{"title":"‘I’m a person who loves beautiful things’: Potassa de Lafayette as model and muse","authors":"Kara Carmack","doi":"10.1177/1470412920944493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920944493","url":null,"abstract":"In January 1977, Potassa de Lafayette visited Andy Warhol’s studio wearing a black velvet and taffeta evening gown. The Dominican model sat for sketches by visiting artist Jamie Wyeth and photographs taken by Warhol that together reveal the sequence in which Potassa raised her skirt and lowered her stockings to expose her penis. This contribution explores Potassa’s strategies of self-presentation amid the politics at play in the studio that day. The author reads Potassa as a self-possessed figure fully in control of her image because hers is an identity not predicated on a gendered or sexed body, but on a visual sensibility – as one who ‘loves beautiful things’. As an aesthete and as one of the first openly transgender models of color, Potassa, the author argues, negotiated difference through beauty and glamor in Warhol’s studio and across New York’s high art and fashion scenes.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"246 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920944493","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41464329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Familiar grammars of loss and belonging: curating trans kinship in post-dictatorship Argentina","authors":"Cole Rizki","doi":"10.1177/1470412920941905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920941905","url":null,"abstract":"On 24 March 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup d’état and established dictatorship. To eliminate radical left activists, the armed forces perpetrated mass civilian murder until democratic transition in 1983. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo emerged, protesting their children’s disappearance by mobilizing portraiture to make visible familial rupture and indict the state. This article examines the archival exhibit, Esta se fue, a esta la mataron, esta murió (2017), which displayed trans women’s vernacular photographs and family albums from the 1970s–1980s, the same years as dictatorship. Analyzing the exhibit’s curatorial choices and the photographs’ material and haptic qualities, this article reads the exhibit alongside the Mothers’ iconic activist visual culture and national narratives of family loss. In doing so, the author suggests the exhibit renders trans sociality familial and familiar to a national viewing public, thereby reinterpreting Argentine history by installing trans subjects as proper subjects of national mourning.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"197 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920941905","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43731500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review: Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy","authors":"S. L. Hayes","doi":"10.1177/1470412920936582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920936582","url":null,"abstract":"Artist Jenny Odell joins a growing conversation about art and social reproduction with her widely circulated (2019) book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. This text offers an exciting popular effort to articulate the politics of non-instrumental aesthetics as a kind of critical revitalization. As she writes it, there is ‘revolutionary potential’ in ‘taking back our attention’ and ‘protect[ing] our spaces and our time for noninstrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality’ (pp. xxiii, 28). The primary wager of Odell’s book is that ‘doing nothing [is] an act of political resistance to the attention economy’ (p. xi). ‘Doing nothing’ is the name Odell gives to the practice of ‘disengaging’ from those frenetic, instrumental, or self-branding styles of attention that are encouraged by social media and our late capitalist world. Odell’s interest in the anxious and overstimulated subject that is produced by such dominant modes of attention may thus be contextualized within a larger body of critical writing on neoliberal affect and human capital subject formation. Read this way, How to Do Nothing issues a timely call for the cultivation of non-instrumental aesthetic practices that might enable us to build ourselves into different subjects (and subsequently also, create different shared lifeworlds) than those disciplined by our competitive, algorithmic work society.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"316 - 319"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920936582","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48973722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prismatic views: a look at the growing field of transgender art and visual culture studies","authors":"Cyle Metzger, Kirstin Ringelberg","doi":"10.1177/1470412920946829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920946829","url":null,"abstract":"Transgender art and visual culture studies is a quickly growing field, and we present it to readers of this themed issue less as a linear discourse or a set of parameters than as a prism, with no clear temporal progression or geopolitical center. In this introduction, we not only announce the articles in this issue and discuss their convergences and divergences but also survey works in transgender studies that have proven critical to discussions of the visual and material within transgender cultures. Reading what follows, we hope any shared notion of transgender art and visual culture is expanded rather than contracted – that we find new ideas rather than merely those that reconfirm our existing sense of things or serve a monolithic construct that limits our future imaginary.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"159 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920946829","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48082445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pretty in pink: David Antonio Cruz’s portrait of the florida girls","authors":"Robb Hernández","doi":"10.1177/1470412920941901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920941901","url":null,"abstract":"Roused by the deaths of five African American transgender women in Florida in 2018, artist David Antonio Cruz intervenes in inaccurate media reports about these murders. Painting portrait of the florida girls in 2019, his diptych of significant scale and palette, confronts this senseless violence and challenges sensationalized coverage. This article centralizes his work arguing for the ways in which Cruz innovates transgender of color visibility through a queer of color critiquing of the portrait form and concerted use of a ‘blacktino’ optic. Ruminating on the combined tragedies of gun violence at Pulse nightclub and serial murder of trans femmes, Cruz’s work interrogates the posthumous transgender image with a reversal of digital source material and bodily logics in pose and countenance. By turning to the transnational crossroads shaping these communities’ shared horrors, central Florida, Cruz activates his audience with a sense of urgency in the persuasive power of pink.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"232 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920941901","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43588825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Surviving in the shadow of the un/seen: on the paradoxical in/visibility of El Kazovsky","authors":"S. Stryker","doi":"10.1177/1470412920944490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920944490","url":null,"abstract":"This short, first-person essay describes and briefly evaluates the life and work of the Russian–Hungarian trans-identified artist El Kazovsky (1948–2008). It principally focuses the author’s viewing of ‘The Survivor’s Shadow: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky’ – a massive, 19-room retrospective exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2015–2016. The author explores the paradox of El Kazovsky’s visibility as a nationally celebrated artist in a moment of extreme state-sanctioned queer-phobia, and the illegibility of his transness. It ends by suggesting that the practice of ‘surviving in shadow’ is increasingly necessary given the continued worldwide drift toward reactionary ethno-nationalist politics that are hostile to trans lives.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"277 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920944490","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49120476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Jesse Darling","authors":"H. Holmes","doi":"10.1177/1470412920944482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920944482","url":null,"abstract":"Jesse Darling, a contemporary Berlin-based artist, produces sculptures, paintings, and drawings that animate material to depict a lived experience of queerness and disability. This article highlights a recent exhibition of Darling’s as an entry point to their wide-ranging practice. Refracted through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s concept of feminist ‘willfulness’, Darling’s objects depict the body as unruly, unpredictable, and given to change, making them exciting candidates for both disability and trans studies. At a moment in contemporary art and cultural production more broadly when gender-nonconformity is signaled through an attempt to erase bodily markers of specificity, Darling insists on such specificity as the inescapability of the human experience.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"272 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920944482","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44683012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘I do not want to pass’: embodiment, metaphor, and world-making in Patrick Staff’s Weed Killer","authors":"Stamatina Gregory","doi":"10.1177/1470412920944500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920944500","url":null,"abstract":"Medicalized and often surveilled shifts of the cancerous and/or trans body intersect in generative ways: metaphorical and material, symbolic and systemic. This piece discusses Patrick Staff’s (2017) video Weed Killer through an analysis of its source text, Catherine Lord’s essay ‘The Summer of Her Baldness’ (2003) along with prior queer and feminist explorations of cancer, disease, and pain, to build a transfeminist analysis of how the experience of cancer treatment reveals the constructedness of femininity as well as the ablism underlying binary gender systems. Staff’s work creates alignments and ruptures between sets of a potentially intersecting politics, which bear the weight of naturalized gender, pharmacological mediation, ‘passing’, and debility.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"283 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920944500","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45181627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marie Høeg’s worldmaking photography: a photo essay","authors":"K.J. Rawson, Nicole Tantum","doi":"10.1177/1470412920941899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920941899","url":null,"abstract":"Marie Høeg, who lived from 1866–1949, was a Norwegian photographer and activist for women’s rights. In this photo essay, the authors feature six photographs depicting Marie Høeg in gender transgressive scenes. These photographs are a few of more than 30 that were recovered in the 1980s from a property where Høeg once lived with her female partner, Bolette Berg. Standing out from the traditional landscapes and portraits that were common for the professional studio of Berg & Høeg, these photographs provide a glimpse into Høeg’s playful self-expression at the onset of the 20th century. This photo essay explores not only the documentary value of these images, but also the important considerations of visibility, privacy, and the ethics of circulation that they elicit.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"184 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920941899","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47539931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review: Joan Kee, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America","authors":"Adela Kim","doi":"10.1177/1470412920936572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920936572","url":null,"abstract":"Joan Kee’s latest book Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America may as well be considered the first foundational text in the field of art and law. Initially, this might appear as an overstatement given the sheer amount of literature on the intersection of the two fields over the past two decades. Indeed, excluding legal case books, one might recall titles ranging from Martha Buskirk’s The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (2003) to the more recent anthology, Daniel McClean’s Artist, Authorship & Legacy: A Reader (2018). These books dutifully address how the continued reconceptualization of art in the postwar era went hand in hand with changes in the conflicting copyright and authorship laws around the world. Yet, if the existing literature remains stubbornly confined to the work of art, Kee’s book proffers a far more expansive approach by focusing on the contentions between art and law: namely, what unfolds when the two disparate fields are put in discomfortingly close proximity? What unexpected aspects might each field glean from the other?","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"308 - 311"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920936572","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44591367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}