ABSTRACT
This paper takes as productive case studies two artistic ventures that took place in South Africa the UK and the United States. The first, The Rainbow Room (2012), by Afrikaans artist Pierre Le Riche, explores the complicated and fraught histories of South African discrimination, masculinity, sexuality, and gay identity in a post-apartheid world. The work forms part of a larger gay activist artistic series, Broederbond (2012), in which rugby balls and the interior are appropriated as sites of an inappropriate decorative, queer masculinity, one that conforms to and yet defies gender expectations. Working entirely with the vibrant colors of the gay flag, Le Riche uses colorful wool yarn as a way to fashion a space in opposition to government-sanctioned criminalization and social convention. The second pair of works by German duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the specially commissioned Tomorrow (2014) presented at the V&A in London and its sequel, Past Tomorrow (2015), at Galerie Perrotin in New York, set the stage for the narration of fictional queer bachelor architect Norman Swann’s life through the deeply real material conditions of his private interiors. The interiors themselves as much as the objects that populate them serve as indexical of a queer identity that is at once omnipresent and yet silenced within the history of interior design. From five expansive rooms at the V&A, the exhibition was downsized to the powerful space of Swann’s bedroom in New York: here, one room stands in to represent a whole story. The spaces of his living quarters portray expressions of luxury, failure, loss and absent identity. Through different material strategies, both interior design/artistic projects trouble the boundaries that define decorous masculinity, interior design, luxury and social convention. By exploring these specially designed interiors, this paper aims to critically examine and problematize the complicated relationship between queer absence and presence within the study and history of the interior.
