Clubs of Night: An artistic response into spaces of collective association and coping in a patriarchal time

Chydenius, Isabella

Clubs of Night: An artistic response into spaces of collective association and coping in a patriarchal time

Master Thesis

2022

Abstract

This academic and artistic research investigates ideas about safety in relation to gender1 and femininity in the heterotopian2 time-space of urban nightclub culture in the context of the current patriarchal time. 3 My aim is to examine the experiences of safety and unsafety within these particular spaces from an individual and socio-political perspective and discuss how contemporary artists have engaged with similar issues in their own practices. Most importantly, I will investigate the need for safety: where, when, how and for whom it “exists” – but, at the same time, it will also be crucial to consider if safety is not merely, as Gay (2014:194) put it in her book Bad Feminist, a much-needed illusion that is “as frustrating as it is powerful”. It is against this background of seeking to identify shared experiences of (un)safety that I will explore the night as a form of metaphor; highlighting it as a romanticised site which can potentially open up the space for imagining alternative possible futures against the oppressive elements in one's day-to-day life (DeGuzman, 2012). At the same time, it is vital to consider the time-space of the night from the rational perspective of caution; as it is often a heightened time of day for emotional and physical violence, specifically with regard to young girls and womxn who are warned of epistemic gendered violence through society and the mainstream media since childhood (Massey, A., 2017). It is from this perspective that my body of work aims to shed light on the theoretical and symbolic meaning of the intentionally created physical “safe(r) space” (Austin, B., 2018) of specific nightclubs and events that challenge patriarchal norms. 4 In other words, I am interested in how these oftenoverlooked spaces can create new configurations of belonging between like-minded people and able to induce new forms of shared subjectivity in the time-space of the night. I draw on art-historical examples of how nightclub culture has historically provided the time-space for expression and reimagination of the ‘Self' and society, and how this has served as a catalyst for change into mainstream culture, as well as national and global politics. While the discourse is mainly produced around the concept of patriarchal violence, there is, nevertheless, a constant search for signs of unity between the marginalised by patriarchal society in the midst of violence (and the night) as will be evident in the work of the artist Gabrielle Goliath (pg. 19). This move, to ensure I use the past (Histories of Art) to participate in finding paths of flight for the present (and future) in my own visual research is an explicit acknowledgment of both the recurring social gender/class/racial challenges faced in society across time and space, and at the same time the role of contemporary artistic production to give form to these challenges so as to enable the production of critique.

Keywords

Fine Arts

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