Maximalism is not a new trend. It has been present throughout the centuries, in the 17th represented in the baroque aesthetic, in the 18th in the rococo, in the 19th in the Victorian, in the 20th in the opulent Hollywood Regency style of the golden twenties. In the world of art, it has historically been dismissed as a superficial bet devoid of meaning.
But as exhibition curator Elissa Auther points out, “Machine Dazzle brilliantly demonstrates that, in aesthetic maximalism, surface effects are political acts of resilience and survival and that, by being embraced by queers, it actively counteracts the biases of the mainstream.” high culture regarding spectacle, flamboyance, and bodies that don’t conform to normative gender expectations,” she says via email. Something that Dazzle corroborates in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue: “I feel that I represent all those creative queers that have existed throughout history and were branded as crazy. I love the counterculture, people who don’t fit into society.”
Of the two floors where the most bizarre costumes are exhibited, the one that shows the 24 designs that accompanied the epic show 24 decades of popular music history stands out. The performance, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017, was written, directed and starred by the American artist Taylor Mac and has the peculiarity that it lasts a whole day. In it, Mac sings 246 songs, dedicating an hour to each era, subjectively summarizing the history of the United States and popular music from 1776 to 2016. It is one of the most representative works of the maximalist current in the performing arts and brings an important change of paradigm returning to the active audience.
In Queer Creativity: Why Maximalism Matters, scholar AC Panella observes that “maximalism can be considered radical inclusion and expression.” By taking risks such as excess and the rejection of a regular structure, he “challenges capitalist notions of artistic exchange between spectators and actors. Offering abundance risks comfort. In a minimalist performance, the viewer does not have many options, but in a maximalist one, the audience must make decisions: where to look, what elements are we willing to miss, whether or not to participate”. At the same time that reflection on sexuality and gender outside the normative is invited, the audience is challenged “to expand our thinking about other identities”.
With the creation of costumes for this performance, Machine Dazzle evokes in an unexpected and original way the political situation, trends, inventions and tragedies that stood out in each era. Machine illustrates the American Great Depression by creating an ice cream suit, which he comments on by saying, “Great Depression. Who knew cones were invented during this time? Put a cherry on top! Glamor is resistance.” For the period 1846-1856 he draws inspiration from two key figures, the composer Stephen Foster (creator of Oh! Susanna) and the poet Walt Whitman. “A game of chess in nature. Whitman’s poetry inspires the innate. Flowers are as sensual as the human body… desire, fantasy and truth. Checkmate”. In the costume that he represents 1866-1876 he mixes inventions such as dynamite, Levi’s or toilet paper. For the AIDS era, from 1986 to 1996, Machine designed a cape hung with real cassette tapes and a crown of skulls. “I convey how abundance turns into mixed messages, confusion, body awareness and loss. It rains at the gay pride parade.”
Maximalism is once again a trend, but unlike the boom of the twenties of the last century, now it does not refer to a mere aesthetic, but is loaded with an identity meaning that confronts heteronormativity and binary gender and bets on inclusivity , the hybrid and diversity. It is the invitation to accept what for some is considered “too much”. To accept (and hopefully celebrate) a body that can encompass everything. Generation Z (born between the late 1990s and early 2010s) champions maximalism as a philosophy of life that affects how people think, how they dress, and where they live. And that it is closely linked to what is queer as it is an invitation to openness and discovery. Cuban academic José Esteban Muñoz referred to this desire in Cruising Utopia when he tried to define queerness as “a structuring and educational way of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” For Muñoz, what is queer “is essentially the rejection of the here and now and the insistence on the potentiality or possibility of another world.”
The current New York art scene is queer, representing this paradigm shift towards progress: Fotografiska has opened the season with a retrospective on David LaChapelle, the Whitney presents Supremacy, by Martine Gutiérrez, and the MET has joined the historic places project of the LGBT collective to launch Queer New York: a virtual tour highlighting the life and work of some queer artists who lived in the Big Apple. It is the resounding yes of culture to plurality.
As novelist and essayist Ann Pancake points out in Creative Responses to Worlds Unraveling: The Artist in the 21st Century: “The only solution to our current mess is a radical transformation of how people think, perceive, and value.” “That is to say”, she adds, “there must be a revolution inside people. And that revolution is what art can do better than anything else at our disposal.”
