Queer Art: A boring and lazy categorisation?

In this article culture journalist Laila Ghaffar explores whether art criticism is doing artists a disservice by simply relegating their work into the category of queer art.

In the last five years, Toor has emerged as a superstar in the art world, with major public institutions such as the The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney acquiring his paintings. His work has been exhibited in all corners of the world, from Beijing, to London, to Hawaii. Unsurprisingly, he has amassed thousands of Instagram followers, and his fanbase includes stars such as Billie Eilish and Alok V. Menon.

Every time I encounter one of Toor’s paintings, I am inundated with an inexplicable sense of desperate and aching longing. Toor’s paintings are deliciously awkward snapshots of the intimate lives of gay brown men. I am not a gay brown man, and these scenes are not a reflection of my own lived experience, but when I look at the details of Toor’s work, subjects who are navigating desire, rejection, intimacy and loneliness, I feel the urge to touch, feel and hold. Toor’s work depicts the textured human experience, one that can only be understood through tactility. But rather than exploring the profound humanity of Toor’s paintings, the art world has conveniently slotted his work in the category of ‘Queer Art’, where he joins an esteemed group of queer artists whose work is also ostensibly queer. But who benefits from this categorisation? And can we ever come to terms with the fact that the queer experience is also the human experience?

In making my case against the category of ‘Queer Art’, I want to make one thing very clear: I am not advocating for the obliteration of queer readings or queer interpretations of artwork. Queer artists are creating crucial new visual languages and frameworks to interrogate their experience of life. Consider Zanele Muholi, the South African photographer and self-described ‘visual activist’, whose work has been instrumental in documenting the lives of  gender diverse and queer South Africans. Like Toor’s portrayal of South Asian men, Muholi’s work has advocated for the visibility of their community. A queer analysis of art reveals that so much of our cultural output is warped and biased by the twin forces of heteronormativity and patriarchy. Other realities have always existed, and this is what a queer history of art shows us.

The problem is when we only ever understand queer artists as representatives of the queer experience. If we look at this painting, Bar Boy (2019) by Toor, we can see a spectrum of human emotion at play:

There is a sense of movement in this painting, most of the subjects are dancing, talking, embracing or drinking. Although Toor depicts a public scene, the subjects are in small, private huddles. They are together but there is no sense of ‘togetherness’. This is testament to the fact that the most public settings can be the most lonely. On the right-hand foreground, we see a couple holding each other, in what looks like a close dance. Their fingers are edging closer together, and one figure leans closer to the other, as if to whisper a secret. Toor captures the tantalising slowness of seduction, all a play of minute movements and surging momentum. In stark contrast, the figure to the left is solitary. They are slumped as if exhausted or defeated but consoled by their own being. Their hands are interlocked, they are ‘holding’ themselves. Maybe here Toor shows us the beginning of someone’s night, and the end of another's. 

The central figure of the painting, who stands alone staring down at their phone with a small smile, is intriguing. They are alone but their phone is a portal to elsewhere. Physically they are in the bar, but we do not know who or what has captivated their attention. How many of us have also stood alone in a public space, disconnected from our surroundings, staring down at our phones?

In this painting alone, Toor explores the pleasure of corporeality, alongside the tension between the public and private. We could intersect this analysis with a queer reading, but we must first acknowledge the elemental human-ness at the core of it. Toor’s management, Luhring Augustine, describes his work, paradoxically, in the same sentence as both ‘deeply relatable’ and ‘creating an opportunity for empathy’. But empathy rests on the assumption of distinct pre-existing categories, from which an empathetic connection is then formed. My point is that Toor’s work is not relatable precisely because it is universal.

So, what benefit does the ‘Queer Art’ category serve the art world? My guess is that the queer identity marker ultimately makes it easier to commodify art. Disclosing Toor’s sexual identity along with his race and Pakistani nationality, makes his work marketable. In the public imagination, Toor is the young brown man who struggled with his queer identity growing up in Pakistan, but in moving to America must now contend with the sense of dislocation that so often accompanies immigration. It is a good story, but it is also too simple. The full scale of any single person’s subjectivity, riddled with all of its paradoxes and contradictions, cannot be so easily summarised. But under the guise of fair representation and visibility for marginalised identities in art, queer people are transformed from human beings to consumer objects.

Great queer artists and cultural practitioners have not just created art for the sake of visibility and representation. Their work has also exposed the insidiousness of prevailing world orders such as heteronormativity, and capitalism, revealing how these forces cruelly suppress us all. The aim has not been to make queer cool, relatable and marketable. Indeed, many queer communities have been wary and critical of queer resistance, such as Pride Marches, being subsumed by late-stage pink-washed capitalism. Ultimately, capitalism is partly sustained by commodification of exotic and transgressive, and the art world finds new markets by lazily slapping buzzword labels on artists and their work. Toor is no exception.

My hope is that the work by queer artists can be situated in the wider context of human subjectivity, rather than a narrow one with immense lucrative potential. Toor’s work asks existential questions about our most private and intimate desires and secrets. But to fully grapple with it, we have to turn away from identity and move towards our most instinctive understandings of human emotion and experience.