Nasty Boys
Hyde Park Art Club, Leeds, UK
27-29 Headingley Ln., Headingley, Leeds LS6 1BL
I moved to New York City in 1999 to study Dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Pockets of nightlife were still thriving in spite of Mayor Giuliani’s tightening of regulations, with clubs connecting people in ways that felt more urgent and vital than ever before. Clubs became a place for me to explore my identity, giving me a place to live as myself, dance freely and meet other young gay men in a more authentic and grittier way than an annual Pride parade – the glossiness of which didn’t resonate with me.
Having spent my formative years on the dancefloor, this exhibition was a way for me to acknowledge my queer predecessors who made it possible for me to live freely, safely and explore my identity. It was a moment for me to acknowledge those shoulders I stand on, all these years later.
Upstairs, the images of Lincoln Kirstein, Rudolf Nureyev, Frank O'Hara hung on the walls, in photographs taken by George Platt Lynes who captured queer history before it was even legal to document it. An installation of disco balls and paper lanterns take you from the club to the dorm room — a representation of the two most intimate and formative spaces of my university years.
I call my practice of line drawings Broken Lines. Back in my student years, when I asked my friend Erickatoure Aviance how can you tell if someone is gay (it was still relatively dangerous to approach strangers in those days), without a beat she replied ‘just look for the broken lines, gurl’. Her insinuation that gay men carry their bodies differently to the stiff, stick figure heterosexual American man has always stayed with me – how they sit into their hips, a dropped wrist, the line of their fingers. This interpretation, which is also present in a lot of my performance and video works, plays with this idea of campness and the way the body performs the codes of gesture.
When I started making more visual art and dance-based installations Ericka’s words came back to me. This led me to reducing figures in art works down to their lines, looking at their postures and posings, and noticing how many broken lines there were. I started focusing on works that present the male figure in positions of power or desire, finding the “camp line” in these shows of masculinity and hierarchy.
The line drawings are also dance figures, a reference to dance history, the preservation of old dance works and the original ways of notating those dance pieces.
Nasty Boys was selected for exhibition by Marion Harrison (Leeds Beckett University), Ella Cronk (Yorkshire Sculpture Park) Holly Grange (Leeds Art Gallery) and the team at Hyde Park Art Club — Sarah Roberts, Simon Rix and Jack Simpson.
Performers: Joshua Haigh, Lucas Gill, Joao Maio and Gian Sanghera-Warren
Images: Chris Walton and Josh Hill
While upstairs referenced the icon, downstairs celebrated the subculture. A nod to the darkroom of a club, outlines of bodies and figures were depicted in UV light. I spent a lot of time in darkrooms during my clubbing days – never to participate, but rather to sit and watch, experiencing the scene as a choreographic study, a performance of queer sexuality.
The third exhibition space was in the bathroom. A tribute to Keith Haring, this piece referenced his mural Once Upon A Time, which cover the walls of the bathroom at the LGBT Community Center on West 13th Street in downtown Manhattan. While stylistically different, I see my minimalist line drawings as a continuation of Haring’s lineage.
For the opening event we threw a queer keg party to reclaim something that was never given to us – a right of passage that queer people like me didn’t experience in our university years. During the run, the exhibition was also activated by a series of public events, including an erasure poetry workshop and a figure drawing event.
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