SMArt Talks: Love, Art and Queer Spaces

19 Apr 2023

ABSTRACT:

Edit András: Amorous Nation

The presentation is about love-affairs with Socialism and Nationalism.

In the existing Socialism women were declared equal, and emancipation was regarded accomplished. However, the hero embodying the whole community was men by default even if the relationship between the male leaders and female members of the societies differed greatly in various Socialist countries.

As of nationalism, since it emerged at about the same time as the concept of masculinity, the nation state could be seen as a masculinist enterprise legitimizing the dominance of men over women. Nationalism and neo-nationalism are not even bothered with covering their gendered nature with their rhetoric; nation state is declaratively and essentially a hegemonic masculine institution.

The presentation explores the different attitudes of artists towards the leaders of Socialist states, such as Tito, during the time of Socialism and after wondering if the love towards the Alfa-man was a real one or rather a spell. What about the profound and eternal love for the fathers of the nation, whether carved in stone or existing as omnipresent, flesh and blood figures of our daily life?

The questions of who is the seducer and who is seduced, and also whose love is returned and whose is unrequited and thus doomed, will be posed.

Ladislav Jackson: We Are Everywhere: Queer Spaces Between Ethics and Aesthetics

Based on his forthcoming book Images of Queer Desire (Vutium 2023), art historian Ladislav Jackson reimagines queer visuality, queer memory and queer citizenship in terms of queer spaces. This perspective offers a more complex way to look at material culture than an analysis of separate visual objects, and helps to reclaim the potential of queer iconography. Considering the material nature of queer history, such as paintings, sculptures, photographs, decorations, furnishings, magazines etc., , we can localize queer lives and communities in time and space in order to understand the hierarchies in which the queer lives and queer social networks were trapped. Assessing the spatial conditions for performing queerness in the life and work of actors such as Toyen, Jan Zrzavý, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, Miloš Havel and Ladislav Fuks, Jackson argues that queer spaces reveal other intersections, such as class, gender, education, cultural capital and political activities that impacted these artists’ expression and sociability. Through the perspective of queer spatiality, therefore, material and cultural production becomes determined by queer ethics, not aesthetics, and thus moves beyond patriarchal and white notions of “high art”.