I was asked to write a review after having seen the exhibition; this is more a reflection of my experience at the exhibition than a comment on the artists' work. Even though I saw the show a second time, my main impression is from the private view.
Listed as a fringe event, an exhibition that very much complemented the conference by presenting transgender in another idiom, made an excellent precursor to the conference. This precursor was also integral with the main event, in that several of the conference speakers made pictorial references to classical, modern and contemporary artists' work. This was in addition to the strong theatrical element utilised by some of the conference speakers, which to my mind made the conference as a conference a fringe event in itself. Thereby the exhibition became a fringe of a fringe event, but then again by its very nature, the subject matter of this innovative exhibition and conference is already at the fringes of contemporary society.
It is no coincidence that the topic of Transgender and Gender in Psychoanalysis should draw on the arts. With their ability to hold several ambiguities in the same frame, the creative arts naturally lend themselves to breaking the ground and giving form to complex human experience. The arts are there in all their manifestations which are then available to psychoanalysis for psychoanalysis to come into play; in a sense, the possibilities of psychoanalysis are everywhere. But this is never straightforward, as a colleague said after a trainee had just completed their pass: psychoanalysis is just so difficult to write about.
Let us not forget that Oedipus – so present in psychoanalytic discourse – originates from the literary arts. How then was the introduction of Tiresias at the conference so liberating. Transforming the gender binary structure of the oedipal drama into a dynamic sexual difference, where sexual difference is considered in a potential multiple otherness, a subjective experience beyond the difference between the sexes.
This fringe event was an exhibition of 27 artists each presenting a single piece of work: a mixed media show, painting, sculpture, photography, film, animation and printmaking. A diverse group of artists at different stages in their practice with some clearly far more established in their work than others. A diversity that contributed to the strength of the show in a limited pop up gallery space, where life size photographs hung beside stone and moulded sculptures mounted on free standing plinths. Displayed under Transgender, these individually titled works very much complemented one another in this intimate space; as French artist and founder of Art Brut Jean Dubuffet says: ‘in the realms of art, genius abounds and any newcomer has sufficient reserve to produce an admirable work of art.’
It seems inevitable when exploring the subject that work gets caught in a gender binary oscillation. The most engaging pieces for me were those that managed to transcend this struggle.
The curators, Mandy Wax and Spencer Rowell, both Site trainees, had the task of selecting work from 72 artists who responded to an ‘open call’ website under the conference title. The exhibition was professionally mounted in the Drayton Hall Community Centre with Luisa Pretolani, another Site trainee and director of this regular Site venue at the edge of a council housing estate in South London.
The private view was full, wide eyed and bustling with excitement. And dare I say how taken I was by the numbers of a younger generation, a generation who was clearly inspired and excited by the transgender subject, making a specific appearance in the public gallery; a generation who is in a very different place from the sexual politics of the hippie and punk eras that I straddled.
This was a thrilling evening making me feel that I was at the cutting edge of something important, reminiscent of the early fringe theatre
and outsider arts movements of my day.
This younger generation audience has of course grown up in the digital revolution and thinks nothing of recording the gallery work on smart phones and retaining images in their personal filing systems. The work, originally sourced by the curators on line, was transformed from the virtual to the real gallery, and then from the real to multiple virtual galleries by those attending the exhibition. Social media publication and communication are now so everyday.
The two main things I have taken from the whole experience are an endorsement of how integrated psychoanalysis is with the arts, and how the trans subjectivity creates movement in psychoanalysis beyond the gender binary.
I recall a conversation with the curator Tom Trevor when he was director of the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. I was obsessing with how to define a project in a funding application. Would I be more successful by focussing on just the arts, or health, or education? Tom responded by saying, ‘Stay in the grey area between the three – the creative is always between things.’
Likewise in the contemporary arts, household names such as Tracy Emin and Grayson Perry have produced work between one medium and another; between the visual arts, film, literature, theatre, digital media etc, more scope has been created for the next generation to make their own transitions from studio to gallery, and take up their place in the world where they are perceived by others.