Art & Cultural Events List

MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde

Guest Curator: Michael Rush
February 5-April 10, 2010
Hayden, Reference, Bakalar Galleries
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 4, 6-8PM
Reception preceded by a conversation with artists Michelle Handelman and John Kelly moderated by curator Michael Rush

5:30PM, Bartos Theatre
Cambridge, MA-January 2010. The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde. This group exhibition, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, explores what has traditionally been called cross-dressing (drag) as a tactic for media artists that has been central to the development of the current avant-garde. The show explores how experimental art has been invigorated and advanced by artists who cross dress for many different reasons as part of their conceptual process. It is not intended as a specific exploration of identity issues but is a deeper look at the current and historical strategies of cross-dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected. For several artists working today, cross-dressing is not even an apt term. For video artist Ryan Trecartin, for example, gender appearances are just that, appearances. In his dizzyingly fast- paced videos, sexual leaps are one part of a multitasking language system that communicates multiple perspectives about his characters’ lives. For performance artist John Kelly, drag (a term he does use) is a theatrical tool applied to a character like any other tool he might use in a non-drag performance. In Michelle Handelman’s work, lesbians, drag queens, and women playing men playing women, create a post-gender scenario not so different from many second-life
experiments on the web. Cross-dressing has a storied history in the development of post Dada art. For Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the transgressive act of dressing as a woman was a strategy that was intended to both shock the bourgeoisie and inflate the sexually intense agendas of the Surrealists whose mostly male cohort felt some threat from an emerging feminism in 1920s Paris. Less attended to until recently were the artfully ambiguous photos of Claude Cahun whose multi-gendered self portraits were as subversive as anything concocted by Duchamp and Ray. In mid 20th century, Pierre Molinier advanced the wildly varied sexual identities of the Surrealists with his photo montages and self-portraits. As sexual representations became increasingly liberated in the 1960s with artists like Jack Smith, Kenneth
Anger, Andy Warhol, and a host of others, cross-dressing became
a hallmark of both gay liberation and the subversive intents of the avant-garde. In most major historical
advancements of experimental art, cross- dressing has been present as a strategy that has expanded the
possibilities of the perception-bending intentions of artists (as opposed to merely gender-bending).
In the same way that Bruce Nauman’s Spinning Spheres (1970), Peter Campus’s aen (1977), or Michael
Snow’s Wavelength (1977) upended viewers’ visual perceptions and re-defined relationships between the
moving image and the body, so too, do videos such as Ryan Trecartin’s K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009),
Kalup Linzy’s KK Queens Survey (2005), and Katarzyna Kozyra’s Men’s Bathhouse, (1999) subvert viewers’
expectations of narrative through the wonder and estrangement of the creators’ use of cross-dressing. In their
virtuosic performances (and, in Trecartin’s case, digital manipulations), these artists train the eye anew,
exposing viewers to radical information that can shock, exhilarate, and transform.
What links the artists Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde is not what their
“costuming” has taught us about the changing roles of men and women, but what their incorporation of cross-
dressing has enabled in their wildly diverse artistic experiments. The phenomenon of cross-dressing can be
seen as a strategy in art that, intentionally or not, continues to provide a wonderful, not to say extravagant, new
vigor to media art. Some of the most widely acclaimed video art currently being produced is structured around
cross-dressing. The virtuosity of the performances in these artworks is also intimately connected to the practice
of cross-dressing. As filmmaker Jack Smith so memorably noted, “It’s not the actor who brings the costume to
life, but the costume which brings the actor to life.”
The exhibition will feature videos, installations, photographs, and performances. In conjunction with the
exhibition a 64 page catalogue has been produced. The catalogue features essays by Michael Rush, John
Kelly, and Ara Merjian and color and black-and-white reproductions of key works. Artists include Charles
Atlas, Matthew Barney, Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle
Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa
Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol
About the artists:
Charles Atlas
Born in St. Louis, 1958. Lives in Paris, France, and New York, NY.
Charles Atlas was a pioneer in the development of media-dance, a genre in which original performance work is
created directly for the camera. He has directed more than eighty films and videotapes and worked as a
filmmaker-in-residence with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for ten years. His own videos have
featured the indomitable performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-1994), who was also Lucien Freud’s muse
and model. Atlas’s work, much of which has also chronicled the downtown New York performance scene, has
been exhibited at The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; World Wide Video Festival, The
Hague, The Netherlands; and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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Matthew Barney
Born in San Francisco, CA, 1967. Lives in New York, NY.
Matthew Barney has worked in several media since the early 1990s after graduating from Yale. In 1991, The
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was the first museum to exhibit and acquire Barney's work, including his
first major installation Transexualis (1991), which includes a walk-in cooler, decline bench, and videos Delay of
the Game and Anal Sadistic Warrior. Barney became best known for his work, The Cremaster Cycle (1994-
2002), a series of five feature-length films featuring elaborate performances, sets, and displays in a multi-
faceted exploration of male sexuality and personal mythologies. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
organized The Cremaster Cycle, an exhibition of the entire cycle, that premiered at The Museum Ludwig in
Cologne, Germany, in June 2002, and subsequently traveled to The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
in Paris, France, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY.
Claude Cahun
Born in Nantes, France, 1894. Died in St. Helier, Jersey, 1954.
Claude Cahun was a photographer, writer, and political activist. Born as Lucy Schwob, she began
photographing herself at the age of eighteen and adopted the androgynous name Claude Cahun six years
later while becoming an active member of the Parisian Surrealist movement along with her stepsister and
lifelong partner, Suzanne Malherbe. Cahun exhibited work at the London International Surrealist Exhibition at
the New Burlington Gallery and Exposition Surréaliste d'Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris (both in
1936) before settling in Jersey with Malherbe. As anti-war activists, the two began producing and distributing
anti-German fliers and were arrested by the Germans and sentenced to death, but were freed on May 8, 1945.
Recent exhibitions of her work have included Mise en Scene at The Institute of Contemporary Art, London,
U.K. (1994); Surrealism: Desire Unbound at The Tate Modern, London, U.K. (2001); and Don't Kiss Me-
Disruptions of the Self in the Work of Claude Cahun at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada (1998). Cahun's collected writings were published in 2002 as Claude Cahun-Écrits, edited
by François Leperlier.
Harry Doge and Stanya Kahn
Born in San Francisco, CA (Dodge, 1966; Kahn, 1968). Live in Los Angeles, CA.
Harriet Dodge and Stanya Kahn began collaborating in 2001 after they each received their MFAs from the
Milton Avery Graduate School, Bard College. Their significant body of video work has explored urban decay
and the struggles of individuals (especially in the guise of a solitary woman) in the midst of an uncaring city.
Their work All Together Now was exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial; and they have recently exhibited in
group shows including Mutual: on Collaboration at Samson Projects in Boston, MA (2009), and the New
Feminist Video exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, NY.
Marcel Duchamp, born as Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp
Born in Blaineville, Normandy, France, 1887. Died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1968.
Marcel Duchamp is considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. A leading figure of
both the Dada and Surrealist movements and often credited with being the grandfather of conceptualism, his
first major notoriety came from his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 (1912), which made a
sensation at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. He thereafter largely abandoned painting and began
working with objects that he called "readymades.” Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy became an
important part of his persona and legacy as a precursor to later movements of conceptual and performance art
during the second half of the 20
th
century.
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Michelle Handelman
Born in Chicago, IL, 1960. Lives in New York, NY.
Michelle Handelman is a multimedia artist and filmmaker known for her colorful and physically exacting
performance videos which often feature herself in a central role. Her 1996 documentary film, Blood Sisters,
which was an intimate look into the San Francisco lesbian leather community, continues to be screened
worldwide. Handelman's four-screen video installation Dorian, a feminist retelling of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
of Dorian Gray, premiered at Participant, Inc. in New York in 2009. Handelman’s work has been exhibited and
screened globally at venues such as The Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris, France; The Institute of
Contemporary Art, London, U.K.; and The American Film Institute, Los Angeles, CA.
John Kelly
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, 1954. Lives in New York, NY.
John Kelly is a performance artist, dancer, actor, and musician who began his career as part of New York’s
East Village club scene during the 1980s. His original dance theater performances, including full-length multi-
media shows based on the lives of Egon Schiele and Barbette performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
have been widely praised. He is also recognized as the creator of Paved Paradise Redux: The Songs of Joni
Mitchell. Kelly has created over thirty performance works which have been presented at The Tate Modern,
London, U.K.; The Kitchen, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, The Drawing Center, Creative Time, Performance
Space 122, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY; The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA;
The Sundance Theatre Lab in Utah; and The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn,
NY. He has appeared on Broadway in 2000 in James Joyce’s the Dead starring Christopher Walken, and in
numerous off Broadway productions.
Katarzyna Kozyra
Born in Warsaw, Poland, 1963. Lives in Warsaw, Poland, Trento, Italy, and Berlin, Germany.
Katarzyna Kozyra is known for her videos investigating human interaction and gendered notions of beauty and
sexuality. Her dual video installations, Bathhouse (1997) and the Men’s Bathhouse (1999) created a sensation.
She filmed herself and others surrepticiously in public bathhouses in Budapest, having undergone an elaborate
prosthetic transformation into a male for the second part. Kozyra received degrees from The Fine Arts
Academy in Warsaw (1993) and Warsaw University (1988) and completed postgraduate studies at Hochschule
für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig in 1998. She has exhibited at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia in Madrid, Spain; The Renaissance Society in Chicago, IL; Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw,
Poland; and The Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, NY.
Kalup Linzy
Born in Clermont, Florida, 1977. Lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Kalup Linzy is a video and performance artist whose satiric soap operas send up traditional understandings of
race, male-female relations, maleness, the art world and a host of other issues. Linzy writes, directs, mostly
stars in, and does all the voices for his videos. Since receiving his MFA from the University of South Florida in
2003, his work has been included in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum
in Harlem, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, NY. Linzy has received a Louis Comfort
Tiffany Foundation grant (2005), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a Creative Capital Grant (2008), and a
Jerome Foundation Grant (2008).
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Ma Liuming
Born in Huangshi, Hubei Province, China, 1969. Lives in Beijing, China.
Ma Liuming is known for his gender-bending performances in the nude, often performing as his self-created,
androgynous persona Fen-Ma Liuming and relying heavily on chance-engagements with his audience. He
received a degree in oil painting in 1991 from the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts before becoming one of the
founders of Beijing's East Village district, a hotbed of experimental art and performance activities during the
early 1990s. He has held solo performances at Gallery Albert, Paris, France; Beijing Art Now Gallery and Top
Space, Tai Kang Life Building, Beijing, China; and Aura Gallery, Shanghai, China.
Manon
Born in Bern, Switzerland, 1946. Lives in Zürich, Switzerland
Manon is a Swiss performance artist known for her environments, photographic scenes, and various carefully
constructed female identities. Initially known only as a muse to her contemporaries involved in the Swiss
performance art scenes, Manon's work eventually came to prominence after her 1974 work Da Lachsfarbene
Boudoir (The Salmon-Colored Boudoir), an installation depicting a performative, hyper-feminized version of the
artist's bedroom. She has been performing and exhibiting widely since the 1970s. She received a critically
acclaimed retrospective in 2009 at The Swiss Institute in New York.
Pierre Molinier
Born in Agen, Lot-et-Garonne, France, 1900. Died in Bordeaux, Gironde, France, 1976.
Pierre Molinier is known for his photographs, photomontages, and self-portraits of highly stylized sexual
fantasies and fetishes, often of himself dressed as a woman. Molinier began painting landscapes during the
1920s, but moved towards erotic imagery by the 1950s. In 1955 he showed his work to Andre Breton, who
helped him exhibit in Paris at the gallery À l’Étoile Scellée and later in the International Surrealist Exhibition in
1959. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, Molinier began cross-dressing and often made use of props and
prosthetics in his works. He committed suicide in 1976. Solo exhibitions since his death have included Pierre
Molinier: Fetish Performance Photographs, Collages, Photomontages at Ubu Gallery in New York (1996) and
Pierre Molinier: Original Gelatin Silver Prints from the 1950s to ‘70s at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York (2000).
Yasumasa Morimura
Born in Osaka, Japan, 1951. Lives in Osaka, Japan.
Yasumasa Morimura is a performance artist known for inserting himself into famous artworks, using a
combination of painting, sculpture, and photography. He has appropriated works from artists such as
Rembrandt, Van Gogh, de Goya, and Frida Kahlo. Morimura received degrees from the Kyoto City University
of Art and Columbia University. He has held solo exhibitions at Shugo Arts, Tokyo; Luhring Augustine, New
York; Japan Society, New York; and Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac, Paris.
Brian O’Doherty
Born in County Roscommon, Ireland, 1934. Lives in New York, NY, and Todi, Italy
Brian O'Doherty is an Irish conceptual artist, novelist, critic, medical doctor, photographer, and performance
artist who took on several identities of both genders as part of his life and work. After receiving degrees from
Trinity College and Cambridge Medical School, he first moved to Boston, then in 1961 to New York and began
working as a conceptual artist and art critic. His widely influential criticism and books on art were trailblazers in
art criticism, especially his Inside the White Cube: the Ideology of the Gallery Space. While still in Ireland,
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O’Doherty adopted the name Patrick Ireland in 1972 as a political response to the tragic events of Bloody
Sunday, vowing to not reclaim his birthname “until such time as the British military presence is removed from
Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights.” In 2008, feeling that peace had returned to his
homeland, he “buried” Patrick Ireland in a performance at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, which
included the burial of a death mask. He often wrote criticism as his adopted persona “Mary Josephson” while
he was editor for Art in America in the early 1970s, not revealing this action until two decades later. O'Doherty
has exhibited at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brookyn, NY; La
Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA; the LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and
Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany. He was given a full retrospective at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane,
Dublin, Ireland in 2006.
Ryan Trecartin
Born in Webster, Texas, 1981. Lives in Philadelphia, PA
Ryan Trecartin is known for his feature-length fantastical narrative videos in which he writes, directs, and stars.
He received his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004; his thesis project, the video A Family
Finds Entertainment was included in the 2006 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has
been presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Saatchi Gallery, London, U.K.; and The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. Trecartin also has a collaborative sculpture practice with
artist Lizzie Fitch. In 2009, he became the first recipient of the Wolgin Prize awarded by Tyler School of Art (at
Temple University) in Philadelphia, PA.
Andy Warhol, born as Andrew Warhola
Born in Pittsburgh, PA, 1928. Died in New York, NY, 1987.
Andy Warhol, along with Duchamp, is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20
th
century.
Beginning as a fashion illustrator he later turned to painting, printmaking, and filmmaking. Before moving to
New York in 1949, he studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology
(now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, the city which now houses the Andy Warhol Museum. While
working as a commercial illustrator in New York, his first exhibition was in 1952 at the Hugo Gallery, where he
showed drawings inspired by Truman Capote’s writings. Warhol’s early paintings during the 1960s used
images derived from advertisements that became forever associated with his legacy as a leading figure in the
Pop Art movement. By 1963, he was using the silkscreen method to create images, using the technique to
make paintings of celebrities. Warhol’s first solo exhibition was at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, soon
followed by one at Stable Gallery in New York. He was a preeminent experimental filmmaker and tastemaker
throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. He remains the subject of numerous international exhibitions worldwide,
including Andy Warhol: Other Voices Other Rooms, organized by The Stedelijk Musem, Amsterdam and The
Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2008.
About the Curator: Michael Rush is a museum director, award winning curator, and widely published author
and critic. He was director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University from 2005-2009, and director of the
Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art from 2000-2004. In each of these posts the curatorial and public
programs were regularly covered by the New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America for their quality and
diversity. He is co-founder of the Contemporary Art Museum Directors Association. Among his numerous
books are Video Art (2004, fully revised 2
nd
edition 2007), New Media in Art (2005), and New Media in Late
20
th
-Century Art (2001), all published by Thames and Hudson. Other books include monographs on artists
Marjetica Potrč, Günter Brus, Steve Miller, and Alexis Rockman. Since the early 1990s he has contributed
regularly to numerous publications including Art in America, Art on Paper, The New York Times, artext,
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Bookforum, and many others. His numerous award winning curatorial projects have ranged from international
exhibitions of video art to Surrealism and monographic exhibitions on artists, both modernist and
contemporary, including Hans Hofmann and Sue Williams. He has lectured on art and museum practice in
many parts of the world, including universities throughout the U.S., and centers in Great Britian, Korea, France,
Australia, among others. He received his bachelors and masters degrees from the Jesuit College of Arts and
Letters at St. Louis University and his doctorate from Harvard University
Support for Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde has been provided by the Council for the
Arts at MIT and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Media Sponsor: Phoenix Media/Communications Group.
Directions:
The MIT List Visual Arts Center is located in the Wiesner Building, 20 Ames St., at the eastern edge of the MIT
campus. It is in close proximity to Kendall Square, Memorial Drive, and the Longfellow Bridge.
By T, take the red line to the Kendall/MIT stop, follow Main St. west to Ames St., turn left, and walk one block
to the cross walk. The MIT List Visual Arts Center housed in a building identifiable by its white gridded exterior,
will be on your left. Signage is on the building.
By car, coming across the Longfellow Bridge or from Memorial Drive, follow signs for Kendall Square. Limited
metered parking is available on Ames Street. A parking garage is located at the Cambridge Center complex
(entrance on Ames between Main and Broadway) during business hours and on campus after business hours
and on weekends.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Wednesday: 12-6PM; Friday-Sunday: 12-6PM; Thursday: 12-8PM; Closed Mondays and Major Holidays.

Information: 617.253.4680 or http://listart.mit.edu

All exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center are free and open to the public. Wheelchair accessible. Accommodations are provided by request.