The Bare Decadence of “Bad Girls”
Bad Girls at OCDChinatown. Installation view. Courtesy of OCDChinatown and Jason Mandella.
I walked out of the second-floor gallery tucked away in a Chinatown mall with the fresh conviction that the opposite of the male gaze is not, in fact, the female gaze; its inverse can be much better epitomized by “camp.”
In the group exhibition Bad Girls at OCDChinatown, a 25-inch-tall, black patent leather platform shoe made for two feet anchors the flamingo pink gallery lined with black-and-white photographs of figures on a beach, in a bed, in front of satiny curtains—some elaborately clothed and others nude—each aware of the camera’s presence to varying degrees. The images incarnate a queer longing for the natural, which turns out to be merely an agreed-upon fiction, so we construct a state of nature of our own. In the absence of an origin story and of ancestral archives, queer/trans collective existence is marked by an embrace of the artificial.
Turning the camera on one another gives rise to a gaze that can only be characterized as camp. In Susan Sontag’s seminal essay, “Notes on Camp,” she describes a camp “vision” or “way of looking at things” (filed under, “These notes are for Oscar Wilde”):
Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
Camp is often misaligned with vapidity, consumerism, and kitsch, but anyone who has ever seen Paris Is Burning should be able to tell you that it is, in fact, a mode of survival. “Artifice” is by no means synonymous with “surface.” This is abundantly clear in Bad Girls.
The exhibition composes a way of looking at and experiencing embodied existence as an aesthetic phenomenon, maintaining a critical distance that allows the failed seriousness of everyday tyrannies to lose their patina of control. Silk, sand, skin, sheets, and pleats are all afforded the same tender, playful regard. Artists Sebastian Acero, Fern Cerezo, Jan Anthonio Diaz, Chuy Medina, Jessica Mitrani, Reynaldo Rivera, and Cruz Valdez explore sex, work, the trans nude, surveillance, and motherhood, using queer entanglements as medium or material rather than subject.
“I really wanted to try to create a sort of femininity that dolls and gays traffic in, but it’s not exclusive to them,” said curator Devan Díaz in a discussion with Interview Magazine. Diaz adds that the experience of longing towards femininity is often left out of explorations of femininity. This longing towards, rather than enactment of, a feminine state of being is epitomized in both subject and artist throughout Bad Girls. The title itself evokes the notion of “queer failure” taken up by scholar Jack Halberstam: an embrace of improvisational “low theory” as a means of thinking and creating that makes no attempt to buy into the cultural canon.
The exhibition derives its name from the eponymous Camila Sosa Villada novel, but also brings to mind another text, in subject matter if not in affect: Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. In Whipping Girl, a (much-debated) treatise on transmisogyny, Serano pinpoints the antifeminine sentiment that pervades both the straight and queer communities. She argues for embracing femininity “not in an enchanting, enticing, or supernatural sort of way, but in a tangible, practical way” that understands feminine expression as powerful, as existing on its own—not merely in relief to masculinity.
That being said, the single, two-foot-tall platform heel by Jessica Mitrani that presides over OCDChinatown from atop a lucite platform oozes femininity in its glorious impracticality. The massive shoe à la Vivienne Westwood, with its comically dainty ankle strap, has more in common with a pedestal than an article of clothing, meant to elevate its wearer to the realm of monument rather than facilitate movement, or, god forbid, work. A portrait of model and writer Crystal Renn wearing Zapato Imposible by Ruven Afanador occupies the back right corner of the gallery.
Sebastian Acero, Cruz (2024). Courtesy of OCDChinatown and Jason Mandella.
Sebastian Acero’s photo collage Cruz is magnificently tender in its reverential stillness. Gently curved fingers fold across the stomach, curl softly over the right hip, and lie outstretched on white sheets. Smooth sepia tones sink into a shallow pool of black shadow against a washed-out bed. The collage of Polaroids of Cruz Valdez post-surgery, bearing the composition of an off-kilter cross, deftly dodges the trappings of voyeurism without falling into false modesty. The division of the image into five individual close-up snapshots feels maternal, though not motherly, rather than fetishistic.
Cruz Valdez, Self Portrait (2024). Courtesy of OCDChinatown and Jason Mandella.
Cruz Valdez’s Self Portrait interrupts the serenity that otherwise permeates the gallery. Kneeling, head downturned, the nude figure grasps what appears to be a triangular sheet of metal upright on the ground in front of her, the point angled between her thighs. A dark wave of thick, shiny hair swings forward, obscuring her face. The image is elegantly fierce, reveling in a moment of transformation rather than succumbing to the mundane angst of growing pains.
When I reached the photograph of a mother and son positioned in the center of the back wall, I paused. This photograph is the most explicit nod to Villada’s novel Bad Girls, which begins with a group of trans sex workers finding an abandoned baby in a park and welcoming him into the pink house in which they collectively dwell. As I stood before the image, Lee Edelman’s critique in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive of the impulse to validate queerness by squeezing it into the universal politics of “reproductive futurism” nagged at the corner of my mind. The abstract figure of the child, Edelman claims, represents innocence and the future, while “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”
Jan Antonio Diaz, Mother and Son (2024). Courtesy of OCDChinatown and Jason Mandella.
The prominent placement of the image at first glance suggests that assimilation into the future-focused social order is the ultimate aspiration of queer love. But then my gaze shifts from the child to the mother. Maybe the two figures’ biological relationship is not the point. The child’s body leaning against the mother’s chest echoes the composition of Chuy Medina’s Martine and Dara (Fire Island); the configuration of the mother’s hands gently folded across her baby’s stomach and thighs repeats itself in Valdez’s Self Portrait on the adjacent wall. Perhaps, in its present context, Mother and Son proposes ways of existing together that transcend established social bonds.
Chuy Medina, Martine and Dara (Fire Island) (2023). Courtesy of OCDChinatown and Jason Mandella.
Bad Girls insists on a nowness characterized by—to return to “Notes on Camp”—“the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve,” blissfully rejecting the distant “notional freedom more highly valued than freedom itself” that Edelman identifies as the core of the collective political fantasy. Stranded between an unsalvageable past and a crumbling future, I would rather exist in Bad Girls’ relentless present.
Bad Girls is on view at OCDChinatown from October 23 to December 8, 2024.
