Drag as protest in award-winning doc Queendom

“I just hope people get it and don’t think I’m some sort of propaganda freak,” says Gena Marvin, as they prepare to take their performance art onto the streets of their home town Magadan, an old Soviet gulag.

“I think drag’s always been political,” responds their friend, who is filming the performance for social media. “Totally!” says Gena.

Queendom is an award-winning documentary film from Agniia Galdanova that should be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

Gena is a 22-year-old queer artist who was already using their art to make statements against the homophobic, nationalistic Russian regime.

Seeing the film, just days after a ruling by the Supreme Court of Russia stating that the “international public LGBT movement” – whatever that is – is “extremist,” and effectively outlawing any public LGBT-related activity, adds further context.

As Gena discusses the “exaggerated” nature of drag, they observe how that obviously means it draws attention to itself, and how “all important issues deserve attention” – in this case, the Russian war on Ukraine.

Brought up by their grandparents after their parents died, Gena is abused, physically and verbally, by residents in Magadan – and verbally by their grandfather – before leaving to study in Moscow. There, they joins protests against the war.

A scene where they watch through a car window while travelling through the Russian capital, with scores of police in riot gear heading in the same direction, on foot, is just a single example of many powerful ones.

They create their own costumes, largely from junk and tape, often with a resulting otherworldliness. Indeed, early on, they express how, even as the film was being made, they were still exploring where they fitted in any kind of the boxes/labels that ‘normal’ society tries to impose on everyone.

In today’s Russia, Putin uses the ‘traditional family’ as a distraction from other issues and to maintain the support of ultra-orthodox Christian leaders in the country. It’s no coincidence either that the Supreme Court statement came on the cusp of a presidential election year.

Gena is thrown off their course for “using” the colours of the Russian flag in a protest costume, on the grounds that that “violated federal law”.

The film offers a great appreciation of what performance art can do. Gena disappearing below a raft of bodies clad in plastic tape colours of the Russian flag is incredibly powerful.

In the course of all the harassment and brutality that faces them, Gena maintains dignity.

The film also illustrates the bravery of anti-war protestors in general, facing baton assaults as police claim that arrests are to “stop the spread of COVID-19”.

Galdanova’s film is, at all times, calm – surprisingly so, given what the camera records. It’s no surprise that it’s been seen at a number of film festivals and has already won a number of awards.

With a limited cinema release, it can be streamed via watch.dogwoof.com.

Updated: Queendom will be screening tonight (12 November 2024) on BBC4 at 10pm.

Spring 2022: A poem for a troubled season

Spring 2022

A furious wind screams in across the Baltic,

Winter’s raging farewell that cuts clean to the bone.

Crows scythe through the air, scanning for mussels,

While decaying munitions dream beneath the churning grey

And the Gustloff lies at sleep.

Halyards yammer against poles on the Strand, as the flags,

Wrapped round and round and round,

Cling on for dear life.

Yet blossoms still prick through the eye of the storm,

And a sheen of green can just be seen caressing the skeletal trees.

Two and a half thousand kilometres south east

It is a different storm and a different spring.

There, fire is in flower and blood blossoms across pavements.

A pall of dust hangs over blasted ruins and

Settles on the charred bodies and cars in the graveyard streets.

Once more, the world wonders where the hatred springs from and

How to make it stop.

Seemingly impotent in the face of the tempest,

Fingers cross with the hope that it will blow itself out

So spring can come once more.

Until the seasons turn again.

4 April 2022

Photo: The Baltic at Travemünde, by the author

C+nto – a stunning poetic riff on being a butch dyke

It was arguably a fortuitous coincidence that saw me pick up a copy of C+nto.

Having read a review of Joelle Taylor’s 2021 collection of poems in the Observer in mid-February, just after it had just won the TS Elliot award, less than a week later, I was on Broadway Market in Hackney – my local shopping street for over 30 years, in case you imagine I’m part of the more recent trendification – and, after getting incredibly tense about the lack of mask-wearing in shops, happened to walk past the Broadway Bookshop.

Glancing inside the wedged-open door (good ventilation), I could see that the owner was masked, behind a screen. I felt so absurdly grateful that someone was still taking COVID seriously that I went in, heading straight to the poetry shelves, which are not much more than a metre from the door.

And there was C+nto. So, what else to do but buy a copy? And since February is, in the UK, LGBT+ History Month, it also seemed apt.

It is a simply outstanding collection.

“There is no part of a butch lesbian that is welcome in this world”, says Taylor (pictured above) in her introduction.

“According to the Human Dignity Trust, it is illegal to be a lesbian in almost a quarter of the world’s countries.”

She goes on to cite how Brexit has led to a “nationalist confidence”, with “bigots from both sides emboldened to assault homosexual and trans people.

“The word ‘lesbian’ is synonymous with that hated epithet, ‘TERF’, and, as a community, we spend more time policing each other than protecting.”

Quite. And indeed, I am writing this a few days after reports in the LGBT+ press – and even appearing in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun – that the Russian forces currently waging war on Ukraine have drawn up lists of those to be murdered, and that those lists include known LGBT+ people. For the ‘crime’ of being LGBT+.

Vladimir Putin has form on this – not least in terms of Chechnya, which tells us that his support for genocide against LGBT+ people is not imaginary.

However, in terms of the book itself, let’s start with the title.

“Cunto

– inflection of CUNTARE

(third person singular past historic)

“Cuntare

– (transative) (obselete. literary)

To relate, tell, or recount (a story)”

This is an incredibly powerful selection of verse that centres around conveying a sense of a specifically butch lesbian history; of pubs and clubs now gone; of individual dykes now departed.

Taylor very powerfully explores the idea of having to work out not simply who you are, but how you authentically present to a world that does not, largely, want an authentic you – unless you conform to a hetero normative – and in a horrifying large number of cases, will murder you for daring to present as anything other than that.

And indeed, this also touches on what the very process of having to do all this actually does to the person having to do it.

Her idea of a symbiosis between one’s skin and suits of clothing is stunningly effective. As are her portraits of specific dykes that she has known: in particular, in Valentine, where she introduces us to a black dyke – or ‘stud’; a black, masculine presenting lesbian, according to the glossary.

But more widely, in her conjuring up a fictional lesbian club, Maryville, and an origin myth for butch dykes, she has given voice to a world that most people will not know exists.

Scene Nine is set in a crematorium, where butches file past the open coffin of one of their own, only for the lead butch mourner to find that her deceased loved one is to take her final journey dressed in a “cerise ballroom dress, as though the coffin were the display case for a doll. Her face is battered with makeup. Her hair is hair, but the boi knows that under the wig, the stud has a clean undercut. Her severed strings are arranged carefully around her. The woman in the coffin looks at the woman standing over her. The woman in the coffin looks like a woman.”

It is a short, but utterly tragic and heart breaking and powerful representation of the brutal and dehumanising nature of homophobia, that is so very much more than the sum of its words.

Taylor – predominantly know as a performance poet (there are videos online and QR codes in the book for a couple of her performances) is from Lancashire and there are definite moments when you think of Jeanette Winterson and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

But this is in terms of overlap of experiences – perhaps not least in both having made comments on fundamentalist Christianity.

In ROUND THREE – the body as trespass, Taylor writes of how “... three Pentecostal pastors   hymning holy Nazi insignia   break into your home [God is an atheist who no longer believes in Himself]   they unscrew the lightbulbs slowly  eyes fixed on the unfinished girl sobbing war   on the corduroy settee & whisper   a prayer for you to leave your family”.

Her use – and relish – of language is simply breath taking and astonishingly effective.

Sex, gender and so forth is complex – and as a bisexual who struggles even now, at the age of 59, to use the word ‘woman’ to describe themselves (it just really doesn’t seem to fit and never has), there was a vast amount in this collection that I could directly relate to – not least in terms of the ideas around one’s skin as a suit, and picking the ‘wrong’ one off the hanger.

And if there has ever been a better collective noun for butch dykes than “an insolence of leather jackets”, then I dare you to find it!

But I cannot recommend this enough. It is an absolutely incredible work and, I would suggest, as essential a piece of literature as one might wish to find.

 

Joelle Taylor

 

Broadway Bookshop

America After the Fall is a bona fide must-see

American Gothic, Grant Wood

A couple of weeks ago, booking for the following evening to see America After the Fall at the Royal Academy, I observed to The Other Half that it would be worth the entry fee just to see Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic.

As we discovered 24 hours later,  that was an entirely fair statement. But the rest of this concise exhibition means that its £12 ticket is an even better – if unexpected – bargain. 

Entering the first of just three rooms and turning left, one of the first works you see is Aspiration, a big canvas by Aaron Douglas, painted in 1936.

In the foreground are the manacled hands of slaves, while rising above them are three African American figures holding symbols of education, looking and pointing toward a bright future that’s represented by a conjunction of industry and tower blocks that could be Oz meeting Metropolis.

Aspirations, Aaron Douglas

A really strong piece, it’s key to the exhibition, which it also links to the RA’s other running show on Russian revolutionary art until 1932.

Here is the same hope for a better future; the same harking back to a rosy past and a hagiographic representation of tradition (in both cases, of agriculture) and the future – also in both cases, of industry.

Seeing them both is not obligatory, but doing so certainly benefits the understanding and appreciation of each one. 

Here, in the industrial category, we have work by Charles Sheeler – pristine industrial landscapes that come close to a sort of super-realism, including Classic Landscape from 1931, while Suspended Power (1939) is reminiscent of the some of the Russian industrial photography on display downstairs.

O Louis Guglielmi’s Phoenix from 1935 includes a portrait of Lenin within a landscape that is arguably close to di Chirico in terms of it use of symbols.

Cotton Pickers, Thomas Hart Benton

And indeed, it’s worth remembering that many of the artists shown here were themselves immigrants or first-generation Americans. The influences of European art are clear.

As are the political influences. Peter Blume’s The Eternal City (1934-37) is a savage, Daliesque take on Mussolini, while Philip Guston’s Bombardment (1937) is from the same year and covers the same subject as Picasso’s Guernica.

In terms of the natural landscape, there’s Alexandre Hogue’s Erosion No2 – Mother Earth Laid Bare (1936), which rather overdoes the point and was disappointing after works by Hogue we’d previously seen at the Pompidou in Paris.

Daughters of the Revolution, Grant Wood

Thomas Hart Benton’s pastoral paintings are more interesting – not least because one on display, Cotton Pickers (1945) treads a fine line between the brutal realism of picking cotton and sentiment: personally, I think he just manages to get it right.

But nobody could be in any doubt that Joe Jones’s American Justice (1933), showing the aftermath of a KKK lynching, is intended as anything other than a total damning of such racist murders.

Young Corn, Grant Wood

Yet the revelation here is Grant Wood.

Yes, yes … we all know and recognise American Gothic (1930). And it is a brilliant work that merits time spent looking at it in detail, including up close enough to see the brush work (it needs a clean, mind).

But this one painting has so come to define Wood that few of us – certainly on this side of The Pond – will be aware of his other works. From the stylised, pastoral landscapes such as Young Corn (1931) to the history painting of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931), from his simply brilliant Daughters of the Revolution (1932) to the equally fabulous Death on the Ridge Road (1935) – which seems to nod to comic book art – Wood’s paintings are a major reason to visit this exhibition.

Death on the Ridge Road, Grant Wood

Deceptively simple on many occasions, his use of perspective and angles illustrates the facile nature of such a view.

I haven’t even mentioned the two works by Edward Hopper – and they are no disappointment either.

Indeed, quite the contrary. Hopper was a superb artist. Gas, from 1940, is an absolute star of a painting, with a haunting sense of mystery about it.

But this exhibition – first seen in Paris – offers wonderful opportunities to explore the work of artists we shamefully know little of in Europe.

A friend who saw the exhibition in Paris thought it clunky curated. I do know what they mean, but seeing it in the wake of the Russia exhibition downstairs firms up that curation.

Gas, Edward Hopper

And even if you set aside that, this is worth seeing if only because there are so many good – and a few great – paintings here that it would be criminal to miss the opportunity to see art that rarely (if ever) has left the US before.

We went on a Friday evening and, amazingly, it was not crowded, so we had the time to stand in front of any individual work and enjoy at our leisure.

I’d recommend seeing this and the Russian Revolution exhibition, but if you can only do one, do this – the standard of the actual works on display is, overall, far higher.

* America After the Fall runs until 4 June at the Royal Academy, London.

Not all revolutionary art inspires

Vladimir Lenin in Smolny

Picasso famously declared that “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”.

And that is certainly one of the things that art can do, but if that’s the sort of artistic experience you’re looking for, then don’t look toward the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932.

For this centenary year of the revolution itself, the RA got in quick. And while there is much to recommend a visit, there are also flaws and clunky curation to contend with.

It would help, for instance, if there was some context provided for the events of October 1917: even a meagre note that Czarist Russia was no paradise on Earth would be useful, if only to remind visitors that the revolution did not come out of some sort of vacuum.

Instead, we begin with a room dedicated to visions of Lenin and Stalin – as though the roots of the revolution itself are in the cults of the leaders alone.

The defence of Petrograd

Actually, set aside whatever your political and philosophical views of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union are, and there are some fine paintings here: Issak Brodsky’s Lenin and Demonstration from 1919 is very good: the eyes give you a sense of a powerful and charismatic character, a real human being, in marked contrast to other more iconised portrayals.

It’s light years away from the later ‘socialist realism’. And much better. Indeed, the later, idealised ‘socialist realist’ paintings of agricultural workers are profound only in their blandness.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s painting of Lenin in his coffin (hidden from the world for decades because it was considered so controversial) inhabits the same world as other death paintings. Vladimir Lenin in Smolny, again by Brodsky but this time from 1930, is also excellent with its extraordinary sense of simplicity and lack of pomp.

Space Force Construction

The next room gives us works that seek to make industrialisation and industrial work heroic. It includes some brilliant photography – not least, Arkady Shaiket’s Construction of the Moscow Telegraphic Centre from 1928 – but also paintings that make workers look like robots. That might – or might not – have been deliberate, but it’s what we have in front of us.

One large canvas portrays three women in a cotton mill: not one of them has a facial expression or characteristic that marks her from the others. If this was supposed to convince people of the wonderfulness of the Soviet Union and industry, then it's difficult to see how it would.

There is some Kandinsky here and some Chagall – both of whose work is always worth seeing – and plenty of Malevich (I had enough at the Tate Modern’s 2014 exhibition, frankly, but this was new for the OH), although Landscape With Five Houses (1932) is worth seeing again.

Works like Space Force Construction (1921) by Lyubov Popova make you think positively of Constructivism.

There is an extraordinary design for a worker’s flat that has been recreated here – it still feels modern in the minimalist way that design TV shows love.

Construction of the Moscow Telegraphic Centre

However, it’s slightly surreal to view the displayed figurines in porcelain – revolutionary versions of Royal Doulton shepherdesses. The printed fabrics one does expect – but not these.

A wall in one room displays a series of portraits of cultural giants such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich, who pushed the boundaries of their art forms – yet there is with no real suggestion as to how we should view these in the wider context of the exhibition.

Given some of the mutterings on social media, by the sort of people who declare themselves experts on something without having actually seen it, it’s possible that the curators simply felt too wary of any backlash if they penned something that looked overtly positive, and have left such sections almost blank in terms of explanations. 

We have adverts, food coupons that are designed way beyond the strictly utilitarian and examples of works that celebrate the pre-revolutionary ‘Mother Russia’.

The final room is a disaster: there are some interesting works, but we end up with a logjam of viewers because there is (yet more) film to watch and the only way to see it is from a narrow passageway.

Adjoining this is the almost-final exhibit – a black box where you can sit and watch pictures flash by of people killed by the Soviet regime. Its black boxness seems to invoke the religious nature of Mecca. 

Tatlin's glider

Before this, though, Tatlin’s glider rises above much else on display – perhaps because one can view it without trying to understand or impose onto it anything overtly political. Displayed beautifully, on it’s own and turning gently beneath a dome, it conveys a sense of hope.

The Russian Revolution offered hope to many – including to artists. But the hope died as time passed: as counter-revolution caused war and suffering, and as the regime responded with a clamping-down on creative thinking and anything that might be consider ‘individual’.

The Defence of Petrograd, by Alexander Deineka (1928) is an epic canvas that sees blank-faced men head to the front to defend the new Russia. Above, on a gantry, wounded men return.

Alexander Samokhvalov’s painting of a shot putter has a sense of being extraordinarily modern, though painted in 1933.

The Shot Putter

Much is pure propaganda, but it’s also evidence that propaganda can be good art.

Film footage throughout includes Eisentein’s October. We face the question of whether the Odessa steps is propaganda? Well, yes. But  is it good art too? Absolutely! Just as Leni Riefenstahl’s films are. Will seeing works by such artists ‘convert’ you? That’s up to you and you alone.

Just as you can appreciate great Western religious art without becoming religious, so you can see this exhibition without taking on a specific political view (pro or anti).

However, there’s an extraordinary sense of modernity and vision throughout the exhibition that would make it difficult not to mourn the betrayal of the spirit of the revolution.

It’s a fascinating view – albeit a flawed one. Inevitably, it’s hard to see it through anything other than the prism of one’s own political leanings, popular perception and history books, but if you can manage to push beyond, there are rewards here – as well as things to deeply irritate.

Some of what is on view is poor. But some is very good indeed.

You have until 17 April to decide whether for not you wish to see it.

Royal Academy