PhD Oral Exam - Adrian Deveau, Art History

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

The trial was a sharp wind, a change in the tide. In 1982, the Canadian gay magazine The Body Politic was charged by the federal government for publishing “obscene material” in their article “Lust with a Very Proper Stranger” (alternatively titled “Sex with a Very Proper Fister”) by Angus Mackenzie, documenting the experiences of fisting during gay sex. Running parallel to the country’s exclusionary, or ironically “inclusionary” policies, is an emerging alternative queer arts scene. Seated in the courtroom with pen and paper in hand were the members of the Toronto-based gay arts collective JAC, an anagram for artists John Grube, Alex Liros, and Clarence Barnes (formerly known as Gay Art Involvement). John Grube, a founding member of JAC, produced a courtroom drawing during the 1982 trial, documenting the proceedings in real time. Although the trial was a brief moment in the long and turbulent histories of charges for The Body Politic magazine and other queer venues across the settler state of Canada, JAC managed to capture the swift hammer of queer censorship laws after the federal decriminalization of homosexuality. My dissertation, entitled Out of the Bedrooms, Into the Streets! The Relational Force of a Queer Self in Canada analyzes the emergence of the new queer art movements of the 1990s to the 2010s, specifically in the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Tseil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples (Vancouver), Traditional Treaty 7 Territory (Calgary), Tkaronto (Toronto), and Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). My analysis of queer art histories challenges existing narratives of “Canadian Art” as defined by structures of heteroreproductive nationalism. Key artists I will feature in my dissertation include Cliff Red Crow, Warren Arcand, Bruce LaBruce, Paul Wong, Adrian Stimson and Lori Blondeau, Kamisha Alexson, Jordan Tannahill, and Jes Sachse. By utilizing the space of the streets, the camera, the artist-run centre, and the body, LGBTQIA2S+, or alternatively termed “queer,” artists actively challenge the canon of so-called “Canadian art,” an aesthetic rooted in white supremacy and colonial aesthetics.