Tomboy: Review of the Exhibit

Tomboy
The power and ambiguity of queer visibility
Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College Chicago, Nov. 8 – Jan. 7, 2011

Reviewed by Therese Quinn and Erica R. Meiners

A tomboy is brash and fresh and in-between: Not quite adolescent; not yet adult. Both girl and boy, or neither one. “That way” or growing out of it. There is something queerishly unfixed about tomboys, something green and tempting.

Curator Betsy Odom’s succinct exhibit showcases six “queer women artists” exploring “the idea of the tomboy.” Odom’s crucial curatorial statement acknowledges the political power of visibility, but clarifies that these artists “employ identity in intentionally ambiguous, mercurial, and peripheral ways.” They may be lesbians, but this exhibit won’t tell the viewer what that means.

What shines in Tomboy is pleasure and play. In Mary George’s fine The Cult of the Endorphin, the setting is a workshop in which cult leader and members appear to be happily reinventing the wheel, and more, in wood. The shop-slash-natural gym is littered with projects in medias res—clock, speakers, disco ball, and barbells made from tree trunks, along with safety gear, pop bottles and other detritus of delirious labor. A looping video offers infomercials of dancing, jogging and cart-wheeling women exhorting family, friends, and viewers to join; they aim to recruit with the promise that action leads to natural highs.

George’s themes resonate in Daphne Fitzpatrick’s sculptural installation: a growing mound of the artist’s worn out athletic shoes. This witty work, titled Tomboy, conjures sexual and gendered fairy tales (some shoes will never fit) and a butch’s boasts (nobody can fit these shoes). But Fitzpatrick may also be signaling the isolation of identity; only her shoes can make that pile grow. And, like a reversal of Felix Gonzales-Torres’ installations that shrink as viewers take away candy and prints, this sculpture suggests loss: physicality and a youth—her tomboy—that is sliding past.

Nearby, Alison Halter’s What’s so funny? softly grainy video reinforces and challenges the theme of bliss—it captures women laughing; one after another throws her head back, slides into tears, rolls on the floor, covers her mouth and clutches her belly or her face —offering sequential snapshots that name the soft edges between pleasure and pain, and the awkwardness of affect, or how emotions are worn, and “read” by others. Does one woman have a black eye? Is her laughter a lie or is she just toughing it out?

Kelli Connell’s luminescent staged photographs also confound simple readings. Each features a female couple, but every body belongs to the same woman. Is Connell playing with feminist fantasies of easy loving between ladies or encouraging the queer question: Who is tomboy—the woman on top or the one wearing lipstick?

One answer offered to the question—Who is tomboy?—may be unintended: The near-total absence, paired with some uncomfortable presences, of women of color in the exhibit indicate that Tomboy is probably white..

For example, Leeza Meksin’s tactile interactive piece, replete with gendered neoprene bags and mysterious toys is a play party on a wall. A “black mammy” statue in the midst of these sexy utensils, linked by a pulley to an ironing board and a spatula, is a freighted presence. The exhibit insists that identity is performed; the inclusion of the caricature may be an attempted nod in this direction, but it misses the mark.

Irony, play and race also surface in another video by Halter. In Please, Please, Please, a young apparently white woman paints teardrops on her face until it is nearly covered with the marks. Is Halter, as the curator’s statement asserts, “poking fun at the sadness of the [Smith’s] song” someone is singing in the background? Or, is she commenting on our national fascination with black masculine forms—in this case, “gangsta” (teardrop tattoos, see Lil Wayne) and the soul singer (via James Brown‘s 1956 hit, Please, Please, Please)? Perhaps she’s doing both, along with some tomboyish appropriation of her own.

Dana DeGiulio adroitly claims another kind of gendered power: her thick black wall splashes one-up Jackson Pollack. He’s canonical, but she exceeds the canvas and other parameters with painted ejaculations that shout anger, pleasure, and the power of performing artist. This is serious play, and messy.

Vexing and thrilling, Tomboy is worth the bite.

Participating Artists: 
Kelli Connell, Dana DeGiulio, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Mary George, Allison Halter and Leeza Meksin.

Therese Quinn worked as an exhibit researcher, developer, and evaluator for a decade, and is currently Chair and Associate Professor of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Erica R. Meiners Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, teaches, organizes and writes about LGBTQ lives, justice movements, and prison abolition.

Queers, Safety, and Schools

A proposal for Pride Campus, an open admission public high school that will implement a college prep curriculum in all subject areas, was approved by the CPS Office of New Schools last week. The school will serve LGBTQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning and allied, according to the school’s planners) students from all over the city.

The Greater Lawndale Little Village School for Social Justice submitted the proposal to the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Office of New Schools for the Social Justice High School-Pride Campus.

A CPS community hearing about Pride Campus will be held Thursday, Sept. 18, 6-8 PM, 2008 at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted. If, after the hearing, CPS gives the school its final approval, Pride Campus will open in 2010. No location has been selected for Pride Campus yet.

I have to admit I have mixed feelings about the school. I understand that schools can be lethal and are often dangerous and scary for queer and queerish kids; all the stats support that. And as a girl who liked to hold hands with other girls, hung out with drama-kids, and dressed like a freak in high school, I was called dyke and other lesbian-baiting names, shoved into lockers, and had bottles thrown at me; I hated most of my time at high school (I always loved drama club), barely graduated, and would have gladly escaped to another, safer, place if one had been available.

I became an educator, in part, to create schools that are not just healthy and safe places for all students, but joyous, art-rich, and vibrant zones where all kinds of people encounter and learn about and from each other. I know this is possible, and it is public education at its best. From this perspective, the idea of a Pride Campus prompts questions:

• With the advent of Pride, what happens to the queer and otherwise non-conforming kids left behind in all the other schools? Shame?
• Will Pride Campus let CPS continue to avoid really making sure all schools respect and care for all students?
• Will schools push their trannies, fags, and dykes out to Pride Campus, rather than work with their teachers, parents and students to develop an inclusive educational culture?
• Is the school a retreat, really, an admission of systemic failure to love our queer youth?

It seems to me that Pride Campus is still a “choice” school, one that plays to the fantasy that we can all just choose our ways into better situations, and those left behind, who just didn’t choose as well as we, aren’t our concern. It’s exclusionary, in this case, not because it requires high SATs or signed contracts for admission, but because it asks for a declaration of identity/affiliation that many youth just can’t make.

If we have given up on the big job of building a society, or even a city school system, that actively recognizes everyone’s rights, why settle for a queer day campus? Maybe we should demand a Pride Boarding School, a 24 hour safe zone, a home for all the LGBTQ kids thrown out by parents, forced to attend “ex-gay” Christian camps, afflicted by abstinence programs that ignore their existence, subjected to “marriage is for a man and a woman” speeches by politicians and preachers. Let’s make it big, let’s take over city hall, hey, how about declaring the whole city a Pride Campus?