Swimming against the hetero- and homonormative tide

Abstract

This paper reflects on questions of sexuality, gender, and desire by delving into the artistic practice of the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, whose work seeks to transcend the idea of a binary, patriarchal society that is hetero- and cisnormative. In one of his installations, on display from 2004 to 2009 in the Panorama Bar of the club Berghain, two highly ambiguous camera-less Freischwimmer photographs were displayed next to a photograph of a human genital area. It is this interdependence of different image realities that, as a performative strategy in the process of reception, not only entails anticipatory and transformative potentialities, but also allows for a queer reading. Starting from queer art studies and its critique of identity and visibility politics, the overall aim of this paper is to find out to what extent the photo installation intervenes in normative discourses of sexuality, gender, and desire. In the subcultural context of the techno and rave club culture, Tillmans’ radically ambiguous installation becomes highly political, foregrounding a heterotopic playground, in which norms of visibility are negotiated in a way that eludes the hetero- and homonormative modes of representation. While emphasizing the inescapable dimension of context in both art production and its reception and interpretation, this paper argues that by aiming at a constant (re-)contextualization and (re-)combination Tillmans’ curatorial practice favors discontinuities rather than continuities of meaning. This leaves us with the structural ‘unsaturation’ of contexts, and thus the impossibility of final determination.