Transformer - Aspects of Travesty, Richard Saltoun Gallery

Recreating an exhibition staged forty years ago is an intriguing idea. That’s what’s happening at the Richard Saltoun Gallery later this month. 2013 marks the 40th anniversary of Transformer – Aspects of Travesty, curated by decorated Swiss art historian Jean-Christophe Ammann and held originally at the Kunstmuseum (Lucerne) in 1974. It was one of the first exhibitions to look critically at non-normative notions of gender and sexuality, and this recreation reunites many of the artists whose work at that time explored drag, transgender culture, and the blurring of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’.

The title of the exhibition is a reference to Lou Reed’s 1972 Transformer album – a seminal work which in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Factory – which featured the collaboration of larger-than-life figures from the worlds of music, art, and performance. Such was the overlap of these genres that Warhol at one time managed Lou Reed’s former band The Velvet Underground, and David Bowie, a friend of Warhol's at the vanguard of experimentation with self-image through his on stage personae Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, also jointly produced and provided backing vocals for Transformer. The lyrics from Take a Walk on the Wild Side refer to Holly, Candy, Little Jo, Sugar Plum Fairy and Jackie, all ‘artists’ associated with Warhol’s Factory.

Expect to see a number of sexually explicit photographs, several of which feature mirrors which the subjects use to reflect on their image in different ways: curiously, defiantly and in the case of Luciano Castelli’s Spiegelssal (1973) – very alluringly. Alex Silber’s Spiegelbild (Boudoir) (1974) features a man in conventional woman’s attire - a sweater and a pretty neck scarf – whose large masculine hand dominates the foreground of the photograph and is at odds with the delicate compact mirror he gazes into. Andrew Sherwood’s portrait Jackie Curtis Making Up features one of the drag artist stars of the ‘Factory’ who is also mentioned as ‘just speeding away’ in the lyrics of Take a Walk on the Wild side.  

The opening of the 1974 exhibition was deemed newsworthy by Swiss television, but received little publicity in this country. In terms of art history, however, it’s seen as groundbreaking. Forty years on and this area of art could still be considered ‘marginal’ although recent exhibitions such as Glam - The Performance of Style (Tate 2013) have attempted to address this. In today’s society, where image is everything, these works simultaneously provoke, disconcert and amuse. Their boldness of their challenges to accepted ideas of gender and stereotyping makes this exhibition every bit as relevant today as it was in 1974.

Admission: FREE
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