How absolute is the conservative vision of gender delineation? Peter Farrugia reviews Milkshake, an art collaboration that explores these questions and more.
It’s a fairly formal photo, and in it you see a naked man standing beside a headless mannequin and a younger woman seated off to one side looking into the distance. They are surrounded by the debris of a life played out in the confines of a darkened room, lit by a moment’s sunlight.
The picture invites a strange intimacy that is only possible when a photograph stops being a simple representation of life and brings a viewer in to explore the carefully-constructed world beyond appearances. Meanwhile, on Paul Street is Alexandra Pace’s contribution to the Milkshake exhibition currently on display at the St James’ Cavalier upper gallery.
This is a cross-section of fascinating art, collected from various national and international artists to address themes of the queer body and the Maltese in a very personal, self-exploratory context. It surveys how same-sex love can be portrayed in art not so much as the meeting between lovers, but as the impact of love on an individual whose relationship with society carries its own baggage.
Milkshake handles this difficult brief with subtlety and sensitivity, allowing an apparently thematic exhibition to breathe through the personalities of its contributors.
One of the first things I noticed was Pierre Portelli’s set of seven china teacups, engraved with epigrams and bon mots lifted from Sappho, Ovid, Marlowe and other queer-conscious writers. Entitled T-Time (redolent of American drag slang where tea means gossip and personal truth) the work claims to “explore the ontology of gay literature”.
How the said exploration can be addressed by a set of dainty teacups with lines from Sarah Waters scratched into the side is anybody’s guess. But it’s a stylish joke, a pretty way to poke fun at the camp paradigm that seems to inform so much of the aesthetic.
Queer art is difficult to define. The exhibition (curated by Lisa Baldacchino) walks a fine line between overt sexuality in its various depictions of the body, and ulterior subversion, alluding to non-normative gender expression and methods of building identity.
A group of serigraphs by Sarah Maria Scicluna captures this exploration of gender, sexuality and sex by layering images of the artist’s partner with textual prompts. Entitled Frammenti Tagħna, it includes one especially successful image in iconic red and blue. The message attached reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando who says: “I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
Glen Calleja and Adrian Gauci present a mural in acrylic, Marija, defined as a “visual meditation of the first mystery of the Rosary” and “a womb”. It’s fun because of the typographic exploration, with text made to resemble Winsor McCay’s sinister Little Nemo adventures.
Also of note is Nadine Noko’s Transfiguring Judas set of paintings on wood, like a fairground hall of mirrors, where each face replicates its neighbour before melting the gender divide. It’s a sophisticated eroticism, suggesting that appearances are not the vain trifles they seem – they change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. Alongside humour, this show is full of tragedy, and Austin Camilleri’s linen and thread Inħobbok, a dinner table runner/lacy wall-hanging, embroidered with text that’s poignant in its reticence, really hammers that home. Even its placement in a dim side room reinforces ideas of a bright life confined to the shadows. It asks to be deciphered even as it refuses to go fully public in its meanings. And as so many of the works make clear, these are real lives and earnest struggles – there’s sorrow even when, at long last, same-sex love stops hiding.
Milkshake is an ongoing project envisaged by Gilbert Calleja, in collaboration with the Malta Gay Rights Movement. It’s presenting an intergenerational, international dialogue between artists and art lovers, committed to the queer creative community and the outreach it needs to affect Maltese society.
Whether this particular exhibition, with its specific curatorial vision, accomplished that breadth of vision is debatable. However, it’s another opportunity for patrons of the arts to experience an alternative side of art-making that remains underexposed and in need of support.