The Heteronormative State

Grayson Perry - BIRTH MOTHER © Richard Ansett 2018

It might feel comfortable and safe to sit within the confines of a clearly defined existence and judge others but it is not secure ground. Certainly the previously dominant structures that set out our world are now seen increasingly as merely other ways of living and in a free society even bigots are welcome as we recognise the pathetic hubris of their superiority.

The complications of accepting personal responsibility for our lives and the accompanying existential loneliness are prices we pay to break free of oppressive forms of traditional identity. We increasingly exist in parallel to the passive aggressive bully that is the stereotype and 'minority' is an increasingly archaic term.

'Queer' has evolved from the reclamation of an abuse to become an inclusive definition that allows us all to share in the complex relationship to what has been identified as the 'heteronormative state.'

The heteronormative state should be defined as the oppressor not just of those broadly defined by sexuality. It is the fabric within which we all function evolved over centuries, the historic legacy is stitched into the foundations and structures that frame our lives. It cannot be torn down so easily like a statue but we can scratch and nudge at it with tools like the zeitgeist.

In my latest collaboration with Grayson Perry the focus is on the tireless motif of mother and child for the 21st century. Claire is not a natural mother, it is a trans- immaculate conception.

A very limited edition giclée available through SINGULART

Monocultural Monumentalism

The project 'Lynching in America' distills a horrific national legacy down to the simple collection of soil by the descendants at the site of a 16 year old boy's murder in a woodland glade outside LaGrange, Georgia.

Ironically the blog Wakeupscreaming has invited me to contribute to their issue themed 'The Great Outdoors' with this series, which feels more micro rather than macro and is the antithesis of what might be defined as great.

The photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams' iconic monochromatic works shot at Yosemite National Park are the personification of 'The Great Outdoors' and continue a romantic tradition of representing US landscape. Free from any presence of humanity these monumentalist cliches offer a simpler more palatable monocultural language, a bigger 'universal truth'. The chaos, pettiness and failures of humanity seem too complicated for Adams and he withdraws to contemplate an alternative utopia free from our parasitic species. So vast are the mountain scenes that I can no-longer make out the noble attempts of individual truth and reconciliation being played out in our intimate landscape (at the same time the flaming torches of the marching fascists are drawing the gaze of the worlds media just down the road in Charlottesville).

When defining beauty by natural rules we should take time to comprehend the terrible cost in Darwinian terms in its evolution. At the end of her life, Leni Riefenstahl similarly withdrew from the world to an undersea paradise in her trite films that accidentally re-enforce her fascist credentials.

I am suspicious of representations of the natural world without some acknowledgement of the presence or impact of humankind. To be representing the present we must start to perceive the chaos and mess of contemporary society as a beauty too. The romanticised representation of the natural world is a dangerous meme that threatens a complex democratic and free thinking society.

Frances with soil, LaGrange, Georgia USA (from series Lynching in America) © Richard Ansett 2017

Yosemite National Park, Ansel Adams