Vogues New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style

293

Fashion Theory, Volume 12, Issue 3, pp. 293312

DOI: 10.2752/175174108X332305
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
2008 Berg.

Sally Gray

Dr Sally Gray teaches art and

fashion history and theory at
The University of New South
Wales. Sydney. Her research
interests include fashion and
the city, gender, sexuality
and identity, and cultural
intersections between art and
fashion.
salgray@ozemail.com.au

Im Here
Girlfriend Whats
New? Art, Dress,
and the Queer
Performative
Subject: The
Case of David
McDiarmid
Abstract
In a self-consciously political enactment of a mobile identity as gay
man, queer artist David McDiarmid (195295) employed a changing
series of dress, grooming, deportment, and adornment practices. Intimately connected to a life-as-art creative practice, this performative
unfolding of a becoming gay male identity resonates with McDiarmids
artistic oeuvre achieved in Sydney and New York between 1972 and
1995.
KEYWORDS: queer, performative, masculinity, art, politics

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Sally Gray

Australian-born artist David McDiarmid (195295) produced, between

the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, a signicant body of work concerned
with gay male sexuality and cultural politics. While this art work,
collected in public art museums in Australia, and in private collections
internationally, explored, from his earliest exhibition in 1976, gay liberationist concernsit can also be read as proto-queer. In its radical
engagement with mobile rather than xed ideas of identity it exceeds
the gay identity politics of the 1970s which argued for a distinct gay
identity. McDiarmids art practice and his performative practice of dress
and adornment worked with a more mobile, less xed idea of masculine
subjectivity resonant with Judith Butlers ground-breaking work on the
uidity and instability of gendered identities and her formulation that
gender formation and identity is performative. While McDiarmid
was a radical Gay Liberation activist he arguably had an early
understanding, evidenced in his work and his invested performance of
his own embodied identity that gender and sexuality may be seen not
as something we are but as something we do (Brod 1995: 16).

Gay Man and Gay Art

The multi-valent political and cultural self-portraiture contained
within McDiarmids art extends to an embodied practice of self-representation in dress, grooming, gesture, and adornment. This amounts to a
parallel creative practice that takes place in a dress and fashion context
rather than as an art practice of embodied self-exploration (as seen in
the work of some other artists of McDiarmids time such as Gilbert
and George, Cindy Sherman or Tracey Emin). Unlike these artists
McDiarmids invested practice did not take place in a gallery-exhibiting
context in which aspects of embodied identity are explored. Rather his
vestimentary enactments, while exploring his identity as gay man and
gay artist, are a separate creative practice taking place on the street and
the dance oor, in public and private space. Nonetheless this invested
practice is more than simply a private and personal one. It is made
political and public by the way in which the artist chose to present
photographic images of himself in a narrativized and politicized form.
It is also politicized by the way in which the artists invested identity is
made nomadic, mobile, and unxed, as I argue below.
In describing Oscar Wildes personal self-invention as the self-designated professor of aesthetics, Shelton Waldrep refers to the broader
role of writer as performer that he [Wilde] used self-consciously in an
attempt to destroy the binary opposition between art and life (Waldrep
2004: xi). McDiarmids performative self-presentation through an
embodied invested practice, as rst gay and later queer artist, is
this kind of life-as-art practice.

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295

A Short History of Facial Hair, 1993

Creative engagement, on McDiarmids part, with the importance of
appearances is evidenced in his publicly performed autobiographical
essay A Short History of Facial Hair (1993) (Matthews 1997: 916).
The artist presentedtwo years before his death of an AIDS-related
illnessa prepared autobiographical text accompanied by projected
35 mm slide images of himself representing a twenty-year period of
his life and times.1 In an ironic camp performance the artist retold the
history of his own personal imaging, dress, grooming, adornment,
gesture, attitude, hairstyles, and facial hairstyles during what he called,
an extraordinary time of redenition and deconstruction of our
identities, from camp, to gay, to queer (McDiarmid 1993: 92). The
artist foregrounds his own embodied vestimentary practice against
the political, sexual, stylistic, cultural, and viral concerns of gay male
life in the urban West between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. The
essay unsettled xed ideas of identity by exploring a changing range
of personae and making McDiarmid himself both the subject and the
object of the male gaze: Queer appropriations of the gaze undermine
normative codes of spectatorship by creating a reversible look that
allows men to be both subject and object of the gaze both spectator and
spectacle, writes Joel Sanders (1996: 24).
McDiarmid revisited, in the 1993 essay, the gay male performative
image typologies he had previously referenced in his art work, beginning
in the late 1970s. He ironically proposed, using this as the formative
structure of the essay, a taxonomy of his own changing facial hairstyles
bearded, mustached, clean-shaven. Using this tropeof changing
facial hairstyleshe set up a rhetorical framework for looking at the
evolution of multiple images of himself as a gay man from hippy, to
clone, Gay Liberation activist to sexual revolutionary, hustler to dance
oor diva, and ultimately to HIV-positive queer subject, his self-styled
Toxic Queen.2
A Short History of Facial Hair was written at a key time for HIVrelated cultural scholarship and for debates within the academy on the
importance of popular culture, sexuality and everyday life. The spoken
and published piece inserts itself as a non-academic, intellectual and
creative intervention into the scholarly domain of work on AIDS and
queer theory and the attendant questioning of what is serious in culture
and what is not:
My priority as an artist has always been to record and celebrate our
lives. Having lived through an extraordinary time of redenition
and deconstruction of identities, from camp to gay to queer; and
seeing our lives marginalised everyday; we all have a responsibility
to speak out. To bang the tribal drums of the jungle telegraph
Im here girlfriend whats new? Weve always created these

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Sally Gray

languages, as weve created and shaped our identities. I hear our

lives in many formscoded, verbal, visual, physical and aural. It
might be the anticipation and release of hearing Sylvesters voice
on the dance oor at 7 am . . . It might be the language of the erce
divas in Paris is Burning as they read and shade their sisters
into oblivion. It might be the sublime gaze of the gods in Tom
of Finlands drawings. Or the ACT-UP T-shirt that says, EARN
YOUR ATTITUDE (McDiarmid 1993: 96).
A Short History of Facial Hair is in part a retrospective account of
a trend towards the re-coding of the masculine as a sign of glamour, at
a time when, as Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton put it, . . . the
masculine won out over the feminine. Masculinity replaced femininity
as a site of meaning in fashion (Evans and Thornton 1989: 55).
McDiarmids essay references a time when fetishized, glamorized, and
eroticized masculinityand homoerotic masculinity in particular
became a leading concern in fashion and lifestyle imagery. Fashion
and style publications such as The Face and Arena were emblematic
of this trend (Mort 1996: 4579) which has been characterized as the
emergence of the queer insider as a source of cultural capital (Waldrep
2004: 8).
McDiarmids essay evoked and recounted, with detached irony, gay
male performative cultures of street, bar, and dance oor. It demonstrated
a knowingness, a self-awareness, a lack of innocence, an impatience
with the serious and authentic and an embrace of the frivolous, which
works on the assumption of complicity with an equally knowing
audience (Radford 1998: 160). The essay sets up a complex backwards
and forwards dynamic of active looking and conscious reception of the
gaze of the other. As Judith Butler says in Subjects of Desire: True
subjectivities come to ourish only in communities that provide for
reciprocal recognition, for we do not come to ourselves through work
alone, but through the acknowledging look of the Other who conrms
us (Butler 1999: 28).

Art, Identity, and Dress

Links between art, identity and dress and adornment are of course not
new as the Oscar Wilde example above implies. Self-representation has
become a major concern in postmodern artistic practice, with many
artists such as those mentioned above, unsettling through their work,
the ways in which identities are formed and presented. Historically also,
artistic subcultures have been associated with bohemian nonconformity
in dress. The distinct tradition of the dandy also encompasses intersections between art, life and life-as-art which this article explores.
But neither the idea of the bohemian in dress, nor the concept of the

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dandy, is explanatory of the way McDiarmids art and his practice of

dress and adornment form part of rst gay and then queer cultural
politics. McDiarmids dress and adornment and his art practice were
impacted by the way other gay male artists of the second half of the
twentieth century used both their art and an embodied performative
practice of dress and adornment as separate but related ways to
propose ideas of art, artist and life-as-art specic to their times. Andy
Warhols self-presentation, for example, became an integral part of the
creation of the idea of Warhol-as-artist. I have mentioned Gilbert and
Georges invested art practice as art but it is their art-as-life practice of
everyday dress and habitation that more closely resembles McDiarmids
performative invested practice. As does that of David Hockney, whose
life and work together create resonances around the idea of gay artist.
McDiarmids close friend, ex-lover, and sometime collaboratorjeweler
and sculptor Peter Tullyalso had a creative practice in which his own
self-adornment was enmeshed with his self-titled Urban Tribalwear art
oeuvre and arguably can be seen as intersections of gay male subcultural
style and art in the 1980s (McPhee 1991).

Gay Male Appearance Typologies

McDiarmids vestimentary practice was part of the wider, late-twentieth
century, gay male exploration of appearance typologies delineated by
fashion historian Shaun Cole (1997; 2000) who notes the adoption
of stereotypic male clothing and imagery relating to lumberjack,
construction worker, biker, and cowboy. Cole traces the evolution of
the phenomenon of the gay male clone whose Levi 501s, plaid shirts,
and manual workers boots became a hyper-masculine dress typology.
Neat haircuts and various highly recognizable facial hairstyles, notably
neatly trimmed mustaches and beards, internationalized a masculinized
gay male appearance code that McDiarmid explored in both his art
work and his personal appearance after his rst visit to the United States
in 1977.
McDiarmid later (1993) wrote of his rst sight of clones at a gay
bar and disco where he worked in Sydney in the mid-1970s before he
had traveled to post-Stonewall America:
It [the bar and disco] had an illuminated dance oor like the
one in Saturday Night Fever and the queens wore body shirts
and ares. One night I noticed a cluster of men dancing together
who wore check shirts, 501s and military haircuts. They were
Sydneys rst taste of clones, and they were members of a genderfuck troupe from LA called the Cycle Sluts. Sydney would never
be the same again, Haughtiness was replaced by attitude.
The politics of butch had begun (McDiarmid 1993: 92).

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Sally Gray

The mixing up of the artists personal appearance, his interest in

fashion and dress, and elements of received gay and other masculine
imagery in his art work, constitutes a form of queer visual politics.

Enacting Gay Man

In a photograph taken in 1983 (Figure 1), David McDiarmid presents a
carefully self-conscious personal image that resonates strongly with the
fetishized gay male image taxonomies he had proposed in a suite of art
works (offset printed multiples) he created for a 1978 solo exhibition at
Hogarth Galleries in Sydney. Entitled Trade Enquiries, referencing sex
as trade, these art works had explored urban gay male appearance
typologies of the late 1970s. Arriving in San Francisco for the rst time
in 1977 McDiarmid had described the gay male dress typologies he
observed on the streets of the Castro: . . . the guys dress uniformly in
tight Levis, big lumberjack boots, and Airforce ying jackets . . . nylon
with fur collar; short hair and moustache (McDiarmid 1977). The
contemporary emphasis on hyper-masculine dress and style expanded
the long tradition of homosexual men using dress and adornment to
both signal same-sex desire and also disguise it. Richard Dyer articulates
how a conscious re-inscription of mainstream masculine imagery, what
he calls, the quoting of mainstream masculinity, has the effect of
destabilizing the supposed naturalness of masculinity and celebrating
the masculine as erotic. These acts of queering are brought about
by an insistence on clothes as performance, the decision to see a
conventional masculine image and dress stereotype as stylish and to

Figure 1
David McDiarmid, New York,
1983. Photographer unknown.
Reproduced with permission of
the David McDiarmid estate.

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299

wear it with irony (Dyer 2002: 68). This ironic inection is also integral
to much postmodern art practice. McDiarmids complex intersecting of
self-fashioning and art practice may be seen as part of the culture of
irony and self-referentiality which, as Robert Radford observes, may
equally apply to both art and fashion practices (Radford 1998: 153).
In one of the 1978 Trade Enquiries works, entitled Facial Hair . . .
(Figure 2), McDiarmid appropriated a drawn outline head of a gay
man from the North American gay press and altered it in various
ways to create a visual taxonomy of gay male types using hairstyles,
facial hairstyles, and sunglasses. The precise contours and outline of
beard, mustache, and mouth shape shown on several of the types of
man McDiarmid created in this work Facial Hair . . . are replicated in
the crafting of his own personal appearance in the above-mentioned
1983 photograph taken on a street in lower Manhattan. The casual,
shaggy-but-consciously-groomed man in the 1983 photograph conforms closely to one of the types in the 1978 art work (upper right)
albeit that the artist is photographed in New York in Winter and wears
spectacles rather than the aviator sunglasses in the art work. The
artists knowing gaze in the photograph almost precisely replicates that
of the man in the artwork. McDiarmids clothing (jeans, denim overvest, padded aviator-style jacket) and demeanor (hand in pocket,
leaning against the wall with a sideways obliquely cruisy look,
meeting the camera with a streetwise, knowing gaze) signify urban
edginess, cultural outlaw status, and sexual availability. The setting
(against a graftied wall in a location that signals downtown) makes
a connection with McDiarmids grafti-based art works of 19834
exhibited at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney in 1984creating a to and
fro movement between art, life, and art-as-life. While the artist plays,
in both his image in the 1983 photograph and the 1978 art work, with
what he later calls the politics of butch (McDiarmid 1993: 92), the
play is within a moveable game where xed identity is not sought but
is willfully destabilized by the multiple images, personae, and scenarios
the artist chose to employ in his own self-representation, as well as in
his art work.
The adoption of gay machismo, by taking the traditional signs of
masculinity and eroticising them in a blatantly homosexual context,
[ensures that] much mischief is done to the security with which men
are dened in society, and by which their power is secured, argues
Richard Dyer (quoted in Dollimore 1996: 231). This resonates with Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwicks articulation of the meaning of queer. She argues
for queer as a way of disrupting available thinking about sexuality
rather than a search for category denitions. Not linked to xed sexual
identities, or practices, or an innate sexual nature, queer for Kosofsky
Sedgwick, is a continuing moment, movement, motiverecurrent,
eddying, troublant. Tracing an etymology of queer, she writes: The
word queer itself means acrossit comes from the Indo-European

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Sally Gray

Figure 2
David McDiarmid, Facial Hair
. . . from Trade Enquiries 1978,
one of nine offset multiples,
edition of 200. Reproduced
with permission of the David
McDiarmid estate.

roottwerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin

torquere (to twist), English athwart (Sedgwick 1993: xii). From the
beginning of his practice as an artist McDiarmid manifested in his work,
and his invested personal identity, a mobile subjectivity in this kind
of unstable, twisted process of becoming and unfolding as protoqueer and later queer man.

Proto-queer
Preempting the market-driven play with multivalent masculinities,
quintessentially expressed in the styling of Ray Petri in the 1980s,

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301

(Mort 1996: 4584), McDiarmid early makes links between a mobile

masculine subjectivity and an ironic take on art and artist. In
1975, the year before his rst solo gallery exhibition, the artist, then
aged twenty-three, created a sleeveless, black silk-taffeta chemise-like
garment for himself on which he hand-painted a replica of the KY
lubricant tube (Figure 3). He wore this to the Flamingo Park fashion
collection of that year at which the collections of Linda Jackson and
Jenny Kee were shown at the Bathers Pavilion at Bondi Beach, Sydney.
The hand-painted KY tube squirted its contents, like a tube of artists
paint, over the wearers shoulder onto the hand-painted outline of an
artists palette. The artist thus simultaneously labeled himself, through
this ironic vestimental gesture, as both artist and gay man. He did
this in a distinctly fashion context at which the work of Australias
then most daring fashion designers was being shown. Jackson and
Kee were friends of McDiarmids and his hand-painted fabrics formed
part of Jacksons oeuvre in the 1970s and 1980s.3 This 1975 camp
performative play with the idea of artist and gay man echoes the
concerns of McDiarmids art work, inextricably linking the ideas of
art, artist, sexuality, sexual-activism, gay identity politics, proto-queer

Figure 3
David McDiarmid, Sydney,
1975. Photographer: Sally Gray.
Reproduced with permission of
the David McDiarmid estate.

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Sally Gray

cultural politics, and personal dress and self-presentation. The artists

rst gallery exhibition in 1976, entitled Secret Love had explored the
secret, embodied coded subculture and geography of gay male urban life
and celebrated the possibility that in the conditions of Gay Liberation it
(gay sexuality and sociality) need not be Secret any more.4

Unsettling Masculinity
The hyper-masculinity of the imagery the artist adopted in the later
1983 photograph, while being emblematic of the stereotypical dress
and adornment of (Western) urban gay men at this time, simultaneously
contains a dissonance activated by the gray hand-painted lamb-suede
scarf (part of a range designed and made by McDiarmid) and the careful
art direction of the settingthe background texture and red of the wall
resonating with the red plaid scarf he also wears. This is an example
of the detail, in Roland Barthes terms, which removes McDiarmids
vestimentary performance from a group enactment, destroying its shared
(hyper-masculine, clone) value in a dandyish assertion of singularity
(Barthes 1962: 67).
Destabilizing xed ideas of masculine identity, the artists multivalent,
mobile approach to adornment unsettles stable (hyper-masculine or
other) homosexual identity and plays instead with its complex potentialities. Leo Bersani and Jonathan Dollimore note the uncertainties in
gay male attitudes towards masculinity itself. Dollimore writes, based
on a reading of Bersani, that: In one and the same gay milieu one
is likely to encounter identication with, desire for, and parodies of
masculinity, thus unsettling ideas of a unitary homosexual identity or
desire (Dollimore 1996: 3212). Tensions and resonances between all of
these responses to the idea of masculinitydesire for, identication
with, and parody ofare the concern of both McDiarmids art
practice and his self-presentation as gay man and artist in his personal
life-as-art.

Do You Wanna Get Funky with Me?

McDiarmid frequently had himself photographed in front of his art
work in a posed situation in which his own vestimentary performance
resonates with the materiality of the art work. These extant photographs, taken as a whole, make a study in self-created personal image
production and provide an opportunity to examine resonances between
the art work and the artists mobile, embodied performative identity.
In a 1986 snapshot taken in Manhattan, McDiarmid stands in front of
his work Disco Kwilt (1981) in a loose, lawless, available, and deant
pose (Figure 4). The art work itself is part of a series created between

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303

Figure 4
David McDiarmid, New York,
1986. Photographer: (attrib)
Robert Cromwell. Reproduced
with permission of the David
McDiarmid estate.

1979 and 1981 using shiny, reective laser-etched commercial display

material, and patterns derived from traditional North American quilt
making. Known collectively as the Disco Quilts these works sought to
materialize the reected light and the visual, aural and visceral sensation
of the underground dance club experience, especially that of the, mainly
black and Hispanic, gay underground dance club Paradise Garage.5

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Sally Gray

Wearing a ashy, shiny outt and aviator shades in the W12 St

apartment of his Ohio-born African American lover, the artist is
photographed before going out clubbing at the Paradise Garage. With
sculpted but unshaven facial hair evoking late nights and serious
pleasure, the artist bares his torso in a languid lean (Bordo 1999:
192) against the shiny reective surface of the art work. His contextual
placement in terms of space and time sets up performative resonances
between sex, underground dance clubbing, African American musical
culture, hipness, and night-time in the city. The photograph enacts a
mobile performative play with image and identity as artist and gay
man which, as we have seen, McDiarmid had made a trope within his
public persona since the beginning of his career as an artist.

Masculine Stereotypes
Stereotypesof businessman, dandy, hustler, hipster, debauchee
were engaged by McDiarmid as serial provisional personae. Usually
conceived of as limiting and potentially insidiousan entrapment of
their subjectsstereotypes can arguably be destabilized by irony and
appropriation. To be politically effective in its task of control, Craig
Owens has suggested, the stereotype must remain xed. Unxing it
releases a subversive potentiality (Owens 1992: 195). McDiarmids
vestimentary practice is a strategy of resistance in a playful interrogation
of preexisting masculine stereotypes which as Michel Foucault wrote:
. . . treat the body as an object to be held in position, subservience,
submission; they disavow agency, dismantle the body as a locus of
action and reassemble it as a discontinuous series of gestures and
posesthat is as a semiotic eld (quoted in Owens 1992: 125).
McDiarmid engaged in a strategy such as Caroline Evans describes
when she writes that an identity that is uid and mobile, rather
than xed, might be the only way to resist both recuperation and the
determining voice of discourse (Evans 1997: 180).

The Beats, Hip, and Cool

There is, I suggest, a visual trope of blackness being explored in
the ashy, insolent aunting of the languid leaning gesture and the
clashing liveliness of the shiny willfully mismatched fabrics of the
1986 photograph (Bordo 1999: 20910). McDiarmid appropriates in
his image the inventive improvisational aesthetic African American
scholar Robert Farris Thompson sees as emblematic of African American
style, referring to the deliberate clashing of high affect colours and

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305

the use of patterns and colors which argue with each otherpart
of diasporic West African visual aesthetics (Farris Thompson 1983:
209 and 217). McDiarmid is here, in his African American boyfriends
apartment, engaged in an appropriative aesthetic move consistent with
his entire creative oeuvre. In this case he has allowed his own performative
invested identity to be inected by his African American community of
choice in a re-signication of the cultural meanings he adopts as part of
the mixembedded in his ironic personal style and materialized in
the Disco Quilt works such as the one shown in this photograph. Of
McDiarmids complex and discerning range of vestimental choices, one
might ask, as Kobena Mercer does in relation to the appropriation of
tropes of blackness in hairstyle and dress: So who, in this postmodern
age of semiotic appropriation and counter-creolization, is imitating
whom? (Mercer 1987: 3354). In this posed snapshot, McDiarmid
employs stance, gesture, outt, grooming, attitude, setting, and context
to signal a conscious status ambivalence embracing the notion of hip
and cool specic to the African American diaspora and rearticulated
by the American Beats. The adoption of a self-consciously elaborated
personal style was, within this context, both an assertion of superior
taste (the dandyish assertion of an aristocracy of talent rather than of
birth) while at the same time an eschewing of the very idea of Western
bourgeois good taste.
McDiarmid admired the work, style, hipness, and outlaw status of
those of the Beats who were out homosexualsespecially William
Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Derived from African American
cultural tradition, especially jazz, hipness relates to the possession of
the kind of insider knowledge which also applies to homosexual culture
(Leland 2004: 348; Sedgwick 1990: 204). McDiarmid was manifestly
interested in the notion of hip in all its expressionsdress, music,
attitude, and sexiness. While being hip implies insider knowledge,
being cool implies a composed nonchalance of the kind embodied
in the 1986 photograph of McDiarmid under discussion. Robert Farris
Thompson in an essay on the aesthetics of cool notes that the African
American notion of cool, derived again from West Africa, is a deeply
and complexly motivated, consciously artistic, interweaving of elements
serious and pleasurable, of responsibility and play (Farris Thompson
1998: 372).
McDiarmids adoption of the lineage of the Beats is manifest in his
personal demeanor and dress as well as in his work. In a number of
posed snapshot photographs of the artist taken in the early 1980s in New
York he adopts various tropes of American-ness linked to notions
of hipness, coolness, sexual availability, hot sexuality, and streetwise
urban artfulness. Levi 501s; Haynes T-shirts; chinos; workers boots;
lumberjack shirts; long john underwear; sweatshirts; motorcycle
jackets; denim jackets; aviator jackets; baseball caps; shiny showy
fabrics and other aspects of North American cool and stereotypic

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Sally Gray

Figure 5
David McDiarmid, New York,
1983. Photographer unknown.
Reproduced with permission of
the David McDiarmid estate.

American male dress found their way into McDiarmids performative

self-presentation.
In a photograph of the artist taken in the early 1980s at the gay male
cruising grounds at the disused Hudson River piers in west-side lower
Manhattan (Figure 5), McDiarmid adopts a pose coolly American in
the sense implicit here:
Queens [in Australia] had travelled and acquired a taste for big
city pleasureswe all turned into porn stars, we took lots of clever
drugs, we dressed down and dirty for sex, and dressed up to go
dancingoften confusing those sisters whose model for being gay
was precious, alcoholic and European (McDiarmid 1993: 93).
In Levis, white cotton vest, and cowboy belt, he leans into the broken
masonry of the old pier with the languid lean of the sexually available, backgrounded by a locale that speaks of drugs (Rush Rules), risk,
excitement, and the abjectly urban. McDiarmids outt, grooming,
demeanor, and location for this photograph imply an awareness that
self-presentation and transitive identity formation is located spatially
and temporally.6 He contrived to have himself photographed in front
of other apparently opportunistic backgrounds which, together with
the dress and demeanor of the artist himself, construct a proto-narrative
setting which speaks of sexual availability and cool, streetwise hipness.
These interconnected personaeartist and streetwise sexual outlaw
form a discursive connection between the subject matter of the artists
work and his life-as-art.

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307

Masculine Masquerade: Identity, Dress, and Theory

Identity as Simon Thrift says, comes from the outside, not the inside;
it is something we put or try on, not something we reveal or discover
(quoted in Bruzzi and Church Gibson 2000: 270). The evolution of
queer theory from feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and lm and
literary studies has destabilized xed notions of gender, sexuality, and
identity and has in turn fuelled scholarly interest in the instability of
gendered practices of dress and cultures of adornment. Recent writers on
embodied performative masculinity have been interested in the notion
of masculine masquerade, drawing on the much-quoted 1929 essay
by Joan Riviere on feminine masquerade (Riviere 1929). Masquerade,
following Riviere, was generally seen as the province of the female
and thus only effeminate men would adopt a masquerade. The phrase
masculine masquerade would be an oxymoron, a contradiction
in terms (Brod 1995: 13). Contemporary theory, however, proposes
that:
The masculine, . . . is not a monolithic and immutable gender but
a conation of personal, sexual, social, and historical conditions.
Once assumed to be the normative or authentic gender role,
dened in marked contrast to the masquerade of the feminine,
masculinity is nally revealed to be, like femininity, a constructed
identity (Posner 1995: 29).
Recent fashion theory also elaborates the potential in seeing masculinity
as masquerade. Caroline Evans nds that the metaphor of masquerade
seems particularly apt to describe the way in which men as well as women
move through and negotiate subcultural space for themselves (Evans
1997: 181). Judith Butlers formulation of the performative nature of
gendered identities has played an important part in the development
both of queer theory and fashion theory. Gender and cultural and
subcultural identity for Butler are not a matter of a preexisting nature or
essence but are brought into being in a mobile, uncertain and unfolding
process. In David McDiarmids case he both stood knowingly outside
of, and at the same time participated in, the performative masquerades
of masculinity being enacted within gay male subcultures. Often himself
in the vanguard, he was also at an ironic distance.

Art and AIDS

In a self-composed photograph, taken by Sydney photographer C.
Moore Hardy in 1993 (Figure 6), the artist elegantly presents himself in
contrasting tones of black and white standing in front of his work Spiral
(1992) a black and white vinyl mosaic work on board. This work, along

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Figure 6
David McDiarmid, Sydney,
1993. Photographer: C. Moore
Hardy. Reproduced with
permission of C. Moore Hardy,
www.starshphoto.com/.

with several others executed in the early 1990s, explored the idea of the
vortex as a metaphor for death and mortality. As the artist came to terms
with his HIV+ status, which had been conrmed in 1987, and later his
impending death (of AIDS-related conditions in May 1995), he engaged,
through his art work, in a vibrant and uncompromising cultural politics
of AIDS. In this self-composed portrait, the artist ironically adopts
the pose of a suave man-about-town, displaying the clean-cut elan of

Im Here Girlfriend Whats New?

309

the model in the Australian Pelaco shirt advertisements of the 1950s,

or Peter Stuyvesant cigarette advertisements from the 1960s. Slightly
leaning to his right, a burning cigarette in his left hand, with his weight
supported on his right leg, the artist adopts a studied but casual pose
which allows the cut, hang, and patterning of his clothing to be shown
to best advantage.
The clothing he wears is itself a study in self-composition. The
geometric pattern-on-pattern he has chosen: black and white checked
jacket, differently checked waistcoat, and spotted tie resonates with the
intricate geometry of the painting behind him. The suave sophistication
of the pose is unsettled by the denim jeans which, as Christopher
Breward notes, signify rebellion, subversive intent, difference and
refusal (Breward 2003: 111). With the tonality of the graying-at-thehairline, neatly barbered hair, the clean-shaven-with-mustache face, the
scholarly gold-rimmed eye-glasses, McDiarmids demeanor, meeting the
eye of the camera with a direct self-possessed gaze, could be saying:
You think you know who I am. But take a look. I will continue to
puzzle and confound you.

Conclusion
The dynamic intersection between the sexualpolitical themes explored
within David McDiarmids art work and the artists embodied selfpresentation, part of his art-as-life practice, was an important unsettling
of the stable ideas of the male artist as gesturally hyper-heterosexual
one of the legacies of American Abstract Expressionism. McDiarmids,
consciously photographically recorded, vestimentary practice constitutes
a pleasurable, transitive play with queer resistance to normative notions
of masculinity, homosexual identity, art and artist. The ironic tropes
of art and artist and playful engagement with identity expressed
in the self-made and designed 1975 taffeta evening chemise, discussed
above, inaugurates a play with fashion and dress that informs both the
artists work itself and his embodied practice of self-representation until
the end of his career. As separate but related creative practices they
together constitute a queer cultural politics.

Notes
1. McDiarmid left in his estate, on his death in 1995, a signicant, welldocumented collection of photographic images of himself, including
the 35 mm slides which he used as the visual content of his essay A
Short History of Facial Hair (1993). These snapshot images were
created over a twenty-year period in what might be described as
a form of joint art direction between subject and photographer

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

(usually friends) recording the life-as-art which was being mutually

created by the protagonists.
Toxic Queen was the title of an exhibition and limited edition
artists book created by McDiarmid in 1992 in the context of the
cultural politics of AIDS.
McDiarmid created hand-painted fabrics in a collaborative design
process with Linda Jackson (who designed and cut the resulting
garments). He also designed and made his own range of lamb-suede
garments, which became signature outts worn for dance clubbing
in New York and Sydney in the 1980s. He also hand-painted selffashioned garments in Ethiopian cotton which resembled his graftiinspired paintings (exhibited at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney in
June 1984) created while the artist was resident in New York (Gray
1999: 96101).
The 1976 exhibition title referenced the popular 1950s song Secret
Love sung by Doris Day. Written by Sammy Fain (music) and Paul
Francis Webster (lyrics) the song was a major popular hit and won
an Academy Award for best song for its performance by Doris Day
in the lm Calamity Jane (1953).
Located in a former trucking-garage at 84 King Street, Manhattan, the
Paradise Garage (19771987) is remembered for its groundbreaking
DJ Larry Levan (one of the originators of House music), its state-ofthe-art sound system and lighting technology, and its dynamic racial,
ethnic, sexual, and cultural mix. The clubs existence coincided with
the movement towards gay male self-determination and the reinvigoration of African American musical creativity in Disco, House,
and Hip Hop (Brewster and Broughton 1999: 25467; Fikentscher
2000: 612).
This image recalls (and possibly quotes) in its location and mood,
photographs of New York gay artist David Wojnarowicz taken at
these piers (Wojnarowicz and Scholder 1999: 168).

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