A Queer Walks into a Data Analyst's Office

The Centraal Museum invited artist Philipp Gufler and me to respond to the data from the baseline assessment of its collection. I am Anne van Lierop, a queer art historian and co-founder of the queer art platform The Pink Cube. The Pink Cube advocates for queer art and culture to have a more prominent place both within and beyond the Dutch museum world. Philipp and I both identify as members of the queer community and were asked to critically examine and question the research findings. The first conclusion we had to draw—one the Centraal Museum’s researchers had already reached—was that the data is binary. In the baseline assessment, the Centraal Museum’s collection is divided into the categories male, female, collective and ‘unknown’. The year of acquisition is also included in the assessment. I cannot speak for the entire community, but as a queer person, you generally do not have much affinity with binary data. The word ‘queer’ was introduced precisely to move away from existing, restrictive definitions. Unfortunately, as human beings we depend on language, but otherwise we might have preferred not to have a word at all and simply made a vague gesture or an indefinable sound to express our identity.

It quickly became clear to us that language should complement the hard data and add nuance. Philipp, who is from Germany and now works in Munich and Amsterdam, emphasized the limitations of the words we use: "A lot has changed over the past twenty years. When I was growing up in a rural, German-speaking area outside the city, words like 'non-binary gender' were not available to me. But even a term like 'non-binary gender' is inherently somewhat limiting, because it creates a new binary between people who are non-binary and those who are not. Yet while gender is, on the one hand, something constructed by culture, it is also something that everyone across the spectrum experiences differently. That is why I think we need to think very carefully about which words we use, and when we use them, we should not forget their limitations."

Every now and then, our use of language is criticized, particularly when we apply contemporary terms to historical subjects. It is often quickly dismissed when, for example, we refer in a historical context to an LGBTQ+ community rather than homosexuality, gender-neutral pronouns, or transgender identities, simply because this kind of language was not in circulation until recently. But even those ‘original’ words have a complex history. The word ‘homosexuality,’ for instance, was used mainly in medical contexts, while ‘Uranism’ was once the common term for homosexuality, introduced by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Before that, the accepted term was ‘sodomy,’ although this was the word used by the church and carried more negative connotations. Language is constantly changing, and I therefore wonder whether I myself would mind if, 100 years from now, historians used a completely different word for how we identify. We can no longer ask the queer people who came before us, but we can at least begin archiving the language we use.

The Centraal Museum also encounters difficult questions when cataloguing its collection. What if an artist does not want to be described as queer at all? A transgender artist may be keeping a very low profile for their own safety, or may simply not consider it relevant to mention. When is it relevant to mention this, and when is it not? Whose interests are you serving: the artist’s, or those of future generations who want to see themselves reflected in archives and history books? And who gets to decide?

Philipp Gufler: "We must not forget that same-sex desire was criminalized by the state for such a long time, and in many countries queer lives are still criminalized. In West Germany, for example, 'Paragraph 175' made sexual acts between men a criminal offense until 1969. This is, of course, why queer archives play such an important and necessary role, but it is also more structural than that. These self-organized queer archives have a completely different way of working and organizing, because they are connected to the personal desires of the people who often run them on a voluntary basis. They truly reflect their personal efforts and their personal biographies. In government institutions, we sometimes feel that history is kept at a distance from us, but I don't think that distance is always useful. I think we should allow personal perspectives on archiving in government or municipal institutions."

Archiving means not only collecting and preserving history, but also documenting and preserving how the archiving was done. Choosing not to archive something is just as deliberate a decision as choosing to archive it, an approach also adopted by the Centraal Museum. The rationale behind such decisions can document all kinds of information that is at least as important to the historical record as the object itself, such as social developments, the personal beliefs of the artist in question, or the donor’s motivation. In short, it is virtually impossible to record that a transgender artist does not wish to be identified as such without mentioning that artist’s transgender identity. An agreement to omit information is still an agreement.

In 2020, Philipp exhibited a specially made quilt alongside work by Dirkje Kuik in the exhibition A Different History According to Dirkje Kuik and Philipp Gufler. The quilt is part of a series about artists, writers, an LGBTQI+ magazine and vanished queer spaces, which Philipp depicts on screen-printed fabrics. It was shown opposite work by writer and graphic artist Dirkje Kuik, an iconic figure in Utrecht’s history. Dirkje had a fascination with history and depicted the city of Utrecht as it looked in the past. Philipp, too, explores the generations that came before us—and, in doing so, the generations that will come after us.

Philipp Gufler: "The quilts I make are not only about queer people from the past. They are really about us, today, and I believe that caring for those who came before us is a very important way of looking and archiving. We need to care for queer people from the past in order to care for queer people in the future. The past is not something far removed from us; it has such a profound influence on how we understand art, but also on how we understand ourselves in the world. And as we reorganize the past, hopefully we are also caring for the people who may gain access to that material in the future."

This, alongside language, is the next key point: taking care. After all, this is where the word ‘curating’ comes from: the Latin ‘curare’, meaning ‘to care for’. Not only in the archives, but also in exhibitions and spaces where the objects will be seen by the public, it is the museum’s responsibility to care for both the objects and their makers. In her book Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, Maura Reilly also notes that the art-historical canon has been under pressure and considered problematic for years, beginning with Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists (1971). Reilly outlines three strategies that can be used to challenge hegemony within the canon and the museum world.

1. Revisionism. This appears to be the strategy used most often so far. In a revisionist approach, the canon is rewritten with the primary aim of including forgotten or hidden figures. ‘Revisioning’, or looking back, is the main method.

2. Area studies. This strategy does not take the existing canon as its basis, but produces new canons. To this end, separate exhibitions are created with a special focus on art by women, artists of color, LGBTQ+ artists, and so on.

3. Relational studies. This strategy often seems to be put forward as an option, but is not yet widely implemented in practice. The relational approach was introduced by cultural scholar Ella Shohat, initially as a remedy for Euro-US-centrism and sexism in university classrooms. In a relational strategy, historical timelines, origins, movements, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and other categories are omitted. A relational approach encompasses “not a monologue of sameness, but a multitude or cacophony of voices speaking simultaneously”.

None of the three strategies is beyond criticism. Revisionism builds on the same canon that has already been found problematic, area studies relegates marginalized groups to a separate ‘corner’ of the museum and may even verge on segregation, while relational studies seem like an ideal scenario that cannot exist without first addressing the current problems. Many museums appear to want to take an initial step towards a balanced collection by introducing quotas into their acquisition policies, a choice that is quickly labelled reverse discrimination. A quota, however, is yet another form of binary data: a hard figure that strips the subject of all nuance.

Philipp Gufler: "I would always be against any kind of quota, because it doesn't really encourage thinking from an intersectional perspective. For example, who has access to the market or to art education? We also need to think about class, race, and disability in order to challenge the canon. And who is allowed to have a universal perspective? And who, once again, is only allowed to have an autobiographical perspective? It is very limiting for artists' practices if we only view their work from an autobiographical perspective."

A ‘diversity grid’ is a wonderful tool for melting down the complexity and murkiness of identity into neat little shapes and slotting them back into rows and columns in Excel. However, that does not mean that taking stock of the collection is not a good place to start. Every museum will be confronted with the facts once it discovers that, over the years, sexism, racism and homophobia have crept into its collection in the form of disproportionate representation. From there, you can take further steps. How will we tell these stories from now on? Which stories are still missing? What kind of language do we use, and why? And who has the authority to make these decisions?

Philipp Gufler: “I created artworks and co-curated exhibitions about the Munich-based artist Rabe perplexum (1956–1996), who gave up their legal name and a binary gender classification in 1982. When I read all the newspaper articles and documentation about them, I was shocked by how much of their work was described in highly personal terms. And I am interested in the personal, but can we also still look at the art? We struggle with these moments of tokenizing, when it seems as though we are now collecting these artists because they are this or that, but that is not the case. It was always the other way around. Many artists were not collected because they were seen solely in terms of their biography rather than as artists.”

This discussion is far from over, and neither Philipp nor I can provide any concrete answers. As a queer art historian, I constantly encounter similar issues: how do you define queer art or a queer artist, how do you distinguish between them, and is it about the person, the art, or both? The indefinable nature of the word ‘queer’ makes it a threat to the established order and preconceived rules. This has always been the case. The disruption of that order has now reached museums. This means there is much to reflect on and discuss, but ultimately, a queer strategy of radical change may be exactly what the museum world needs.

The Centraal Museum’s research group (Laurie Cluitmans, Curator of Contemporary Art; Marte van der Salm, Contemporary Art intern; and Chantal Perlee, Senior Documentation & Research) is deeply grateful to Anne and Phillipp for their open and candid conversation and for this account of it. In our search for greater context and interpretation, we greatly value the opportunity to learn from other perspectives.