Thomas F R E D E R I C K FOLLAND

It has long been axiomatic that the readymades of Marcel Duchamp exemplify the New York dada movement. But the mass‐produced objects that he famously chose and inscribed with his name were also a response to another paradigm of early twentieth‐century modernism: that of primitivism. Indeed, it is surprising to discover the extent to which the immediate culture from which the readymades emerged was one saturated in notions about the so‐called ‘primitive’, the result of a sudden influx of African art into New York in the years following the First World War. This essay re‐situates the readymades within this historical context and posits that they allegorized primitivism. It is equally argued that the profound impact of African art on the development of twentieth‐century modernism exceeds traditional art‐historical narratives. If Duchamp's primitivism has remained largely invisible it is because of the ways in which the primitive (as a set of ideas about art that are racial in origin) has been corralled within Western modernism.

Thomas Folland’s “Robert Rauschenberg’s 'Red Show': Theater, Painting, and Queerness in 1950s Modernism” now available on Project Muse https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/35972

“Rauschenberg’s violation of [New York School] principles—the purity of form and the sweeping lines of vigorous strokes that reiterated that masculinity—in the kitschy, messy, theatrical excesses of the Red Paintings queered the logic of the abstractly rendered contours of heteronormative identity. The Red Show turned the heroics of self-discovery into camp and theater.”

The Combines that  Robert Rauschenberg  produced between 1953 and 1956 represent a “queering” of Abstract Expressionism, and by extension the culture of postwar modernism itself, through the artist’s pronounced use of decoration. The decorative materiality of his work is overlooked by current scholarship that frames the Combines as either a postmodern allegory of representation, or as an iconographically read revelation of his gay identity. Refusing biography, the essay draws on queer theory’s opposition to legible—and legislated—identity to read the decorative as a queerly deconstructive strategy deployed to undermine postwar American art’s grand narratives of subjectivity.

The work of Stephen Andrews is discussed. Moving between drawing, painting, and photography, Andrews's work presents contemporary ideas around issues of the body, AIDS, and new media. It is an ongoing witness to the themes of desire, sexuality, and mortality in an age that is increasingly digital, and a central aspect of the work is the idea that the self is both a social construct and a personal construction that is inveigled within technologies of representation. The artist takes a found image, a drawing, a personal fragment, and breaks it down into its digital components, abstracts it, plays it out by repetition, and mixes the self with its public and private representations. Although the resulting imagery may resemble the high-resolution graphics of digital media imagery, the formal mechanisms and the material reconstruction of photography-derived imagery cancel many of the assumptions of cyber reality, especially the interface between the self and representation.

Article from anthology "Mirror Machine: Video Art and Identity" edited by Janine Marchessault
Centre for Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions/YYZ Artist Centre, 1995.
The essay describes a history of Canadian video art in relation to AIDS activism of the 1980s and 90s, and in specific relationship to the emergence of Canadian broadcast and cable technologies.

"Reviews" 1995-96 is a series of four exhibitions which re-situate some of the last 20 years in the Toronto art scene. Reviewing not only individual works but also the critical context in which the work was produced, this series attempts to expand upon ideas of local art history. This second exhibition in the series focuses on key exhibitions from the early to mid 1980′s which assembled the intense collective activity of the burgeoning Toronto arts community. Through the exhibitions YYZ Monumenta, Chromaliving and The New City of Sculpture, attempts were made to forge a sense of a shared formal language; a vital language of imagery and representation which not only abandoned a “modernist” approach to art, but also became the base for a communal structure.
https://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/reviews-a-project-room-seriesexperimental-art-and-ideas-2/