Cathy's Art Diary

Mixed exhibition at the Hayward Gallery featuring work which explore and celebrates gender identity and fluidity. I’d looked forward to this show hoping for a fun but challenging collection of contemporary art however I found quite a lot of the work took itself very seriously and some of the commentaries were fairly impenetrable in their convoluted wordy explanations of the work such as a description of sculptures which “examine the bio-politics behind identity formation.” There were some standout pieces which I’ll describe but there was also a lot of overly self-conscious work. On the whole I thought portrait photographs came out of the show best as they record communities and invite you to engage with them. I liked Peter Hujar’s black and white pictures of his friends in 1970s and 80s   New York, Zanele Muholi’s pictures of the black lesbian and trans gender community in South Africa and Catherine Opie’s pictures which isolate sitters against a brightly coloured...

Interesting exhibition at the Hayward Gallery looking at contemporary artists who have used drag to explore or question gender and identity through self-portraiture. The show took quite a broad definition of drag seeing it as much as dressing up in general not just cross dressing. Cindy Sherman’s series of identity card photos explores aging rather than gender. I did like Michael Journiac’s “24 Hours in the Life of an Ordinary Woman” where he enacted scenes from a typical woman’s day based on a survey from a woman’s magazine. It was lovely to see a couple of Robert Mapplethorpe self-portraits with him in partial drag. However I am going to have my usual moan about video art! There was a bank of screens showing films with headphones. They were popular so you were queuing to get onto them and if you had watched them all you would have been there for over 2 hours! Closed on 14 October 2018. Review Guardian

Fabulous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of found images of people cross dressing.     The work came from the collection of filmmaker and collector Sebastien Lifshitz who has been collecting these images from flea markets junk shops and eBay. They were beautifully grouped into themes.   My favourite images were the anonymous ones such as the first section of images of men dressed as women. These were personal photos so who knows who the people are or why they wanted to record themselves in women’s clothing. Some may be theatrical pictures but many just show a need to dress in this way. Each one has an unknown story behind it. With other groups of pictures we know more about the people. There was a set from a community in Washington DC in which they took turns to host evening where there cross dressed. They are a lovely set of pictures of a group of friends. There was also a nice set of Bambi, a drag artist who had a 30 year career then left to hav...

Interesting exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery of photographs by Catherine Opie of her friends in the gays and trans community. There were some beautiful images such as one entitled “James 1993” but I wanted to be shown happy liberated people at home in their skins and I hoped that was the point but in fact I felt I was seeing quite sad images in some cases. The show played with sterotypes yet in doing so seemed to create new ones.

Lovely exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool looking at the life of April Ashley, one of the first people in the world to undergo gender reassignment surgery. It told the story of her life from her birth in Liverpool as George Jamieson, through her career as a model, the surgery and her life as a campaigner. This was set against a time line of trans gender history from a Roman emperor who was assassinated in 22AD for trying to get sex change surgery through to the present day and in particular the change in the law in 2005 that allowed April Ashley, and others, to have their change of sex recognised with a new birth certificate.