Would you recognise a queer world?

Zheyu Lin

Collection: Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Keywords: Suzanne Treister, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, David Bowie, Jack Nicholson, videogames

Is this a kitchen? Arranging the food and kitchenware in a Gothic interior, Suzanne Treister’s Q: Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise? Entering the Kitchen No.1, 1995, transforms an image of King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s (1845-1886) Neuschwanstein castle into a kitchen (fig. 1). [1] The pots and cakes, as well as the name of this artwork, assure the audience that they are looking at a domestic scene. However, there is something dazzling and disorienting about this kitchen: the ground is transformed into a distorting chequerboard of high-contrasting colors; the concentric circles on the wall evoke a hypnotic effect and the walls seem to swirl and pulsate; portraits of fictional figures from popular culture, such as David Bowie’s alter ego Aladdin Sane and Jack Nicholson as the psychopathic Joker, are framed and hung. Overall, these visual puns fuse ‘kitsch’ with kitchen, nodding to the kitchen’s excessive, gaudy, chaotic, and yet playful aesthetics. Looking at the juxtaposition of Gothic architecture with psychedelic decorations and fictional figures, one starts to wonder again, is this a real kitchen or a fantasy? This kitsch’n blurs the distinction between a physical, fantastic, fictional, and psychological space.

In the foreground stands a wooden carved table, whose color and style align with the Gothic architecture. Yet, instead of cohering and grounding the pictorial space, it further disturbs the boundary between the image and our relationship to it. With its left leg partially cropped by the frame and its front edge dramatically protruding outwards, the table seems oblique, losing its balance and tipping towards the audience. The food and objects on the table thus gain momentum to pop out, sliding towards us and demanding our visual attention. In this way, the skewed table interacts with the audience by both threatening to transgress into their space and staging a theatrical encounter with the erotic food/objects.

With the food/objects, Treister unleashes the queer narratives embodied by Neuschwanstein and transforms the castle into a queer utopia. Food morphs into figures and buildings, while buildings and figures become food. The pink blancmange is sculpted into a phallic shape and resembles the exterior of the castle, while the black forest cake is decorated with three leather-wearing s/m figures on the top. Instead of pathologizing transgressive sexualities and fetishes, Treister puts them on the table and portrays them as edible and enjoyable, sweet and tempting, normal and casual. This transformation of the food/objects responds to Ludwig’s vision in building the real castle as a way of navigating his same-sex desires and his Roman Catholic background. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the term ‘homosexual’ was first emerging as a way to join same-sex desire to a kind of personhood, Ludwig’s behaviors were regarded as strange and nonsensible, and won him the name of the ‘Mad King’.

In response, Ludwig envisioned Neuschwanstein as a place ‘between the wood and the world’. [2] The castle was not only the place where Ludwig met his lovers, including the musician Richard Wagner, but also the place where he escaped from dogmatic social disciplines and lived his queer self like an alter ego. Adopting a concept from queer theorist José Muñoz, scholar Sean Edgecomb interprets Ludwig’s fairytale-like castle as a ‘queer utopia’, where ‘a fantastical queer transformation’ of Ludwig could happen. [3] For Muñoz, fantasy ‘activates a challenge to the limitations of the political and aesthetic imagination’ and provides ‘a blueprint for alternative modes of being in the world’, thus the fairy-like castle becomes Ludwig’s queer utopia to transgress conventional sexualities. [4] This is a queer utopia where alternative sexualities and desires, once marginalized as ‘perverted’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘mad’, are celebrated and enjoyed. Sitting between real and fantasy, they claim the table, demand attention, and confront, challenge, and transgress social conventions in the real world. In this sense, the transformation of the kistch’n is unapologetically queer.

The transforming power of Entering the Kitchen benefits from references to popular culture, such as science fiction and fantasy texts, as well as glam rock and punk music from 1970s and 1980s Britain. Treister frequently appropriates imagery from ‘history and popular culture’ to create ‘possible ways of reading the world’. [5] To uncover Ludwig’s queer utopia in the late-nineteenth century, Treister gathers fictional figures from popular culture of more recent decades as his queer companions. They include David Bowie’s alter ego Aladdin Sane, stigmatized by society as ‘a lad insane’, and the Joker performed by Jack Nicholson in the 1989 film Batman, who is the alter ego that Jack Napier transforms into when he decides to embrace his insanity. Along with the ‘Mad King’ Ludwig, the kitsch’n holds a party for those who have been marginalized, refused, and stigmatized by society across time. Here, alternative identities are welcomed, celebrated, and remembered, so that these fictional figures’ portraits are framed and hung on the wall like important historical figures or intimate family members. In this kitsch’n, the building of queer utopia and the writing of queer history consist of both historical figures and fictional characters from pop culture.

On one hand, the transformation shows how pop culture in the 1970s and 1980s, including glam rock and punk, reshaped gender and sexual norms. This occurred, for instance, through David Bowie’s androgynous performances of glam rock, or British punk’s close connection to sexual fetishism and s/m aesthetics, such as leatherwear and bondage. On the other, it also shows how the fictional and fantastical hold space for people to negotiate social conventions in real life and imagine alternative ways of living and reading the world. The disorienting encounters here with kitsch aesthetics, erotic objects, and fictional figures from pop culture confirm to the audience that they are not entering a familiar domestic space. They are confronted instead with the transforming power of the fictional and fantastical to take over space and narrate alternative identities and sexualities.

The transformative power of Entering the Kitchen is also associated with technological innovations. Treister was among the first artists in the UK who engaged new media, such as CD-ROMs and videogames, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With the increased accessibility of personal computers and the popularity of videogames, Treister started to interrogate this new technological phenomenon. In 1991, with her newly bought Amiga 1000 computer, she made a series of fictional videogame stills where she offers questions such as, ‘are you dreaming?’, and instructions like, ‘You have reached the Gates of Wisdom - Tell us what you have seen’, to interact with viewers. [6] These texts resemble what ludologist Espen Aarseth calls ‘cybertexts’, which require an audience’s ‘nontrivial works’ in their interactions, like moving the mouse or making choices during gameplay. [7] Through these cybertexts, audiences interact with the story and explore more routes, possibilities, and narratives. In this light, the first half of the painting’s title asks, Q: would you recognise the virtual paradise?. Here, Treister uses the cybertext to incorporate a ludic structure in this painting, inviting audience’s responses and collaboration in recognizing and exploring the virtual reality before them. To Treister, videogames help her to create ‘ways of mapping space’ and to ‘encourage the viewer’s interaction in a psychological sense’. [8] Technologies thus provided her with more interactive media and materials to interrogate the mutability of history and reality.

Throughout the 1990s, Treister worked across new media and painting, producing several depictions of Ludwig’s castle/kitchen. Apart from the series of paintings including Entering the Kitchen, she also made the castle/kitchen transformation more interactive in web art and a CD-ROM. In 1995, she created a web project titled Q. Would you recognise a virtual paradise? where visitors could move their mouse and virtually tour around Ludwig’s castle/kitchen with different routes. [9] In 1997, she designed the virtual Ludwig’s castle in the CD-ROM titled No Other Symptoms - Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky. In the CD-ROM, the time is set in 2058 and the castle’s owner is Treister’s alter ego Rosalind Brodsky, a ‘delusional time traveler’. [10] Different iterations of the kitchen/castle were rooted in different historical times, and they related to each other through interactive buttons. In this context, the space depicted in Entering the Kitchen was set in 2027; by rotating the David Bowie portrait, visitors and Brodsky were transported to other kitchen/castle spaces and other times.

The multiple and parallel kitchen/castle space across Treister’s paintings and digital media shows that the kitsch’n in Entering the Kitchen is one of many narratives and realities, and that it takes certain steps and routes to enter it. This speaks to the precarity of the queer utopia and the chance of encountering it. Treister, however, does not wear rose-tinted glasses and uncritically laud the transformative power of technology and popular culture. To me, she suggests that the queer utopia in Entering the Kitchen is only one of the many narratives and realties opened by pop culture and technology. Entering a queer utopia always requires the audience’s collaboration, such as pressing certain buttons, making certain choices, looking at certain places, and recognizing the queer world. Entering the Kitchen can thus be likened to a videogame still which captures the moment when the virtual, fantastic, and fictional summon a queer utopia and invite audiences to recognise, validate and enter into it.

Entering the Kitchen makes its home at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Hanging against the wooden carved panels that line the gallery’s staircase (fig.2), the painting draws the chandelier, deep red carpet and the Victorian architecture around it into conversation, simultaneously interacting with and disorientating the gallery space. Here, the kitsch aspects and queer transformation in the pictorial space appear ready to spill over into the viewing space at any time. The painting also sits right where the staircase turns and becomes an engaging focal point when visitors make their way in and out of the gallery’s Victorian and Georgian rooms. In the process, the stairs become akin to steps that you might ascend or descend in video gameplay. As they ascend or descend the staircase, the seductive and strange kitsch’n demands visitors pause, look and choose their perspectives, narratives, and realities. While the virtual, fantastic, and fictional in the painting pictures a queer gathering, the painting imposes on ordinary reality and asks the audience ‘would you enter this kitsch’n?’, ‘would you join the queer crowd?’ and ‘would you recognise a queer world?’. In this way, Treister’s Entering the Kitchen not only transforms a nineteenth century Bavarian castle and uncovers its queer historical narratives, but it also sits ready to disorient gallery visitors, transform the gallery space and generate queer possibilities.

Zheyu Lin is a PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham. She studied for her MA in Social History of Art at the University of Leeds 2018-2019. Her PhD thesis explores how art and music in late 1980s China reconfigures people’s bodies and how the bodily gives shape to the disorienting social transitions that people lived through in this period.

Notes

[1] Hereafter Q: Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise? Entering the Kitchen No.1 will be shortened to Entering the Kitchen; King Ludwig II of Bavaria will be shortened to Ludwig.

[2] Sean F. Edgecomb, ‘A Performance between Wood and the World: Ludwig II of Bavaria’s Queer Swans’, Theatre Survey 59.2 (2018), p.232.

[3] Edgecomb (2018), p.228.

[4] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, 2009), pp.171-172.

[5] Suzanne Treister, ‘From Fictional Videogame Stills to Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1991–2005’, Journal of Media Practice 7.1 (2006), p.53.

[6] For more fictional videogame stills, see Suzanne Treister, Fictional Videogame Stills [accessed 1 April 2025].

[7] Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore MD, 1997), p.4.

[8] Treister (2006), p.54.

[9] To access the web project, see Suzanne Treister, Q. Would you recognise a virtual paradise? [accessed 1 April 2025].

[10] Treister (2006), p.61. To access the stills from the CD-ROM, see Suzanne Treister, No Other Symptoms - Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky.