This exhibition and stand-alone reader, mapped out the unacknowledged overlaps and tensions between philosophers Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, Pierre Klossowski, their relationship to the art of 1970s French gay liberation, and the cultural legacy of that moment today, as well as the possibilities for employing Foucault’s genealogical model in the exhibition space. The only exhibition in Paris, on the 50th anniversary of May 1968, to acknowledge the influence of that year on sexual politics.

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the May 1968 Paris riots, this publication and exhibition looked at the intellectual impact of those events upon sexual liberation in 1970s France, how artists responded to critiques of the 'repressive hypothesis' (Foucault) of desire, and the reverberations of those ideas in art-making today. Archival research drew out the links between artist and philosopher Pierre Klossowski's book Living Currency (1972), and the later, better-known theories of theorists Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Klossowski questioned the idea that capitalism represses desire, in contrast the beliefs of many 1970s sexual liberation groups in France. The exhibition traced the relationship between Klossowski's thought and his artmaking, as well as showing an undercurrent of scepticism about desire as revolutionary force shared by other artists working in 1970s Paris. These artists included Pierre Zucca and Claude Farraldo, and Lionel Soukaz, a member of the Front for Homosexual Revolutionary Action. Archival material sat alongside Soukaz's never before screened film 'Amor', and the publication 'Activitie Sexuelle: Normal' by punk Parisian art group Bazooka, who parodied the idea that polymorphous perversity, once unleashed would trouble capitalism (see Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire). Bazooka's work uncovered seldom-acknowledged tensions between late-70s Parisian artists and the preceding generation. More recent artworks included a suite of prints and films from Oreet Ashery's cycle 'Party for Freedom', which focuses on how far right politicians across Europe have taken up the discourse of sexual freedom as an argument against immigration from majority Muslim countries.

In addition to the intellectual research, tracing the origins of Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis back to Klossowski, the exhibition contributed to curatorial knowledge by adapting Foucault's genealogical model to the exhibition space. Artworks from political flashpoints teased out discontinuities between supposedly static ideas of desire and liberated subjectivity, rather than seeking to find a stable history of those concepts. The show also contributed to art historical knowledge, showing the place of filmmaking in French sexual liberation (the work of Soukaz and Zucca) as well as tensions with artists of punk-era Paris. A stand-alone reader of Paul Clinton's recent essays on sexual politics was printed in limited edition by the art imprint Goswell Road, and launched on the closing night of the exhibition.

1) The exhibition was very positively reviewed and featured in French national and international art press including: Le Quotidian De L'Art; La Republique de l'Art, MOUSSE. The subject of a feature in the Presses du Reel published journal Inferno.
2) The book and exhibition research were the subject of a radio programme with critic Juliet Jacques, in partnership between Verso Books and Resonance FM, London.
3) This project led to Paul Clinton being awarded prestigious essay commissions on tensions between Marxism and queer theory in contemporary art, including for the Hayward Gallery, London (his essay 'Useless Man') and Secession Vienna, Austria ('A Class Act'). The book Forbidden to Forbid was co-launched in Paris with the republication of Elisabeth Lebovici's Ce Que Le Sida M'a Fait (pub. JRP Ringier) which included a public an in conversation between her and Paul Clinton on the revaluation of the art and philosophy of sexual liberation which occurred in Paris during the AIDS pandemic.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28884