Henrik Olesen: from Parody to the Imagination of a History of Queer Art

Abstract

This article will analyse the work Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artist Relevant to Homo-Social Culture Between c.1330-1870 (2007) by the Danish artist Henrik Olesen which, taking Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne as its starting point, proposes a queer critique of the patriarchal and exclusionary modes of writing art history. To do this, a series of inertias that the discipline reproduces with the aim of creating a single narrative will be unravelled; at the same time, the work will use these same strategies in a parodic key to lay the foundations for a queer art history that sex-disadvantaged minorities need and deserve. On the other hand, the work will propose, through a heterodox and anachronistic approach to images, new ways of relating to art from the present that use the activated body and desire-among others-as alternative epistemological instruments to write other possible narratives. In short, this close reading of this work moves towards an attempt to critically imagine possible presents and futures through play and the queer disarticulation of past temporalities, thus rehearsing a counter-history of queer art that constructs queer genealogies of its own through which to narrate ourselves.