Huh?

Age shapes your identity at least as much as gender and ethnicity.  You can't teach an old dog new tricks, no matter how many treats you throw his way.  All this by way of prefacing my reaction to Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, an exhibition at the New Museum as perplexing as it is fascinating.

Start with Mariah Garnett's "Encounters I May or May Not Have Had with Peter Berlin."  A couple of years ago, a Chelsea gallery resurrected some selfies taken by gay porn's first superstar during his heyday in the late 70s and early 80s.

It's hard to convey the feverishness of the spell cast by Berlin when I spotted him one night under a lamp post in Central Park just as I was coming to grips with my sexuality.  He cocked a sailor hat over his blond bangs, an open vest exposed his smooth, tight chest above white hip hugger pants. The trademark bulge in his laced-up fly was visible at 50 feet.  Berlin got off by being looked at, a hands-off object defined by the queer male gaze.

So what was a female artist doing more than three decades later appropriating him in blurry projections scattered around the room by a glitter ball?

Another WTF reaction awaited me in Liz Collins's "Cave of Secrets," although her carpeting, wall hangings and upholstery did yield prettier pictures than what may be the male equivalent, a basement den in flyover country festooned with guns, mounted animal heads and sports memorabilia.  

A blood red frieze by Vaginal Davis (ha ha) drew me into the adjacent gallery.

 

ektor garcia (no upper case for this artist) worked with a range of materials, from frilly lace to solid iron.  Maybe the medium is his message.

Meanwhile Mickalene Thomas, an African lesbian, channeled Ingres Odalisque in a video grid with a fierce soundtrack by Eartha Kitt.  Her voice struck a chord.  As a child obsessed with Kitt's purr, I used to run around singing "C'est Si Bon" in my own precocious display of gender confusion.  Not cool in the 50s.

Sadie Benning smeared gender boundaries in her blurred rainy day photo series.  

Her vibrant wood cutout paintings aren't as easy to interpret.

Leidy Churchman painted the floor.  Is that a sea creature behind the rocking bench?  

He also transformed Marsden Hartley's French Canadian boxer into a gym bunny, updating and brightening the gay artist's homage to early 20th century masculinity.     

Tuesday Smillie's simple banners gave my brain a brief respite.  To quote Bowie, a gender bending pioneer of my generation, it already had begun "to hurt like a warehouse, with no room to spare."

Stanya Kahn's super earnest cri de coeur about the environment was one of the few works that looked past identity politics: "Internal response/A howling wind from the forest and every mother’s mouth/Rise or be damned.”  

Wu Tsang riffed on "Girl Talk," the tune by jazz legend Betty Carter.

Christina Quarles imbues art tradition with a feminist consciousness.  Her work could hang in MoMA.  

Sable Elyse Smith's wall-size erotic manifesto nearly overwhelmed the delicate mystery of Anicka Yi's plastic-encased pearls and peanuts in the same gallery.

Thanks to a podcast several months ago that described the crowd at Comic Con, I knew what "cosplay" meant when I entered my favorite gallery.  Some people also fetishize dressing up as animals during sex.  Nayland Blake, the show's elder, dials it back just a bit for New Museum visitors.  When he's around, he offers bear hugs in this beribboned outfit.

Blake abandons propriety for this work although that became apparent only after I read the label text. Look carefully at this double booth, mirrored on one side and connected to the other with a couple of phallic size holes.  

These toy figures--all male I'm pretty sure--are literally hanging out on the other side, waiting to do guess what?  No wonder the teddy bear patron has a bag over his head!

I discovered Justin Vivian Bond very late but felt an immediate connection.  We seem to have spent a lot of our teen years listening to the same womyn singing even though we were born a decade apart.

She sketched Karen Graham, an Estee Lauder model.  I took my personality cues from Doris Day. Who was your female role model?

When I picked up the headphones in her installation (which looked a lot like my mother's French Provincial living room in suburban El Paso), I heard Mx. Bond singing "Superstar." It gave me goosebumps, big time.

Loneliness is such a sad affair
And I can hardly wait to be with you again

Bette Midler captures the pathos of the 1969 song (co-written by Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell) even better than Karen Carpenter. 

They could have been referring to the guys who comprised the collage directly opposite. Troy Michie--who's from El Paso, too--assembled body parts from gay porn magazines.  For a brief moment, the exhibit spoke my language.

I had to put my thinking cap back on for the next gallery.  Connie Samaras constructed a photo grid of an isolated RV park outside of Albuquerque.  According to the label, it's populated by lesbians.  Womyn, Cherry Grove has gotta be more fun!

Cribbing from 70s gay porn auteurs Fred Halsted ("El Paso Wrecking Crew"!) and Wakefield Poole ("The Boys in the Sand," recently canonized in HBO's "The Deuce"!),  A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner erected a Cliff Notes Community Action Center for lesbians with glaring spotlights.  Those brooms in the corner look politically incorrect.

Curtis Talwst Santiago must have spent a lot of time beading these masks and headdresses.

The curators gave Harry Dodge's head-scratching sculptures a lot of real estate.

A "pure shit hotdog cake."  Indeed.

I read somewhere that Nancy Brooks Brody rendered the microscopic threads of dresses worn by feminists.  Good to know--otherwise the gender connection of five large abstract panels doesn't make much sense.

Patrick Staff's video meditation on a breast cancer begins with psychedlic images of hair. Transitioning to womyn can be as difficult as beating a disease, with some definite parallels.

Don't miss Geo Wyeth's work, tucked away between two floors.  Random question:  why are Siri and Alexa both female?   Are womyn more comfortable asking other womyn to do things for them?

I couldn't tell if this cool staircase lighting fixture is part of the exhibit or not.

 

"Toxic," a film by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz is projected to movie theater size on the exhibit's upper floor.  It dominates the space, along with an empty stage.  A guard stopped me from shooting video of this smoking drag queen, who is re-enacting an interview with Jean Genet.

Quibble:  when explanations are as critical in connecting an artist's intent to the exhibition's theme as they are in "Trigger," position label text more clearly.  Kudos to Simone Leigh for her comfort in using disparate materials even if the meaning of her creations is difficult to decipher.

Her suspended sculpture looked lethal in close-up.

Hieronymus Bosch may have inspired this steel receptacle.

Mindblowing by Josh Faught and Sondra Perry.

Tschabalala Self wowed me with her large, quilted representations of sexually ambiguous African Americans.  My favorite looked like man spreading, but who knows?

Her more abstract work was just as colorful.