Sunday Arts Magazine

10 Apr 2022

Myles Russell- Cook Senior Curator Indigenous Art talks about Love – Queer

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Myles Russell- Cook Senior Curator Indigenous Art talks about Love – Queer

Representations of queer love, desire and sensuality throughout history range from coded to overt, and often focus on the body as the site of emotion and sexuality. These works reveal intimacy, create erotic atmospheres, and depict pleasure. The art historical genre of the nude provided the opportunity for artists to explore eroticism in the guise of figurative studies and various narratives, particularly in periods when queer genders and sexualities were demonized. Artists would often use coded signifiers to indicate meaning to viewers ‘in the know’. Intimacy and romantic love appear sometimes in the frame of the work, as in Mary Cockburn Mercer’s Two women, and at other times are conveyed through the artist’s tender view of their subject, as in Agnes Goodsir’s The letter.

With the shift to postmodernism in the late twentieth century, representations of the body were recognized as shaped by various ideologies and politics. Artists including Tracy Moffatt and Brook Andrew invite us to understand the body as a form onto which the viewer imposes their desires and which equally has agency to resist presumptions. Eroticism is communicated through references to sexual practices and subcultures, and through fashion and sculpture that revel in the sensuality of bodies.