#gender norms can fuck off and they can be fabulous in their dresses

[those-pink-specs]

So, um, yeah … I finally finished my great long rave about the Klámstrákur video … make of it what you will …

Maybe this is a load of hot garbage, but my starting point was what they’ve said about self-image and toxic masculinity.

But I reckon that if your toxic masculinity shows up in a latex crop-top and corset, there’s probably something interesting going on.

I had a quiet Sunday a couple of weeks ago, so I watched it really, really slowly and overthought the hell out of it.

Sssooo … tl;dr (because the bit after the cut is really long).

What if ..

·         the lighting and colours (and costumes) have consistent meaning, and are part of the storytelling?

·         it’s basically all an attack of angst in a bathroom: an internal power struggle with no clear winner?

·         everyone who appears is part of that person’s own psyche (except Einar, who is a memory)?

 I’m definitely not saying that any of my thoughts are a ‘right’ interpretation, or especially original for that matter. It was just fun to fit all the bits into a nice pattern that makes sense – at least to me.

[Even I’m quite surprised by how much I had to say about this in the end...]

Klámstrákur

The toxic-masculinity-in-a-corset interpretation

*TW: low key for discussion about anxiety and gender angst. Nothing heavy, but, hey, I know how easy they can be to set off at times …*

 So, this thing is Art and it can mean basically anything you want it to.

Most people see a narrative around sex work. The lyrics make it hard to get away from, in fact (though could be a metaphor for queerness – but never mind that). Anyhow, while I agree that sex work is the background, in my overthinky way, I don’t think the song is about that, precisely.

I like to overlay it with the idea that the two voices are the same person, and we’re mostly having a tour through his angst. This works okayish for the song on its own, but it’s much better in the video (or so I think).

Anyhow, we start in the bathroom. The scene is saturated in a deep, velvety red light. (I’m going to talk about lighting a lot.) A choir hums gently in the background. Our lad stumbles in, washes his face and has one of those ‘is that really me?’ moments in the mirror.

He shakes his head, as though trying to dispel bad thoughts – and that’s where we immediately go … and stay.

Bad thoughts.

We get a flash of Einar alone in a theatre. Then three nearly subliminal flashes of Matthías as we see him at the end. Only with his head in hands like this:

(Sorry for the shitty screen shot. Perfect gifs of this bit do exist, just not here.)

This has got to mean something, surely. It’s not there by accident. I pause to mention it now, but I’ll come back to it later…

 00:25 – … on stage…

A curtain brushes aside and we’re on stage. My interpretation is that the stage is his perception of the outside world and/or memory of the recent past.

Why? Because that’s where Einar is – and it’s the only place we see him. Einar is the only ‘outside’ person we see. So he’s being recalled and thought about as an audience. It’s a perfect metaphor for playing a role, as the outside world looks on. As I flippantly said on another post – Einar is the ‘male gaze’ on this rather ambiguous body. (I wrote it as a weird academic joke [‘male gaze’ is a feminist art theory thing], then went … oh wait … what if he is?)

And then … there’s that red light bathing everything in the theatre. I think the red represents (or reinforces) a concept. Possibly desire … for sex, sexuality, submission, androgynous or feminine expression … money, whatever – anything except the accepted norm for a nice cis-het bloke, basically.

We’re just 26 seconds in at this point – and our lad is recalling stripping off and dancing on his pole for Male Gaze Einar. But the recollection is starting to make him feel guilty, ashamed, anxious and sick (or just more so than he already was). He starts to panic, and think he’s dying – as you do. But he’s not really dying: it’s anxiety.

His thoughts start to circle. There’s a nightmarish hospital trolley – that he’s literally chained into (perhaps by the anxiety if we want to really push the metaphor – or at least by those serious-looking girls in catsuits). And then there’s the theatre where he’s dancing like the sinful, slinky mink he accuses himself of being.

The first time we see the trolley (at 0:59), it’s in a blue corridor –the first real change from the red – but as the other three in the scene approach, the trolley swings slowly back into a red corridor. Then, just as we get to the end of the intro … ég sé að deya (1:16)… back onto stage.

Don’t worry – I’m not going through the whole thing this slowly. In fact, for the first verse – where we’re hearing about what a degraded, weak little smut addict he considers himself to be – it’s mostly visual escalation. We cut between him being strapped tighter into the trolley in the red corridor, the stage, and a few shots of Male Gaze Einar starting to look … frisky…

At the end of the verse, it’s crisis time, because we get our first, momentous: Þú ert klámstrákur!!! … and so enters Matthías properly.

He’s mostly lit with blue. He’s wearing some very important pink specs (ahem) and a lab coat. And he is most certainly playing the part of ‘toxic masculinity’ as in internalised shame, guilt, and a self-hating need to conform to society’s expectations of maleness. He’s a part of our pole dancer’s psyche, though. Not someone else shouting at him: just his own desire to be someone else, to be another way. To be in control of himself. To not be gay or gender-bendy or a pole dancer … or whatever.

So I see something implied in the settings and lighting: red scenes, desire and immersion in the klámstrákur lifestyle; blue scenes, self-loathing and a need to control, purify and conform. And it’s a real tussle with … I think … no clear winner.

 01:45 … The spin out

I particularly like the next little bit.

Don’t look now, but between one bellow from Matthías and the next, we’re back on stage. And Einar has got a bit over-excited and is clambering over the seats. As in a dream, the pole has transformed into a chair full of pole dancer, and in one of the most memorable snippets, we get fingers tenderly/sexily making their way down Klemens’s chest.

Let’s enjoy a crappy screen shot of that for no reason at all:

[… oh my …]

And then that fabulous chair spin from the red stage to the blue clinic room (screen shots do not do it justice, so please just replay that bit in your head … I’ll wait …)

… Now how about this?

When he stumbled into the bathroom at the start – he was just starting to get anxious. And that bit with Einar was what set him off. Desire for some stranger. A touch. Something too gay or too … something … for his self-loathing part to handle. He panics, spins out and goes into cold self-hatred (blue clinic) needing to regain control, and to conform and purify.

And from the two minute mark – right through the next bit of verse where he lists all the things that ‘sometimes’ happen – that’s what’s going on. The list maybe be factual, or his fantasies, or angsty exaggeration, or some of each. It doesn’t matter, he seems to think he needs or deserves the treatment he’s getting, and submits to it wholly, like a góður drengur.

But – as I said at the start, that toxic masculinity in control of the situation is dressed a wee bit less masculine than you might expect. I mean – when you think about gender-panicky homophobes IRL, you don’t usually think latex crop-top and corset. But maybe it’s more about domination and control. This is the part of the psyche that seeks and exerts those things – so dominatrix chic may be just the ticket.

Anyhow, he’s bathed in the purity of that blue light, busily head-massaging away the gay, while screaming at himself for being filthy and disgusting.

[This is so fucking camp … why am I like this?]

 02:30 – ambiguity – or who’s the anxious one here anyhow?

From here on, things get really ambiguous and therefore really interesting.

New setting: this is a chamber with a nice pole in it, and windows so the Matthías character (now in a nice fluffy red coat that just screams ‘pimp’) and the serious girls in catsuits can watch at a safe distance.

And our pole-dancing boy is released from captivity for observation. And what happens then?

This …

Followed by this …

This little backward glance. An implied moment of eye contact.

What do you see? Is porn boy anxious? Unsure? Obedient?

Well, maybe.

But I like my queer boys a bit bolshy, so I see defiance. A look that says: ‘Think you can control me? Well game on, bitch.’

Because he really goes for it on the pole after that. Surely that lightning-quick crotch grab at 02:43, when he’s being called ógeðslegur karlmaður is a very clear ‘fuck you’!

[Really though?

Well why not?]

It’s easy to listen to the Eurosonic version and hear the Klemens voice suffer and panic, and just assume that he’s a victim. There’s no real story line to the lyrics, but the Matthías voice gets the last word, so we naturally suppose that our poor little filthy boy is somehow lost, or fighting a losing battle for survival.

But to me, the video evens things up a lot.

One of the reasons that I thought that both voices might be the one person even just in the live versions, was that the name-calling is so over-the top it seems kinda panicky. The video reinforces that – with the shouty voice being so obviously controlling. And the need to control is an anxious need. Internalised homophobia as a fear. So, Mr Shouty in the crop-top is as much an embodiment of anxiety as the filthy boy. Maybe more.

Because if they’re both inside the head of a lad having a panic attack in a bathroom, then it’s Mr Shouty who has caused it. He (Matthías) desperately needs to control his impulses (Klemens), maybe because he’s afraid of what will happen if he doesn’t.

[Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense to someone besides me.]

 Anyhow … back to the action … it’s game on, and the next bit (02:45 to 03:00) is a lot of shouting about filth and a whole lot of arse.

Uhm …

[well … quite …]

The battle pushes to-and-fro until we’re suddenly back here:

 What is this? Opening his pores? Who knows, but it’s a very cool effect. It definitely looks like punishment/purification (so very like opening one’s pores). The light is blue – just as hard and bright as before. No red in sight (there was a lot of red in the observation chamber – such was the power of the filthy boy’s wiggles). So control is seriously asserting itself again.

The struggle is real.

Now, from 3:02 – the really difficult bit – the couch:

The couch is long and low, lit blue and red at opposite ends with a homoerotic / bondage picture partly obscured by curtains. What does it signify?

The messages are really mixed, even just with Mr Shouty. He’s in his pimp coat screaming about his disgust, sometimes lit blue sometimes red – but he’s got filthy boy by the leash now.

So what is it? He hates himself, but he kinda gets off on being a slinky-mink pole dancer? It’s the same mixed message as the clinic outfit: ‘I’m your need to be a normal bloke – but I’m rocking this crop-top and corset look.’

Well … at risk of overdoing it by trying to fit everything together too neatly – what if the couch bits are about balance? Getting over the attack with a little give and take between the warring selves. Or something like that.

In the last minute, the war between clinic and pole is fierce – with interludes of couch.

When we see the couch we also see:

Porn boy’s leash being held, him dancing obediently and wearing more clothes. So less impulsive – under some control. The purifying ‘treatment’ has worked a bit. Pores cleansed.

Control freak still shouting but, as I said, he’s not looking like a dominatrix anymore – more like a pimp. So arguably, he’s secretly enjoying porn boy’s show while calling it filthy and disgusting. I think that’s the point – which I guess means that toxic masculinity also makes one a moralising hypocrite (‘that type: making a scene’ – though that’s not the official translation, sadly!). However, for now he seems comfortable watching – and he’s no longer trying so hard to control his filthy-boy self.

But, of course, the war isn’t over. How could it ever be, for an androgynous pole dancer with internalised homophobia and gender panic?

[Sounds horrible and I don’t recommend it. Just be a happy slinky mink and a cheeky sinful seal, that’s my advice.]

 So lastly …

This whole emotional-breakdown-in-a-bathroom theory would have been greatly assisted if we had even the tiniest throwback to the bathroom right at the end. But we (probably) don’t.

What we have instead, however, is a throw forward from those flashes of Matthías on the couch at 0:24 (I said I’d come back to that!). If I’m even vaguely right, then those flashes show the balance breaking down. The visual is of Matthías’s shouty half of the psyche – head in hands. What’s he feeling?

Our pole-dancing lad is staring at himself in the mirror at that moment, thinking of that excited audience member. His inner control freak, who had been moderately at ease with the dancing, and sitting on his comfy couch, is suddenly overwhelmed by guilt and flickers into breakdown … and it begins where it ends.

So it’s a cycle. Maybe.

Or maybe this is a load of hot garbage.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: Long Live Dusty Whistles’s New Flesh (with no apologies to David Cronenberg)

Dusty Whistles

It amazes me that we still talk about drag as if it is anything but performance art. Yes, there are degrees of drag, which makes it hard to pin down, to make institutional, and there are many, many styles: night club fancy drag, high end theatre grade drag, quick-draw men in dresses/women in suits “rough drag”, and the still alive tradition of “female/male impersonation”, to list only a few.

We understand the performative nature of gender itself, and from that how our daily gender performances can so easily become creators of further performances. The very term drag is in many ways just another descriptor of life itself (“it’s all drag”, as RuPaul famously remarked of so-called gender normative presentation). Why then do we still regulate drag to “entertainment” and not discuss it with the same bookish, hushed, churchy-schooly gaze we apply to more official, more self-declaring forms of performance art? Is it simply because drag shows mostly happen in bars and performance art generally happens in art galleries? Is it simply a class thing? Well, fuck that.

Berlin-based, NYC-born artist Dusty Whistles practices a purpose-driven drag that blends futuristic post-gender, post-human iterations with front line political messaging. In Berlin, where mainstream drag can be boiled down to two show types, Cabaret/Sally Bowles re-castings and Hausfraus in bad wigs low comedy, Whistles is part of a new drag generation that wants to put the pocket knife back in the queen’s purse. Drag is political, and always has been. Sometimes, however, drag culture needs a bit of a tune up. Whistles is here to help.

In a series of monthly events, Whistles and their colleagues take the non-essentialist truth, that gender is a fluid construct, to the front lines of Europe’s current identity crisis. How, Whistles asks, can the innate in-betweeness of drag be a lived example in the promotion of understanding between “born” Europeans and “arrived” Europeans; in particular to the increasingly difficult situations lived by displaced and migrating people who come to Europe seeking asylum?

The connection is so clear – people who live between binary-based gender assumptions and people who live between nationalist identities and those sets of assumptions have a lot in common. To be always both and neither in a world that demands singularity is damned exhausting. Watching Whistles in action, one marvels at the sweet truth of the parallels they present, dissect, and make beautiful.

Dusty Whistles

Dusty Whistles: I’m the child of immigrants in North America; my parents arrived from Venezuela and the island of Madeira to a suburb of New York City, cycling distance to the 7 train in Flushing Queens. My parents gave a shot at a more typical North American lifestyle, and we lived in a nuclear family constellation, that is, till the apartment building which I spent my early childhood in was condemned. In solidarity with an old neighbor my folks refused to move as our building became slowly empty. Memories of my early childhood were composed of running around stairwells and empty flats of a crumbling building, and my father taking down a wall to give our small flat an open floor plan feeling, even though we, my parents, brother sister and I, still all slept in one room. Later we moved in together with 3 generations of my family, in the same town, surrounded by the parking lot for the LIRR train. I feel like these experiences of urban decay and reinvention, as well as collectivism, made for an easy transition into my life in the squats of the LES and in the collective houses of the DIY Punk scene of Brooklyn.

New York City at the time in which I grew up was still full of experimentation and a rich culture of poor people, very much unlike it is today. I started my relationship with the city, being young, out, and gay, and sneaking out of my family’s home in the night to partake in the vibrant club culture of the late 90’s, where difference and wit were celebrated above all. I saw the city I love change into a safe homogenized corporatized and heavily policed playground for the wealthy. Sometime shortly after the increased police powers granted in the wake of September 11th and the Patriot Acts 1 and 2, and the brutality of mass arrests during the Republican National Convention for Bush’s second term, I got the hell out.

RM Vaughan: What was it like to start over in a new country?

I had a limited connection to drag in Berlin, outside of an awareness and admiration of its history in the Polittunte movement, an intersection of drag and politics reaching back to drag’s history as a culture and artistic practice connected to resistance. Back in New York, drag was club kids, and piano bars, and the odd visit to Lucky Cheng’s with tourists.

[After much exploring] I found a community in [Berlin, with encouragement from the legendary drag artist/provocateur Olympia Bukkakis] in which I could interact with a political discourse that was not heavy with the weight of a lecture, a reading circle, a panel discussion, a workshop, or the dry and tired performance of a demonstration. I saw an art form that was interactive, vulnerable, ripe with the potential to experiment and play, and entrenched in a long history of resistance struggle.

It hasn’t stopped since then, contrary to my life and poverty, bouts of homelessness, and working two jobs as a carpenter and cleaner. And though I don’t confuse it for political action, I see it as an important part of my political practice, in the exercise of recreating a commons of sorts, exploring the possibility of collective emotional processing, and at times the fabulous simplicity of agitprop.

Dusty Whistles

Your work conflates the questions of gender identity, and of binaries, with the situation(s) of the dispossessed. To put it plainly, you embody in your performances the intersectionality between being multi-gendered and being multi-national. How did this parallel come to you and how do you continue to grow these representations in your work?

My drag persona is a living network of relation expressed through a point of multiple intersections of lifeforms and experiences. Sometimes I am a cloud and folds of atmosphere, sometimes the process of photosynthesis, or red volcanic earth and a field of orchids, sometimes more human in form but not in expression. It is somehow, also, an extension of what I would consider my spiritual life. Off the stage I am fluid in my gender presentation, often wearing wigs as prosthetics, and make up. The borders between my performance practice and my life are thin, and my life and its experience always bleeds through.  The practice of performance is often for me a space to explore the struggles that I find myself and my community within, not to find answers to my questions, but to explore them in a space of play.

Do dispossessed, multi-national people (I hate the word “refugee”, aren’t we all refugees from something?) come to your performances? What do they say to you?

For starters, we are not all refugees. As a North American I come from a country that creates and feeds the massive global political instability and war that creates the conditions for people to need to flee their homes and lives, not by choice, but for survival. I am not subject to racial oppression and the violence of national borders and immigration policies. Yes, the nation in which I was born failed me, and the construct of nations fail all lifeforms, but there is an implicit privilege in holding certain markers of citizenship because of the currently insurmountable damage of empire and colonialism.

To answer the question, yes, I’m sure some refugees have seen my shows, especially since I participate in Queens Against Borders, a drag performance night which donates all its proceeds to support queer refugee projects and performers, who also participate in the night’s performances. But do they say anything particularly different compared to other audience members? No. My audiences are often queer, unless I’m in the context of a gallery or museum performance… but even then they are quite queer. I seem to do quite emotional performances, people often cry or open up to me afterwards. I guess I’m that emo-polemic queen. But those moments are quite beautiful, and I feel less alone, and the isolation of modern life falls to the wayside, even if just for a while. As always I feel more like a facilitator, or a channel, they are not my performances, we did it together. It is a sacrament of sorts.

Dusty Whistles

Why is it vital to be doing this work here, in Berlin, and now?

I am doing this work here because I live here. I am doing work about, and for the community I live in, particularly for those who are immigrants like me, but also to keep a culture alive that knows no country. It’s very internally focused work, I guess.

The sexual revolution of the west started here. It survived 2 wars, somehow. And the radical and playful culture of the squatters movement and the radical left laid more groundwork… institutions that somehow managed to survive… the few of them that are still left… and give this city its character. I wish I could be more positive about this city, positive that that energy will survive the meaning and culture-destroying mechanisms of late neoliberal capitalism, but I’m not so sure if it will. Cities are slowly becoming a way of life only for the wealthy and Berlin is no exception. I’m not wealthy, neither is my family, and I can envision a time in which I too will be forced to leave if I want to continue living an artful life.

There is a word in German, lebenskünstler (lebenskünstlerinnen in its gender neutral variation). It literally translates to “life artist” and is more often than not used as an insult for someone with a lack of direction. I take it on as a life direction, an archetype to embody, the fool in the tarot. It’s not the easiest of careers, and by no means the most profitable, but it depends on how you find value in your life.

Drag has always been political, always presented and at the same time messed with certainties and shared experience. Where do you see your work in the larger “canon” of drag (with full acknowledgement that drag defeats systems such as canonization … but everything comes from something, yah know?).

I struggle with this. I look at perfect make up, and the standardized and limited range of contemporary popular drag performance, and I do not see myself there. I enjoy it, for what it is, but it’s not something I can do well or find much satisfaction in. The German Polittunte scene, which also somehow still exists but is separate from the international “alternative drag” scene, doesn’t appeal to me in its current practice, and politics.  I see myself take this art form into artistic institutions and also struggle as it bends and twists with more performance art narratives and an audience that doesn’t necessarily understand all of the subtlety that speaks to the queer community I would find in a bar or nightclub. Just the same in nightlife, I struggle to be heard reciting prose and lip syncing to Monteverdi arias over the clamor of “people wanting to have a good time”.

I’m still a young artist, and I guess I have yet to see where I fall into this “canon” or herstory. I know for certain I seek to preserve the connection of this art form to a herstory of resistance and revolt, to find overlaps in a political practice. Drag Queens in revolt at Stonewall, Drag Queens in the front lines of the Gay Liberation Front, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, my New York City sisters, trans and fabulous, STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and FEIRCE, and the queens of ACT UP, and the queens of Queer Fist and Gay Shame, the Radical Faeries and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

I seek to realize drag as a continued pursuit of an ideal that is never reached. An art of struggle, play, and failure, and an absolute rejection of things as they are for how they might be. Isn’t it fabulous?

Your work is giving and open, even, I would say, vulnerability-creating, or creating a safe space for vulnerability. Yet, we live in Germany, where vulnerability is almost a taboo. How do you reach a German audience in this climate, one that over-privileges the false face of “strength”?

Haha! I don’t think i do [reach them]… though there are often a lot of German people in my audiences, they are often Germans who feel comfortable in more multicultural/national communities. Still, i don’t really know how I do it, or if it is even something I can affect. It just is. Like I mentioned before the work moves through me and is realized by us together. I’m always so absolutely grateful for that opportunity. Without each other, we are nothing.

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