Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies

Visual Arts through a Queer Lens (1800-2000)

Sergio Cortesini — 2024-09-26

The contributions collected in this special issue of Whatever shed light on modes and forms of visual representation within twentieth-century Mediterranean artistic practices for the construction of expanded subjectivities in constant metamorphosis.
The essays participate in the construction of an alternative historiography of Italian and Southern European art that acts as a narrative “against the grain” to foster a new area of art historical studies inflected by queer perspectives, complementary to the Anglo-American and North European theoretical and historiographical canons.

The studies published here focus on theories and experiences capable of expressing resilient and inventive forms of subjective identities that are hybrid or dissident from social norms. Authors in this special issue have addressed topics of the body, desire, and eroticism in areas traditionally considered particularly heteronormative and whose narrative strategies of subjectivity outside the norm have been less explored.

Dionysian Fantasies and Queer Subtext in Filippo de Pisis’ Male Nudes

Sara Vitacca — 2024-09-26

The Italian painter Filippo de Pisis (1896-1956) often used references to Dionysians and Arcadian subjects to emphasize the homoerotic connotations associated with the representation of the male body. Sometimes, de Pisis represents a Dionysian male nude immersed in nature, as in Bacchino (1928) or the striking lithographs illustrating Catullo’s Carmi. At other times, the animalistic dimension of the Dionysian world is transposed into the intimacy of the artist’s studio, as in Nudino sulla pelle di tigre (1931). This paper aims to shed new light on the homoerotic and self-reflexive dimension of these Arcadian fantasies the artist elaborated during a lifetime. I will investigate their connection with a well-established homoerotic visual culture that has been widespread since the late 19th century and the way they offered the painter a prolific and safe outlet for representing the eroticized male body in the Italian context of the early 20th century. It will thus be possible to address through an original perspective the queer dimension of de Pisis’ work, still too often overlooked by the artist’s historiography.

“…irresistibly attracted to certain complications”: queering desire and painting in Italian Magic Realism

Filippo Bosco — 2024-09-26

This paper aims at a queer theoretical reading of what the painter Filippo de Pisis called “irresistible complications”, that is subtle deconstruction of heteronormative narratives, in Magic Realism paintings of the 1920s in Italy. Exemplified by rare emergences of the sociological reception of painted subjects concerning desire, the discussion takes into account two male painters, Felice Casorati and Ubaldo Oppi. Their works dedicated to disquieting female, same-sex affection (the typical subject of Le amiche) are analyzed through the lens of queer theory. René Girard’s triangular desire allows to articulate the thematic presence of the male gaze in this representation of sapphism.

Cross-dressing, gender performance and photographs of ghosts

Greta Plaitano — 2024-09-26

Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, scientific practices and phenomena linked to the paranormal world intermingled, influencing the cultural and artistic scenario of the time and showing different studies around spiritism and the role of mediums. In this context, the present contribution analyzes the work of two women, Linda Gazzera and Eva Carrière, and the use of photography within the sessions for the purpose of testifying to their mediumistic powers. The analysis of these two case studies, in which mechanisms of suggestion and illusionism meet, will make it possible to observe the original employment of a symbolic gender disguise aimed at conquering a new space of freedom and social emancipation.

Hiding the Queer Identity in Painting: The case of the Greek painter Diamantis Diamantopoulos

Evaguelia Diamantopoulou — 2024-09-26

Artists are often stereotyped as eccentric individuals with unique personalities and attitudes. Therefore, while in traditionalist Greek society the LGBT community has long experienced oppression or marginalization, homosexual male artists were comparatively more allowed to deviate from social norms. This led Greek homosexual artists to hide their sexual orientation in their social life while expressing it covertly or, in a few cases, explicitly, in their art.

This paper studies the expression of sexual identity in the artworks of the Greek painter, Diamantis Diamantopoulos (1914-1995). In many of his pictures – mostly anthropocentric in subjects, focusing on the male human body – he hinted at his homosexuality more or less covertly. I aim to examine these works in correlation with issues of subjectivity and otherness, in the context of the artist’s lived experiences and social status. My research is based on Erving Goffman’s theory about social roles, and Didier Eribon’s books on sexual and class identity.

Queer Rediscoveries and Appropriations of Francis Picabia in 1970s Italy

Giorgio Di Domenico — 2024-09-26

In an article he published in 1973 in the queer magazine FUORI!, Mario Mieli stated his appreciation for Francis Picabia’s aphorisms. Building on this surprising statement, the paper addresses and contextualises the underground circulation and some queer appropriations of Picabia’s work and writings in 1970s Italy. The publishing history of Picabia’s aphorisms leads to a reconstruction of the gallerist Luciano Anselmino’s collection and commercial activity. Next, the paper focuses on the role that Corrado Levi played in the dissemination, critical reception, and Italian collecting of Picabia, tracing and contextualizing the presence of writings by the artists in Levi’s publications of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Madame Pontormo in leather

Sergio Cortesini — 2024-09-26

The article profiles Corrado Levi – architect, artist, critic, and gay activist – during the 1970s. Levi evolved from revolutionary Marxist convictions in the early 1970s to embracing the liberating and creative potential of alienation in capitalist affluent societies by the end of the decade. The essay examines how Levi utilized examples from art history, including Dadaism and Jacopo Pontormo, to articulate a politics of the image for queer subjects. Through theoretical reflection and the practical experience of sadomasochistic eroticism, Levi contributed to a visual atlas suggesting the existence of queer desires and potentialities in Western art history. By finding expressive similarities between Pontormo’s drawings and Tom of Finland’s leather imagery, Levi challenged the linearity of historicism and the emotional neutrality of formalism and philology. He proposed an “empathetic” and affective historiography capable of capturing the perpetuation of Pathosformeln through time. This historiography retrieves, from an LGBTQ perspective, both the historical lessons of Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft and Achille Bonito Oliva’s notion of “deviant citation.”

Non-normative models: some considerations on the male nude in performance art contexts in Italy (1968-1974)

Francesca Gallo — 2024-09-26

The essay analyzes some examples of the use of the male nude in photographic and performance works made in Italy between 1968 and 1974, starting from the hypothesis that merely departing from the norm – represented by the female nude – is already a noteworthy fact. Although, in some cases, the thematization of the androgyne resorts to the mythological and allegorical filter, the use of the male nude contributes in various ways to shaking gender clichés and traditional heterosexual binarism. What emerges is a potential area of tangency and overlap between the affirmative postures of the homosexual movement and a certain tendency to rethink masculinity, which is also being challenged in parallel by feminism.

Queering Identity: Luigi Ontani’s Camp Tableaux

Anna Mecugni — 2024-09-26

This article contributes to a queer historiography of 1970s Italian art by taking an unprecedented approach to the study of Luigi Ontani’s artistic practice: it investigates the camp qualities and queer subtexts of a group of tableaux vivants that he performed in the early 1970s, either in front of a live audience or for the camera impersonating various iconic male and female characters drawn from high and popular culture. Situating the works in the context of the emergent Italian gay liberation movement, FUORI, this study builds on discussions of camp and kitsch by Susan Sontag and Gillo Dorfles in the mid- to late 1960s, as well as later articulations of gender performativity and queer theory by Judith Butler and others, to show how Ontani’s enactments at once embrace camp – in its citational, ironic, theatrical, incongruous, non-hierarchical character – and posit identity as performative, queer, that is, as unstable, fluid, plural, thus undermining the patriarchal, essentialist, bourgeois model of identity predicated on binary oppositions and postulated as fixed, coherent, and natural.

Andreas Karayan’s pioneering, queer counter-discourse in 20th-century Cypriot art

Antonis Danos — 2024-09-26

The pioneering depiction of male nudes by the Cypriot painter Andreas Karayan (b. 1943) caused quite a stir in the Cypriot art scene, when exhibited from the late 1970s onwards. Using Constantine Cavafy’s poetry as a starting point and recurring reference, Karayan portrays the male nudes as both sexual(ized) subjectivities, as well as, and because of their eroticism, embodiments of social protest and queer subversion. Even more subversive, however, are some other works, from the late 1970s and through the 1980s: images of (fully dressed) young men in public spaces – bus stops, streets, coffee shops – and of sailors and soldiers in seemingly banal conditions (for instance, resting before or after an official parade). Such works, for the first time in Cypriot art, not only brought, literally, into the open, (homo)erotic desire (gazes are exchanged, seeking response, or are directed toward the viewer), but they are also imbued with political irony and critique that interrogate issues, and queerly subvert discourses, of power, desire, and national and other ‘sacred’ symbols of collective identity.