What We Think We Know, What We Think We See

“Indeed, this refusal to adhere to knowable standards extends to every level of her work, and his life, resulting in images that push hard against the borders of what we think we know about gender, race, sexuality, and beauty.”

Del LaGrace Volcano, Jax Revealed, Jackie McConochie, London, 1992. Da Vinci Archival Fiber Gloss Stochastic pigment print, 33×23 in. Courtesy of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and Del LaGrace Volcano.

Changing What We Think We Know, What We Think We See
By Jonathan D. Katz

At the recent opening of Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, perhaps the greatest gathering of the contemporary global art world, a familiar image caught my eye. Not on the wall, but in the postcard racks in the exhibition bookstore, were numerous copies of photos by Del LaGrace Volcano. This ambiguous presentation encapsulates Volcano’s curiously ambiguous career. S/he is at once the maker of some of the best-known images in the contemporary art world, and yet an artist whose work has been too politically charged, too subversive, and frankly, too sexual to garner the official recognition its fame and familiarity should engender. Perhaps the clearest instance of this is that the American-born Volcano, while shown in museums throughout Europe, has never received a New York exhibition. Consequently, the newly founded Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City is presenting a full-scale mid-career retrospective of Volcano’s work spanning 3 decades of photography, opening September 19 and running through November 11, 2012.

In concert with recent developments in queer theory, queer photography has made the performance of gender—and the subversion of that performance—into a cardinal virtue. As an assumption based on what is generally scant visual evidence, the legibility of gender is thus a fragile thing, and photography plays with the ease with which it can go awry, get misread, or become a complex dissimulation. But Volcano’s particular kind of gender subversion is a lie that generates another lie; there is no moment of “reveal,” the climax of the old time drag show where the queen removes her hair and gender is again restabilized. Instead, in Volcano’s work all we get when we get the performance is more performance.

That Del LaGrace Volcano is doubtless the most celebrated transgender photographer in the world helps explain why a rare and curious mixture of ubiquity and official neglect has haunted his career. I suspect that it’s Volcano’s attitude to gender and sexuality, and not his simple status as a transperson, that largely explains the discomfort the work has consistently garnered. As an artist, she is uncomfortable to assimilate at almost every level, not least in the banal regard of nomenclature, for he has continuously refused to frame his trans status as the legible progression from one gender to the other, preferring instead to inaugurate, as my alternating pronouns evidence, a complicated process of the continuous refusal of identity according to accepted standards of gender clarity and knowability. Indeed, this refusal to adhere to knowable standards extends to every level of her work, and his life, resulting in images that push hard against the borders of what we think we know about gender, race, sexuality, and beauty. The work thus puts in play ways of seeing, knowing, and perhaps most importantly, classifying difference that even the most progressive among us still deploy.

The chief strength of this work is its near surrealist playfulness with categories and structures we think we know when we see them. When Volcano photographs a gender indeterminate black model in black face dressed in showy vaudeville garb in a desolately unpeopled all-white arctic landscape, it can come to seem that every visible signifier of identity cancels out every other one: white meets black, blackface meets black, culture meets nature, male meets female. The result is a scene of captivating mystery and unmatched sensual beauty. And this finally, is the key to Volcano’s art, for above all, s/he is the maker of gloriously beautiful photographs, images that, once glimpsed, the mind can’t let go. This, then, is what happens when we work to destroy what we already think we know before we’ve seen it: a world of great and intimate beauty peopled by those unafraid to let themselves be seen forthrightly. If you believe in freedom, this is your utopia and Volcano is a great guide to get you there.

Del LaGrace Volcano, Moj Minstrel Tears, Antarctic Peninsula, 2005. Da Vinci Archival Fiber Gloss Stochastic pigment print, 33×23 in. Courtesy of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and Del LaGrace Volcano.