Greg Day, “Stephen Varble at the 12th Annual Avant-Garde Festival”, 1975. Digital print. © Greg Day 2019
In costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects, Stephen Varble (1946-1984) took to the streets of 1970s New York City to perform his "Gutter Art." With disruption as his aim, he led uninvited costumed tours through the galleries of SoHo, occupied Fifth Avenue gutters, and burst into banks and boutiques in his gender-confounding ensembles. Varble made the recombination of signs for gender a central theme in his increasingly outrageous costumes and performances. While maintaining he/him as his pronouns, Varble performed gender as an open question in both his life and his work, sometimes identifying as a female persona, Marie Debris, and sometimes playing up his appearance as a gay man. Only later would the term "genderqueer" emerge to describe the kind of self-made, non-binary gender options that Varble adopted throughout his life and in his disruptions of the 1970s art world.
"The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s", photographs by Greg Day
On view March 1, 2019 - May 17, 2019
ONE Gallery, West Hollywood
626 North Robertson Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Opening Reception: Friday, March 1, 2019 from 5 - 8 p.m.