Watchqueen

Touch of the Other: Performing the Laud Humphreys Papers: Wednesday, April 8, 2015, 7:30pm

One of the most iconic architectures of public sex, the glory hole, is usually equated with its obverse: the phallus. Yet, as the artists gathered in Watchqueen suggest, public forms of queer intimacy, even those bartered through a hole in the wall or the peep-like portholes of the camera and projector, can be tethered loosely to a metaphor outside penetrative pleasure: one of highly proximate and radically limited exchange. When the glory hole’s insistence on the phallus is disrupted, we begin to see an alternate ethics present in a much wider range of anonymous, public sexual encounters that speak to diverse bodies, genders, and identities. Referencing Laud Humphreys’ self-appointed role of the watchqueen while conducting research for Tearoom Trade(1970), the exhibition’s title and the work included do not consider the visual as an ersatz stand-in for real sex. Rather, its ogling is a necessary, ocular platform for staggered multiple fields of pleasure, vulnerability, power, and play.

These fields’ unevenness can be readily experienced in the uncanny, queer gifts given by Eve Fowler and Math Bass’ Gloria Hole, through the open vulnerability of Until the sun rises—nighttime portraits gleaned from Emmanuel Guillaud’s visits to the no-man’s-land of Tokyo’s and Singapore’s cruising spots, or deep within Dino Dinco’s lusciously pastoral Elysian Park, an abrupt Los Angeles landscape littered with the long duration of brief sexual exchanges. Relations of power, formative of media and of contractual exchange, also shape these suddenly shifting topographies.   In Numbers, Yi Zhang’s linking of the anonymous, pseudo-digital communication of China’s public men’s rooms to the authority demanded by today’s contemporary art reminds us of the undemocratic, uneven nature of public sex. Likewise, Deanna Erdmann’s short videos, crafted from materials in the collections at ONE Archives, foreground an alterity always resident within sculptural landscapes of passage and communication, a glorious, visual trip back and forth across the time-space hole.

Watchqueen is mounted in conjunction with Touch of the Other: Performing the Laud Humphreys Papers, a site-specific performance at ONE Archives by Takao Kawaguchi and Deanna Erdmann.

Watchqueen is organized by Jonathan M. Hall, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona Collage, and David Frantz, Curator at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.