queerness: no homo, bro

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (billboard of an empty bed), 1991. 

what is queerness? what does it look like? how does it operate? what is its purpose? is there one?  

what is most important to note is the difference between sexual orientations and queer modalities. QUEER doesn't necessarily imply LGBTQ+, but is rather characterised by a defiance or non-normative approach to subjectivity. it is an aversion/subversion of the mainstream, cognisant or not.

for example, i attended a conference last year and there was a speaker claiming that Donald Trump was our queerest president yet! obviously this doesn't imply that our misogynistic pussy-grabbing leader has ever sucked a cock. instead, it casts him as the commander-in-chief most unlike any other POTUS before him. sure, we've had controversial figures before, but come on... this guy is queer! 

so back to Gonzales-Torres: yes, he was a homosexual male artist, but his works would have been queer regardless. how? well, Minimalism as an entire artistic movement was queer by its own volition. instead of making art that relied on representation to convey meaning these artists implemented an economy of medium—rather than a Pollockian method of abstraction—as a mode of escape. in this scenario, the use of material is what is queered, not the subject. making sense yet? 

this "Billboard" is not a queer image because the two phantom figures implied within would have been homosexual men. instead, it is queer because the supremely intimate space of a bed has been enlarged and placed over a bustling public street. it it queer because it appropriates the capitalistic format of the billboard to display artwork. it is queer because it takes art out of the museum/gallery space and a million other things make this work queer that have nothing to do with sexual orientation so why is queerness still being only associated with LGBTQ+ subjectivity? 

anyone/everyone should be queer. normativity only survives as a power infrastructure by marginalising 'others' but what if we were all others? fuck the patriarchy, it's time for a change.