Discovered Visual Artists from the Past

By Dominik Böhler

From time to time, I realise there are many artists I don’t know about. When I discover something interesting for my research or pure artistic pleasure, I will share it with you.

Lorenza Böttner (1959 – 1994) was an artist born in 1959 into a family of German origin in Punta Arenas, Chile. At the age of eight, he was electrocuted when climbing up a pylon, resulting in both arms having to be amputated below the shoulder. He returned to Germany with his mother in 1973 to undertake a series of plastic surgery operations and moved to Lichtenau. Böttner refused prosthetic arms and she chose to transform her situation, developing an interest in classical ballet, jazz, and tap dancing, and learning to paint with her feet and mouth. Lorenz decided to use the name, Lorenza, affirming an openly transgender feminine position without transitioning. Her life concept was as powerful as her art concepts.

 

Mark Morrisroe (1959 – 1989) was an American photographer. He was a good friend of Nan Goldin and David Armstrong and his photography was mostly been exhibited and discussed in connection with them. Morrisroe candidly shot images of lovers, friends, hustlers and New York scenes. He had a big influence on the development of the 1970s punk scene in Boston and the art world boom of the mid-to-late-80s in New York. He had a tragic life story that ended at the early age of 30 due to AIDS. “Mark was an outlaw on every front—sexually, socially, and artistically. He was marked by his dramatic and violent adolescence as a teenage prostitute with a deep distrust and a fierce sense of his uniqueness. I met him in Art School in 1977; he left shit in my mailbox as a gesture of friendship. Limping wildly down the halls in his torn t-shirts, calling himself Mark Dirt, he was Boston’s first punk. He developed into a photographer with a completely distinctive artistic vision and signature. Both his pictures of his lovers, close friends, and objects of desire, and his touching still-lifes of rooms, dead flowers, and dream images stand as timeless fragments of his life, resonating with sexual longing, loneliness, and loss.” – Nan Goldin, 1993

Bhupen Khakhar (also spelled Bhupen Khakkar, 10 March 1934 – 8 August 2003) was an Indian artist. He was a member of the Baroda Group and gained international recognition for his work as “India’s first ‘Pop’ artist.” Khakhar was a self-trained artist and started his career as a painter relatively late in his life. His works were figurative and concerned with the human body and its identity. As an openly gay artist, the problem of gender definitions and gender identity were major themes of his work. His paintings often contained references to Indian mythology and mythological themes.

Claude Cahun, born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob (1894 – 1954) was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer. Schwob adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914. Cahun is best known as a writer and self-portraitist, who assumed a variety of performative personae. In her writing, she consistently referred to herself as elle (she), and this article follows her practice; but she also said that her actual gender was fluid. For example, in Disavowals, Cahun writes: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” Cahun is most well known for her androgynous appearance, which challenged the strict gender roles of her time. During World War II, Cahun was also active as a resistance worker and propagandist. Founding the leftist group Contre Attaque alongside Andre Breton and Batallie; a union of communist writers, artists and workers. Cahun’s work was often a collaboration with Marcel Moore (the pseudonym of Suzanne Malherbe). It is believed that they were lovers. Following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out, as the island was liberated from German occupation in 1945. However, Cahun’s health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954.

David Wojnarowicz (1954 – 1992) was a Polish-American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. His work is about America, a place he had described in his 1991 essay collection Close to the Knives as an “illusion”, a “killing machine”, a “tribal nation of zombies … slowly dying beyond our grasp”. The self-taught artist embraced a cobbled-together aesthetic and frequently integrated found materials – driftwood, animal skulls, maps – into his work.

Dominik Böhler is the Chief Adviser of GAY45. PhD candidate, passionate about the transcendence of science in the philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. Works in Vienna and commutes to England at the University of Oxford where to continue the DPhil (doctoral) programme in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences. Böhler does not have a social media presence.

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