Queerness and queer body practices (cross- dressing, gender-bending) are omnipresent in the artistic practices of the ‘classical’ avant- gardes, as Man Ray’s famous photographs of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy show. Nevertheless, there are still only a few studies on the intersections of queerness, sexual orientation, gender identity and the art of classical modernism(s). When queer sensibility is described as a “creative ‘energy’” (Jack Babuscio) that is fuelled by the knowledge of living in a world of social inequality and is situated contrary to the norm, are sexual orientation and gender identity ontological for the formation of avant- gardes? What role does queerness play for and within classical modernism(s)? And how does this relate to other categories such as race, class, gender and place? Can there be a ‘sexual avant-garde sensibility’? And if so, to what extent is this necessarily linked to sexual orientation?

Program:

Wednesday, 4 December, Marie Jahoda Center for international Gender Studies

6:00pm: Keynote
Hongwei Bao, Marie Jahoda Fellow 2024,
The ‘Cool Kids’: Locating Queerness in Chinese Art

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Thursday, 5 December, Kunstsammlungen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum

09.30am:
Änne Söll: Introduction

10:00am:
Antje Krause-Wahl: Constellations. The Circus as motif and aesthetic form in American queer modernism (1930-1945)

10:30am:
Joe Nickols: Mavo: Queer Anarchy in 1920s Japan

11.00am:
Coffee Break

11.15am:
Susanne Huber: Against Nature or Establishment? Florence Henri, Ruth Bernhard and the Sensual Pleasures of Organic Formalism

11.45am:
Helene Roth: Queering Places: The Portrait Studio and Photo Compositions as Sexual Orientation and Artistic Practice in New York Exile

12.15pm:
Lunch Break

01.30pm:
Jo Ziebritzki: Gazing at Queers or Queering the Gaze: Amrita-Sher Gil’s Nudes and their Reception

2.00pm:
Miriam Althammer: Danced De/Stabilisations: Loheland’s ‘Amazons’ between androgyny and body culture in the Weimar Period

02.30pm:
Jordan Troeller: Redefining Queer Bohemia: A Postpartum Perspective

03.00pm:
Coffee Break

03.15pm:
Nicholas Maniu: Alexander Sacharoff – Dance beyond gender

03.45pm:
Paweł Leszkowicz: A Queerness of Male Nudes in Central-Eastern European Modernism

04.15pm: Jonathan Katz: The Sexuality of American Modernism

04.45 - 17.15pm: Closing Remark

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Only on-site!
Please register for the workshop until the 30th of November via queeravantgarderub.de.

Locations:
4 December: Marie Jahoda Center for international Gender Studies, Universitätsstraße 105, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

5 December: Kunstsammlungen located on the Campus of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, southern forum of the campus (opposite the Audimax, level underneath the University Library), 44801 Bochum

The workshop is organized by Prof. Dr. Änne Söll, Tonia Andresen, M. A. and Christian Wandhoff, M.A., Institute of Art History, Ruhr University Bochum