This year’s Swiss artistic committee — their project billed unusually as a curatorial device delegated to adjunct research artists — immersed itself in the late-1970s public image politics of homosexuality to draw out its social repercussions on today. Projections taken from television magazine programmes, brought into the twenty-first century with jaggy CGI, narrate the tension and tenderness of civic rights and aesthetic emancipation. Alarmist activist statements serve as the show’s wayfinding. News cuttings point to a sense of peril, while a gay predator shark has triumphantly devoured the patriarchy.
Mission accomplished? Not quite, the wall text suggests. Yet the forms on show do not attest to the project’s cyclical necessity; they merely foreground once vital art’s descent into dry sociology. They please the eye as they do so, granted, but that only makes their demand more pernicious. This call for liberation is bogus! If the Swiss don’t think they’re free, who is?
