Fandom, Queer Kinships, and the Revolt of the Child: An Interview with Patrick Staff

In a wide-ranging conversation, artist Patrick Staff and Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, the recently closed exhibit in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture, discussed queer archives, visibility, and the tensions endemic to looking back at certain histories.

Staff’s most recent work includes Weed Killer (2017), The Foundation (2015), and Bathing (Drunkenness), commissioned for the 2018 Made in LA biennial at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Weed Killer was screened at the Walker in February 2018.

GWYNETH SHANKS (GS)

Thank you so much for talking with me, Patrick. The exhibit I’ve been working on is focused on queer and radical performance practices from the 1980s and ’90s in the US. I know for myself, I often grapple with the legacy that era of queer performance offers cultural producers, scholars, artists, curators. How do you approach the work made during this time and the politics at play? In your film, The Foundation (2015), for instance—a work that focuses on the house, now foundation, of iconic gay artist Tom of Finland—how did you approach these questions?

PATRICK STAFF (PS)

My friend Catherine Grant, a scholar at Goldsmiths, wrote a really great essay called, “Fans of Feminism,” considering the different ways artworks rewrite, reimagine and reactivate second-wave feminist art and politics, and particularly the generational tensions or situations that complicate familial models of feminist generations. She begins by asking whether to be a fan indicates an excessive over-attachment, embarrassing desire, or loss of perspective. So, in The Foundation, one way I thought about the work was to ask myself, “Am I a fan of, a child of, or an inheritor of that particular moment or body of work or a space? What does that position offer and what does it foreclose? If am to take those different positions, what changes?” If I’m a child of something, for instance, I can say, “Fuck you, mom and dad. I’m not doing what you tell me,” you know?

GS

The revolt of the child.

PS

Yeah. Exactly. But, then, if you’re an inheritor, your obligation is much more about care, but also about facilitating an accumulation of value. So, I felt that I was trying to understand how I may be shifting through these different roles, and trying to understand how my own identity, which was very much in flux at the time of making the work, may be a factor. With The Foundation my identity was an obstacle, of sorts, or a challenge in that moment.

GS

In what ways did it feel like an obstacle or challenge?

PS

In 2012, when I began to work on The Foundation, I was starting to come to terms with occupying some form of a trans identity, though I was much more about whether I would medically transition. And I just remember having negative experiences with people of an older generation at that time, particularly around questions of responsibility. I had one older cis gay guy say to me, “Don’t you think you have a responsibility to my generation?” He was basically implying, “Don’t you feel like you are a gay man and you have an obligation to carry on that lineage?” That was kind of an awful thing for someone to say, but once I was able to get over the offense and hurt that caused, it became interesting to me to try to understand that response. What implicit information is carried generationally, and what is particular about whether or not you embodythat identity? What does it mean to transition? What type of child do you become? Have you severed a family tie? What line gets drawn in the sand?

GS

There seems to be, within that comment, a deep desire to see a certain iteration of oneself reflected moving forward, right? In some ways, that comment gets to the heart of some of the tensions within the LGBTQIA movement and across queer, lesbian, and gay studies. There were these concurrent, if somewhat oppositional, impulses, moving forward from the height of the AIDS epidemic: the formation of queer studies as a radical iteration of queerness and the shift towards a more family-centered activist politics within the mainstream LBGTQ movement. This latter approach seems, of course, quite rooted in the notion of “How do you reclaim a notion of ‘family’ in the wake of AIDS?”

PS

Yes, and I also think there are ways that AIDS rippled through the country that we aren’t so aware of. Sarah Schulman, the American writer and AIDS historian, for instance, argues for recognition of the relationship between gentrification and AIDS in her book, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. She describes the effect of these mass deaths in cities like New York or San Francisco and how those empty apartments all got flipped; rent controlled apartments were gone, and taken over; and the city was transformed. She talks, of course, about many other aspects of that time, but for me it was a realization of the many interconnected facets, these things we don’t think about as linked were contingent. When I read about that link to real estate, I thought, fuck. There are ways that this mass death moved that many of us don’t even recognize.

GS

Yeah, these material and spatial effects of the epidemic.

PS

So, I think you’re right. I always found it fascinating to try and understand those conflicting impulses of openness versus self-preservation within the queer movement, and that was something I was thinking about so much—this sort of desire to batten down the hatches—while making The Foundation. Lots of the work I’d made before that piece was about communes and collectives, and those pieces often became about trying to understand the dualism of a sort of utopianism and also a very conservative agenda. For instance, when I was younger I was involved in DIY activist kind of circles. The thing that shocks me when I look back now is just how much policing went on constantly: this low-level disciplining of each other and each other’s identities, you know?

GS

As you were talking, I was thinking about the kind of messiness present in works by Karen Finley or Ron Athey or present, in a different kind of way, in Kathy Acker’s writing. I think about how their work might be said to encourage this reading of the body as always spilling outwards, as messy. Those aesthetics, though, became co-opted, in a certain kind of way, to stand for a particular set of identities, a particular set of politics, right? And, in the process, some of the porousness of that work was narrated as quite concrete, as a very stable iteration of identity politics.

PS

Yeah. I feel very aware in the work I make of straddling identities, of the messiness of it. A lot of the work with the Tom Foundation went to the heart, in some ways, of that: of really trying to reconcile my trans-feminine identity in a place that could be said to be the center of gay male image making.

GS

When you were there at the foundation, were those conversations you were able to have? Or wanted to have overtly with people in the space?

PS

Yeah. I wouldn’t say “overt,” because, for a lot of the people that are there, it’s all about lived practice. It’s all about lived politics. Amongst the community that is there, I don’t think there is a huge amount of—I don’t know what the word is—”theorizing” of their own way of being. It’s sort of just, “This is what we do.” I think that is the case for many of us, in our lives. But I was really struck by how the desire to facilitate community entails a constant changing, or challenging, of the habits of the folks who live there or run the space. If you open your space up for it to be for a community, then you don’t really get to say who turns up, and if you want people to turn up, you have to learn. I feel like I’m not explaining it well, but—

GS

No, you are. If you open a space up in that way to a community, to communal living, you’re opening it up to anyone who wants to take advantage of that invitation, and it could be who you expect or not.

PS

Exactly. So at a certain point,for instance, certain folks at the house have to learn not to assume people’s pronouns, right? Or certain signifiers become obsolete. I published a book with the project and interviewed one of the guys, and he kind of jokes in it: “I can’t tell anymore who’s gay and who’s straight. I just have to kind of go with it.” What’s nice about that sentiment is that it shifts into this thing of, “Well, if you’re here, if you’ve made it to the point of turning up, then there’s a commonality. There’s a kinship, and then that’s where we begin from.” I think that’s what’s really incredible.

GS

Absolutely, and such a different sentiment from the comment you relayed earlier.

PS

It feels good to me. To challenge our own assumptions of who belongs in the room. If someone doesn’t fit the mold that we’re all used to, but they’ve shown up at the event or at the screening or at the meeting, then that’s enough; that’s the commonality, and that’s where we go from. That feels challenging, but also really liberating. Do you know what I mean?

GS

Kind of beginning from a place of empathy? Is that the right word for what you’re describing?

PS

Yeah, totally. Of course, it can become difficult when the space you created becomes a place that people want to turn up to because they have some sort of perception about it and what you do. I think it can be jarring, or hard to know how to act, when suddenly everyone wants a seat at your table. I have a lot of friends, particularly older trans folks, who just don’t know how to reconcile this.

GS

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is, returning to these tensions between certain generations or iterations of the queer movement, how the types of conversations we have now was tied to who, quite literally, survived. The artists who became visible, or who remain visible, are still alive.

PS

Yeah. I think it’s about archives, as well. I remember when I was at the Tom of Finland Foundation, people would say, “Bill has just died, you need to come and get everything.” Because everyone knew that families would turn up and throw everything out that didn’t fit into how they wanted their child to be remembered. Folks at the foundation would tell me that they would often turn up as the parents or siblings would be cleaning out a house, and they would go through and try to just save stuff. This is not an uncommon story amongst queer people.

GS

How did Tom’s house and archive become the foundation?

PS

It became the foundation out of Tom and Durk [Dehner]’s friendship, their relationship. My impression was that there was a very conscious decision to formalize it as an organization, to promote and preserve Tom’s work, to make it mainstream in a way. I think what’s interesting is that over the years they began to collect and preserve all types of erotic art, which has produced some tension, I think, when there’s interest from larger organizations, researchers etc., who are only interested in the better-known works or, possibly, the works that have already become “legitimate” in the eyes of the mainstream world.

GS

So a kind of reimagining, or sanitizing, of the archive both as a means of appealing to larger institutions but perhaps also the fear that, if they don’t do that labor first, it will be out of their control to frame Tom’s narrative?

PS

Yeah. I wrote an essay recently for the Tate Modern’s Queer Britain Art, 1861-1967. They showed a huge amount of things that they deemed queer and British. It was a very complicated endeavor. Queer was very contested. “British” was very contested. Art was very contested. For instance, there was a lot of English stuff, but in the UK the critique is, “Well, where’s the Welsh? Where’s the Scottish? You’re saying it’s British art.” So that kind of colonial legacy comes into it. The display of certain objects was called into question, such as how the prison door of Oscar Wilde’s cell was shown: they displayed it so it wasn’t the side that Wilde would have seen. It was the outside of the door, you know what I mean?

GS

A kind of re-imprisonment.

PS

Possibly. The essay that I wrote for the catalogue was really trying to grapple with the way the painter Gluck has been historically categorized, and how categorization is really an implicitly violent gesture. There’s no real way around it. The process of writing and publishing that piece, though, was upsetting because nothing changed. The article was published in the Tate’s thing, but still people would write, “Hannah Gluckstein was a female painter who chose to go by Gluck and she did blah, blah, blah.” It felt to me that Tate made no effort to even to facilitate a different conversation around Gluck’s work. They took an excerpt of my article and put it on the wall next to Gluck’s paintings, so I felt like I became decoration for this essentially violent act. It was really frustrating.

GS

These sorts of considerations—at the Tom Foundation or with this exhibit—raise the question about how institutions invested in processes of archiving or of historicization are politically imbricated by what and how the archive materials and ephemera. Archiving isn’t an unmarked process, of course.

PS

Right. My perception is that the foundation played a critical part in having Tom’s work recognized as “fine art.” Some other artists and curators organized exhibitions of Tom’s work in New York, but before that, none of that was happening to Tom’s work; it was classed as pornography. It was being photocopied and reproduced and pirated and circulated. I think it could be argued that a significant aspect of them solidifying as an archive and as a foundation was to restrict the work’s circulation as a means to legitimize Tom as an artist in the eyes of the market. A kind of self-colonization, right?

GS

Well, it’s like, “What are the codes you have to follow to become legitimate?” They’re market-driven; it’s about a kind of class and racial uplift.

PS

Yeah. And so we come back to that conversation: “At what point is it self-preservation?” You can clamp down to protect a work historically, but at the same time you limit its reproduction, limit its other forms of circulation or currency, which are themselves actually very queer and very beautiful.

GS

And also far more intimate. In your own work, how do you find that balance between this kind of self-preservation and that intimacy?

PS

This isn’t a direct answer, but I think about something that really came up with making Weed Killer. It was a very conscious decision that Catherine [Lord] is someone that I’m close to, and that I became close to as a fan [the influential American artist, writer, curator, social activist, professor, and scholar’s memoir, The Summer of Her Baldness, serves as a starting point for Staff’s film]. When I was at art school, I loved Kathy Acker. I loved sort of copying things and kind of misuse and appropriation and all of this stuff. But I find that actually now I’m more interested in the ethical dilemma of that type of appropriation, that does stem from intimacy or from being a fan. Catherine and I have done talks about Weed Killer. And she’s always like, “This isn’t a collaboration. We’re not collaborators. This is a text that I wrote that Patrick took and used.”

GS

Does it feel that way to you as well?

PS

I guess I’m a little more touchy-feely. So, I’m a bit more like, “We love each other.” [Laughter.] But I’m aware that her text is misused, and that that was a conscious choice at the end of the day. I am overstepping a boundary in regards to over-identifying and letting that pervert and change her work and shift it into a different space. Again, I do think that’s what I did with the foundation. I’m inserting myself into a community that I somewhat belong to, but in some ways don’t. But I’m allowing my presence and my subjectivity to shift and bend it a little. It’s fraught territory. But in both examples I deliberately invite those people, and others, into the situation to trouble it. I guess it could be said that I feel like I am collaborating with Catherine more than she feels like she’s collaborating with me, right?

GS

As we’ve been talking, I’ve been reevaluating the premise, on my part, of wanting to talk with you about an earlier generation of queer artists. My initial question to you was, in fact, something like, “How has this past generation informed your work?” But that question is problematic in some ways; it really depends on this type of chronological or evolutionary type thinking. But maybe a word like “collaboration” sidesteps the return of generational thinking?

PS

I often get into these conversations around my work, and these last two projects have really spoken to your questions. I mean, it also seems like the great scam of the art world is this idea that every new generation redefines things, and every new generation is meant to keep pushing the wheel forwards or somethin. And it’s this weird lie that we’re all sold on, whether at art school or culturally. I think we get stuck in these models of only being very referential or reverential. I feel like you can either be hagiographic or you can kill your idols, and there’s no middle ground. There needs to be.