The relationship between gimmicks and value constitutes the subject of literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai\u2019s latest monograph, in which she treats the gimmick as both aesthetic judgment and capitalist form. In Theory of the Gimmick (2020), Ngai describes this \u201caesthetically suspicious object\u201d as a \u201ccontrivance\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 1.<\/span> that works both too hard and not hard enough. Overrated and irritating, the gimmick indexes a series of antinomies, functioning at once as labour-saving trick and an overzealous attempt to capture our attention. In Ngai\u2019s view, our misgivings arise from growing uncertainty about the disjoints among labour, value, and time that interpenetrate our aesthetic judgments: \u201cOur dissatisfaction with the form of the object, based on spontaneous appraisals of the labor, time, or value it embodies, quickly morphs into ethical, historical, and economic evaluations of it as fraudulent, untimely, and cheap.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid., 23.<\/span> Such ordinary encounters with the gimmick adumbrate how capitalism\u2019s aesthetic forms are contiguous with its economic forms. Our marvelling at gimmicky or simply \u201cdumb\u201d paintings routinely selling for millions of dollars borders on larger anxieties underlying the production, circulation, and abstractions of art. Critically for Ngai, the gimmick encodes an intersubjective encounter in the moment of judgment. In calling something a gimmick, wemust believe that there are those who haven\u2019t seen through the ruse that props the object up. If all aesthetic judgments hinge on a presumption of disagreement, the gimmick is unique in that it requires us to imagine someone who is buying into what the gimmick is selling. Yet Ngai claims that this conception of another spectator is precisely what allows the gimmick to enchant us: as we would with a horoscope, we displace the conviction of belief to another agent, allowing us to love the thing that we \u201cknow\u201d is a ruse.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid., 96 \u2013 97.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n One peculiarity of the gimmick is that it seems to crop up everywhere once you start looking for it. Can the devices of any aesthetic object \u2014 its motifs, its allusions, its rhetorical figures\u2014be reduced to gimmicks in the eyes of the right observer? To what extent are gimmicks inherent to art production under late capitalism? Although Ngai leaves some of these questions open-ended, her discussion of the gimmick\u2019s role in minoritarian cultural production nonetheless clarifies that we need not apprehend the gimmick as merely pernicious. As necessary as it is superfluous, the gimmick can be a \u201csurvival strategy\u201d for vulnerable subjects whose identities and social positions capitalism exploits as its own labour-saving contrivance.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Ibid., 9<\/span> \u201cIn a world in which the essential depends on the gratuitous,\u201d she writes, \u201cgimmicks are sometimes necessary to get out of other gimmicks.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid., 10.<\/span> Performing a close reading of James Baldwin\u2019s \u201cLetter from a Region in My Mind\u201d (1962), Ngai seems to mean that some gimmicks are less risky, less invidious for their practitioners, than are others. Writing on the coming-of- age of African American boys, Baldwin treats taking to the church and taking to a life of petty crime as equally valid \u201cgimmicks\u201d for weathering the deprivation of Black life in white supremacist United States culture. If not an exit from a phobic society, the gimmick offers a way to stay afloat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Theorizing the gimmick as a survival strategy provides one means of elucidating the strategies of a youngish group of queer male figurative painters, among whom the aforementioned Kyle Dunn is numbered. Painters such as Louis Fratino, Doron Langberg, and Salman Toor have achieved as much notoriety for their \u201ctwists\u201d on earlier moments in art history as they have for the queer content of their paintings. Fratino paraphrases the idioms of modernist painters such as Picasso and L\u00e9ger in his paintings of gay men whose bodies twist around sexual partners and contort with longing. Langberg employs a Post-Impressionist colour palette in his scenes of intimacy, ranging from groups of friends hanging in the living room to rimming in the bedroom. Toor pairs studied art-historical allusion with an illustrative style that renders his figures charmingly cartoonish. If some works by these painters invite suspicions of gimmicks, as Dunn worried about his own work, nobody can accuse this cohort of virtuosic artists of shirking any painterly labour: their works tend to be highly technical feats. In this sense, working \u201ctoo hard\u201d at establishing formal<\/em> legitimacy for their queer content<\/em> might be understood as one gimmick for getting out of a worse one: a critical reception that treats these artists as cheaply employing their queerness as a representational gimmick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think these artists are acutely aware of the compromises of minoritarian representation, and I offer Toor\u2019s Bedroom Boy<\/em> (2019) as one painting specifically about the gimmick and contemporary art. Reclining supine, his foot dangling off of the side of the bed, Toor\u2019s boy waves into his smartphone\u2019s camera, oblivious to our gaze. Is the boy taking a selfie or video chatting with a friend or lover? At the least, his nudity suggests an intimacy with the engagement that his phone mediates. He commands his own framing, for he can manipulate his phone\u2019s camera as he wishes. Although the boy does not acknowledge our presence, we are nonetheless drawn into the intimacy of the painting: the work\u2019s small size permits not more than one person to stand in front of it at a time \u2014 unlike Toor\u2019s larger, more social paintings, which invite a small group of onlookers to join the revelry. Yet this intimacy can sour into scopophilic intrusion, leaving this Brown, nude boy surveilled in spite of the fictive command over his own image that his phone\u2019s camera promises. The tension between self-construction and surveillance emblematized by the phone structures Toor\u2019s other works, in which fabulously dressed Brown boys slump at depressing airport security checkpoints. Bedroom Boy skirts the line of gimmick not only through its queer and Brown re-skinning of the genre of nude painting but in its cheeky inclusion of the phone. Indeed, the smartphone itself might be the very totem of the gimmick \u2014 before they became ubiquitous, smartphones struck many as expensive devices predicated on gimmicks such as touchscreens and apps. In its clever use of the smartphone, this painting can be read as a meditation on the gimmick itself \u2014 imagine something more gimmicky than that!\u2014and in shouldering this subject, Toor plays at the limits of the bind that contemporary painting finds itself in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n If these painters self-consciously tarry with gimmicks, I nonetheless want to suggest that a homogenized gayness that appears across their paintings works too hard (or, not hard enough) at trying to be queer, and in doing so, it functions as a limiting gimmick. Although Toor\u2019s cosmopolitan \u201cboys\u201d are racially and ethnically diverse, there is a curious sameness in their billowy, reed-thin, well-dressed, and overwhelmingly cute <\/em>figuration. There is nothing wrong with painting what you know, yet I agree with the assessment of art historian Tausif Noor, who writes that Toor\u2019s recent Whitney Museum exhibition underscores \u201cthe limit of recognition and of identification: a mirror image can only take you so far.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Tausif Noor, \u201cSalman Toor\u2019s Cosmopolitan Queer Life,\u201d Frieze, February 16, 2021, acces- sible online.<\/span> The mirror image recurs as a limit of gay figuration: many of these painters recycle the same kind of (white) body, a body that supposedly signals queer difference itself in its splayed form and oft-exposed penis. We might also ques-tion the cutesy repetition of the word \u201cboy\u201d that has become a trope of gay art titles, ranging from Toor\u2019s Bedroom Boy <\/em>to John MacConnell\u2019s art book Sketch Book Boys <\/em>(2019), whose conventionally attractive bodies MacConnell believes can \u201csubvert the classical paragons of male beauty.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Antwaun Sargent, \u201cThese Gay Figure Artists Are Reimagining the Male Gaze,\u201d The New York Times Style Magazine, September 17, 2018, accessible online.<\/span> Following Ngai, cuteness is yet another gimmick, an aesthetic mode drawn from low culture that registers \u201cthe appeal of powerlessness as opposed to power.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 58.<\/span> In reality, however, these figures may not strike us as powerless; they may number among a cosmopolitan elite, as Noor suggests, or the white clones who already dominate queer visual cultures. \u201cQueerness\u201d is the gimmick in these works, I am arguing, insofar as it manifests predominantly in the form of an unimaginative gayness. If queerness is fundamentally about difference, there is a nagging problem with sameness in gay figurative painting. I have focused on the work of queer male artists in this essay not only because of this group\u2019s endless representations of the same body but also because critics ascribe a more ambitious and defiantly queer political ambit to a body of works that seem \u2014 and let\u2019s be honest about this\u2014resolutely gay. So long as gay figurative painting relies on its repetitive gimmicks, we will continue (re)seeing the same painting, over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The late queer theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz famously declared that \u201cqueerness is not yet here,\u201d that it belongs to the domain of the future and is \u201cthat thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity<\/em> (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1.<\/span> If figurative painting has a queer future, it will not be found in the sleight of hand that syllogistically equates the ubiquitous, gimmicky penis of gay figurative art with queer subversion. Perhaps my critique rankles by proposing that gayness can function as a gimmick. But here I echo Ngai in her suggestion that \u201cthe exercising of suspicion can be creative, playful, and sometimes queer.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick<\/em>, 37.<\/span> If we are enchanted by the gimmick, if we even find these paintings pleasant or sexy in the present, a healthy sense of suspicion might pave the way toward a truly queer figurative painting just beyond the horizon.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/DO2-IMG2-IM_Spencer_Dunn_01_RGB-Portrait.jpg\")
Physical, <\/em>121,9 \u00d7 152,4 cm, 2018.
Photo : Annik Wetter, courtesy of the artist & Galerie Maria Bernheim, Z\u00fcrich<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n