Published: "Inside and Outside of "Queer": Deborah Kass's Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times" article by Art History Faculty Theo. Triandos

Excerpt from the article:

I have an issue with the word and category "queer" because I
think it obfuscates the material differences between men and
women, which are so huge, okay? That said, I might be the
queerest artist I know.
--Deborah Kass, 2010 (1)

Deborah Kass's Daddy I Would Love to Dance (2008; Pl. 15) superimposes the rectilinear format of Frank Stella's concentric square paintings over a vortex of orthogonal lines, connecting the outer edges of the canvas to a vanishing point at center. Combining these formal and spatial motifs, the painting recalls the art critic Rosalind Krauss's suggestion, in "A View of Modernism" (1972), that if Stella's works depict anything, it is the teleological view of history that modernist criticism brings to them: likening the human eye's perception of linear perspective to the critical reception to the past, understood as a sequence of stages, Krauss sees in the illusionistic depth of Stella's concentric squares a reflection of modernist criticism's view that 1960s painting is the outcome and vessel of the entire history of that art's incremental development. (2)

[...]

By pairing an image of men engaged in action with a Pollockian fragment and overlaying these images with a reproduction of the Dance Diagram, Kass's Making Men decodes Warhol's Pop engagement with Abstract Expressionism, suggesting that his nimble presentation of the male role in the foxtrot as a stand-in for, say, Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), posits the latter as a form of gender performativity. While the dripping and slashing that comprise a Pollock appear, as Rosenberg suggests, to index the artist's discovery of his inner-self, those gestures in fact represent the performative citation of external sources, contemporary social and cultural discourses attributing masculinity to activity. Indeed, as Kass's Making Men proposes, if painting in this male sphere offers any sense of self, it is by virtue of the artist's engagement in genderconstituting acts that create and sustain its illusion.

Theo. Triandos is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at UB, specializing in gender and sexuality in 20th century North American art. Triandos’s recent article, “Inside and Outside of Queer: Deborah Kass’s Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times” (2024) is out in Woman’s Art Journal. His book, Gender Deconstruction in North American Art, 1960-1999, will appear with Routledge. Triandos’s other projects explore gender destabilization in the thriller genre of Western cinema, since 1950, and cultural identity formation in the writing of art criticism. Triandos teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in art history, visual culture, history of criticism, and theory. He has spoken at institutions such as the Clark Art Institute, The University of Chicago, The Courtauld, and The Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame.