So we looked good this year, to ourselves and to others in and around CAA.
Despite this tremendous success, however, as Co-chairs, we confess to some anxiety about the status and future of the Caucus. We’d like to use a short rehearsal of our successes this year to interrogate and challenge the membership about the future of the Caucus.
Our first event, on the opening Wednesday of the conference, was a memorial event to mark the passing of two of the Caucus’s founding members and former officers, Joe Ansell and Tee Corinne. Despite the snow that delayed -- or simply prevented -- many people’s arrival at the conference, the event was a warm and convivial gathering of both men and women (that’s important) who’ve been through a lot together. The emotions of sadness at the passing of our friends and support for one another felt real. The event truly seemed to manifest what Pau l Skiff identified as the overlap between our professional identities and our human ways of being or living (that’s important too). Thanks especially to David Brown, Sallie McCorkle, and Laurie Toby Edison for their roles in organizing the memorial event.
On Thursday evening, we had the opening of the Caucus-sponsored exhibition “Mother, May I?” curated by the energetic and apparently unflappable Sheila Pepe. This exhibition too evoked our history, as the participating artists showed work in conversation between generations. Younger artists paid homage to, riffed on, evoked, and/or challenged the art of their influential elders, some of whom -- Tee again and Christine Tamblyn -- have passed. But the atmosphere at the jam-packed opening suggested there is a lot of life in these connections. Sheila and all the artists worked together to create a really brainy and joyful (nice combination!) exhbiition. As Co-chairs -- and art historians -- we are hugely grateful and, frankly, a little awed.
Friday afternoon’s Caucus-sponsored panel “Love/Sick,” co-chaired by Beth Stephens and Tina Takemoto, staged a provocative exploration of eroticism and illness that -- with the kind counter-normative logic “queer” implies -- certainly qualified as the liveliest panel at CAA this year. Who else could boast a live auction (of artifacts from artist Linda Montano’s years of caring for her father after his stroke), let alone orchestrated with the panache of Beth Stephens? Beth and Annie Sprinkle dazzled us with the healing powers of their Love Lab. Tina moved us with the power of performance born of empathy. Tanya Katan and Angela Ellsworth empowered us to laugh in the face of mortality and, above all, to exercise agency.
On Saturday, Tirza and Harmony Hammond chaired a lunch-time panel “Art Partners: the Erotics of Collaboration,” yet another lively, entertaining, inspiring romp through possibilities -- through the idea of possibility. Panelists were Kim Anno (in absentia), Shawna Dempsey and Lori Millan, Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe, and, representing the LTTR collective, Ulrike Mueller and Ginger Takahashi. The panelists addressed how relational dynamics inflect paradigms of creativity and shape work produced within partnerships.
In both our panels, the energy and enthusiasm in the room was palpable; audience members asked lots of questions, and we lingered until we were thrown out of the space. All of our events seemed profoundly, delightfully, transformatively queer, as we challenged the conventional protocols of our academic disciplines.
So why are we worried? Well, we’re worried because, despite the fantastic public show(s) being put on by the Caucus, the backstage crew is getting a little sparse. More specifically, despite the commitments our events displayed to queer collaboration in general, and across boundaries of sex and generation, this energy tends to dissipate when it comes to administering the Caucus itself.
Our two-year terms as Co-chairs are set to come to an end at CAA next February and we’d really love to see new faces step up to continue the legacy of queer fabulousness that has been the Caucus’s history. Sherman Clarke has signaled that we welcome collaboration with the newsletter (one of the areas in which Tee’s contributions are sorely missed). So, please, anyone and everyone who might be willing to help keep the Caucus going: contact Sherman or us.
We also need proposals if the Caucus is to sponsor a lunch-time session at the conference in Dallas in 2008, and we need ideas for the full-length session at CAA 2009 in Los Angeles.
Chris Reed & Tirza Latimer
reed@lakeforest.edu
ttlatimer@sbcglobal.net
The gathering started with announcements: Jenny Rogers will be having a show at Chashama in New York City; Tirza announced a “Queer studies 20 years out” conference at Yale; Noreen Dean Dresser reminded people about the events on Saturday in celebration of the Feminist Art Project with a reception at Casa Frela in Harlem.
Programs for 2008 and 2009 were next on the agenda. Erica Rand and Jason Goldman are doing a session entitled “Queer loveboats: politics of inclusion in queer culture” as the official caucus panel. [The call for participation has since gone to the queerart list.] Possibilities for 2009: postfeminism and queer (Susan McKenna); gender and craft (Jenni Sorkin); lunchtime panel on queer theory vs behavior, critical tool, post-Judith Butler (Flavia Rando and Susan McKenna); midwesterners and/or southerners and/or southwesterners (Jim Bergesen). Rupert Goldsworthy and Jonathan Katz have connections for a possible exhibition in Dallas for 2008.
Jonathan Katz discussed a metrics study of LGBT presence in exhibitions and museums which should be released soon. How do we publicize it? On the steps of the Met? Or: guerrilla action, acoustiguides, alternative wall labels, CAA channels, photo opportunity, projection on walls of museums, artists rejected or not out on labels, invert Helms debate and other arguments. What would the Met be without queer artists? How do we frame it? Do a mock exhibition of “gay art in New York museums.” Something on YouTube? Take a curator to lunch to discuss it? The Human Rights Campaign has as equality index of funders and audiences which could be trolled for information about funders who also fund art venues.
The business meeting closed as the time neared to g o to the exhibition reception for “Mother, May I?” at the LGBT Community Center. A report on the exhibition and other caucus activities appears in the Co-chair’s letter for the May 2007 issue of the newsletter.
Recorded by Sherman Clarke, Secretary
Tirza True Latimer is organizing “Art on the borderline” which will address “points of articulation among artistic practice, non-normative subjectivity, (im)migration, and the creation/surveillance/crossing of borders.”
The Committee on Women in the Arts will sponsor a panel on “Bringing a feminist perspective to non women-centered topics,” organized by Janet Marquardt, Eastern Illinois University.
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1 September 2007
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