Beginning in Paris in the late 16th Century, the Salon functioned as the world’s preeminent annual exhibition of the visual arts. housands of people from all social classes came to the Salon, as at this time there were no other opportunities for the general public to experience the visual arts. The modern museum, a 19th Century innovation, has little in common with the Salon; where museums have been built specifically to showcase artworks, with each painting centered at 52″ above the floor, the Salon walls were covered from floor to ceiling with paintings.

The first piece I saw at the Prague Biennale was Rosefeldt’s three-screen video installation, Trilogy of Failure (Part 1) The Sound Maker. In the approximately 30-minute loop, Rosefeldt stacks all of the furniture and contents of his studio apartment into a pile in the middle of the living room floor. As this is going on, on another screen we see Rosefeldt, seated in an office chair and surrounded by studio recording equipment and a mess of odds and ends, facing the viewer as he watches himself carrying on in the other room. He loosely mimics his own every move from this vantage point, absentmindedly rearranging the items within arms’ reach to where he is sitting. The arbitrariness of this view underscores the banality of the objects being manipulated in the living room. After all of the contents of his studio have been ordered into a precarious tower, he returns everything to its original place, all the while under his own mimicing observation on the third screen. When he has finished, he opens the door and walks out of the apartment as the camera pulls back to reveal the studio set. As he smokes a cigarette, gaffers and technicians silently go about their work, and the camera slowly pulls up, revealing the tiny studio room with the office chair and a television screen mounted on the wall.

I found this piece to be captivating for the mechanical ambiguity of Rosefeldt’s performance, and disconcerting for the many different perspectives that it presented: Rosefeldt’s private, untranslated purpose in his actions; Rosefeldt’s watching himself (while staring at the camera); the gradually apparent artificiality of the set; and the business-as-usual procedures of the crew.

“I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.”
-Judith Butler

Judith Butler is a well-known feminist philosopher who contends that gender (masculine/feminine) has traditionally been based on sex (male/female). The result of this binaristic determinant is a set of rigid and unrealistic social norms concerning sexuality and sexual desire. Her work focuses on the disconnecting of sexuality from gender so that sexual desires and the ways people define themselves with regard to gender can be more flexible and dynamic.

Personally, I think of sexuality as a continuum; while I’m attracted to certain feminine qualities, I don’t deny myself the appreciation of someone of my own sex if they exhibit those qualities. But what happens if one finds a transsexual person to be attractive and then, after acknowledging the attraction, finds out or realizes that the person is a transsexual? Is the transsexual to be regarded as a male or female? Judith butler says that, if one would opt for the latter, then the transsexual would be dismantling the hegemonic idea of masculinity.

The following are notes from my first reading of her essay, Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion, from Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985.

In her essay, Performing the Picture or Painting the Other: Romaine Brooks, Gluck and the Question of Decadence in 1923, Bridget Elliott describes the developments of sexuality and gender identity in the early 20th Century. At this time, the woman’s body was still a metaphor for commodification. This can be clearly seen in the paintings of Kirchner, Dix and Grosz. Yet society was opening up to the increasing agency of women, both as producers in the workplace and as consumers. Elliot states that many male artists and writers (Baudelaire, Benjamin, Wilde, Delacroix) not only felt their own individual agency was being curtailed by the increasing commodification of modern life, but also felt threatened by the increasing agency of women. So, the flâneur - the idle, heroic pedestrian who strolls through the city streets, puffing a pipe and taking in the gossip, retaining his individuality while all the people around him are losing theirs - represents not the triumph of decadent masculine power, but its attenuation.

In the 20s, Brooks and Gluck both created male personas for themselves by adopting the fashion sensibilities of the dandified male. Because both of these artists were financially independent, they had greater freedom to explore past social and artistic trends, rather than pursuing contemporary styles (such as Vorticism, Cubism, or Fauvism). The difference between these female artists’ crossdressing and that of well-known male artists, such as Duchamp, is that for the women, crossdressing was for years an integral part of their everyday life as outspoken lesbians, while Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Selavy, was little more than a means to artistic production. By adopting and then adding a gendered twist to the figure of the flâneur, Brooks and Gluck identified themselves on their own terms while bringing to light the narrow-mindedness of contemporary gender sensibilities.

Romaine Brooks

Self Portrait, 1923

Portrait of Emile d’Erlanger, 1924

Hannah Gluckenstein (Gluck)

Portrait of Gluck, by Romaine Brooks

A few more names mentioned in the essay:

Lucy Schwob aka Claude Cahun ( works)

Je Tends les Bras, 1931

Djuna Barnes
The Book of the Repulsive Women

Natalie Barney

Radclyffe Hall
Author of what is considered to be the first lesbian-themed novel, The Well of Lonliness. Published in 1927 and largely autobiographical, the book was banned in Britain, yet sold a million copies during Hall’s lifetime.

Decadence is always modern because it celebrates individualism at the expense of traditional authoritarian requirements.