Queer Proclivities

I'm reading Dave Hickey's introduction to Between Artists, where he paraphrases de Kooning:

"One can hardly expect a work of art to do anything in the world when it is trivialized as a scrap of evidence pertaining to itts maker's eccentricity. You make a painting about a crazy world, they say it was made by a crazy artist. That's a loser's game."

He goes on to say that work made in the sixties tried to extract the personal from the object, be it through pop, minimalist, or conceptual strategies. But that turns into a loser's game as well. The next generation of critics came along and used Marx, Freud, and deconstuctionist theories to
reframe the work as symptomatic of some cultural proclivity or another.

Along similar lines I was questioning (in earlier posts) the reading of queerness into abstract work by gay men or women.

This discussion started around the idea of what constitutes queer abstraction, but because we're artists, the conversation has quickly morphed into strategies for our own artistic production. As Adam said:

"...in going out and searching for this specific breed of abstraction, which you and Nicholas are trying to pin down, you are qualifying your own personal queerness through discovering potential moments of it in the world.

Thus far the queer abstraction dialogue has been centered on defining/describing the thing in an objective stance (as far as one can be objective with abstraction). The variable I been thinking about is an aesthetic one. I'm thinking that to discuss queer abstraction you have to discuss A queer abstraction, that of a particular individual's outtake."

I'm not sure how much of my own "queer proclivity" had been incorporated into the images I've posted thus far, but in qualifying my own queerness I've touched upon a few others along the way. So the point is well taken that I need to move from the general to the specific, and specifically to my own POV.

Years ago when I was is grade school, someone on the playground instructed me to make a circle, putting my thumb and index finger together with my left hand. With my right arm I was to bend my elbow as far as possible, bringing my hand near my shoulder.

The next step was to overlay the "OK" circle from my left hand over the cleavage that formed between my forearm and bicep. Looking though the circle, one would see a little butt, which made a bunch of six and seven year-olds laugh and laugh until we nearly peed our pants. We would then run off an find some elbow-butt neophytes and share our hysterical new discovery.

Forty years later, with my subcutaneous fat gone and my skin loosing its elasticity, my "elbow butts" come out wrinkled, much like the one I'm sitting on.

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