Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2019 i Aperture

Birgit Jürgenssen An artist insufficiently exhibited during her lifetime, Birgit Jürgenssen deconstructed patriarchal notions of fixed, feminine identity by offering ruminations on the multiplicity of the self. This long-awaited retrospective, at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, is the avant-garde Austrian artist’s first exhibition in Scandinavia. From drawings to photographs, the works are “at once very funny and very sincere,” says curator Mathias Ussing Seeberg. “They dream about a kind of unbound, unhindered identity, where you simply are what you are and it does not define or limit you.” Appropriately subtitled Ich bin/I am, the exhibition pays due diligence to an artist who often used self-portraiture to explore the body not simply as an object or form, but as a projection of infinite realities. Birgit Jürgenssen: Ich bin/I am at…

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a novel about a man in Elizabethan England who is mysteriously transformed into a woman and who lives for over three hundred years. Woolf wrote it as a tribute to her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. That is true about Orlando. Also true, however, as Woolf wrote in 1938: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” Few great novels are as brilliantly eccentric as Orlando. Few great novels are so heedless about plausibility. And few great novels so frustrate any attempt to convey, to anyone who hasn’t read them, what it is that they’re about. You could say it’s about Orlando’s dramatically various experiences, first as a man and then…

In a 1978 film called Lynn Turning into Roberta, the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson applies makeup to her face, sets a wig on her head, and gradually eases into the role of her fictitious persona and multiyear performance piece Roberta Breitmore (1972–79). Roberta rode buses around San Francisco, went to a psychiatrist, and had her own credit card. “Several times I left my house as Roberta, forgot something, and had to return in Roberta costume and makeup,” Hershman Leeson recalled of the years she spent enacting her alternate self, “which was a continual annoyance to my then eleven-year-old daughter.” To say that Hershman Leeson was ahead of her time would be an understatement. A pioneer in performance, video, and multimedia art who throughout her life has probed the connections between…

The Palace of Versailles has been fetishized by photographers since Eugene Atget—“a Balzac of the camera,” in Berenice Abbott’s words—first fixed the crumbling statuary of its gardens in his romantic gaze early in the twentieth century. More recently, Luigi Ghirri created photographic puzzles of the place that shift between fiction and fantasy, Candida Hofer explored its social architecture, and Robert Polidori captured its epic decorative constructs. For her most recent work, Viviane Sassen has applied her distinctive visual style to the storied location. Versailles, as imagined by Louis XIV, began to take form in 1661; in 1682, it became the principal royal residence of France until the start of the revolution, in 1789, under Louis XVI. It offers a visual history of French architecture from the seventeenth century to the…

Toward the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, the title character falls madly in love with Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess. As he (for he is “he” in the early part of the book before transforming into “she”) firsts beholds Sasha, unsure whether she is a boy or a woman, Orlando struggles to categorize the creature before him. “Images,” Woolf writes, “metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in [Orlando’s] mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.” From this overwhelming burst of confusion—of gender, of visual referents, of the senses…

“Can we give Fela the other socks, the glittery ones?” Jamal Nxedlana asks stylist and makeup artist Orli Meiri, a short, talkative brunette in bright yellow Y-3 Kaiwa sneakers. She agrees. It’s Sunday afternoon on the calmer side of Yeoville’s ground zero—Rockey Street, where the back seat of a black Toyota Yaris has been transformed into a changing room for Nxedlana’s collaborators this afternoon, FAKA. Many an artist’s heart has been found, loved, lost, and broken in this infamous oasis of social intercourse, often unfairly considered the Sodom and Gomorrah of Johannesburg by apartheid’s Calvinistic legacies. Today, in the aftermath of the glow of some of its ascended rock-star ancestors—the eradefining singers Brenda Fassie and Lebo Mathosa, the globetrotting trumpeter Hugh Masekela—it has transformed into a neatly sliced pie of…

“My transition from young white boy with a false sense of privilege in the 1970s to young tranny-girl with little or no privilege was a real smack in the face,” Rosalyne Blumenstein wrote in her 2003 autobiography, Branded T. “My spirit and soul seemed to be uplifted and smashed on a daily basis.” Blumenstein is an icon. I met her, in 1993, when I came to New York as a newbie trans activist from San Francisco and visited the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, where Blumenstein, a self-described “woman of transexual experience,” lent street cred as director of the center’s pioneering Gender Identity Project, which included an HIV-prevention program for trans people. Blumenstein didn’t invent the word transgender, but she popularized it through her public-health work. I doubt she…

A Surrealist photographer’s hunt for images In 1934, with plum assignments under her belt and a professional photography studio to her name, Dora Maar was a star on the rise. A profile of Maar in L’art vivant magazine that year described the photographer as “a brunette huntress of images,” an artist whose studio functioned like an “operating room.” It was a notable portrayal of independence, singling her out from the creative partnership she maintained with set designer Pierre Kéfer and marking an artistic departure from her mentor Emmanuel Sougez, whose belief that “scissors, pincers, and glue are not photographic tools” conflicted with Maar’s budding Surrealist impulse to physically construct images, occasionally taking scissors to her prints in order to reconstitute them in photomontages. Perhaps this is what led another critic…

“For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.” Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), perhaps the author’s most whimsical, begins as a tale of a young nobleman in the age of Queen Elizabeth I. Orlando, improbably, lives for centuries and along the way mysteriously shifts gender, a radical plot point that is rendered—in an even more radical gesture—as a nonevent. After having Orlando traverse time and geographies, Woolf concludes the narrative in her present day, October 1928, on the eve of the book’s publication. In 1992, director Sally Potter adapted the novel for…

Collier Schorr is a patient person. Some of her photographic series follow a body over the course of five years or more (Jens F. [2002]); others emerge from several years with a group (basketball players, wrestlers, adolescent German boys). New work, Untitled (Casil) (2015–18), finds Schorr shadowing a model named Casil McArthur, who transitions over the course of a multiyear project from boyish girl to girlish boy, from artist’s muse to Bowie-like chameleon, from a woman used to binding her breasts to a supple-chested man. Schorr’s topic is change. Go online nowadays and type in “gender transition female to male” and you will find a number of homemade videos offering a quick look at the transformations over time that surgery and hormones can support. These videos tend to make transition…

He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him. The…

Through her poetry, essays, and art criticism, Maggie Nelson has proven to be a singular and indispensable literary voice. Critics like to classify her work as unclassifiable. An expansive thinker, she blurs genres but looks and questions deeply. Nelson has engaged subjects as varied as the color blue, the murder of an aunt, and, in The Argonauts (2015)—a book she has referred to as the product of twenty years of reading feminist and queer theory—the nature of love, family, and intimacy with a gender nonconforming partner. “Certainly I would like my books to do something paradoxical,” Nelson has remarked, “which is intimate things that fall outside of categories, or language, even, by being exceptionally clear about what I see, think, apprehend.” Speaking here with artist Shannon Ebner, Nelson shares a…

The 1992 film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton in the title role, is a British period drama that begins during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the early 1600s. The queen, played prodigiously by Quentin Crisp, fancies a young, boyish, aristocratic poet, Orlando, and grants him the male privilege of estate ownership. The narrative travels progressively through more than three centuries of attitudes, politics, fashions, and, most remarkably, relationships between the sexes. While the word gender only appears once in Woolf’s work of fiction (in reference to Orlando’s “China robe of ambiguous gender”), the concept of gender is cast radically and rightly as a plaything in the film. Swinton, with delicate quietude and characteristic androgyny, evolves from man to woman in what she has…

Jacques Derrida’s l’avenir: the unforeseeable that will appear, although we cannot control our expectation of what it will be. It’s 2019, the wheel has turned, and here I am again, marveling at Orlando and its impact—not only on my own life, but also on the lives of a host of my colleague-artists. When I sent out my calling cards to the extraordinary collection of individuals whose work you open here and now, between these covers, it was with an invitation to share the inspiration of a book, a novel: Virginia Woolf’s 1928 “writer’s holiday,” her wild-goose chase of a fantasy. The response was universally overwhelming. And overwhelmingly personal. Woolf calls the book a biography and refers constantly to its diligent biographer’s task and the specific challenges therein, recording the life,…

Tilda Swinton, in her foreword to a 2012 edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, writes that the book “is, perhaps, the most transgressive experiment [Woolf] ever made: the merging of a double-exposure portrait, in the vernacular of her paternal inheritance, as a kind of talisman of hopefulness and carefree abandon toward something better than a brightening future—rather a glorious, trustworthy present.” At first glance, there would seem to be scant reason to link together the lives, works, or aesthetic sensibilities of Woolf and filmmaker Derek Jarman, respectively the consummate modernist and the fearless postmodernist. None, that is, apart from this issue’s majordomo Swinton as the central figure in both of their works. She is the definitive embodiment of the storied protagonist in Sally Potter’s film Orlando and the essential co-conspirator with…

Any attempt to document a life is limiting, but some are more limiting than others. Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando is, like many novels, the story of a particular life. But it is also a kind of biography: a record of the life of Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. Woolf knew a thing or two about biography; her father, Leslie Stephen, was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, that late Victorian institution for enshrining the contributions to culture of “great men.” Stephen oversaw the orderly collection of neat and potted narratives, from birth to death. Woolf, on the other hand, offers a very untidy life story indeed. Orlando begins in the sixteenth century and ends in Woolf’s present day. It insists that narrative form is challenged by…

Virginia Woolf is, has been, and will be attacked or dismissed by some because she was an upper-class Englishwoman, and her detractors contend her class origin separates Woolf too much from “us.” To these detractors, her class makes her writing irrelevant and tendentious. In Orlando, she writes: Crime and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning; none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call “life” and “reality” are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality. Woolf rebuts all kinds of conventions and conventional thought in this inventive novel. Here she rebukes those…