To talk about the simple desire, Andr\u00e9s, we talk about Santos. Surely the Museu Nacional d\u2019Art de Catalunya is not the first place to where you would think to celebrate the month of LGTBI<\/a> pride. However, the Department of Activities were not of the same opinion and proposed the possibility of carrying out four guided visits<\/a> which were capable of mobilising queer<\/a><\/em> narratives based on the main works from the museum’s collection. This text summarizes some derivations, some unexpected songs and a set of dissident affections that squatted<\/em> the museum’s rooms on two Tuesdays and two Saturdays of June 2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Obviously, the main question that guided the proposal from the outset\nwas how to develop narratives linked to LGBTI activism from a set of pieces thought\nup, in their original context, for the representation of the contents of the\nOld and the New Testament or the daily life of the Catalan bourgeoisie. And\neven more so, how to do so by keeping an interest in these pieces and not\nlosing their respect from easy positions of confrontation and sacrilege.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer, or rather, the answers, encouraged me to do a juggling\nact. We identified a couple of pieces or authors from which it was really\npossible to make queer narratives emerge without losing or altering their\noriginal intentions or their historical context. Ismael Smith and the\nrepresentation of San Sebasti\u00e1n are the most obvious examples. We could have\nfound some others, such as the portrait of the lesbian writer Colette. But this\nwould have been insufficient and would have given the feeling that there really\nis a solid queer narrative in the museum. Hence the need for a second juggling\nexercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The title of the visits and this text speaks of the possibility of cultivating “ Rebellious<\/em> views”, a concept borrowed from the essay by Alberto Mira<\/a> Rebellious views. Gays and lesbianas in the cinema<\/em> (2008). In this text, the author explains that in his town, and as a young homosexual, he cultivated a rebelliousview with the cinema of Hollywood that allowed him to establish personal ties with fundamentally heterosexual narratives<\/strong>. Mira explicitly speaks of the existence of \u00abcurrents of emotional and erotic sympathy that from the screen spoke to me even if they did it from heterosexual situations\u00bb. And, based on this exercise, he invites all those non-normative and under-represented identities to the dominant narratives so as to install a crack through the cultivation of a deviated and unauthorized and undesirable taste; to establish a rebelliousview that allows one to make elements of personal experience dialogue with distant works at the beginning of the LGTBI experiences, in this case, the pieces of the collection of the Museu Nacional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now I had the title. The next\nexercise was how to develop this strategy in the Museu Nacional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In December of 2018, I attended the University of Barcelona in the\ntalk of researcher \u00c9lisabeth Lebovici, “All things queer, the impact of\nqueer theory in contemporary art practices”, in which she discussed the\nintervention of Zoe Leonard at the Neue Galerie during the Documenta 9 of Kassel\nin 1992. The artist decided to empty part of the nineteenth-century collection\nof this institution to make dialogues of\nimages of female genitals framed right up front in the foreground<\/strong>. In some\nof these images we saw the hands of those bodies stimulating the lips or the\nclitoris. Thus, in the months that the Documenta lasted, it was possible to\ninstall a rebellious views where academic paintings of submissive women talked\nwith feminist empowerment. For Lebovici, this proposal made explicit out how \u00abthe museum is always half empty. Is always half empty of us\u00bb. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Obviously at no stage did it occur to me to ask to empty half the\nmuseum. Neither did I see it necessary to do so because, what was indeed\npossible was to fill the museum of\ndialogues that, for at least four days, allowed a museum to be less empty of us<\/strong>.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n These dialogues took on two specific forms. On the one hand, I was\naccompanied by a small projector to help\na set of visual dialogues to emerge on the pedestals, walls and tiles of the\nmuseum<\/strong>. As if it were a ghostly presence, homosexual, intersexual, lesbian or zero-positive experiences invaded\nthe skin of the museum<\/strong>. On the other hand, given that we started from one\nof us, I decided to invite four friends\nwho are developing projects linked to LGBTI experiences and activism<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Installation of Zoe Leonard at Documenta 9 of Kassel, 1992 (left). Projection at one of the pedestals of the museum where we recuperated other pieces produced by Ismael Smith (right).<\/p>\n\n\n\n If anyone embodied festive pride the most, it was Likorka Fey, drag artist, host and member of the Futuroa collective with whom they organized the Sarao Drag<\/a>, an indispensable party of the city where the dance culture and drag race are recuperated. Likorka Fey presents this event that escapes from some more normative and neoliberal versions such as the famous RuPaul’s Drag Race, to welcome more fluid, more open and, above all, more critical, performance proposals for the genre. The drag artist was invited not only to help us to cultivate this rebellious view, but also to embody the spirit of Ismael Smith.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n And what’s for sure, Smith’s trajectory is most explicitly installed in the queer narratives of the whole collection of the Museu Nacional. The artist has been a problematic figure for the historiography of Catalan art, since his work, unstable, grotesque, transgressive, ambiguous and mutant, never fitted in with a normative way either in the modernist circles, and much less in the Noucentistes<\/em>. Surely for this reason, from the excellent collection that the museum has of the work of the artist, it has been decided to exhibit it in the rooms the Head of Don Quixote or Cervantes<\/a> <\/em> and the head of the Literary figure<\/a><\/em>, two busts that not only represent extreme and extravagant characters, but also can be linked to content of sexual dissidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the case of this green head of\na literary figure which it is believed to represent Aubrey Beardsley, described\nby Oscar Wilde in one of his texts as the man with silver-coloured skin and\ngreen hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These two artists are linked to the\nother reason why Smith’s work has been locked up in the cupboard until\nrelatively recently: the link between artistic contents and a daily routine around\nthe transgressing dandy, of the ambiguity of gender expression and experience\n-explicit in many cases- of homoerotic desires. Thus, on each one of the pedestals\nwhere the tops of the heads are placed, we project those drawings of Smith that\nare part of the museum’s collection, in which the Catalan bourgeoisie is\ntransformed into sweet bejewelled men in heeled shoes, in women with strong and\nAmerican jaws and in figures of clear sexual ambiguity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We also recuperate the portable\nmuseum \u00abCollection, cupboard and figure by Ismael Smith\u00bb that Equipo Palomar\nset up thanks to a grant from the Sala\nd’Art Jove<\/em> in collaboration with the Museu Nacional. Of the multiple\nmaterials that we exhibit in this box-exhibition<\/em>\nwe highlight the facsimiles in the form of a postcard of those drawings of phallus\nand naked men in erection, that Smith had been producing throughout his career\nand that remained hidden in one of several archives of the main collector of\nhis work, Enrique Garc\u00eda-Herraiz. In fact, these drawings of clear homoerotic\nfascination for the masculine genitals had never been exhibited, not even in\nthe major retrospective that the Museu Nacional dedicated to him in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given that the chronicles of the context of Smith, like those of The Catalan people<\/em>, present him as one of the first men who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, would enjoy putting on make-up, the presence in the rooms of Likorka Fey is undoubtedly the most appropriate invocation of the artist we could have. Following the visits of the month of June, the drag artist initiated the tour by interpreting in dialogue with sculptures such as Desolation <\/a><\/em>\u2013Josep Llimona- or Eva<\/a> <\/em>\u2013Enric Claras\u00f3-, the Salom\u00e9<\/em> of Chayanne. Right in the middle of sculptures of women in rest or grieving, Likorka performed that constellation of “salom\u00e9s” at the turn of the century from a homoerotic perspective from the version of Wilde and which Smith echoed, executing this sexuality version overflowing with one myth after the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Likorka Fey interpreting an acoustic version of the Salom\u00e9 <\/em>by Chayanne. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Based on the engraving of Smith belonging to the museum, Joseph<\/a><\/em> in which he could represent his rejection of female sexuality through identification with Joseph, Likorka becomes a zarzuela singer to play “Ay, ba!” in the room around the Orientalism<\/em>, linking the problematic exotic perspectives of the nineteenth century with the current debates around cultural appropriationism<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As if he were Fregoli, Likorka takes\non another identity throughout the visit, and embodies the little angel that\noften accompanies Sant Sebasti\u00e1n close to his ear, making reference to the\nability of the saint to encourage the condemned Christians thanks to this\nangelic presence. The artist sings to us in our ears to accompany a tour that\nconnects the sculpture of Smith that this saint represents and that can currently\nbe found at the Cerdanyola Art Museum with other pieces from the collection\nwhere this iconography appears , such as the Calvary<\/em>; San Sebasti\u00e1n<\/em>\n-Joan Mates-, the Altarpiece of San\nJer\u00f3nimo<\/em>, San Mart\u00edn and San\nSebasti\u00e1n<\/em> -Jaume Ferrer- and the sculptural San Sebasti\u00e1n<\/em> by Andrea Bregno<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we decide to incorporate this\nsequence into the framework of these rebellious visits, it is to track how and at what moment the iconography of this saint is\nlinked to homoerotic looks or sexual ambiguity<\/strong>. In this sense, the\ncollection of the museum allows us to see how the imagery of that apostolic,\nundressed, and even sensual San Sebasti\u00e1n, has not always been a constant in\nthe history of art. This is demonstrated by the pieces belonging to the\ninternational Gothic of Ferrer and Mates where the saint appears dressed\naccording to the courteous or chivalrous fashion of the period, holding in his\nhand the attributes of his martyrdom – the arrows – and, therefore, showing\nhimself closer to his triumph over death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we move towards the Renaissance\nblock of the collection, we will observe in Italy the tendencies in the\nrepresentation of the same iconography and for the same period they already\nacquired other solutions. This is the case of the sculpture of Bregno, in which\nthe saint is already naked, he shows himself to be young and Apollonian with\nblonde curly hair and without any pathetic symbol of suffering due to\nmartyrdom. This piece serves us to display an iconographic constellation and\nobserve, essentially, at the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th a\ngroup of Italian artists such as Antonello da Messina and, above all, Perugino\nand Bronzino, fixed a iconographic typology of the saint that transforms him\ninto a kind of Christian Apollo, as an excuse for artistic revival in the\nrepresentation of the anatomy and of a sensual figure and ambiguous sex. As it\nhas been pointed out more explicitly in relation to San Sebasti\u00e1n de Bronzino\nin 1533, this iconographic commitment would also filter possible contents or\nhomoerotic approaches. Based on this premise, the saint would serve to open up\ntwo new paths to these rebellious visits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Displaying a constellation of images based around the iconography of Saint Sebastian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First of all, the ambiguity in the sexual or gender definition of the saint<\/strong> that\nwas installed above all in the 16th-century plastic arts – we are thinking, for\nexample, in Giorgione’s work – and from the nineteenth century on, it links\nwith another of the best known iconographies of the androgyny: the angels.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n V\u00edctor Ram\u00edrez Tur <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" V\u00edctor Ram\u00edrez Tur To talk about the simple desire, Andr\u00e9s, we talk about Santos. Those afternoons in the Church where you stay imprisoned, perplexed and sucking the wounds from the side of Jesus, or the arrows stuck in Sebastian’s naked body; the wounds are like open mouths, and Genet understood in his day and in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":17657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,1],"tags":[1477,1519],"class_list":["post-17654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collection","category-general","tag-lgtbi","tag-lgtbi-en","author-guest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/cabecera-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4tWCI-4AK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17654"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17659,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17654\/revisions\/17659"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Those afternoons in the Church where you stay imprisoned, perplexed
and sucking the wounds from the side of Jesus,
or the arrows stuck in Sebastian’s naked body;
the wounds are like open mouths, and Genet understood
in his day and in our imagination we associate happiness
with that vision of Pain and Joy.
Pepe Espali\u00fa, \u00abBook of Andr\u00e9ss. A tale from yesterday\u00bb<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nQuite a challenge: how could we establish a dialogue with the museum’s works from an LGBTI viewpoint?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Where does the title Rebellious views<\/em> come from?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How to incorporate LGHTI narratives in the collections of the Museu Nacional<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fig-1-1024x810.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/li>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fig-2-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\nLikorka Fey and Ismael Smith, a transgressive artist<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fig-3.-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fig-4-225x300.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nLikorka Fey and the representation of Saint Sebastian<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fig-5-768x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/li>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.museunacional.cat\/wp-content\/uploads\/Fig-6-768x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n