Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.
– José Esteban Muñoz [1]
Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz likens queerness to a site of possibility, the ‘warm illumination of a horizon’.[2] He articulates that this horizon is visible, but it is still in the distance. Its warmth represents hope, a place where things can change for the better. However, there is still work to be done; although we can feel its warmth, it is not quite ‘here’ yet. This assertion provides a poignant metaphor for explorations of identity and queer worldmaking in the work of Paul Yore. In his work, Yore imagines spaces and places in which normative ideas of gender and sexual identity are disrupted, fragmented, and are inherently ‘messy’ (in the best way possible). The crown, the state, and the church are all institutions of power and knowledge that Yore dismisses with a campy swish of the (limp) wrist. In their ruin, Yore builds a new queer world, or rather multiple queer worlds, where new ways of living, thriving, and desiring are made manifest.
This is perhaps most evident in many of the works on display in ‘The Horizon’, (Gallery 4 of the exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), which unites several large-scale appliquéd quilts. These textile works play on the iconography of medieval tapestries and stained-glass windows; associations made ever-present by the ‘ecclesiastical’ purple paint used on the walls of the gallery. However, there are certainly no recognisable saints or religious icons to be seen here. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. In Your capital is at risk 2018, there is an effigy of a shitting Justin Bieber surrounded by ‘relics’ of a time gone by, including a flip phone, a children’s toy from McDonald’s, Lego bricks, and a computer mouse. Instead of a classical rural idyll, in Heads are spinning 2015 we see an imagination of ‘Faggot Land’ – a world in which rainbows shine, various twinks from the pop band One Direction run about guzzling cum, cops are either dead or beheaded, and the undoubtedly queer Muppets, Bert and Ernie, live out their lives in harmony. These quilts are accompanied by soft sculpture statuaries such as i am not you 2018, Mummy 2018, and Daddy’s #1 2018 which represent hybrid, phallic, Frankenstein-like monuments, seemingly inviting visitors to get on their knees and … pray?
Yore’s visual rhetoric is incredibly playful, but certainly no less political. Although the worlds that Yore crafts might seem frivolous at first glance, there is a much darker underbelly to many of these candy-coloured imaginaries which attack capitalist ideology and expose traumatic colonial histories, the effects of which are still felt today. In many of the works in The Horizon room, Yore appropriates and subverts the visual language associated with colonial landscape painting, such as in The darkest secret of your heart 2016. Looking beyond the bouncing kangaroos, plush koala bear, and appropriation of cutesy cross-stitched pastoral scenes, we can see that Yore depicts the violent colonisation of Australia at the hands of British forces, namely Captain Cook whose name is appliquéd here in the style of the Coca Cola logo. To the left of the work, in the background, we see these colonial forces arriving by boat. In the foreground, we see a vast number of skulls and a long chain wielded by a fuzzy-felted King Henry VIII. The composition bears a striking resemblance to an 1865 engraving by Samuel Calvert (based on an original painting by John Alexander Gilfillan) which depicts a scene from 1770 in which James Cook claimed sovereignty over the coast of Possession Island (known as Bedanug or Bedhan Lag in Kalaw Lagaw Ya) and oppressed the indigenous Kaurareg people.[3] During his voyage, Cook not only supported the colonisation of Australia, but he effectively helped to introduce many of Britain’s strict moral codes and introduced archaic anti-homosexuality laws, such as the Buggery Act of 1533, which was actually passed during the reign of Henry VIII. The British Empire criminalised male-to-male relations in Australia, imposing the death penalty up until 1890, and life imprisonment thereafter until 1949. Yore brings attention to these histories and ongoing systematic violence against marginalised peoples (both indigenous and queer), who are quite-literally treated as trash, human waste, or the ‘abject’ by dominant social forces.
In physically recuperating society’s cultural detritus and utilising found objects in his work, Yore transforms this cultural detritus into something sexy and glamorous, not as the pathetic and debased spectacle that it appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronormative culture. He establishes a parody, a camp détournement, which recuperates the deprecated into a source of strength and identity.[4] As Muñoz has also suggested, ‘disidentification’ is a particular mode of cultural production which operates by quite literally recycling damaged stereotypes into sources of power and self-creation, often being employed by minoritarian subjects as a survival strategy.[5] Muñoz’s notion of recycling the raw material of majoritarian culture to represent a positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture is evident at the very material level of Yore’s work which quite literally recycles materials as a way in which to recycle meaning. Through his use of materials and techniques, Yore crafts his own system of value; one which values the broken, the worn down, and the discarded.
Although some of Yore’s works represent utopian visions of queer futures, and others remind us of a darker past, perhaps they all offer ‘a backward glance that enacts a future vision’.[6] Ultimately, Yore’s work offers up glimpses to the possibility of new queer worlds, bringing the warm and inviting horizon that Muñoz describes ever closer to the foreground — one sequin and sloppy stitch at a time.
Daniel Fountain is an artist, cultural producer, and Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at University of Exeter, UK. Their book Queer Crafts is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. www.danielfountain.com
[1] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York University Press, New York, 2009, p.1.
[2] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p.1.
[3] Australian Museum, ‘Captain Cook taking possession of the Australian continent on behalf of the British Crown’, 3 September 2021, online at: https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/recognising-invasions/captain-cook-taking-possession/
[4] Daniel Fountain, ‘All That Glitters Is Gold: Queering Waste Through Campy Craft’, 8 November 2021, online at: https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/All_that_glitters_is_gold_queering_waste_through_campy_craft/16587026.
[5] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999, p.4-31.
[6] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p.4.