“Homage: Queer lineages on video”

Including P. Staff’s The Foundation

P. STAFF The Foundation, 2015, video still. Video, 28 min. 20 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council

The exhibition brings together eight moving-image works by contemporary artists who use video and film-based installations to pay tribute to formative figures and overlooked histories. The works upend conventional modes of commemorative image making—such as portraiture, documentary, and monuments—by foregrounding performative interventions, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging. It preferences desiring, melancholic, and reflexive forms of relationality across generations through works that posit Queer forms of kinship.

P. STAFF The Foundation, 2015, Video still

Staff’s The Foundation explores Tom of Finland Foundation. It was established in Los Angeles in 1984 to preserve the vast catalogue of Finnish artist Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen, 1920–1991), who made a considerable impact on masculine representation in post-war culture.

Continuing the thematic significance of anachronistic gestures, formal affinities, and archival adjacencies in reframing relationships between artists and their chosen ancestors, The Foundation holds intergenerational and historic confluences in relation. The film takes its title from Tom of Finland Foundation, set up by Durk Dehner and Tom in 1984 to preserve the artist’s vast catalogue.

TOM OF FINLAND Untitled, 1986, Graphite on paper, 13.00” x 13.25” © 1986 Tom of Finland Foundation

The film combines footage shot at the Foundation’s HQ in Los Angeles, TOM House, with choreographic sequences staged within a specially constructed set that draws on the aesthetics of experimental theatre. This allows Staff to introduce us to a discourse of identity formation that spans time and place and locate it in the context of historically important struggles within the Queer community.

Tom of Finland made a considerable impact on masculine representation, and the film becomes a portrait of this site, as a home to the archive of the artist and Gay icon, as well as the community of people that care for it. Rather than focusing on Tom’s work as a documentary might, in offering a reflection on the communities that it hosts and promotes, Staff’s film works through the social relations that such a place produces. In its exploration of archival material and its caretakers, the film ruminates on the more human aspects of archives and the communities that can be built when such an approach to institutional working is considered.

P. STAFF The Foundation, 2015, Video still

Much like this exhibition itself, the film asks: How is a community formed and constituted? What kinds of communities can a body of work produce? We are invited to think through the performance, construction, and deconstruction of physical attributes and gender identifications.

Artists Dineo Seshee Bopape, Tony Cokes, Carolyn Lazard, Kang Seung Lee, P. Staff, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul challenge the preoccupation with visibility and publicness across the politics of identity and representation, demonstrating instead the potential of anachronistic gestures, formal affinities, and archival adjacencies in reframing relationships between artists and their chosen ancestors. The resulting constellation reveals modes of memorialization–of paying homage–that disturb canonicity and heroization through constant creative reinterpretation.

Lenfest Center for the Arts
Wednesday–Sunday, Noon–6p