"Transformer": Bruce Hainley on the wild side

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Bruce Hainley

"Pop After Pop" assumes that I know what "Pop" is, that I know what "Art" means. I don't.

Take, for example, "Transformer": Aspekte der Travestie," curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann, which ran from mid-March to mid-April 1974 at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, traveled, to Graz and to Bochum, and then, basically, disappeared into a poof of fairy dust. (I've found nothing other than the catalogue to prove the show existed--no ads, no international reviews, although there must have been some local art notices.) Incorporating and inspired by the work of Urs Luthi, Luciano Castelli, Katharina Sieverding, Jurgen Klauke, Werner Alex Meyer, Luigi Ontani, Walter Pfeiffer, Marco, Pierre Molinier, Andrew Sherwood, the Cockettes, Andy Warhol, Brian Eno, Mick Jagger, the New York Dolls, and David Bowie, the show charted a drag zone between the masculine and feminine, a "between" it complicated and allegorized by mixing glam rock into the context of art. The catalogue's uncredited cover photo shows clothes hung on hooks: on the left, jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, a hat, and a pair of cowboy boots sprawled beneath; on the right, a shimmering silk frock, furs, and translucent sling-backs. It looks sexy. Is that the look of Pop?

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While the affect and look of the catalogue owe much to Warhol (his astonishing Moderna Museet book meets early Interview), the title of the show was appropriated, of course, from Lou Reed's second solo album. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Transformer was released at the end of 1972. The album's first single. "Walk on the Wild Side," was a Top 20 hit by Valentine's Day, 1973. Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, 'Iil Joe Dallesandro, and the Sugar Plum Fairy sexed up the air waves (the verse about Candy Darling, who "never lost her head / even when she was giving head," was removed for the US release) around the time the Loud family imploded on television. By the end of the year, the American Psychiatric Association depathologized homosexuality. Hit me with a flower.

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"Transformer" was a key early show for many of the artists--some of whom are still prominent names (Luthi, around whom the exhibition focused; Ontani; and Sieverding, the only woman--or is that "woman"?--included, who made a key early work entitled Transformer, which would provide the name for a show curated by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin in Paris nearly thirty years later). Others--like Dutch artist Marco, a photographer of cool. Scavullo-ish, disco-ready guys in various stages of undress--flared brightly here, and then, to the best of my knowledge, well, who knows? (Maybe he now does spreads for Butt.) The first big show for Pfeiffer, it was the second major exhibition of Molinier's photos, which retained all their negligee eeriness. Pfeiffer presented pictures of a fetching lad named Carlo: In one shot he smiles, his juicy lips and broad nose hypnotizing; in the remaining shots he has transformed himself, quietly soignee, into a silkily groomed glamour-puss, looking like Monica Vitti's little sister. Most intense is when he appears in full makeup but topless, his skinny smooth boyness exuding its natural girl potential. The images proved memorable enough for Pfeiffer to include Carlo pix in his infamous first book. Walter Pfeiffer (1970-1980).

Even more than it was about drag, transvestism, or disrupting gender's biological imperative. "Transformer" can be seen to observe the range of selves that appear in self-portraiture, questioning the self's modes of appearing and disappearing, often simultaneously--and, thus, looking ahead to "Pictures" artists (Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince) and even to identity-based art. Perhaps Sieverding makes this clearest when she states in the catalogue: "The conquest of another sex takes place first in oneself." The '70s weren't called the Me Decade for nothing. "Transformer" tested the transformative potential of looking beyond and between "popular culture" and "art"; it dressed its investigation in the extravagances of the queen and butch, looking beyond and between the masculine and feminine.

To place his show in a tradition. Ammann name-checks an idiosyncratic array of, well, what to call them, cultural exemplars of a transgender aesthetic? from Greek myth to Balzac, Strindberg, Genet, Gore Vidal. Duchamp, and Kafka. What is curious is that there is no mention of Franz Gertsch, Fassbinder, John Waters, Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, or Mario Montez; even stranger, given his interest in the rupture of the popular, there's no mention of Elvis Presley. Some Like It Hot, Liberace, gay rocker Jobriath, or trailblazing autopornographer Peter Berlin.

"Transformer" acknowledges Warhol explicitly (Candy Darling in the poster for Women in Revolt, along with many pictures of Jackie Curtis and some of Holly Woodlawn, glitters among the catalogue's illustrations). Ammann takes Warhol's lead by attempting to deal with Andy's expansion and interrogation of, as well as his indifference to, "art" and its proper parameters--those of the museum (a task doomed to failure). It's not odd that he should turn to Warhol's film work, since it's there where these issues are questioned most thoroughly.