Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Frauen der Arbeitersklasse (Abstract Drag), 2013
Photographic print
23 x 32 x 3 cm (including frame)
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
In place of the objects typically used in drag performance to engage with the constitution of the self as an assemblage of societal markers, i.e. the constitution of the self...
In place of the objects typically used in drag performance to engage with the constitution of the self as an assemblage of societal markers, i.e. the constitution of the self “through norms that I myself have not produced”, then “drag is a way to understand how this constitution occurs, and to reconstruct it on one’s own body”. Thus Lorenz suggests that a “radical drag” might borrow and reconstruct from “traces of history” to “do something different than staging a transformation from ‘man’ to ‘woman’ or ‘woman’ to ‘man’; that, for instance, work with contradictory gender markers or bring elements into embodiment that disrupt any interpretation within the two-gender system”. Depictions in these works are thus frequently intentionally beyond coherency; they reject it. Instead, we contemplate identity, desire, chronologies, utopia, process, and art, all at once and inseparably.