Gary Lee, Heat

Gary was awarded Best Writing by an Indigenous Australian for Heat, in the 2024 Art Writing and Publishing Awards hosted by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ).

On Heat by Tristan Harwood (https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/5137/exhibition-and-book-review-gary-lee-midling-28larra/)

Heat is a perfect title for a book on Lee’s career as artist, curator, writer, and anthropologist. There is the heat of Darwin, Lee’s hometown, and heat as metaphor for the desire in Lee’s photographs of semi-nude and nude bodies. Across the pages, heat acts as a kind of metonym for the moral policing the artist has encountered. Lee has copped heat from the kind of motherfuckers who in the private brutality of their delicate sensibilities don’t want to see what Lee sees as the beautiful faces, arms, abdomens, cocks and legs of the people he photographs.

In one instance at the 2006 Dreaming Festival in Woodford on the Sunshine Coast, Lee’s series Nice Coloured Boys (1994–), a homoerotic study of elastic masculinity, was censored by the festival staff. In Heat, in conversation with the eminent artist Tracey Moffatt, Lee recounts having to take down his exhibition because of pressure from festival staff.

Contrary to this kind of anecdote, the Lee of Heat isn’t an artist who courts controversy, rather he constantly works toward complexity in expression, seeking an eloquent articulation of qualities that are beautiful but have often been cast as otherwise. Lee is perennially the artist of otherwise. Reading Heat, the history of Indigenous art is a queer and trans history in that Indigenous art is always elusive to—and in excess of—any normative definition. The way Jack Halberstam puts it in Trans* is that typological naming, or ‘the mania for godlike naming began, unsurprisingly, with colonial exploration.’ The otherwise is that which never collapses under any such name.

In the middle of Heat, the article ‘Love doesn’t have a colour’ concurrently chronicles the love story between Lee and O’Riordan, doubling as a critical engagement with the interplay between racism and homophobia as experienced by an Aboriginal and an Irish-Australian gay male couple. Here, text and image are inextricable. The tone of the text is set by a photograph of Lee and O’Riordan taken in the backseat of a car in 1991 in the vein of Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film, Happy Together. Taken six years before the film’s release, the photo, (although not taken by Lee), demonstrates how the artist is in dialogue with—and has sometimes pre-empted—traditions of queer image-making.

Heat sways the understanding of Indigenous art history. Like midling, it is grounded in a Larrakia lifeway, in what is known inter alia as Darwin. What’s different is that the book as an object can go walkabout and is here with me now in an apartment on Wurundjeri Country. I’ve got it on the table sitting with Fred Moten’s Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (2023) and it’s like the two of ‘em really been talking, when Moten writes ‘can that we survive destroy what we survive…?’ and Lee responds: ‘art […] begins with the recognition of irreparable loss.’