"Transformer": Bruce Hainley on the wild side

"Pop After Pop" assumes that I know what "Pop" is, that I know what "Art" means. I don't.

Take, for example, "Transformer": Aspekte der Travestie," curated through Jean-Christophe Ammann, which ran from mid-March to mid-April 1974 at the Kunstmuseum Luzern traveled, to Graz and to Bochum and then, basically, disappeared into a poof of fairy dust. (I've base nothing other than the catalogue to ascertain the show existed--no ads, no international reviews, although there must have been a certain number of local art notices.) Incorporating and inspired through the work of Urs Luthi, Luciano Castelli, Katharina Sieverding, Jurgen Klauke, Werner Alex Meyer Luigi Ontani, Walter Pfeiffer, Marco, Pierre Molinier, Andrew Sherwood, the Cockette Andy Warhol, Brian Eno, Mick Jagger, the of recent origin York Dolls, and David Bowie, the present to view charted a drag zone between the masculine and feminine, a "between" it complicated and allegorized by means of mixing glam rock into the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of art. The catalogue's uncredited overspread photo shows clothes hung upon hooks: on the left, jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, a hat, and a pair of cowboy gains sprawled beneath; on the right, a shimmering silk frock fur and translucent sling-backs. It direct the eyes sexy. Is that the direct the eye of Pop?

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While the affect and direct the eye of the catalogue owe plenteous to Warhol (his astonishing Moderna Museet volume meets early Interview), the title of the display was appropriated, of course, from Lou Reed's next to the first solo album. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson Transformer was released at the extreme point of 1972. The album's first single. "Walk upon the Wild Side," was a Top 20 hit by the agency of Valentine's Day, 1973. Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, 'Iil Joe Dallesandro, and the Sugar fruit of the plum-tree Fairy sexed up the air waves (the line of poetry about Candy Darling, who "never not to be found her head / even when she was giving head," was remov for the US release) around the time the high-sounding family imploded on television. by dint of the end of the year, the American Psychiatric Association depathologized homosexuality. Hit me with a flower.

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"Transformer" was a lock opener early show for many of the artists--some of whom are still prominent names (Luthi, around whom the exhibition focused; Ontani; and Sieverding, the alone woman--or is that "woman"?--included, who made a lock opener early work entitled Transformer, which would provide the name for a present to view curated by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin in Paris nearly thirty years later). Others--like Dutch artist Marco, a photographer of somewhat cold Scavullo-ish, disco-ready guys in various stages of undress--flared brightly here, and then, to the best of my knowledge, well, who knows? (Maybe he now does spreads for Butt) The first big exhibit for Pfeiffer, it was the next to the first major exhibition of Molinier's photos, which retained all their negligee eeriness. Pfeiffer at handed pictures of a fetching lad named Carlo: In individual shot he smiles, his juicy lips and broad nose hypnotizing; in the remaining discharges he has transformed himself, quietly soignee, into a silkily valeted glamour-puss, looking like Monica Vitti's little sister. greatest in quantity intense is when he appears in replete makeup but topless, his skinny plain boyness exuding its natural girl potential. The images prov memorable enough for Pfeiffer to include Carlo pix in his infamous first work Walter Pfeiffer (1970-1980).

smooth more than it was about drag, transvestism, or disrupting gender's biological imperative. "Transformer" can be seen to eye the range of selves that appear in self-portraiture, questioning the self's methods of appearing and disappearing, repeatedly simultaneously--and, thus, looking ahead to "Pictures" artists (Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince) and flat to identity-based art. Perhaps Sieverding makes this clearest when she states in the catalogue: "The mastery of another sex takes place first in oneself" The '70 weren't called the Me Decade for nothing. "Transformer" proofed the transformative potential of looking beyond and between "popular culture" and "art"; it make straighted its investigation in the extravagances of the queen and butch looking beyond and between the masculine and feminine.

To place his exhibit in a tradition. Ammann name-checks an idiosyncratic array of well, what to call them, cultural exemplars of a transgender aesthetic? from of greece myth to Balzac, Strindberg, Genet Gore Vidal. Duchamp, and Kafka. What is curious is that there is no mention of Franz Gertsch Fassbinder, John Waters, Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, or Mario Montez; level stranger, given his interest in the fracture of the popular, there's no mention of Elvis Presley more [i]or[/i] less Like It Hot, Liberace, gay rocker Jobriath, or trailblazing autopornographer Peter Berlin.

"Transformer" acknowledges Warhol explicitly (Candy Darling in the [i]affiche[/i] for Women in Revolt, along with many pictures of Jackie Curtis and more [i]or[/i] less of Holly Woodlawn, glitters among the catalogue's illustrations). Ammann takes Warhol's lead by the agency of attempting to deal with Andy's expansion and interrogation of as well as his indifference to, "art" and its specific parameters--those of the museum (a task doomed to failure). It's not not divisible by 2 that he should turn to Warhol's film work, since it's there where these issues are questioned greatest in quantity thoroughly.