Ariel Zaccheo, Assistant Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Craft & Design
On a recent trip to San Francisco to interview Nicki Green in greater detail, I had the opportunity to meet with Ariel Zaccheo at the Museum of Craft and Design. Through her graduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute, Ariel has a strong foundation in queer theory applied to performance art and now has the opportunity to apply it to contemporary craft and design. Enjoy!
Your graduate school experience involved a strong foundation in queer theory. Have you incorporated any queer theory into your exhibition practices, narrative development, or display strategies?
Absolutely. One reason, to my mind, that queer theory is such an attractive strategy for art historians is that it is an identity practice and an applied knowledge.
For me, one of the most valuable things I got from graduate school was the fact that there was a name, a hugely rich history, and a massive literature to a survival strategy I had been employing for years. Queerness and camp are survival strategies before they are theoretical lenses to be applied. It wouldn’t be possible for me to divorce my curatorial vision from that. I owe much of that development both to my cohort at the San Francisco Art Institute and to the unrivaled wisdom and guidance of Nicole Archer, BA Chair and Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art at SFAI.
In terms of applying that practice to exhibitions, the artists that I gravitate towards always have a transgressive/subversive quality to them. Whether or not the artists would self-identify as queer, there is something queer or camp and definitely subversive about their work. We had an exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design in 2016 called Constructed Communication and it featured local San Francisco artist Ben Venom, who makes quilts with used heavy metal T-shirts and recycled fabrics. The quilts are heavily influenced by heavy-metal, biker, and tattoo imagery. So, I mean, very macho on the surface. But, I think there’s something so transgressive about the way he deploys those masculine coded images with the element of textile work.
Obviously quilts are heavily loaded within queer iconography, and they have this very personal, almost abject feeling as an object of love, as a family heirloom, and as a site of public mourning (the AIDS quilt). Using used band t-shirts as the core fabric for the quilts locates them in this web of community and identity practice. Band t-shirts are subcultural currency—you wear an Iron Maiden t-shirt and you’ve called yourself in to a community.
In that way the t-shirts themselves are these critical locations of identity formation, and specifically identity formation against the grain of normative social conduct. The rattier, dirtier, more ripped up they are, the better. Despite the heavy machismo sometimes present in metal and punk scenes, there’s an interrelation between those subcultural strategies and queer identity practice.
Getting back to your question, queer theory in relation to display strategies, I also co-curate Almost Public/Semi-Exposed, an annual performance series in a storefront window gallery at Artist’s Television Access, which will be in its fourth year this November.
It started when my co-curator (video and performance artist Tessa Siddle) and I were painting the walls inside the window one day and noticed how many people were straight-up staring at us, stopping, trying to engage us. The window provides enough of a barrier that the relationship between two people on opposite sides of the glass is skewed immediately toward performer/observer, like the fourth wall in stage acting. It’s a perfect space for performance both because of the immediate dichotomy that occurs of performer/observer, and because the performance artists are engaging a normative public (people walking down an increasingly gentrified street) in a bodily spectacle that the public at large may not typically engage with, and in many instances, would avoid. In that way, there’s a bit of play in terms of queering public space using a display strategy.
I am 100% interested in brainstorming other methods and display strategies that are inherently queer or have subversive/queer qualities. Pushing boundaries and identifying alternative artistic strategies and spaces are always on my mind.
In our initial conversation, you mentioned the MCD has previously been very object and process focused, but is now moving towards shows focusing on social and identity issues. Can you address what brought about this transition? Are there any topics you’d especially like to address? Do you see other institutions making the same transition?
So to clarify, incorporating social and identity issues into our exhibitions is a personal ambition of mine, but MCD often works with guest curators, and they all have different visions, which is one of the reasons MCD is unique—every time a visitor comes back, it’s a completely different set of concepts, questions, and expertise that they are greeted with.
I think MCD will continue to be object and process focused in large part. Part of that is inherent to the institution’s mission and to its core patrons and members. Process is such an integral part of craft practices, and it is not often foregrounded by institutions. When I talk to artists, such a huge part of the conversation revolves around their process, and their relationship with materials. I think the public wants to be a part of that conversation as well.
That said, my eye has always been trained on art and artists that incorporate elements of social justice/critique and identity politics. I do not think that the two tracks are mutually exclusive. In fact, process often involves identity to a great extent. What I try to do when I give tours or when I’m thinking through possible exhibitions is to invite in both ways of looking.
A really great example of that would be an exhibition MCD hosted in 2015, Art and Other Tactics: Contemporary Craft by Artist Veterans. This was a collaboration between MCD in San Francisco and two institutions in Los Angeles, the Craft and Folk Art Museum and Craft in America. The curator was Emily Zaiden from Craft in America, and she did a phenomenal job. The basis of the exhibition was to showcase, first, veterans that had utilized the tuition funds granted by the G.I. Bill to either continue or initiate their artistic practice (heavy hitter examples are Peter Voulkos and J.B. Blunk) and second, to showcase artist veterans from WWII to the present day. Such a perfect blend of identity practices, social justice causes, and process/object based craft were given a platform with this exhibition.
One of my favorite works from Art and Other Tactics was a piece by ceramist Jesse Albrecht. His four-foot tall wood soda fired ceramic sculpture Suicide Hotline – Cheaper Than Healthcare (2013) still haunts me. Albrecht was pursuing his MFA in ceramics at the University of Iowa when he was deployed to Iraq as a combat medic. His return home was a tough transition, and returning to grad school allowed him to deal with the trauma of the experience. For me, this piece was the perfect mix of injecting the artist’s identity into a social critique (the prevalence of PTSD and addiction in veterans returning from combat mixed with the utter failings of our veteran healthcare system) while still maintaining a passion for process and his chosen medium.
MCD is the only museum in San Francisco dedicated to both craft and design, and I don’t think I could make a fair comparison with other institutions and their curatorial models. What I do know is that the experience of art occurs on all three of these registers (social critique, identity politics, process/materiality), all the time, so it just makes sense to combine them as much as possible.
The terms “craft” and “design” within the museum’s name establish a binary focus of interpretation and display. You referenced that part of your ambition is to push beyond that and play with stretching those categories to make them more fluid. Can you tell us more about your thinking behind this, and how you have (or would like to) do this?
Well, craft and design were not my focus while I was in school studying art history. I was into video and performance, relational aesthetics, installations... the further outside the box, the better. It is nice to go back in, research new modes, and start to see the histories of craft and design unfold, it’s like I never left school. But, whenever I see some kind of limitation or boundary it is natural for me to try to push against those limitations, brush against them, rebel in a quiet way. So, I see a binary and I immediately want to disrupt the categories or find the space in-between them.
In order to design well, you often need an indexical knowledge of materials. In order to create craft, you need to establish a relationship with materials. When these two things overlap, it is so engaging. MCD had an exhibition in 2015 titled Hands Off: New Dutch Design, and a lot of the artists in this exhibition fit in that interstice between craft and design categories. Hands Off was our first fully international exhibition, curated by local design writer Zahid Sardar,
Daniël de Bruin was this amazing young Dutch designer who made a piece called This New Technology (2014). It is an entirely analog, mechanical 3D printer that produced clay cups. He could attach different wire arms to make different shapes and sizes, and the 3D printer object was powered kind of like a grandfather clock, where you’d pull down on these weights, which would spin a cog, which would then extrude clay from a syringe. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine, but also a semi-practical means to an end. At the time, 3D printers were still taking an ungodly amount of time to print, and here you had this object that could produce objects with the same look as 3D printed clay, but without any digital inputs (or electrical needs!) This piece is such a perfect example of the marriage that can be made between craft and design.
In terms of stretching and playing with those categories, one of my goals while I’m here at MCD is to incorporate video art into our exhibition schedule, sort of go back to my roots. Video and particularly film share some interesting crossroads with traditional craft—there’s a deep resonance with medium specificity and structuralist explorations of medium in both. There are so many amazing artists working in video and incorporating craft based practices like paper cutting, using textiles as narrative, etc. I think it would be unexpected for a craft/design based museum, but would also fit right in.
One of your current exhibits is the Archive of Creative Culture, which is a crowd sourced repository of iconic creative works nominated by members of the museum’s community. It strikes me that the participatory and mobile nature of the exhibit helps decentralize the institutional role of the museum as a maker and disseminator of knowledge. What has the impact of this been? Has it strengthened community involvement with the museum, made it more accessible?
It’s hard to tell, frankly, because we only see what goes on through our doors. The Archive of Creative Culture existed before we brought it to MCD and it will continue to grow and live outside of us.
There is a strong connection to MCD, though—the curator of Archive, Lacey Haslam, began the project in honor of MCD’s former director and co-founder, Seb Hamamjian, who passed away in 2013. The project originated from Lacey’s concept to map and therefore visualize creative communities. It began in a very simple way—she asked three of the people that she respected most in the creative community for the book that was their #1 creative influence, their go-to resource, and then donate it to the Archive. The first book donated was The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde, donated by SFAI educator Meredith Tromble. Lacey’s three nominees would then nominate three more people, and on and on it goes until it creates this linear, linked network.
For the exhibition at MCD, the staff was asked to nominate their own three influential creative people, mentors, artists etc., and then they would contribute a book to our exhibition. This definitely strengthened everyone on staff’s ties to the exhibition, gave them a sense of ownership. I’m thrilled and humbled by the results we got. I mean if you just sat in our galleries and read each of those books, you’d have a solid education in craft and design. We should print out honorary diplomas.
I think the more people are able to interact and to nominate their own creative place makers, the more ownership they take of the project. Lacey Haslam drives the Archive around in a 1973 Argosy Airstream to different locations throughout the US. In this way, it’ll be able to travel places and reach communities that brick-and-mortar museums may not be able to and, in turn, expand the creative network.
Shifting the dynamics of power in art away from the museum and gallery complex and into the hands of the public wherever and however possible is a fascinating project and I think this is one of the big strengths of the Archive.
The Bay area has a strong LGBTQ community, are you aware of ways that making has contributed to the formation, identity expression, and history of this community?
I can definitely rattle off some examples that have been personally important but I could talk for hours and not even begin to scratch the surface of the history of LGBTQ artists and makers working within the community in San Francisco. Honestly, you can step outside anywhere in the Bay Area and see an example of the ways our LGBTQ creative communities have shaped our city. All of the murals in the Mission and the Tenderloin and the Castro speak a story about how deep this city lays its roots in creative culture.
Historically speaking, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot was here (in 1966, three years before Stonewall). The White Night Riots were in the Castro after Dan White got a slap on the wrist for murdering Harvey Milk and George Moscone. If you want to see some queer revolutionary world-making in action, check out the fliers and the photos of the White Night Riots—they are POWERFUL. The riots were in 1979-- punk was hitting the Bay in a big way and the gay community had rallied behind its first openly gay district supervisor only to see him murdered and the murderer set (essentially) free. It was explosive.
My colleague and friend Aimee Harlib researched the intersection of punk rock and the AIDS crisis in San Francisco for her Master’s Thesis, which is titled Incendiary Images. She was able to find so many incredible examples of moments where making was the method to create community. There was a zine from 1991 titled Diseased Pariah News, written by and for gay men with HIV/AIDS. Harlib also wrote a great essay about a local SF artist, Jason Fritz-Michael, who made a video piece called Zen and the Art of Teddy Bear Burning. It was a critique both on the burned-at-the-stake manner that those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS were treated by the heteronormative community, and on the other hand, the profiteering off of sympathy for those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS by self-help “guru” Louise Hay.
Coming back to the present, there’s an active SF chapter of radical queer activist group GAY SHAME. They’ll be doing an installation in June at the Artist’s Television Access Window Gallery that I mentioned before. They’re a perfect example of community creation, making/performing and political activism. Back in the day they would hold “Goth Cry-Ins” where you could go and “bask in sadness around the current state of LGBTQ politics and the horrors of the larger world”. I mean, couldn’t we all use a Goth Cry-In right now? They recently papered the city with flyers decrying the Tech World invasion of San Francisco that were both hilarious and poignant. “Nobody cares about your tech job” indeed.
Last thing I’ll mention to move us away from the heavily political is Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass events. These are monthly/bi-monthly events held at the historic Castro Theater where Peaches Christ (our local drag queen extraordinaire) screens movies and hosts elaborate pre-shows to accompany them with all-star drag casts. They have been so incredibly informative to my life here in San Francisco. I’m a huge cult movie fan, and really found my first community, as many of us do, in local midnight screenings of Rocky Horror Picture Show in my hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. Peaches Christ and her cast and crew are able to mix queer readings of classic cinema, cult films, etc. with high drag, performance and ritual in a way that is really accessible for anyone. The first Midnight Mass screening I went to became the first time I felt very at home and accepted as part of a community here.
In our initial conversation, we discussed your interest in drag video performance and camp sensibility. Can you envisage ways in which over-performance associated with camp can be channeled into a display strategy for exhibitions?
More glitter?
Especially with camp, more is always more. Step into a rococo period room or a display of 18th/19th century decorative ceramics-- it’s campier than anything I could attempt to design or emulate. I got to hang out at the Ceramics Study Center at the Legion of Honor in SF a few years back and the Worcester decorative porcelain is the campiest stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s absurdly ornate and colorful, gilded to the nines, and could break from a single ill-placed breath. I mean, Notes on Camp could have been written while studying a Worcester porcelain candlestick.
So maybe it’s a matter of poaching from the display strategies of traditional museums with unintentionally campy artifacts in their collections and adapting that to work with contemporary, intentionally queer art objects. It would be neat, for example, to display camp-influenced video artists’ work on an LCD monitor framed in a luxurious rococo gilt-wood frame. I always struggle with how to display video in museums and this could call attention to that in an interesting way, I think.
Your graduate school experience involved a strong foundation in queer theory. Have you incorporated any queer theory into your exhibition practices, narrative development, or display strategies?
Absolutely. One reason, to my mind, that queer theory is such an attractive strategy for art historians is that it is an identity practice and an applied knowledge.
For me, one of the most valuable things I got from graduate school was the fact that there was a name, a hugely rich history, and a massive literature to a survival strategy I had been employing for years. Queerness and camp are survival strategies before they are theoretical lenses to be applied. It wouldn’t be possible for me to divorce my curatorial vision from that. I owe much of that development both to my cohort at the San Francisco Art Institute and to the unrivaled wisdom and guidance of Nicole Archer, BA Chair and Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art at SFAI.
In terms of applying that practice to exhibitions, the artists that I gravitate towards always have a transgressive/subversive quality to them. Whether or not the artists would self-identify as queer, there is something queer or camp and definitely subversive about their work. We had an exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design in 2016 called Constructed Communication and it featured local San Francisco artist Ben Venom, who makes quilts with used heavy metal T-shirts and recycled fabrics. The quilts are heavily influenced by heavy-metal, biker, and tattoo imagery. So, I mean, very macho on the surface. But, I think there’s something so transgressive about the way he deploys those masculine coded images with the element of textile work.
Obviously quilts are heavily loaded within queer iconography, and they have this very personal, almost abject feeling as an object of love, as a family heirloom, and as a site of public mourning (the AIDS quilt). Using used band t-shirts as the core fabric for the quilts locates them in this web of community and identity practice. Band t-shirts are subcultural currency—you wear an Iron Maiden t-shirt and you’ve called yourself in to a community.
In that way the t-shirts themselves are these critical locations of identity formation, and specifically identity formation against the grain of normative social conduct. The rattier, dirtier, more ripped up they are, the better. Despite the heavy machismo sometimes present in metal and punk scenes, there’s an interrelation between those subcultural strategies and queer identity practice.
Getting back to your question, queer theory in relation to display strategies, I also co-curate Almost Public/Semi-Exposed, an annual performance series in a storefront window gallery at Artist’s Television Access, which will be in its fourth year this November.
It started when my co-curator (video and performance artist Tessa Siddle) and I were painting the walls inside the window one day and noticed how many people were straight-up staring at us, stopping, trying to engage us. The window provides enough of a barrier that the relationship between two people on opposite sides of the glass is skewed immediately toward performer/observer, like the fourth wall in stage acting. It’s a perfect space for performance both because of the immediate dichotomy that occurs of performer/observer, and because the performance artists are engaging a normative public (people walking down an increasingly gentrified street) in a bodily spectacle that the public at large may not typically engage with, and in many instances, would avoid. In that way, there’s a bit of play in terms of queering public space using a display strategy.
I am 100% interested in brainstorming other methods and display strategies that are inherently queer or have subversive/queer qualities. Pushing boundaries and identifying alternative artistic strategies and spaces are always on my mind.
In our initial conversation, you mentioned the MCD has previously been very object and process focused, but is now moving towards shows focusing on social and identity issues. Can you address what brought about this transition? Are there any topics you’d especially like to address? Do you see other institutions making the same transition?
So to clarify, incorporating social and identity issues into our exhibitions is a personal ambition of mine, but MCD often works with guest curators, and they all have different visions, which is one of the reasons MCD is unique—every time a visitor comes back, it’s a completely different set of concepts, questions, and expertise that they are greeted with.
I think MCD will continue to be object and process focused in large part. Part of that is inherent to the institution’s mission and to its core patrons and members. Process is such an integral part of craft practices, and it is not often foregrounded by institutions. When I talk to artists, such a huge part of the conversation revolves around their process, and their relationship with materials. I think the public wants to be a part of that conversation as well.
That said, my eye has always been trained on art and artists that incorporate elements of social justice/critique and identity politics. I do not think that the two tracks are mutually exclusive. In fact, process often involves identity to a great extent. What I try to do when I give tours or when I’m thinking through possible exhibitions is to invite in both ways of looking.
A really great example of that would be an exhibition MCD hosted in 2015, Art and Other Tactics: Contemporary Craft by Artist Veterans. This was a collaboration between MCD in San Francisco and two institutions in Los Angeles, the Craft and Folk Art Museum and Craft in America. The curator was Emily Zaiden from Craft in America, and she did a phenomenal job. The basis of the exhibition was to showcase, first, veterans that had utilized the tuition funds granted by the G.I. Bill to either continue or initiate their artistic practice (heavy hitter examples are Peter Voulkos and J.B. Blunk) and second, to showcase artist veterans from WWII to the present day. Such a perfect blend of identity practices, social justice causes, and process/object based craft were given a platform with this exhibition.
One of my favorite works from Art and Other Tactics was a piece by ceramist Jesse Albrecht. His four-foot tall wood soda fired ceramic sculpture Suicide Hotline – Cheaper Than Healthcare (2013) still haunts me. Albrecht was pursuing his MFA in ceramics at the University of Iowa when he was deployed to Iraq as a combat medic. His return home was a tough transition, and returning to grad school allowed him to deal with the trauma of the experience. For me, this piece was the perfect mix of injecting the artist’s identity into a social critique (the prevalence of PTSD and addiction in veterans returning from combat mixed with the utter failings of our veteran healthcare system) while still maintaining a passion for process and his chosen medium.
MCD is the only museum in San Francisco dedicated to both craft and design, and I don’t think I could make a fair comparison with other institutions and their curatorial models. What I do know is that the experience of art occurs on all three of these registers (social critique, identity politics, process/materiality), all the time, so it just makes sense to combine them as much as possible.
The terms “craft” and “design” within the museum’s name establish a binary focus of interpretation and display. You referenced that part of your ambition is to push beyond that and play with stretching those categories to make them more fluid. Can you tell us more about your thinking behind this, and how you have (or would like to) do this?
Well, craft and design were not my focus while I was in school studying art history. I was into video and performance, relational aesthetics, installations... the further outside the box, the better. It is nice to go back in, research new modes, and start to see the histories of craft and design unfold, it’s like I never left school. But, whenever I see some kind of limitation or boundary it is natural for me to try to push against those limitations, brush against them, rebel in a quiet way. So, I see a binary and I immediately want to disrupt the categories or find the space in-between them.
In order to design well, you often need an indexical knowledge of materials. In order to create craft, you need to establish a relationship with materials. When these two things overlap, it is so engaging. MCD had an exhibition in 2015 titled Hands Off: New Dutch Design, and a lot of the artists in this exhibition fit in that interstice between craft and design categories. Hands Off was our first fully international exhibition, curated by local design writer Zahid Sardar,
Daniël de Bruin was this amazing young Dutch designer who made a piece called This New Technology (2014). It is an entirely analog, mechanical 3D printer that produced clay cups. He could attach different wire arms to make different shapes and sizes, and the 3D printer object was powered kind of like a grandfather clock, where you’d pull down on these weights, which would spin a cog, which would then extrude clay from a syringe. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine, but also a semi-practical means to an end. At the time, 3D printers were still taking an ungodly amount of time to print, and here you had this object that could produce objects with the same look as 3D printed clay, but without any digital inputs (or electrical needs!) This piece is such a perfect example of the marriage that can be made between craft and design.
In terms of stretching and playing with those categories, one of my goals while I’m here at MCD is to incorporate video art into our exhibition schedule, sort of go back to my roots. Video and particularly film share some interesting crossroads with traditional craft—there’s a deep resonance with medium specificity and structuralist explorations of medium in both. There are so many amazing artists working in video and incorporating craft based practices like paper cutting, using textiles as narrative, etc. I think it would be unexpected for a craft/design based museum, but would also fit right in.
One of your current exhibits is the Archive of Creative Culture, which is a crowd sourced repository of iconic creative works nominated by members of the museum’s community. It strikes me that the participatory and mobile nature of the exhibit helps decentralize the institutional role of the museum as a maker and disseminator of knowledge. What has the impact of this been? Has it strengthened community involvement with the museum, made it more accessible?
It’s hard to tell, frankly, because we only see what goes on through our doors. The Archive of Creative Culture existed before we brought it to MCD and it will continue to grow and live outside of us.
There is a strong connection to MCD, though—the curator of Archive, Lacey Haslam, began the project in honor of MCD’s former director and co-founder, Seb Hamamjian, who passed away in 2013. The project originated from Lacey’s concept to map and therefore visualize creative communities. It began in a very simple way—she asked three of the people that she respected most in the creative community for the book that was their #1 creative influence, their go-to resource, and then donate it to the Archive. The first book donated was The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde, donated by SFAI educator Meredith Tromble. Lacey’s three nominees would then nominate three more people, and on and on it goes until it creates this linear, linked network.
For the exhibition at MCD, the staff was asked to nominate their own three influential creative people, mentors, artists etc., and then they would contribute a book to our exhibition. This definitely strengthened everyone on staff’s ties to the exhibition, gave them a sense of ownership. I’m thrilled and humbled by the results we got. I mean if you just sat in our galleries and read each of those books, you’d have a solid education in craft and design. We should print out honorary diplomas.
I think the more people are able to interact and to nominate their own creative place makers, the more ownership they take of the project. Lacey Haslam drives the Archive around in a 1973 Argosy Airstream to different locations throughout the US. In this way, it’ll be able to travel places and reach communities that brick-and-mortar museums may not be able to and, in turn, expand the creative network.
Shifting the dynamics of power in art away from the museum and gallery complex and into the hands of the public wherever and however possible is a fascinating project and I think this is one of the big strengths of the Archive.
The Bay area has a strong LGBTQ community, are you aware of ways that making has contributed to the formation, identity expression, and history of this community?
I can definitely rattle off some examples that have been personally important but I could talk for hours and not even begin to scratch the surface of the history of LGBTQ artists and makers working within the community in San Francisco. Honestly, you can step outside anywhere in the Bay Area and see an example of the ways our LGBTQ creative communities have shaped our city. All of the murals in the Mission and the Tenderloin and the Castro speak a story about how deep this city lays its roots in creative culture.
Historically speaking, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot was here (in 1966, three years before Stonewall). The White Night Riots were in the Castro after Dan White got a slap on the wrist for murdering Harvey Milk and George Moscone. If you want to see some queer revolutionary world-making in action, check out the fliers and the photos of the White Night Riots—they are POWERFUL. The riots were in 1979-- punk was hitting the Bay in a big way and the gay community had rallied behind its first openly gay district supervisor only to see him murdered and the murderer set (essentially) free. It was explosive.
My colleague and friend Aimee Harlib researched the intersection of punk rock and the AIDS crisis in San Francisco for her Master’s Thesis, which is titled Incendiary Images. She was able to find so many incredible examples of moments where making was the method to create community. There was a zine from 1991 titled Diseased Pariah News, written by and for gay men with HIV/AIDS. Harlib also wrote a great essay about a local SF artist, Jason Fritz-Michael, who made a video piece called Zen and the Art of Teddy Bear Burning. It was a critique both on the burned-at-the-stake manner that those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS were treated by the heteronormative community, and on the other hand, the profiteering off of sympathy for those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS by self-help “guru” Louise Hay.
Coming back to the present, there’s an active SF chapter of radical queer activist group GAY SHAME. They’ll be doing an installation in June at the Artist’s Television Access Window Gallery that I mentioned before. They’re a perfect example of community creation, making/performing and political activism. Back in the day they would hold “Goth Cry-Ins” where you could go and “bask in sadness around the current state of LGBTQ politics and the horrors of the larger world”. I mean, couldn’t we all use a Goth Cry-In right now? They recently papered the city with flyers decrying the Tech World invasion of San Francisco that were both hilarious and poignant. “Nobody cares about your tech job” indeed.
Last thing I’ll mention to move us away from the heavily political is Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass events. These are monthly/bi-monthly events held at the historic Castro Theater where Peaches Christ (our local drag queen extraordinaire) screens movies and hosts elaborate pre-shows to accompany them with all-star drag casts. They have been so incredibly informative to my life here in San Francisco. I’m a huge cult movie fan, and really found my first community, as many of us do, in local midnight screenings of Rocky Horror Picture Show in my hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. Peaches Christ and her cast and crew are able to mix queer readings of classic cinema, cult films, etc. with high drag, performance and ritual in a way that is really accessible for anyone. The first Midnight Mass screening I went to became the first time I felt very at home and accepted as part of a community here.
In our initial conversation, we discussed your interest in drag video performance and camp sensibility. Can you envisage ways in which over-performance associated with camp can be channeled into a display strategy for exhibitions?
More glitter?
Especially with camp, more is always more. Step into a rococo period room or a display of 18th/19th century decorative ceramics-- it’s campier than anything I could attempt to design or emulate. I got to hang out at the Ceramics Study Center at the Legion of Honor in SF a few years back and the Worcester decorative porcelain is the campiest stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s absurdly ornate and colorful, gilded to the nines, and could break from a single ill-placed breath. I mean, Notes on Camp could have been written while studying a Worcester porcelain candlestick.
So maybe it’s a matter of poaching from the display strategies of traditional museums with unintentionally campy artifacts in their collections and adapting that to work with contemporary, intentionally queer art objects. It would be neat, for example, to display camp-influenced video artists’ work on an LCD monitor framed in a luxurious rococo gilt-wood frame. I always struggle with how to display video in museums and this could call attention to that in an interesting way, I think.