#fag face

Belonging: Alas, A Lack.  (Queer Interventions in Museum Spaces)

This semester I was able to take a 12-day working-vacation after being accepted to present on my thesis research at the INSEP - Institutional Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics 2018 Sexual Revolutions and Sexual Politics conference in Ghent, Belgium. 
I spent most of my time on this first visit to Europe in Portugal, with a layover long enough in Amsterdam to visit the Stedelijk Museum.  From January to the end of this semester, I’ve walked the halls of the AGO, the Stedelijk Museum, the MAAT (museum of art, architecture and technology) Lisbon, the Gulbenkian Museum Lisbon, and other smaller galleries in Toronto, constantly seeking out the political, the queer, the difficulties. After visiting the spaces that I did, I was left frustrated with the lack of overtly political and paradigm-smashing work at the AGO (outside of the now-closed Canadian contemporary exhibit, or the hall now dedicated to Annie Pootoogook), leading me to question how and whether queer and/or political artists, artworks, and ontologies have any (permanent) place within the walls of the AGO. 

 Nam June Paik’s ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAY at the MAAT Lisbon opened with a Zach Blas’ work in Queer technologies. 

The above tableau offer’s Blas’ approaches to the ways in which technological interventions in and around the queer body serves to uproot understandings of biological essentialism, identity, scientific advancement, and modes of surveillance.

Most strikingly for me, Blas’ work in Facial Weaponization Suite - aimed at challenging digitization facial recognition softwares. This video in particular works with the Fag Face, a collective work and amalgamation of many queer/gay faces gleaned from biometric facial identification technologies.  the fag face is at once an amalgamation of many faces as it is a representation of using the technologies of securitization and social order to actually subvert them and render them useless (the Fag Face can no longer be recognized through the technology that was used to build it).  

Here, Blas works in “displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evident, assemblages allow us to attune to intensities, emotions, energies, affectivity’s, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities” (Puar p.128) If we read Blas’ Fag Face as a queer assemblage, the Fag Face  (which he might understand to operate very much like the SoftQueerBody:  Multitude, Swarm, Virus, or Pack, using the words in his also-featured book Gay Bombs). The Fag Face is a collective iteration of abjection which intervenes with the subjectivising power of the technological regulatory systems.

What is produced as abject in the process of bodily materialization- read as what does not belong- serves at once to be the foil in which normative bodies are produced and re-produced against. In writing the abject, Kristeva writes “disturbs identity, system, order” (ibid). As such, the abject serves as a foil while also inevitably fleshing out its own space - one of rupture, collective explosion, the sticky goo of thousands of faces rendered unintelligible to normative society. Renedered impossible to detect or surveil. Rendered a threat.

Gay Bombs were an actual US-made pheromone based theoretical chemical warfare bomb aaimed to make enemy soldiers "sexually irresistible" to each other…. released in 2005 Berkeley’s Sunshine Project (The Guardian, BBC News). These are the foundation of Blas’ instructional radical queer interventions in tech.  In Queer Assemblages. Puar cautions that “ we must [not] engage in the practice of excavating the queer terrorist or queering the terrorist” understanding instead that “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist. The terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance, deformity” (Puar p.127)

As such, a reading of the queer body as one able to destabilize that state and/or regulatory technologies is insufficient. The logics of surveillance and subjectification instead always employ queerness in the regulation of the state. For this reason, I choose instead to mobilize Puar’s understanding of surveillance as “as not only responsive and thus repressive, but also as pre-emptive and thus productive. And many of these forms of surveillance appear in neo-liberal models of security, model-minority racialization, proper modes of masculine and feminine gender conformity, educational mandates, and patriotic citizenship.” (interview). Facial Weaponization Suite (not the tableau featured at the MAAT, however) also features a conglomerate of biometric facial data gathered from women wearing burqas as a response to the ban on religious wear in France - a cutting into the system that understands burqas as a threat by creating a collective face that would, in turn, have the power to throw their system. Similarly, Blas’ creation of a conglomerate biometric face of black and racialized men signals the ways that racist security technologies often fail to recognize the faces of people of colour all together.  In reading Blas’ work through Puar’s understanding of surveillance technologies - productive surveillance is not undone by queerness alone, however, the mobilization in Blas’ work might be understood as weaponized embodied (or at least faced) assemblage of the abject forces and faces of queerness that then serve to not break, but work around technologies of surveillance.

Parikka points out that “from a societal point of view, you need a face, an address, and a net password to exist. . . . Subjectifcation works through assigning faces to otherwise anonymous preindividual flows.” ( Blas, p.51)  The Fag Face is at once a part of the mobilization of the  SoftQueerBody. A fake face can individualize the multiplicity of theSoftQueerBody to allow for unhindered movements throughout the grids of capital.”

The Fag Face can thus be understood as an abject disavowal to the techonogies of the state.

some of the questions that have come up for me as i put this piece in conversation with the AGO:  Are artistic interventions in technology useful? Do they actually serve to disrupt the realm of either art or technology? What is the role of cisgender/white artists in publicising and politicizing messages about terrorism, racism, gender, identity or marginalization outside of their own experiences? Where is the queer representation at the AGO? In the AGO’s online collection? Where is the black and trans and POC presence at the AGO? Are they just rejecting and usurping us all - rejecting technologies of surveillance? Why is Warhol still a celebrated acquisition, like really?    Why are queer/trans/black/ POC artists only ever featured in temporary exhibits? Why does the AGO’s one exhibition dedicated to tech STILL feature classical art? Why did I have to go to Amsterdam to see work by General Idea? Why did I search over 70 queer woman artists in the online collection to find one?