Art Queer : une Théorie Freak

Art queer looks at how the strategies of denormalization put in place by the visual arts can be extended through writing. In the three chapters of this book, theoretical and artistic discussions combine with queer theory, disability studies and postcolonial theory to define three practices: radical drag, transtemporal drag and abstract drag. One of the characteristics of queer art, as defined by Renate Lorenz, is its ability to act across time, disorganizing a positivist chronology and seizing historical objects by affinity. Queer art cultivates anachronism as a method.

Drawing on the work of eleven artists, the book is less an attempt to reread art history, than the manifestation of a method, which the author calls drag, that would make apparent modes of assemblage, “productive connections between the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate, anything that allows connections to others and things to be produced rather than represented.”

Among the artists studied∙e∙s include Zoe Leonard, Shinique Smith, Jack Smith, Wu Tsang, Ron Vawter, Bob Flanagan, Henrik Olesen, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sharon Hayes and Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz.