Heart Flora: A Response to Karen Asher’s “Class”

Content Warning: This piece contains discussion of transphobia.

Sheldon and I had crossed the threshold from dating to boyfriends a couple weeks before our Winnipeg excursion. Leaving town together felt like a tacit agreement about our relationship: there was something about us being there together, about pulling him into a slow-dance in a gallery, that produced a queer kind of joy. Him, standing on my feet. Me, shuffling around the gallery in the pink glow of a cursive neon sign flashing from “class” to “classy”. It’s very rare for me to enter a gallery and feel the effects of an artwork so immediately, but the budding joy and hypnotic rhythm of Karen Asher’s video work Class was something I was happy to be unprepared for.

I walked into Plug In ICA looking for a Ryan Trecartin show, and just as the gallery employee told me that it was “broken,” I heard the opening chords of  Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” drifting out of the front gallery. I was visiting Winnipeg for a weekend with a new love, and in the wake of that fuzzy romance, the kind that makes all experiences blur at the edges, the sweetness of a teenage dream was enough to move me through the double doors. We entered a hazy hidden basement, furnished with a checkerboard floor, a disco ball and the remains of what looked like a fantastic party.

The first image offered by the video was a person wearing a strap-on being embraced from behind by another, swaying gently to the dulcet croon of Hope Sandoval. It is the kind of image I love: equal parts crass and tender, earnest and satirical. It is the kind of image that offers a reminder of the inherent absurdity of love and sex while managing to evade the fear that levity cancels out seriousness. I was struck by the effortlessness of the piece and the comfort with which it slid in and out of excitement, melancholy, moving and still images, choreographed and improvised movement. It seemed to characterize an excitement about ambiguity in stark contrast to a traditional understanding of photography and video as strictly evidentiary.

At more than 90 minutes in length, it would be easy to call Class an epic, but I’m not sure the grandiosity of that designation fits. The space that this work takes up and the unfurling of its fragments are an experiment in the joys of fuzziness and blurring and how much space is required for that kind of exploration. Queer people often suffer a call for clarity; ‘what is your gender?’, ‘how could you do that with another guy?’, ‘why are you so mad?’, ‘does that actually feel good?’, ‘why are you so obsessed with sexuality?’ Along with the fatigue of these questions, there is sometimes a real inability to formulate a convenient response for people who have decided that something about you begs clarification, and that they are deserving of that clarity. What this video makes space for are the kinds of joy that are pushed out by the labour it sometimes takes to address these demands for clarity and the perceived ambiguity of queer bodies, queer lives, and queer ways of understanding the world. 

Asher’s blurry fragments awaken in me the recognition of a type of emotional malnourishment that eats away the flora of one’s heart. When I think about demands for clarity and the kind of translation that some people have to do, my mind inevitably strays to the things, the poetry, the observations that are lost to the time it takes to make that kind of cultural conversion. To deal with that sensational loss, I sat with the images presented—a spool of silver tinsel stretched across the face of a body in fishnets, billowing in an imagined breeze; three people spooning on the floor of a cherry-red backdrop until the stillness of their sleep breaks into the quake of giggles and laughter; two people pressing themselves together to pop a pink balloon lodged between their chests; a glam-masked leader guiding a group through an improvised dance routine.

I can’t make any claims about the queerness of anyone in Asher’s video or Asher herself, but I felt drawn to the queerness of the work itself. A week before Sheldon and I went to Winnipeg, Chasten and Pete Buttigieg had been the subjects of what is, to me, one of the squarest queer images of all time, posed on the cover of Time magazine, projecting what Greta LaFleur described as “Heterosexuality Without Women.” LaFleur notes that Chasten and Pete, in the bright, blinding whiteness and normalcy of the image, are inhabiting the stability, power, and homogeny that has been the face of politics for centuries. This image is saying ‘business as usual’ and attempting to project a familiar and legible idea of what a ‘first family’ could be, with one small exception. In this attempt to minimize their queerness, the image represents a concession to the scrutiny of queer lives. It is a way for the most privileged queer bodies to become visible through invisibility (or invisible through visibility?). In effect, to pass without needing to pass: the very definition of homonormativity. 

During my time in Asher’s installation, I was reminded of the violence of photography and the way it has been used as a tool for the medical pathology and authoritative scrutiny of a wide range of queer bodies, in particular, the queer bodies that are targeted at exponentially higher rates than my own white, cis, male body. In one of the most unsettling scenes in Sebastián Lelio’s film Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), the main character, a trans woman named Marina played by Daniela Vega, is subjected to an intrusive, dehumanizing, and completely immoral physical examination by two police officers who photograph her naked body when questioned about the death of her older cis lover. Though this example is drawn from a fictional narrative, the tendency for photography, film, and video to be used as a way to simultaneously document the perceived ambiguity of some queer bodies and mark them as deviant and sub-human is a well-established practice.

I would never want to downplay the importance of certain kinds of visibility for queer bodies and lives, but the insistence on narratives of strife and suffering can be their own form of violence, especially when the intended political audience of an image is meant to be broader than the people who are being represented. In her book I’m Afraid of Men, Vivek Shraya reflects on the fatigue of encountering news reports of violence against gender non-conforming people and radicalized queer people, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and sexual assault:

As important as it is to make these incidents visible by reporting them, sensationalizing and digesting these stories is also a form of social control, a reminder that I need to be afraid and to try to be as invisible as possible.

The fatigue caused by these news reports is intensified by the emergence of fictional representations made for and by a primarily straight, cis, white audience. The intentionality of construction makes movies like The Danish Girl and Brokeback Mountain all the more stressful when this high-drama Oscar bait calls for the eternal sacrifice of queer joy, happiness, and life. Queer characters are required to die and suffer so that a predominantly straight audience can learn a valuable lesson about ‘tolerance’. 

While lounging on the black leather couch before a mountain of black muppet-skin pillows, another viewer entered the gallery, and I was struck by the unfamiliar urge to talk to a stranger. She asked if it was alright to take a few photos of the installation with me in it, and I did my best to play the part of ‘viewer’. We talked about the piece and the attitude it projected. She said it reminded her of a slumber party, and I agreed enthusiastically. Something that had felt so familiar about the work was the memory of middle school parties where groups of young women and gays would choreograph dance routines to the Spice Girls, S Club 7, and J-Lo. I remember loving this mix of work and play, the way we focused on small details and laughed when we fucked up. Together she and I created a new genre for Class, dubbing  it “slumber party art.” 

Asher’s vision of nightlife is not the din of a dark nightclub filled with fit, cis-male bodies, another trope that dominates the landscape of queer images by artists like Wolfgang Tillmans and publications like BUTT, but it’s also not the asphyxiated, anti-expression of Time magazine. It is a dance that delights in the ever-present need for time to stretch out, for mistakes to be made, for room to move, and space to think. I was once told by a friend that it is more productive to create a new reality than to oppose a hegemonic system, and I have always wondered why you can’t do both at the same time. What crystallized for me during my time in Class was the possibility of doing just that: of seeing bodies together, in joy and ambiguity.

I would like to thank Jaye Kovach for doing sensitivity reading for this piece. 

Nic Wilson is an artist and writer living and working on Treaty Four land in Regina, SK. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Regina where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow and he is the current Administrative Coordinator of Neutral Ground Artist-Run Centre. He has shown work across Canada and been an artist in residence on the island of Hrísey, Iceland. He recently published his first chapbook of very short essays called Still Life With Dying Flowers. 

1.  Greta LaFleur, “Heterosexuality Without Women,” Blog//Los Angeles Review of Books, May 20, 2019, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/heterosexuality-without-women/?fbclid=IwAR29EtuT1GlTfx1XVPZA8kqYYlHiUvdjXCNd6Ws9ujXgQDH3gwOg6hXBfHA.
2.  Vivek Shraya, I’m Afraid of Men (Toronto: Penguin, 2018), 3.

This article is published in issue 36.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue