 So, hello everyone and welcome to printmaking and LGBTQIA plus communities, whether you're joining us here at PMC or online. I'm Anthony Tino, I use he-day pronouns and I'm the networks administrator at Paul Mellon Center where I work on the British Art Network, the doctoral research network and early career research network, not to plug the networks department too much, but if you're interested in learning more about joining, you can find me after tonight's talk and I can tell you a bit more about what membership looks like and what the networks can offer. But I'm excited to be chairing tonight's talk by Zorian and before I introduce Zorian I'd like to introduce the series as a whole. So printmaking for change past and present has offered a really interesting program this time with public lectures and more experiential learning moments, which has included some visits to print shops such as Page Masters. It's referred to as a festival of free events, exploring how different communities have used and continues to use printmaking to enact change, share knowledge and challenge ideas. With talks, workshops and behind the scenes visits, the two-week festival exploring the potential of printmaking as both a means of mass communication and radical art form. From the 15th century to present day, the program covers a broad range of topics from gender, sexuality and race to politics, activism and health. Talks and workshops have been taking place at PMC, the British Museum, Page Masters and Royal College of Physicians. So, about tonight's event, this evening we will be exploring LGBTQIA plus liberty and visibility through the varied history of printmaking, via 17th century radicals, 18th century flamboyance and 19th century scandal. To contemporary understandings around diverse gender and sexuality, prints and ephemera, Zorian will provide a unique snapshot into a rich and radical history. Through looking at portraits and zines, celebrating pioneer activists, writers and artists, as well as highlighting significant queer spaces in Britain through the centuries, this session will provide an overview of the considerable contribution to printmaking made by the LGBTQIA plus community and its many ancestors. So the learning team at PMC graciously invited me to chair tonight's lecture, given my own background in printmaking, artist book publishing and working with print media more broadly, to give you all a brief background of my professional history. I earned a bachelor's degree in printmaking in 2012 at the State University of New York at New Pulse, where I was sort of intensely creating etchings and litho and silk screen, after which I started Endless Editions, which is a RISO workshop in New York that's still in operation to this day and is associated with the Robert Blackburn printmaking workshop. From 2016 to 18, I worked at Griffin Editions in Brooklyn and also established an art book fair in Dubai called Fully Booked, which was also an artist book platform and distributor for works by artists from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. More recently in 2022, I co-curated an exhibition at New York Center for Book Arts and produced an exhibition at the Others Art Fair in Torino last year. Some upcoming personal work is working with an artist called Ambrosia, whose work will be featured in a publication called Arte Queer by Rosoli Publishers, which will be the first survey publication to index the history of queer art in Italy. Before introducing Zorian, I just wanted to take a moment to mention that there may be a few instances in the presentation where artists have used language originally designed to be derogatory, which these artists have reclaimed in a way that is related to their own empowerment or activism. So I just wanted to make sure that this was addressed because we understand that people with lived experiences may be sensitive to such language, and we just want to be sure that we're being sensitive to our audience in the room and online. So Zorian Clayton is a curator of prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London specializing in poster, paper, ephemera, and queer art history. He's been the co-chair of the LGBTQ Work Group of the V&A for the past nine years. Recent publications, including Contributions to the Poster of Visual History by Thames and Hudson 2020, Museum Sexuality and Gender Activism by Rutledge 2020, and Fashioning Masculinities, the Art of Men's Wear, for which he is also a curatorial advisor. Since 2016, he's worked jointly as a programmer for the British Film Institute's Flare Festival and as a board member of Trans Creative, a Manchester-based arts company, platforming transgender and non-binary writers, artists, directors, and performers. So I will hand it over to Zorian. Hello, everybody at home. Many thanks for joining me in this 45-minute odyssey through a history of LGBTQ interest printmaking, at the end of which we're going to have a bit more of a Q&A and a discussion and a mingly drink for those of you in the building and for those on the camera over there. We will mingle with you in spirit, but we'll be covering a really wide range of artists and some of them will certainly be familiar to you, but hopefully many of them will also, some of them will be new. All of them I selected for having made a significant contribution to printmaking specifically, even if they might be better known for working in another medium in some cases, and I try to fit in as many forms of printmaking from all sorts of printed ephemera like pamphlets and zines and posters and book plates, of which this is a part, to a wide range of artists who've centered printmaking in their practice quite significantly and covering the widest time period as I could as far as my knowledge allows. And printmaking types are also including some screen prints, intaglio varieties. People are doing very interesting things now with intaglio in tetrapacks. So have a go at that. There's all for all of the complicated ways that you can do these processes where you need a studio and lots of equipment. There's always a DIY way where you can hack it and do it with sort of stuff you find out of the bin. So also including relief prints, woodcuts, line of cuts, planographic prints, which is printing from a flat surface, mainly lithography done on huge, heavy stones. I had to move one this week. It was about half the size of this screen. It took 20 hours to move it with 10 people. It's going on display in the London Transport Museum. Have a new show about posters that opens next week. So go and have a look at it. It took a huge amount to get it in there. So yeah, I think the versatility is what's so appealing to me about the world of print and the range of tones and textures that can be achieved with it. I think really outstrips all the other art forms in my view. But it's not a competition. I don't want to let the complexity of some of the processes kind of put you off because there's always a cheaper way to do it. And another thing that's very key that I will mention as we go through is the fantastic collaborative nature of it. It can take many hands, especially to make very large-scale works. Some large print studios might have 10 master print makers who are working with an artist. So we were just talking about print studios before when I got to visit two palms, which is a very fancy one, in New York last year. Christopher Ely was working there. And they had about 15 master print makers who were just executing his ideas. So it's this very amazing collaborative process. And there's nothing really like it. So my selection is simply that. Another speaker might have chosen something very different. But 45 minutes obviously isn't very long to cover everything. But we're going to kick off with very famous print maker, of course, and a master who a lot of people believe has never been surpassed. This is Durer. This is a woodcut of 1496 called the Bath House. This is a little detail as well. One of the greatest print makers of all time, his ability to control texture and depth and light and really pack the detail into a block or a plate is really quite extraordinary. And this cheeky detail zooms in on the person who is the most suggestive figure. And it's a self-portrait of the artist. It's considered to be Durer himself. Lots of bawdy clues were very much all the rage in relation to symbolism, especially things like seeded fruits and frothing cups and jugs that have been knocked over. But this placement of the tap is really quite bold for the time. And there's a definitely cruisey feel about this bath house scene. All of the other people in it are supposedly his friends, people that he knew. And the drinking man on the right is one of his very good friends. He was called Villibald Perkheimer. And between Durer and Villibald were a couple of quite tantalizing letters, references, about them finding Italian soldiers attractive. And one inscription on a portrait of Perkheimer by Durer, which is inscribed in Greek with sexual references between men. So hand printing, of course, had been around for millennia considered to have been invented in China alongside paper making. But it was the invention of the printing press in 1440, which roughly around 1440, which greatly revolutionized things in Europe, allowing phenomenal amounts of art like this to be really mass produced and circulated for the first time. And Durer was one of the first artists to really make an enormous impact with his mastery of printing. And so much so that there was this group called the Kleiner Meisters, who were the little masters who were a group of engravers basically just working to try and emulate his style, but none of them quite come close. So these are from 1620. And this sort of hotbed of self-published printed political pamphlets, which were all the rage. If you had an opinion, you could publish it in little texts or illustrated booklets like this. And a few examples, several examples have survived from the 17th century, which relate to gender non-conformity and so-called deviant sexualities. So one of the best-known illustrated examples is this Hick Moolier on the left, or The Man Woman, which railed against women opting for masculine fashions. And they were especially upset about, I quote, the wearing of broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, and hair cut short or shorn. The title combines a Latin male personal pronoun with the noun for woman. And the pamphlet on the right was the response pamphlet that came out. So it's called Hick Veer, which also came out in 1620 and combines the Latin female personal pronoun with the noun for a man. But the response hits back at various points on the more feminine styles of dress and comportment, which were seen to be worn by men at the time. Both of them are anonymous. We don't know who the authors are. One of the more, a lot of these have been digitized, you can find them online. One, which was published in 1749, is entitled Satan's Harvest Home. It blamed opera for taking men away from their noble war-like moods. And they talked about how paint was very much in vogue with gentlemen, as with the ladies in France. Can there be any more shocking than to see a couple of creatures who wear the shapes of men, which I thought was an interesting way to put it, kiss each other in public places. This is a public pamphlets that were distributed in the street in 1749. So many of these pamphlets actually give quite a lot of information about cruising grounds as well. So even though they have a homophobic intent, they're actually giving a lot of information about the language that people would use for pickups and where you might go. So Lincoln's Inn, Royal Exchange, Covent Garden, very close to here, are all sort of named. And the location of Molly houses where you could go. So they definitely had this kind of dual purpose. Another type of cheap and small mass produced type of prints that would have had a very wide range and reach at the time is the humble playing card. Sets of playing cards depicting historical events were very popular in the last quarter of the 17th century especially. And this example is from 1679. And it links to a gay interest narrative. Titus Oates has been described as a radical homosexual Anglican parson, I like that. And legend has it he was also very prone to exaggeration. He was involved in a lot of fraudulent dealings and he was expelled from the Navy of all places for being gay or for homosexual acts. He was a chaplain in the Navy. But these playing cards illustrate the Popish plot which in short was a conspiracy to kill Charles II and restore Catholicism as the dominant religion in this country. And Titus Oates claimed to have uncovered this plot personally, but his story and his portraits are very widely printed and often they were besmirching his name as a general traitor and things but they were also lots and lots of discussion about him as a homosexual man in the late 17th century. And just to sort of jump into a way that, oh no, it's missed a slide. Oh well, I was gonna show you a slide of, maybe I put it in later and yeah, I did. I've just bought some cards which are Catherine Opie's Dyke Deck which are from 1995 that's 52 lesbians. So we carry on with the cards and they're going into the collection. So I'm very glad to get 52 lesbians into the collection in one go with the next thing. So one of the best known life stories of the 18th century which continues to interest many people today and I think it's really, I can't believe no one's made a fantastic film about them yet. I think there's like a dodgy TV movie but the Chevalier Dion, who I'm sure might have been familiar to you, was a French secret agent soldier and a very famous fencer from whom the term eonism is derived which isn't really a word, particularly used today but it denoted specifically male to female transvesticism or transition. And through a huge amount of printed portraits they were one of the greatest celebrities of a particular moment in the 18th century. They were held in very high esteem by early feminists including Mary Robinson and Mary Wilsoncroft. They were fired in short from their job and ordered to return to France but they refused to go. Instead they aired lots of diplomatic secrets in libelous and scandalous publications in the 1760s and so then they were forced into exile. They remained in London and they'd always been this question about their gender. But basically as part of their agreement, part of their exile they signed an agreement to be publicly recognized as a woman by the King of France and he lived out the remainder of their life in London as a woman. They died in 1810 and they're interred at St Pancras Old Church so their grave has become rather a sort of a pilgrimage for lots of trans people. And this is a poster that's made quite recently by Fox Fisher, he's quite a well-known documentary maker, non-binary artist who has a very good, well it's a YouTube channel, I think it's called My Genderation and they make a lot of trans and non-binary interest films but this is just like an example of a sort of cheap printed poster, this mass produced which they sell on their website that kind of has reclaimed and taps into the Chevaliers past as a keystone, a cornerstone really of trans understanding in history. Ah, it's the wrong way around, sorry, so that's the dyke there. That's the playing cards, I've just numbered them the other day so yeah, this is an example of those. So sort of moving into more kind of satirical prints at this time which sort of find gender transgression to be of tremendous interest and not just around the Chevaliers who had even prints made of them after death, so very salacious and very horrible satirical prints like the one this one relates to somebody who was, it was called Samuel Drybutter and they were lots of court records about them being caught for homosexual acts in the 1770s and they were pilloried, there were many, many prints that were made of them which sorry you can't read the text but he's standing with a hangman called Jack Ketch who holds up this noose and says, Dami, Sammy, you're a pretty sweet creature and I long to have you at the end of my string and then Samuel Drybutter replies, says you don't love me Jackie. There were many, many similar depictions in sexual innuendo in many satirical print shops and popular press and this is at the same time as the very short lived macaroni craze which is very short lived scene of the 1760s and 70s which generated also an absolutely vast amount of prints and the husband and wife team, Matthew and Mary Darley who made this one, you see their name Darley at the bottom of this one, were some of the first to specialize in making their own prints and selling them in print shop in near Soho and most of their prints are about satirizing fashion between, well in the 1770s they produced nearly 150 different satirical macaroni prints which were extremely successful so Samuel Drybutter was reputed to have run the macaroni club which is a club where they could all get together this sort of notorious club about which there's lots of little tantalizing scraps of information these are a couple more of the sort of gender satire prints related to the macaroni from as well the late 18th century as it wasn't really until the 19th century that the popular press as in newspapers and magazines really became properly illustrated illustrated London news was the world's first illustrated weekly which appeared in the 1840s so these prints are just individual prints that you would have bought quite, you know from different ranges but a lot of them if they were on a very cheap paper and cheaply printed they were just a few pence really in print shops so this one is called Jack on a Cruise a Missy in the Offing, a masquerade scene in Kensington Gardens that's from 1775 and the one on the right is a Cornish hug in Billingsgate from 1781 and a Cornish hug is a crushing hug designed to overpower someone and here it's performed by a fish wife on an effeminate gentleman who's easily overpowered by her so these prints were not kind a lot of the time but the audiences would have been vast and would have had I think a certain appeal and a sense of humor across the spectrum and introduced a really wide variety of different notions of gender transgression and that the idea was that it was enormously widespread so the sort of bottom line with all the macaroni things I think for all of the jokes and the prejudice that surrounded them in the printed press the sheer volume of material I think that was generated in the world of print probably did provide access to an extended range of gender presentations beyond the binary I think and this subversions of the one size fits all model of masculinity I just had two little prints of cruising grounds of course these prints aren't intended to look like that but this is like another way that I think we can do querying of the collections really so we've got probably tens of thousands of boxes of prints that look like this that very few people really come and look at or use but we did use them in a project with Ducky the princess project that was like a queer Georgians project and so we were using them to look at the spaces that would have been the cruising grounds of the different times that we were looking at the Royal Exchange was identified as a so-called molly market in one article in the London Journal it describes it as not much changed its character since the swarthy buggerantos used to cruise it in 1700 so there's all this information in popular press at the time about different terminology for groups it's really interesting to find out which words survive and which don't like cruising is the word it's still going if you want to know more about this time and this particular research do read Richter Norton's books about gay life in the 18th century he's basically put a lot of them on his own website so you can access it there and this is one of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens which is the park on the site of the park that's behind the Royal Vauxhall Tavern is today and there's a huge enormous amount of literature about Vauxhall's queer history and you know the Chevalier d'Ian walked in these places and things but yeah it's just sort of an idea about how we're querying 18th century topographical prints from a sense of place really this is my pornographic slide from the 1780s so in the world of literature and book illustration these are from another kind of short lived but very you know a moment that has an enormous had enormous impact these are the Libertine novels of Andrea de Nercia so we have Felicia is 1782 and this is called Getting Caught in the Act the middle is from Les Afrodites by the same writer in 1795 with this strap on scene and Les Afrodites is the prototypical Libertine novel it mixes a very lively narrative with a superbly written dialogue and a menagerie of picaresque characters engravings were made of varying quality you could get very high grade books with these in again sort of very low grade very cheap prints and the third one it was another Nercia book called Le diable au corps and the illustrations from around 1803 a lot of material like this was seized and held in government offices and is now sort of being gifted onto museums we did have an example that was a bit similar to this that had been in a bin bag at one government office here and it had fallen down behind the back of some cupboards and they gifted it to the B&A and that had to sign all the sort of 18th century pornography which had been considered dangerous and a moral threat to society but an amazing range is within this of all different kinds of gender and sexuality presentations so thinking about material that was deliberately kind of set out to shock I could not include Orbi Beatsley within this talk he worked almost exclusively in black ink he worked very feverishly through the night he had no formal training which is quite incredible but letters between him and his publisher Leonard Smithers show that he had a really extraordinary understanding of print techniques he wrote about certain kinds of Japanese papers that didn't print half tone in the way that he wanted to Japanese paper is very thin and superior in almost every sense but obviously not suited to a half tone in a letter to his patron who was the French poet Marc-Andre Rafalevich who'd also been in the circle of Oscar Wilde and attempted to create a catalogue on everything that had ever been published on the subject of homosexuality up to that time that book was called Le Chronique de l'unisexualité so it was unisexuality as a short lived term that was Beatsley wrote that the print shops of Paris are an evergreen joy to me he was very much a big prints collector and his especially old master prints he did collect similar to the ones that are around the walls in this room but particularly a big fan of Mantegna and old master prints which coated the walls of his studio and which you could at that time buy for quite affordable sums but not now but the periodicals he were involved with the Yellow Book is obviously one of the most notorious ones and again the sort of picking up on this masquerade idea again and I think you could probably see the remnant of the macaroni in the person on the right that character is called the Abbe Fanfrelouche or Fanfrelouche which means like frilly embellished adornments so that was from his only novel which was called Under the Hill an illustrated novel that he did and I was just going to read you a tiny little excerpt because I think the style of the prose that describes this character on the right just really summarises the aesthetic and decadent style of which Beardsley was really the poster boy so they say his hand slim and gracious as la marquise du défon in the drawing by Karl Montel played nervously about the gold hair that fell upon his shoulders like a finely curled prouk point to point of a precise toilette the fingers wandered quelling the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle so a lot of his it's all very flancy and frilly and very much sort of addicted to texture and materiality and you know he's just and I'm obsessed with Beardsley really there's a lot we could say about him but people always say we don't really know what his sexuality was and things that you think you really need to know we don't need to have bed evidence about anyone or anything I just think his letters very much and his work a lot of his figures had a lot of androgyny within them and he hid a lot of male genitalia throughout I don't think there are any in this one but if you look very hard there might be something hidden somewhere but yeah we do have an enormous amount of them if you've never seen them in the flesh they print room because we've got boxes and boxes of them and they're really kind of something else a similarly unique artist who maybe isn't as well known born in the 1890s but who came to sort of encapsulate the freedom and queer decadence of the interwar years in Berlin is Jean Maman and she lived in the same studio apartment on Kefürstendamm from 1919 until her death in 1976 that her building was bombed out in the Second World War and she's just remained there drawing by candlelight she only ever gave one interview in the Europe just before her death and was something of a recluse from 1945 on but she was a hugely prolific print maker and it was through her posters and illustrations for books that her work really gained quite a wide audience because she didn't really play the art world game and included her because she was she was at risk of really slipping into obscurity but it was the lesbian community in Berlin who rescued a lot of her work and kept her work on the map and there is now they saved her studio there's a couple more examples of her work and you can visit it now by appointments there's a foundation in her name and it was because of this they managed to have a pretty major retrospective of her work in 2017 which wouldn't happened if it hadn't been community who had really valued this and saved it for the next generation so hang on maybe had earlier so I wanted to include this was also 1920 so the same kind of time as the Jean Mermin prints but really wanted to include some examples from the Renaissance where periodicals and independent press similarly to the yellow book these quite short lived magazines had an enormous impact during the Harlem Renaissance intense period of creativity in the 1920s and 30s and retrospectively many gay narratives have kind of come out of this period or have come to light with people's later reminiscences but Richard Bruce Nugent who did this one on the left was a few who were out and proud at the time he was born in 1906 in Washington DC and this was done for a short story that was also written by Nugent called Smoke, Lillies and Jade in 1926 which was published in the first issue of a radical magazine called Fire in November 1926 the magazine's very clear gay and bisexual content amongst many other subjects like sex work and interracial relationships and racism in segregated America was completely unprecedented magazine started by a large group of African American artists and writers including Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas who did the cover on the right but tragically the first issue was the last as the headquarters of Fire magazine were burned to the ground because people had been so upset about the controversial content it never recovered but original copies of it were one of the great rarities in the world but Nugent had saved a pristine copy for nearly 60 years and this book fanatic called Tom Worth learned that this original copy existed and started the Fire Press in 1982 so he created a replica edition of it which is available you can buy it now for a very reasonable $7.50 so it's incredibly ahead of its time Fire magazine but a great story of print revival and community connections and the importance of archiving to be able to really have access to this kind of stuff Sydney Hunt who I use is my cover pick a little excerpt from this is another artist mainly working in the 20s and 30s and made another short lived magazine that was called Ray I found him looking through a box of big albums of book plates that we have in the V&A and it's not this one but it was a similar similar ones that I just sort of saw and I thought hello you know this is a I found a queer artist here and yeah he was mainly working in sort of vortices influence there's a real hotbed at this time of quite short lived artist groups and again short lived artist magazines so only lasted for two issues much the same as Blast which is magazine by Wyndham Lewis which also just ran for two issues but people have written endless amount of books about that but very few people have really written about Sydney Hunt and Ray there's only a couple of physical copies is one at Oxford Uni and one at Cambridge maybe he would have been pleased with the calibre of library that he is still in he fell out of knowledge because he sadly lost his life and a lot of his work in the London Blitz his house and studio were were destroyed but there's been again through sort of print collectors his work has sort of come come back to light and again he was another person who was out of the closet in a time when there was big sort of risk of doing that and remembered as a book plate artist if anyone could be remembered as such a niche thing but it's sort of become a thriving field again lots of graphic novelists are reinvigorating the book plates so it's an exciting time for that but Sydney Hunt again there is one digitised copy of Ray so do check it out he did make a big impact in his moment Hockney someone who was difficult to not include I just wanted to someone we're all quite familiar with but this is from a series of illustrations which accompanied 14 poems by the Egyptian born Greek poet Constantine Peter Cavalli who came out in 1925 so in 1966 Hockney did this homage series of etchings that reprint the poetry and he stole the original book of poems from Bradford Library and he talked about it on BBC Radio 4 he said I found kivafi in the library in 1960 but you had to ask for it I looked it up in the index but it wasn't on the shelf because they were worried about too many people reading these poems but I got it and I never took it back you couldn't buy this book in England at the time and of course the poems were wonderful so there's this sort of library to put me in mind of Joe Orton a little bit there as well but yeah they're a very exquisite suite of prints if you haven't seen all of them again you can come and see them at the V&A print room Hockney famously did a rakes progress and so did these two artists Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shandibari did versions of rakes progress as well I think Yinka did the queerest one as a large scale photographic work so I'm not including that as it's photographs but these are very new these are all from 2022 I think these two on the right are from a revamped school print series the school prints was started in the 40s in the post-war period to show this sort of nostalgia and put quality art into the classroom so they had a very brief remit they asked artists to make something suitable for children not use more than six colours they would be an auto lithography basically so they revamped this in Yorkshire in 2018 by the Yorkshire by the Hepworth Wakefield and they had exactly the same remit and they commissioned 19 artists over four years to make lithographic prints with school children from the Yorkshire area so some very lucky kids in 2022 got to work with Lubaina Himid and the Yankishonobari to do a suite of prints that were about decolonisation and teaching of black history more widely across the curriculum this one is a reprint well it was made for the 75 years anniversary of the ICA existing but it was a show which Lubaina Himid curated in 1985 that was all black women artists the Thim Black Line exhibition and she said in 2022 when they made this poster to go a memento of that she said how much has really changed in the last 30 years since that show was on some people said I was a cultural terrorist because I made this exhibition in 1985 other people warned me that the ICA would never show the work of black women artists again once this show was over the print I decided to design to celebrate the 75 years of the ICA is a letter to the doubters to remind everyone that the exhibition is important now and was important then and there's Lubaina Himid there's a great very very long interview with her at the British Library which you can listen to or read as a transcript where she talks about working with lots of the women and there's particularly Maud Salter and Ingrid Pollard and the kind of black lesbian art scene of the 80s and Joy Gregory has just done a brilliant new book about that as well so we're going to talk very briefly about fierce pussy how we're doing the time I'll speed it up slightly because we're going to talk about fierce pussy in the chat I know but it's deliberately low a case to be non-hierarchical and another thing that I just have discovered in the V&A is that the left were an un-catalogged group of posters that we got in the mid 90s and there's like a bit of a there was always a bit of a problem when they switched away from paper files to computers the things that they got in the couple of years when they did that some of them kind of slipped slipped off the system basically but back to fix it pretty much now and I was very very happy to get these on if you can't read the they were sort of very deliberately low-fi in their practice they were mainly using Xerox and typewriters and flea market photographs but it was all about getting the message out onto the street really fast there were four original core members of this New York based group who described themselves as a queer art collective they did use the word dyke quite a lot they did do a lot of stuff they were involved in dyke march and things they were involved all with act up before they set up fierce pussy as a more lesbian focused group but they are they're back they're very active they just did something at Leslie Lohman a couple of years ago and continued to do a lot of activism and things about HIV and AIDS but I've loved this they would do print these posters and then drive them around New York stuck to the side of trucks so it's a great way to do visual activism with prints that just goes beyond firing or flight posting so act up in Grand Fury of course don't need a huge preamble but they very similar style with Xeroxing and I wanted to include this this is a very rare one I haven't really seen many collections that have this one but of course he uses the Robert Indiana Love pop art which has been massively made into hundreds of sculptures which is public art all over the world but many different iterations but I think this is a great one for Riot by Grand Fury who of course with a visual arts wing of act up and this is another part of these were made for the AIDS Memorial Jenny Holzer a very key artist who's been much much imitated since doing mainly text based work since the 70s these were made in a collaboration with the New York City AIDS Memorial and I sort of put it in for sort of thinking about print on different kind not just on paper you know there's a whole world of getting print and topography based art out there and they use some of her signature phrases like protect me from what I want but also excerpts from Walt Whitman's poem the song of myself since another sort of queer connection thinking about printing on different kinds of materials if you've never been on the visual AIDS archive I strongly recommend you to do this it's a unique resource which was came about in 1988 and to quote their own aim is to utilize art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue supporting HIV artists and preserving a legacy because AIDS is not over these three I thought were very interesting the rainbow is silk screen printed onto gut skin the middle one is a fingerprint portraits again thinking about the enormous range of what you can do very lo-fi and very fancy and on the right is kissing couple is a Xerox on latex referencing condoms called SAFE from 1993 and just one other artist that I recently discovered was I was putting this talk together indeed this is Mark Pelletier who's from Maine and these are two etchings also from 1989 but this is a great example of an etching where you actually have to make a lot of marks on the plate all of that gradation of texture and tone is done through the way that you ink the plate and the way that you remove the ink so there's an enormous amount of variety tonal variety that can be done with it and I just thought these were fantastic examples Keith Herring very quickly again very prolific unbelievably prolific artist who created more than 3000 works on paper and approximately 300 paintings and I wish I'd seen the 2007 show the Keith Herring Foundation did in the Czech Republic where they put Herring's work together with Egon Schiele and the Herring Foundation said that both were sexually compulsive and condemned in their lifetimes for their depictions of explicit sexuality and its transformative energy achieving aesthetic maturation when barely post-adolescent was what the Keith Herring Foundation say about his work and he really experimented with lithography and silkscreen etching woodcuts embossing and he partnered with so many different publishers all around the world in order to get his work out but these are two untitled lithoblasts from 1983 and he deliberately untitled most of his work so that you could have your own interpretation and the last one I'm going to talk about in this kind of section who I wanted to have in really for the extraordinary range of how Felix Gonzalez Torres incorporated print into his sculptural work so this is newsprint in a bottle with a work called Untested in 1987 and he was very concerned with all kinds of facets of inequality and economic corruption and poverty and he did many different kinds of original installations that defy categorization but this poster, lithographic poster on the right is called Untitled Death by Gun 1990 which was exhibited at MoMA as a stack of papers on the ground and gallery visitors were not sure if they were supposed to pick them up because a lot of his installations to invite you to pick one up but the idea is is that the stack stays 9 inches high and that it will be continually reprinted and replaced by MoMA where it exists so they just keep on printing them and keep the stack the height that he requested but it lists on the sheet the names of 460 individuals killed in just one week by gun in May 1989 and it gives their name and age and city and state and it's one of the most arresting pieces of activist art I've ever seen talking about, I'm sure maybe some of you thought that the whole talk would be more about zines and this kind of these are 4 zines that I got from the digital transgender archive and whole talk could have been done just about this kind of cheaper small press stuff a lot of sources say that the first scene was made in the USA in 1930 and it's called the Comet and the early zines were about sci-fi and things but I think the example that we saw at the beginning from 1620 in some ways is a precursor of a zine of different kinds of cheaply made small printed things which I think you could you could say it goes way way back before 1930 but the first queer scene is usually given as one called vice versa of which there were 9 copies made in 1947 by a woman called Lisa Ben which is an anagram of a lesbian and she hand typed it and I think that I don't know where there are copies of that but I think there are some there must be some in public collections but yeah these are all mainly from when it mainly got going much more in the sort of 80s and 90s and a unique life line you know for people to find their community zines are very fondly remembered by people who grew up in the pre-internet time as like a way that's how they found their scene and their friends there's also a recommend the queer zine library which is a mobile DIY library and they have digitized or they have 900 queer zine titles and there many of which have been digitized so I say that's your one stop shop go to the queer zine library so I'm just going to race through a couple of contemporary artists who made a significant contribution to print Grayson of course probably Britain's most famous artists almost like tipping over into people you know I think a lot of the television stuff is when you get a little bit too popular then people sort of love to hate you a bit but with this print I think it's a fantastic self-portrait in their home or in their studio and in it they say this self-portrait is a fantasy version of myself neither fully male nor fully female which is entering non-binary territory but Grayson's also said that they're very afraid by the word identity and they're always worried that they're going to get told off about it because you know being transvestite is certainly still left out a little bit or it has its own taboos and complexities which I still don't think we have really broached very much as a community but these are works by Didier William who is an artist I discovered last year in Philadelphia he's a Haitian-American artist who I got to visit his studio and he made this incredible suite of posters which just shows you a detail that gives you that fantastic detail of the halftone there on the plate on the stone and it's like this really also has the impression of looking at a lithographic stone which is a finished plate I've got a couple more examples of his they're really quite large scale prints he uses the eye a lot as adornment and voyeurism talking about voyeurism as the black body but he was a very interesting artist to speak to lots of his bodies are quite androgynous and tumbling through space and there are quite a lot of underwater themes but yeah he's just done a lot of really great talks recently so yeah look him up and sort of talking about being a black queer artist working in print as someone I was very excited to discover and the last person I'm going to talk about is Mickalene Thomas because yeah he's just been doing you need to see the work in the flesh as well to get the complexity of it but these are very very detailed prints which have many layers to them I saw some of them being printed or being the blocks being put together at the Durham Press in Pennsylvania last year and some of them have like 40 layers of colour built up and this one is a mixed media collage incorporating wood block silk screen and digital printing it's called sleep de femme noir and it's from 2013 and when I asked an interview with them I asked magazine recently as a black queer artist how do you approach your practice and she said mainly I'm inspired by my personal life by my personal narrative and current events they take those elements to inspire me and try to decipher them in ways that would make sense by thinking about the mediums and the tools that I employ and so yeah the amount of tools and the richness of the world of tools and print making is something that really you have to visit studios and get in there to really behold that but I think she's very interesting for some good mashups of technique as well she incorporates very multiple techniques to get these extraordinary lush and detailed works so the one on the left is screen print, wood block digital print and flocking as well as it has the kind of velvety flock texture also added to it and the one on the right is simply a digital print and she said there are not enough images of black women loving black women specifically so I feel I have a responsibility to contribute positive images for those who don't know where else to go and I think this kind of sentiment really sums up in a nutshell the things that we're considering this evening in terms of print making for change the power of art to really make a difference out there in the world and put people on the map and forge greater understanding I think Mickey Thomas's work really breathes new life into some old genres or classic genres like the nude for instance and mixing traditional print techniques alongside digital so using something like flocking for a wallpaper and incorporating it into fine art practice I think is just a great example of the complexity and diversity of print and its intensely creative collaborative limitless world so thank you very much for listening I haven't gone too far over but yeah ok thanks thank you Zorian it was wonderful I love Lisa Ben as an artist pseudonym I always think it's funny too how there's this debate over the first zine being sort of like is it the 1930s is it but you know as we can see it's sort of something that takes on that distribution in the public form it's obviously not just a modern phenomenon no and everybody loves these like oh it was the first and then mistakes just all you know I think a lot of internet stuff is really lazy and then it just repeat repeat repeat like something you know but there's a lot more digging to be done there's so much already that we don't know or that we don't have access to because digitization of collections it's really only a drop in the ocean of what is actually there so you know there's new discoveries we've made all the time I think that should be an exciting thing I was particularly interested in what you're learning about queer communities from the 1600s, 1700s actually through pamphlets that might have actually been distributed with sort of cruel intense yeah and like court records they called the society for the reformation of manners I think they were called they were like before the police they were this group that were particularly obsessed about homosexuality and started up their own police in the 18th century that was just going around looking for this then all of the court records that then you get from around that time are extremely detailed and you can build up a picture of where people are going and again on the Richter Norton website there's really great really really long detailed things where he's like copied out enormous amounts of the court records but mapped them as well so you can almost take a walk around London geography, yeah that's interesting so I do want to bring it out to the room really fast but before we do that I did want to ask you one question especially thinking about materiality because the last lecture in the series was was about Mesotin and thinking about the process of Mesotin as being quite laborious also taking quite a bit of time using material such as copper to etch and I thought a good place to start as I was thinking about the artist in your presentation today was thinking about fierce pussy which also relates to you know some other aspects of sort of communal practice and I love what you said before too about there's always a cheaper way to do it which is a very like printmaking thing to think about so I was reading an article by Lauren Butler it was published in Art Forum 2019 and she pointed out that among the founding members of fierce pussy including Zoe Leonard in 1991 that several of them were working within magazine departments for GQ Traveler magazine and during these sort of low tide moments of the day they were sort of using the copiers in the office to produce their artwork which they were sort of putting on billboards around bathrooms in New York City and also this strange irony that maybe NBC or Microsoft or some of these major corporations were contributing financially to this kind of like liberation movement so I'm just thinking about sort of materials and value and thinking about the urgency of the work and how that differs from thinking about a fine art print historically and traditionally you know what it might say about yeah the urgency of a message or activism yeah so I just thought that was a concerning point in the 70s in London there were a huge amount of screen printing workshops that were very open community access because people couldn't make flyers for queer nights or whatever just from your they would be barred from making that kind of thing in regular copy shops and stuff things like Sea Red Women's Workshop and Paddington Print Shop and the Lenthal Road Press which Ingrid Pollard and Lou Bainahimid worked at quite a bit there's a great film of that as well on the BFI free player that you can watch of the Lenthal Road Press but yeah so it's kind of interesting in just a decade going from screen printing to kind of labour intensive techniques but ones where they were sort of almost free free access and that you could go down there and learn how to do printmaking and there's more that kind of skill sharing but loads of that was activist printmaking mainly the other Sea Red did some lesbian posters with lots of feminist posters but yeah then to go into the 90s emergency particularly the AIDS crisis like even just going and faffing around cleaning your screens and stuff it's like that's too long you know so all of the yeah the Xerox machine and it really came into it and Rizo I suppose people using this kind you said Rizo, I always said Rizo I always think well it's a Japanese company yeah you're probably right I've been saying it wrong but yeah all these kinds of methods you know really came to their own but there's a lot of printmakers in the pop era who were using Xerox as well to create half tone it has a specific graphic quality yeah and yeah just sort of experimenting and stuff they were still they were precursors to it called Mimeographs or Mimeographs whatever but Xerox machines weren't really that it was still quite a fancy office so yeah I think the technology of a Mimeograph is eventually what a Rizo printer is sort of trying to mimic yeah yeah used for sort of cheaper newspaper runs yeah and fiercely their recent show is mainly I mean it did show a lot of their older cheaper posters but I think they mainly just kind of work in the same way now that's kind of cool as well because it's like the same urgency of activism isn't there but that's now their aesthetic yeah actually meeting about one of their more recent shows today there was a mention of the sense that there's a crisis that's still ongoing so even in thinking about their response to the AIDS crisis that it's still ongoing and also I'm thinking about the matrix that you would need to create for a print and then when you're working in digital formats it's not so much materially it doesn't so materially exist in time and is a bit more ephemeral in that way which which I think can allow an artwork to continue to be produced and reproduced not as firmly historic I don't know if that makes sense but does anybody in the room have any questions for Zorian or comments don't worry if you don't yeah it's not on yeah it's on I had two very different questions but I think I'll ask the first one because it's the first one first I was curious when you were showing the 18th century prints and there seemed to be a lot of conversation between Britain and France whether it's the Liberty novels or sort of via Aubrey Beardsley's Patreon and so on I was just curious about what those relationships were and whether France was ahead what are the conversations happening via these national borders and is it percolating or is it often quite separate I think there's a huge amount of cultural exchange there because France was much more free and easy in many regards around publishing and publishing of sexy and material let's say but also yeah an enormous amount of very accessible brothels things like that which were very open which was not the case here so there was a lot of a lot of diaries and letters and things of people who were specifically going there so Beardsley went to France again and again partly to visit book shops and print shops and things but just the closest place that you could go that was so revered and celebrated as culture, as Paris and so much rich history within just this one city relating to that easily accessible it was when you compare legally how much further behind in some ways we were especially with sexuality visiting Paris was within a great experience for people especially LGBTQ people and you see that sort of in the style of the Liberty novels to as well like the plates and it's interesting that like book the previous two books being thought of as a sort of artistic expressive media there's still the source for expressive acts or for artists to interpret and then lots of obviously ladies of the left bank and those kind of hubs then grow around cities that have a more permissive sense about them then there's a much easier to research as well people sort of get together and make things together and it's much more evocative as well to think about instead of like Chevalier dealing with queer people sort of that far back in history just floating in the sea of time with no community and they're sort of presented as very alone and then you know as century progresses we have these much more lively hubs where people have obviously finding each other and it's exciting did you have a second question I could ask the second question but I don't wonder also monopolies if there's anyone else do you want to I'm just really interested to know how you decide that an image is to be read as a queer image when is an image sorry not a gay man of a naked man surely there are some of them images of a naked man is it about the context in which it's shown and presumably knowing some biographical details of the maker and also I think with women surely we don't read every naked woman I mean western art canon is packed as queer images well there was something yeah there was something Lou Bainer he made said about Auronite paintings she loved she went down to St. Ives and she was looking into the people who had gone before in St. Ives and she was really she described Auronite's paintings as lesbian erotica of these like women who are sitting on the cliffs like it's all very romantic and things and I don't think Auronite is queer but like there's a free you know we are moved into a time when it's kind of people are much more freely open like it's more you know to just crush heteronormativity and feel more you know free about claiming things or you know seeing something within it whether or not you ever find out that there was something but I think particularly with the male nudes because we have different terms within our cataloging system so camp this is quite newly put in camp was one that was put in and homoerotic I suppose but then yeah not every picture of but there's like Frederick Lathen who was a very prominent 19th century artist like his he possibly was a gay man he was a bachelor for life and had there's some letters that exist but there's just something about the way that there's so much more detail and love has gone into the sculpting of the buttocks and thighs of these guys you can feel it you know like with the Sydney hunt things like yeah you know yeah it's just a figure but there's something within it that I think you do read through time I think their intention is in there you get it when queer photographers or whatever are behind the lens and they're photographing a queer person you just you know like the difference between maybe a Diana Arbus photograph of a trans person and then I don't know Catherine Opie photograph of a lesbian like you can feel the difference there and yeah and there's something kind of magical about it but I I've sort of I was a bisexual and I was a lesbian and I came out as trans and I've been a gay man so I kind of feel I've got quite a broad sweep when I'm looking at things how I personally sort of go about looking at things in the museum to queer them you know but then if I'll usually write a little text to explain why I've done it if it's not really obvious you know so people don't say there's no queer narrative here you know but who says how do we know before my second question we have a question from the online audience so if I can read it out and you can speak to it so it's asking could Zorian speak more to how these LGBTQIA plus narratives can be hidden in collections and about the process of unearthing them how easy are these stories to unearth especially when not collected to celebrate this community in many instances a little bit of what you were saying already there was a box that was called Life Studies or something and a colleague of mine discovered it and inside it was all like 1950s physique photography of muscle guys in little posing pouches by plinths and stuff like pure sectorial kind of stuff so they had acquired it I think in 1948 which was pretty early for the physique genre as well but I didn't know if they just sort of hidden it in by saying it's just a box of life studies but then because they weren't really explicitly explained what they were they just sat in the box and looked at until sort of about 10 years ago or something so I think that definitely happens and there's other instances that I found with a trans artist that they acquired something by in the 1930s I guess the curator didn't know what to do about this name that they knew that they had female name before and then they have a male name so they just put the surname and then their name was spelled wrongly in that case as well it's just Anton Prinner but it had been put as Primer because their signature kind of looks like Primer so they just put Primer and you know it took nearly 100 years until you realised but I think it's not necessarily done like with malice necessarily all that we would know but I definitely think things that have existed people might have got them in there we know that three of the directors of the V&A through the 20th century were gay men from the 30s to the 60s so but people then didn't really have to justify everything in the way that they did now they just you could just get it and basically pop a number on it and put it in the cupboard and I can't do that now unfortunately I have to go through a lot of procedure but thankfully now the institutions are clamouring to make up the fact that they have a huge gap and I think that's audiences are driving that and saying actually hang on where are your trans artists where are your artists of colour why don't you have more of them and there isn't a good answer for that except that they just never really they just never focused on it there's no other way of saying that you know but it's better late than never it's what I say so we've got some money at the moment from the Art Fund to improve the representation of trans and non-binary artists so we've been doing that for the last two years giving people lots of lovely money to actually buy their work and not just have it as gifts as well because that's a problem as well all museums are basically living on gifts and that's not appropriate to be growing the collection in various ways like that so I hope that answers the question I digressed a little bit we have another question from you I think rather than sitting here and asking you more questions we could break out into the reception so then people can talk more informally and we can continue our conversations really thank you all so much for coming be lovely all