ART-PRESENTATION: Trigger-Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,Part I
The Group exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” investigates gender’s place in contemporary art and culture at a moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists who explore gender beyond the binary to usher in more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity (Part II).
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum of Contemporary Art Archive
The exhibition’s title, “Trigger”, takes into account that word’s range of meanings, variously problematic and potent; the term evokes both traumatic recall and mechanisms that, set into motion, are capable of igniting radical change. The exhibition features forty-two artists working across a variety of mediums and genres. Many embrace explicit pleasure and visual lushness as political strategies, and some deliberately reject or complicate overt representation, turning to poetic language, docufiction, and abstraction to affirm ambiguities and reflect shifting physical embodiment. The artists in the exhibition share a desire to contest repressive orders and to speculate on new forms and aesthetics. For many, developing new vocabularies necessarily entails a productive reworking of historical configurations. A number of artists in the exhibition return to archival materials in order to critique, build upon, and explore longstanding dialogues and debates around intersectionality, alliance, and the project of world-building. Beauty is not supplemental to politics here, but central to the process of positing new worlds and building new social structures. The exhibition brings together a range of practitioners, some with a longstanding commitment to activism, such as Nancy Brooks Brody, an original member of the collective fierce pussy, and Vaginal Davis, who has long critiqued systematic oppression tied to gender, race, class, and sexuality. The exhibition includes a number of commissioned works, including a major new braided sculpture by Diamond Stingily that pierces through gallery floors, trailing from the Fourth Floor all the way down to the Museum’s Lobby. Commissioned performances feature prominently in the exhibition, with the premiere of a two-part musical by Morgan Bassichis that returns to the influential 1977 publication “The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions”, live music organized by Simone Leigh and staged inside her installation, and a series of performance-lectures on masculinities by Gregg Bordowitz. Participating Artists: Morgan Bassichis, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Justin Vivian Bond, Gregg Bordowitz, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Nancy Brooks Brody, A.K. Burns & A.L. Steiner, Leidy Churchman, Liz Collins, Vaginal Davis, Harry Dodge, The Dyke Division of the Two-Headed Calf, Josh Faught, Ektor Garcia, Mariah Garnett, Reina Gossett & Sasha Wortzel, Sharon Hayes, House of Ladosha, Stanya Kahn, Carolyn Lazard, Simone Leigh, Ellen Lesperance, Candice Lin, Troy Michie, Ulrike Müller, Willa Nasatir, Sondra Perry, Christina Quarles, Connie Samaras, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Tschabalala Self, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Tuesday Smillie, Sable Elyse Smith, Patrick Staff, Diamond Stingily, Mickalene Thomas, Wu Tsang, Chris E. Vargas, Geo Wyeth and Anicka Yi.
Info: Curator: Johanna Burton, Assistant Curators: Natalie Bell, Sara O’Keeffe, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 27/9/17-21/1/18, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org
