Open Collections

Willis V, John (Johnny)

University of British Columbia

“Radically Art Historical” presents a critical overview of the first decade of the Canadian painter Attila Richard Lukacs’s infamous career as Canada’s “bad boy artist” in the 1980s and 1990s. Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the thesis underscores the degree to which Lukacs’s appropriation of art history, and Caravaggio in particular, enabled his monumental scenes of queer male sexuality to enter into the spaces and collections of major international museums at the height of the AIDS crisis. I demonstrate that, passed through the art historical sieve of respectability, Lukacs’s work enabled gay sex to finally have a place on the wall of museums. Lukacs’s objectives, however, were much too deconstructive to be summarized as mere identity politics. Throughout the thesis, I demonstrate that Lukacs was engaged in a Derridean campaign of deconstruction, simultaneously citing and undercutting binary oppositions such as East and West, gay and straight, and past and present. Through careful examinations of his massive tableaux featuring hyper-eroticized skinheads as historical actants, I clarify Lukacs’s thematization of German division, reunification, and historical memory in relationship to both deconstruction and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I illustrate the degree to which Lukacs’s antibinaristic epistemology forms a distinctly queer ethos that harks back to a long lineage of transgressive queer thought from Genet to Foucault, and further, how it evinces a “criminal” strategy that corresponds with the history of art and homosexuality. The thesis also interrogates Lukacs’s deconstructive treatment of masculinity, revealing a parallel between the imitative nature of masculinity and Lukacs’s imitative yet parodic approach to art history. Lastly, the thesis investigates the relationship of Lukacs’s work to the transformations and devastations of the queer body politic during the 1980s and 1990s, elucidating the artist’s antibinaristic, horizontal ontology through his use of paint as a metaphor for flesh. At its core, “Radically Art Historical” works to recuperate Lukacs’s defining work that has since receded from public attention as one of Canada’s most significant living artists, underscoring the degree to which the work unravels the often neglected relationship between sex, art history, and politics.

Text

2023-08-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85743

Art History & Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/