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NOTES NEARBY TRISTAN AMOR RABIT

September 2022 – A text by Inez J. Barrer

As much as one desires to read figurations and references into the displayed paintings by Tristan Amor Rabit (TAR), I kindly ask you to resist this modernist habit and look differently. I agree though devotedly, TARs paintings are as content driven as they are material based, in fact they are somewhat sculptural. And as we urge to classify a vague painting into a historically referential category, I cannot not think of Tristan Amor Rabit, as a 21st-century-Revision of a true AbEx-Dandy. However within a feminist art discourse situating some queer artists’ work into the machoist field of abstract expressionism might at firsthand look like a ferocious gesture, I would like to functionalize the category and history of this cis-male-dominated genre in order to think about TARs work in particular instead of classifying these pieces categorically. New York based artist Amy Sillman describes AbEx (Abstract Expressionism) «as ridiculous and vulgar, as an iconology of the phallocracy, as nothing but an empty trophy» that embarrassingly tries to nobilitate intentions and the materialized expressions of male bourgeoise subjectivity. But once AbEx «have been shut down by its own rhetoric», rendered as the white heterosexual mythology that it actually is, it can become tempting again for artists at the gendered margin.* Even though AbEx always had the potential to reflect the politics of the body through a formalist way, for decades long abstract painting was no accessible practice for female and queer subjects. Especially the visual strategies of euroamerican queer struggles have always privileged recognizability and explicit counter-representation before abstract forms. Self-evidently this is a consequence of a crucial history of heteronormative-biopolitical visuality performed since the late 1960s and peaked in the face of the representational crisis threatening queer bodies during the HIV/Aids-Pandemic. However the question Edouard Glissant rises for the colonial subject can validly be applied to queer visual politics: Who is it who can afford opacity?** Following Glissant we might ask whether we might bear to portray queer corporeality in an abstract way?

At the beginning of these notes, I asked you to resist searching for figurations in TARs work. This is because I am trying to suggest a reading of the displayed paintings which is nonreferential. However deeply concerned with the bodily and the act of being and becoming body, the quality of TARs work lays within their ability to refuse to map the complexity of this procedure in a (futuristic) figurative system of notation. Curator and art theorist Lucy Lippard has written an interesting remark which might be helpful here: «I doupt that more pictures of legs, thighs, genetalia, breasts and new positions, no matter how modernistically portrayed, will be as valid to modern experience as this kind of sensuous abstraction. Abstraction is a far more potent vehicle of the unfamiliar than figuration.»***
TAR is not figurating potentialities of being body rather they summon the awkward and unfamiliar experience of contemporary embodiment. Therefore, I attribute to the displayed paintings something what David Getsy called a transgender capacity. According to the Oxford Dictionary a capacity is both an «active force of power» and an «ability to receive and maintain; hold power». Getsy adds that «only when exercised do capacities become fully apparent, and they may lie in wait to be activated.»**** A transgender capacity thus is to be understood as an ability to visualize or bring into experience the gendered body as multiple and mutable in space and time. It can be found in any sort of text, social situation, and cultural object. Basically, in all sites which enable the execution of a transgender hermeneutics. In refusing to project the recognition of figuration into TARs work we allow the paintings to frustrate legibility and to become a text which is difficult to read. Or not meant to be read at all but perceived in its complex beauty. This difficulty, the illegibility which TAR is engaging us with, corresponds back not to the transgender body as a universal form but to transgender embodiment as an interpersonal and cultural experience of unfamiliarity and abstraction. Abstraction is a mode of resistance to visibility and in this case, it is crucial to favour the mode of abstraction over the portrayal of gendered ambiguity and cybernetic embodiment as an imagination. But rather to prosecute the project of imaging transgender corporeality in its constant scrutiny and surveillance.

I’d like to end with a reference to the gracious writer and thinker Susan Sontag. According to her 57 Notes on Camp, the fetishization of abstract images was the dandys’ reaction to mass culture. She says «Camp-Dandyism in the age of mass culture makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object.»***** Thus, the perversion and vulgarity of objects in camp become tempting not only in their vulgar form but in their perverted context of (re-)production as well. Consequently, thinking about embodiment in juxtaposition of campy objecthood, the revised dandy who is hosting this exhibition notoriously succeeds in invoking the perverted production and the vulgar feeling of the bodily, without heroizing or even victimizing a certain bodily formation. The distinctive concern that lies in such an artistic examination is a true gesture of contemporary dandyhood, my dearest Tristan.
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* Sillman, Amy: AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense of AbstractEexpressionism II. In: Artforum (49/10), 2011.
** Glissant Edouard: Poetics of Relation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
*** Lippard, Lucy: Eccentric Abstraction. In: Art International (10/09), 1966, p. 40.
**** Getsy David: Capacity. In: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First Century Transgender Studies (01/01), 2014, p. 47-49.
***** Sontag, Susan: Notes on Camp. In: Against Interpretation. New York: Octagon Books, 1978, p. 290-291.