “marked by a long association with failure, impossibility, and loss.”13 The
specter of loss also lingers in the free candy spills of Félix González-Torres, who
invites viewers to savor the sweetness and sorrow of the artist’s dying lover. While
the poignancy of González-Torres’s artistic gestures have been widely celebrated
and exhibited, David Wojnarowicz’s unapologetic indictment of religious and
governmental homophobes in his art and activism provoked right-wing politi-
cians to pressure the Smithsonian to censor and remove Wojnarowicz’s video
A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Desire and Difference in American Portraiture
at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010, eighteen years after the artist’s death.14
Indeed, Wojnarowicz’s apocalyptic rhetoric continues to threaten the Right just
as Lee Edelman’s polemical call to “fuck the future” continues to wreak havoc
within current theoretical debates over queer sociality.15 Through their vitriolic
rejection of reproductive futurity, Wojnarowicz and Edelman seize the disruptive
power of queer negativity and antisociality to fight against queer normalization.
On a more cautionary note, Xandra Ibarra’s Ecdysis:The Molting of a Cucarachica
speaks to the debilitating impact of failure, especially for queer artists of color.
After more than a decade of fisting piñatas and wielding strap-on Tapatío bottles,
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Xandra Ibarra, Ecdysis: The Molting of a
Cucarachica (Swimming Pool), 2014, archival
pigment print mounted to plexiglass, 20 x 30 in.
(50.8 x 76.2 cm) (artwork © Xandra Ibarra)
16. See Tina Takemoto, “Drawing Complaint:
Orientalism, Disidentification, Performance,” Asian
Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 1 (2015),
101–2.
Ibarra decided to abandon her burlesque/dominatrix stage persona La Chica Boom
by shedding her “cucarachica” skin. Although her “spictacles” were designed to
interrogate overtly sexualized racial tropes, La Chica Boom’s predominantly white
fans kept clamoring for more while failing to think critically about their own
salacious consumption of Latinadad.16 Ibarra’s experience attests to the precarity of
queer failure and the psychic exhaustion that accompanies the embodiment of
racial and sexual abjection. She also reminds us that even after molting, the cock-
roach remains a reviled and enduring threat to the purity of home and nation.
As we continue to explore the artistic potentialities of queer failure and learn
new ways to fail better, we must also remain vigilant in reminding ourselves that
it certainly does matter who and what is being done (or undone) when we
endeavor to queer failure and fail as queers.
Tina Takemoto is an artist and associate professor of visual studies at California College of the Arts. Her
essays have appeared in Afterimage, GLQ, Performance Research, Radical Teacher, Theatre Survey, and Women
and Performance. She is board president of Queer Cultural Center and cocurator of Queer Conversations
on Culture and the Arts.
88 spring 2016