Darling, Nobody Cares
DJCS
2026


Years ago, I took a regular I befriended at the cruise club where I worked to an exhibition at Artspace. We knew each other from the club where on Saturday nights we would sing karaoke until the club closed at 3am and drink instant coffee or Tennessee Blue whiskey, waiting for the construction trucks outside to move. The trucks had been blocking access to the shop while they rebuilt Karangahape Road, pushing one of the longest running gay sex venues in Aotearoa New Zealand to the brink of closure. They prepared all week for our visit, packing their bag with everything they thought they might need for a day in the city. After all, once the gallery visit was over, what were they supposed to do in town? They saved up some money, dressed for an afternoon of high culture, and caught the bus into Karangahape Road to meet me. They could only visit at 4pm when the gallery was due to close, so I contacted the gallery beforehand and asked whether they would mind staying open an extra half hour for us. They agreed. When we arrived shortly after four, however, the gallery was locked. None of the staff answered their phones. I apologised for the disappointment and gave them some money to get home, agreeing to try again the following week. The second time, the door had been left open. Nobody greeted us, in fact, nobody seemed to be in the gallery at all.

We began moving through an exhibition that claimed to be situated in queer history. As we went from work to work, I watched my friend's face slowly drop. Eventually, they began to yawn. I attempted to explain the exhibition's significance, why it mattered within contemporary art, and why things that might appear boring were supposed, within this language anyway, to matter enormously. They walked into the centre of the gallery, tired eyes darting around the room, and loudly proclaimed, “Darling, nobody cares.” Perhaps this was the most important thing anyone has said about contemporary art. They understood something about the institution that I had forgotten having worked within it. What might appear important from within the apparently professional discourse of contemporary art could appear totally inconsequential from outside it. The elaborate language through which we established the importance of an exhibition did not necessarily correspond to any material transformation. Who cares? Why should they? And what actually changes?

These questions have become increasingly important as contemporary art institutions have embraced the language of queerness. Queer exhibitions, queer archives, queer methodologies, queering, queer histories, queer community. This visibility is often understood as some kind of evidence of progress. Yet after sixteen years working in a variety of roles across artist run spaces, public institutions, university environments, the sex industry and my own independent projects, I have become increasingly suspicious of any assumption that representation is itself a meaningful redistribution of power. Instead, I support a materialist approach to exhibition making.

Throughout this text I use the term queer, a word I have a contradictory relationship to. “Queer” once carried an accusatory violence and was reclaimed relatively recently partly because of its capacity to refuse a stable identity. But its extraordinary expansiveness should also make us cautious. Queer is now often used to describe a huge constituency of people with profoundly different relationships to sex, gender, race, class, family, labour and social power. The experience of a lesbian is not interchangeable with that of a gay man, neither is the experience of a cis male interchangeable with the experience of a trans woman, nor a monogamous couple with a polyamorous quintuple. These experiences overlap, and solidarity between them can be politically necessary, but solidarity does not mean equivalence. Nor does Queer tell us anything about whether somebody grew up wealthy or poor, whether their family rejected them, whether they attended university, whether they have secure housing, whether they have experienced discrimination or violence, whether their sexuality materially determined where they could work or access education, or whether they possess the professional networks through which cultural careers are constructed. Within Queer, two people can therefore sincerely occupy the same institutional category while having almost nothing resembling the same material relationship to power.

Contemporary institutional approaches to queer exhibition making frequently emphasise representation and attempt to recover marginalised histories. This has produced some necessary revisions to collections and exhibition histories from which queer artists have been substantially absent. Yet representation is not synonymous with structural change, and the presence of LGBTTQIA+ artists doesn’t necessarily constitute a meaningful engagement with the artist's practice. The institutional desire to recover marginalised histories can itself build new closets, forms of containment as artists become representatives of identities and their artworks become evidence of historical trauma. Living practices can be killed and historicised through categories that diminish their intellectual and aesthetic complexity.

The encounter with my friend at Artspace exposed this contradiction within institutional claims to queer representation. For those professionally embedded within contemporary art, entering a gallery requires relatively little effort. They know how to enter and behave within it and how to interpret the language through which contemporary art tries to explain itself. Such knowledge makes up a form of cultural capital whose operation becomes increasingly invisible to those who possess it. For the person accompanying me, the gallery required preparation. They had spent more material and emotional energy reaching the exhibition than I had. Yet the exhibition, despite its relationship to queer politics, operated according to cultural conventions more familiar to someone like me than to them. Our queer identity may have been shared, but our class was not.

This distinction complicates the language of community representation. When an institution describes an exhibition as representing “queer communities,” who is actually being addressed? Contemporary art exhibitions remain disproportionately encountered by those already possessing some relationship to institutional culture. The presence of queer artists within such an exhibition does not necessarily establish a relationship between the institution and the heterogeneous populations assembled under the category queer. For five years I worked at Basement Specialist Adult Store and Cruise Club. The majority of people I encountered there I would not expect to attend an exhibition about Queer Aotearoa. They entered that space for anonymous sex, companionship, pleasure, safety, loneliness, sometimes to shoot up, and many other reasons. Their absence from contemporary art institutions raises questions about which forms of queer life cultural institutions recognise and the audiences to whom their representations are actually addressed to.

The proposition that a queer art exhibition should somehow represent these people is problematic. An artist should not be required to function as a delegate for a demographic. A gay painter does not become responsible for representing gay men by virtue of his sexuality. Such demands put the artistic practice at risk by making identity both the justification for inclusion and the limit of its interpretation. The purpose of a queer art exhibition cannot therefore be to produce a representative microcosm of queer society. Its primary responsibility must remain to art, though I don’t mean to imply a conception of art detached from politics or material life. It requires understanding artistic practices as simultaneously aesthetic, intellectual, social, political and materially produced.

The relationship between queer artists and nightlife can complicate this institutional framing of queer art and history. Historical exclusion from galleries and established organisations did not result in an absence of queer cultural production. It created a sort of queer diaspora displaced into other infrastructures such as bars, nightclubs, strip clubs, parties, bedrooms, studios, streets, drag performances, cruising spaces, domestic environments, etc. Artists unable or unwilling to access conventional professional pathways often participate in alternative economies of creative labour. Some work as drag performers, DJs or become sex workers. Others work within nightlife, hospitality or adult industries while maintaining artistic practices. The boundaries between these activities are porous. But such environments should not be romanticised as inherently liberatory. They contain their own hierarchies and exploitative labour relations. Yet they provide material and social infrastructures through which forms of queer cultural production can occur when institutional support is unavailable.

The party is particularly significant within this history. For marginalised communities, a party can operate as both a cultural venue and an employment network, a performance space, a social infrastructure and site of aesthetic experimentation. It generates audiences and collaborations. The party permits forms of bodily and performative experimentation that may be incompatible with institutional behavioural expectations. To reconstruct queer art history solely through objects and images that eventually enter public collections is to misunderstand the conditions, such as the party, under which much queer cultural production occurs. This becomes a problem for the contemporary historical exhibition. Objects and images are removed from the unstable social relations through which they were birthed and reconstituted within the controlled environment of the museum. An artwork produced through relationships between parties, friendships, sex, political organisation and precarious spaces becomes an archival artefact. The work might be preserved, but the conditions that made it meaningful can disappear. The institution becomes a form of birth control, and the historical recovery of queer culture can therefore paradoxically render it dead.

There is also a problem in assuming that the appropriate institutional response to historical invisibility is always greater visibility. Not everything that has been excluded necessarily needs to be made visible, and not every absence means the same thing. There is a distinction between invisibility produced through structural exclusion and invisibility that operates as a social or cultural methodology. Cruising, as a methodology, makes this clear. Cruising depends upon a careful negotiation between visibility and invisibility. It takes place in public and semipublic spaces while depending upon code and anonymity. A cruising site might be completely legible to somebody participating in it and effectively invisible to somebody walking past. Knowing where to look, how to look, when to approach and when not to look is part of the practice itself. In this case, invisibility is not necessarily understood as an absence. Invsibility can be an active condition through which queer social, sexual and cultural life becomes possible.

This creates a problem for an institutional politics organised around visibility. If cruising culture were to be understood as marginalised, the institutional impulse might be to recover it. Something previously intentionally invisible is made visible and this visibility can then be understood as a form of recognition. But what has happened to the culture in the process? The institution preserves the evidence of the culture while destroying its methodology. In this sense, there is a relationship here between exhibitions and surveillance. Queer cultures have historically developed practices of invisibility partly because visibility carried material consequences. Visibility could mean arrest, violence, loss of employment, eviction or social exclusion. The ability to recognise one another without becoming universally recognisable is a cultural form in itself. Codes, cottages, gestures, nods, architectures and ways of looking generated social worlds that depended upon knowing without having to declare it. When the contemporary institution subsequently makes these practices completely legible, the intention may be radically different from the police officer or homophobe who historically sought to expose them. Yet the underlying demand can remain the same under the spotlight. Identify yourself! Explain yourself! This is why I am interested in cruising as a possible curatorial methodology. What does it mean for an exhibition to behave more like cruising?

Such an exhibition would not assume that everything must be available to everyone equally. It might depend upon partial encounters and information that reveals itself differently according to what the viewer already knows. It might allow something to remain private or refuse to explain something. This does not mean making exhibitions inaccessible, and I think it’s important to recognise accessibility and legibility are not the same thing. Nor would it mean returning queer histories to the closet, the exclusion historically imposed upon them. The distinction is between being denied visibility and retaining some control over the conditions under which one becomes visible and to whom.

My own engagement with these questions became explicit in 2018 when I published a post on Tumblr examining the digitised collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Based on my research at the time, I calculated that approximately 0.06% of the collection could be identified as queer in any way, and of that percentage most were temporary public programmes. Queerness cannot be quantified through artist biographies or institutional metadata, and historical sexuality cannot always be retrospectively categorised with certainty. So the significance of the exercise was not the precision of the research. What mattered was the scale of the discrepancy it indicated between the queer artistic production visible within the communities around me and the cultural production that a major public institution had accumulated as art history.

It is important to remember that collections are producers of history. Through acquisition, conservation and subsequent research, institutions establish which practices remain available for the future. An acquisition possesses a fundamentally different function from an exhibition. An exhibition may generate discourse for a month, while entering a collection positions an artwork within the institutional memory indefinitely. This distinction remains important when considering contemporary institutional engagement with queer artists. Queer practitioners may be highly visible within public programmes, thematic exhibitions and discursive events while receiving comparatively less access to substantial research, acquisitions and major solo exhibitions.

My response to the 0.06% figure was not to simply advocate for greater representation within existing collections. I founded Parasite, which I understood as the first contemporary art gallery specifically dedicated to queer artistic practice in Aotearoa. Parasite received funding from Creative New Zealand for two consecutive years and developed projects with emerging and established practitioners. I was interested in what might happen when artists were provided with infrastructure through which they could materially develop their practices. I wanted an exhibition at Parasite to produce consequences that reached beyond having been exhibited. Artists involved with the programme went on to establish further dealer relationships, undertake international residencies, win awards, gain significant institutional recognition and receive opportunities within Aotearoa and overseas.

Parasite operated from my house. Commercial rent was financially unrealistic for me, meaning that the infrastructure of the gallery was absorbed into my domestic life. This constraint became central to the curatorial methodology. The architecture of the stairway the gallery occupied was peculiar. The stairs, landings, hallway and ceilings became exhibition spaces. Rather than asking artists to reduce projects to accommodate these limitations, I attempted to give them as much freedom as possible to realise their vision within them. The curatorial prompt was simple, here is the space, take it seriously and push it as far as it can go. Artists were encouraged to experiment, alter the environment and realise projects with as much ambition and excess as the spatial and financial conditions permitted. Curatorial support meant attempting to make the artist’s idea materially possible rather than determining in advance what the exhibition should look like. The domestic character of Parasite also destabilised distinctions between exhibition and social space. Openings became parties, and the parties continued beyond their function as openings. People remained in my house into the night, and on occasion I found people in my bed or in the bath. Exhibition, nightlife, friendship, domesticity and queer social life became entangled. It was chaotic, and beautiful, but it also connected Parasite to the alternative infrastructures through which queer cultural production has historically survived.

It would be misleading, however, to romanticise these conditions as evidence of resilience. Parasite operated from my house because commercial rent was unaffordable. Its infrastructure was subsidised by my domestic life and its curatorial labour by my three other jobs. These conditions were not new to me. I had worked fulltime through my degree in order to pay rent. At university I encountered severe homophobia which led to a staff member being fired, and eventually I changed schools. Later, while operating Parasite, I maintained two day jobs and night work in the cruise club where shifts could continue until 3am. Contemporary discourse has a tendency to narrate such circumstances as resourcefulness. Precarity is supposed to be evidence of commitment, and burnout evidence of passion. The ability to produce culture despite inadequate resources can become evidence that adequate resources were never necessary. Institutions can similarly displace material politics into questions of symbolic recognition. Within a cultural economy placing increasing importance on testimony, marginalisation itself can become an institutional value. It is important, then, that we can discuss experiences of homophobia and precarious labour without suffering operating as a professional credential. Their significance is material in that they demonstrate how class, labour and institutional hostility structure one’s capacity to participate in cultural production.

In Marxist thought, cultural production is understood in relation to the material conditions that make it possible. When thinking about queer art histories it is then important to remember that the archives they emerge from are not repositories of the most important artists and projects of the past. They are residue of unequal material relations. Some artists were excluded from exhibitions, and/or encountered homophobia, and/or transphobia, and/or misogyny, and/or racism within educational and/or professional institutions, and/or worked continuously to support themselves and/or consequently possessed less time for artistic production, and/or produced work within nightlife and/or bedrooms and/or spaces that institutions did not consider significant, and/or practices disappeared completely. The contemporary curator encounters these material histories as archival absences. There might be insufficient documentation, the work was never acquired, the artist does not appear within existing scholarship, or their exhibition history might be limited. Perversely then, the consequences of structural exclusion can then be used as evidence for continued exclusion. This produces an ethical question for the curator of queer historical exhibitions. What responsibility does the curator have to those who were denied the conditions through which they might have entered art history?

The question cannot be resolved by simply including every Dick, Sam, Nelly and Nancy. An exhibition is selective by necessity. As mentioned, individuals cannot be chosen to function as representatives for an entire excluded generation, demographic or scene. Such an approach reduces artists to underpaid ambassadors and asks individual practices and artworks to carry histories far larger than themselves. Yet omitting an under-documented demographic/generation/scene because its surviving work fails to satisfy contemporary institutional criteria reproduces precisely the historical structures the exhibition claims to interrogate. Therefore absence itself must become a curatorial material, as it is produced by history. If a collection contains almost no work by a particular generation of queer artists, the exhibition should ask why. If artistic practices occurred predominantly through clubs, parties, the sex industry or other spaces, these environments should be understood as cultural infrastructure. If artists disappeared because they lacked the economic conditions necessary to sustain their practices, then questions of labour, housing and class belong within the art historical record. Curatorial responsibility to the past does not mean retrospectively making the past equitable. No exhibition can redistribute opportunities that were denied before, and wall space can't provide retrospective justice. The responsibility is to resist making the past appear more equitable than it was.

There remains another problem with attempts for institutional recovery of queer history. In establishing the seriousness of previously marginalised practices, exhibitions can kill them. Historical exhibitions often utilise a recognisable visual language of archival documentation, vitrines, extensive explanatory texts and objects organised as evidence of political or social conditions. This language risks transforming an artist into a historical case study and an artwork into evidence for the curator's argument. This becomes particularly problematic when applied to living artists. A living practice can be historicised prematurely. The artist can be made to be a representative of a community, decade or political struggle and their practice denied permission to remain unstable in the present. Queer artists are especially susceptible to this. Their practices are frequently read through immediately legible questions of sexuality and gender, particularly where these appear figuratively within the work. Yet the same artists may be engaged with many things like abstraction, conceptualism, labour, architecture, technology, class, ecology, performance or the histories of a particular media… anything. If heterosexual artists are situated within art movements while queer artists are situated principally within identities, institutional inclusion will only reproduce art historical marginalisation. The artist might be visible but is kept outside the broader intellectual history of art. There is also a risk that trauma becomes the principal organising framework through which historical queer subjects become institutionally intelligible. Homophobia, criminalisation, AIDS, violence and discrimination are indispensable to queer histories and cannot be minimised. But queer life cannot be reduced to what was done to queer people and death worlds. The curatorial challenge is to preserve their vitality.

So, recovering a queer artist requires asking not only what happened to them, but, what did they make? What were they looking at? What conditions were they making within? What formal problems occupied them? What did they find beautiful? Who were their peers? What intellectual and aesthetic histories did they participate in? What does their work contribute to art history beyond providing evidence that queer people existed? These types of questions are necessary if queer artists are to receive the same seriousness afforded to other artists. This is also how I now understand the curatorial methodology I attempted through Parasite. Parasite was never intended to represent queer Aotearoa. Its ambition was smaller and more material in that it sought to create conditions through which particular artists, who were queer, could develop their practices.

The question confronting queer exhibition making is therefore no longer adequately expressed as “who is represented?” Representation matters, particularly following histories of profound exclusion, but it cannot account for the material conditions through which cultural history is produced. A collection can become more demographically representative while maintaining the same discriminatory mechanisms through which artistic value is allocated. An institution can programme queer artists extensively while failing to acquire their work. Its exhibitions can narrate historical trauma while leaving contemporary issues and precarity ignored. It can recover marginalised artists while interpreting their practices so narrowly that they remain peripheral to art history.

A materialist curatorial practice requires a different approach. Here, curatorial responsibility requires making visible the material conditions through which absence itself was produced, while recognising that visibility is not in itself an emancipatory condition. The curator must distinguish between an invisibility imposed through structural exclusion and an opacity through which cultural life has been able to operate on its own terms. The curator also has a responsibility not to kill the work through the process of historicising it. Curatorial practice should ask what conditions made the work possible, where are the limitations, what conditions prevented other work from surviving, what should remain partially illegible, and what an exhibition might make possible now.


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