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16/11/2007

Dear Cockettes

UKS galleri, Oslo

Curated by Ida Ekblad & Anders Nordby

“The Cockettes are the double reverse of Gay Liberation… San Francisco’s most outrageous freaks…practicing sexual role confusion out of a third-hand trunk of glitter, feathers, food stamps, and funk in wacked-out musical parodies - their usual style being stoned Busby Berkeley emerging from Kubla Khan’s tent… insanity becomes reality -fantasy becomes truth.”
Village Voice

“Their productions were transvestite-glitter-fairie-theatre masques. Transsexual dressing is a gay contribution to the realization that we’re not a hundred percent masculine or feminin, but a mixture of hormones – and not being afraid of that natural self wich the hormones dictate. The Cockettes brought out into to the street what was in the closet, in terms of theatric dress and imaginative theatre.”
Allen Ginsberg

Dear Cockettes takes as its starting point, the legendary performance group The Cockettes who derived from the Haight Ashbury hippie community and were active in San Fransisco from 1969 to 1972, (where parts of the group reformed themselves into a group called The Angels of Light.) With their flamboyant and psychedelic performances, unpredictability and energy, The Cockettes became a buzz in art and theater circles. Their rich visual material, bohemian lifestyle and mix of genres like art, theater, music, cabaret, performance and drag, have inspired artists, musicians and designers, like Mike Kelley, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Truman Capote, Alice Cooper, Antony and the Johnsons, Marc Jacobs, Sonic Youth and Allen Ginsberg -who performed with the group.

The curators have assembled an extensive collection of unique material relating to The Cockettes’ work, such as original vintage posters, photographic prints, scripts, newspaper articles, artefacts and paraphernalia presented in the form of a “Wunderkammer”. To further enable spectators a rare opportunity to learn about The Cockettes’ life and art, there will be screenings of various films about or concerning The Cockettes, such as the rarely seen Pickup’s Tricks (1971) by Gregory Pickup, a beat documentary where we are following The Cockettes and their founder Hibiscus through a crucifixion and resurrection culminating in a golden shower as a decadent celebration of life. Articulating the destiny of numerable members of The Cockettes, the film Song from an Angel (1988) by David Weismann, is a beautiful portrait of Angels of Light member Rodney Price step-dancing in a wheelchair two weeks before he died of AIDS.

The exhibition emphasizes the importance of The Cockettes’ break with established society, proposing debate around subjects such as gender and sexuality. Furthermore, the exhibition explores the influence of The Cockettes on emerging generations of artists and performers like The London based House of Egypt, who will perform “The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the House of Egypt”, mixing the ancient queer sub-cultural art forms of drag, spoken word, lip-synching and voguing into a dark, mysterious and absurd saga of a less known Egypt. Their tour-de-force ends in the assembling of a photographic sculpture by House of Egypt member Benjamin A. Huseby, part shrine, part levitating pyramid, part debris. Nils Bech will perform Jimmy Somervilles Coming, reflecting on gender-patterns through falsetto and lyrical dance, continuing the tradition of what The Cockettes coined as “Genderfuck”: “I am coming! I am coming! Here I am! Neither a woman, nor a man.” Stephan Dillemuth and Nils Norman´s film I´m Short Your House (2007) brings together their parallel research strands of Bohemia, the ongoing financialisation of the city and the role of the artist within today’s burgeoning international art market.

UKS galleri
Radhusgt. 19 - Oslo

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