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‘Fallen Angel’: making a space for queer identities in schools.

Nicholas Addison1

Abstract This paper is an examination of an artwork produced by a sixth-form student who explores the

prohibited spaces of queer lives. She does so through the production of an installation, a

dominant format in contemporary art, in which space is a central semiotic vehicle. Rather than

choose a confessional strategy she distances herself from her own emerging lesbian identity by

imagining these spaces from the subject position of a young, gay male. This process enables her

to engage audiences in questioning the historical and social structures that reproduce

heteronormativity without falling into the tropes of popular confession. With reference to the

work of Judith Butler I analyse how the student enacts and reconfigures representations of

gender and sexuality to afford a space for the construction of queer identities.

Preamble

In an attempt to counter multiple forms of discrimination, UNESCO’s

Principles on Tolerance promote ‘the respect and appreciation of the rich variety of

our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. Tolerance

recognizes the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of others’ (1995). In

the context of a heteronormative culture that marginalises or pathologises queer

sexualities (Petrovic 2002) this paper aims to contribute to the strategies of

organisations such as UNESCO through an investigation of the ways artworks can be

used to counter discrimination. Young people in particular are subject to a regime of

surveillance in which queer youth is perceived as either deviant/threatening or

vulnerable/at-risk (Talburt 2004). This paper proposes that interpretative discussion

around artworks can provide young people with the space to question dominant

discourses about sexuality and desire. Such interpretative strategies aim to go beyond

‘tolerance’ to build inclusive discourses and representations around expressions and

‘ways of being human’.

The artwork in question was produced by Rachel (a pseudonym), in the

context of an art and design AS examination. It is a type of artwork that is

1  Email:  n.addison@ioe.ac.uk  

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investigative in orientation, seeking to open up a space where something can be said

about silenced lives. Specifically Rachel constructs an artwork allegorising the way in

which queer youth is marginalised within the heternormative culture of schooling.

She does so by demonstrating how heternormativity draws on ancient myths to

sustain itself, an investigation of the layers of history sedimented within everyday

practices. Framed by a discussion of Judith Butler’s theories, my analysis draws on

these spatial metaphors: layers, sedimentation, marginalisation, spaces of freedom, to

produce a visual/textual archaeology of sorts. But it also looks at the way space is a

material resource for organising meaning. Any artwork is an arrangement of signs

within a spatial frame that lead viewers to make meaning. In Rachel’s artwork not

only is spatial arrangement key to the meanings between its various elements (see

Figure 2) it is also a device for positioning/re-positioning the viewer who is incited

away from remaining static to becoming a mobile spectator. The understanding of

space as a semiotic vehicle is therefore vital to the interpretative processes advocated

here.

Introduction

Within a comparatively recent history, the spaces and forms of queer lives

have been shaped and articulated in ways that question the security of the

heterosexual matrix: ‘the grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders,

and desires are naturalized’ (Butler 1999, 194). In times and places where this matrix

holds, the queer, unimaginable within its binary structures, is firstly ‘expelled’ and

then ‘repulsed’, an ejection through which the queer becomes, as it were, excremental,

abjected and exiled from normative, legitimated discourses (Young in Butler 1999,

170). But, as Judith Butler argues: ‘What remains “unthinkable” and “unsayable”

within the terms of an existing cultural form is not necessarily what is excluded from

the matrix of intelligibility within that form; on the contrary, it is marginalised, not

excluded… The “unthinkable” is thus fully within culture, but fully excluded from

dominant culture’ (1999, 98-99). More recently, in those places where the matrix has

been questioned, both in law and practice, recognition and visibility have altered the

conditions under which queer subjects are able to build their lives, be it in the

subcultural communities explored by Judith Halberstam (2003) or as tolerated guests

within the domestic and institutional spaces of heternormativity: e. g. the nuclear or

extended home, hospitals, police, civil service, where tolerance may be understood as

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a victory of sorts. However, as endured outsiders within these spaces, queers often

identify with peripheral and marginal places where, post-16, they can exist within

subcultural enclaves (places often contained within large urban centres which, once

hidden, camouflaged, illegitimate, profitable, have become more visible, even

celebrated). But, contained within the binary thinking of the heternormative matrix,

the possibility of acceptance or assimilation promises only the spectre of a sort of

homonormativity; queer subjects are therefore often torn between the hope for

recognition (gaining equal rights) and an assertion of oppositional alterity.

Despite the legislative and rhetorical turn towards acceptance and equality,

within the heteronormative spaces of UK schooling queer subjects: lesbian, gay,

bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and ‘questioning’ students, teachers and other workers,

are often required to hide or defend their sexualities. As Warwick, Chase and

Aggleton, (2004) have discovered, this is not surprising given that heternormativity is

often upheld in schools through forms of bullying. This space, with its legacy of

religious proscription and social engineering, produces an environment in which

LGBT students in particular pathologise themselves in ways that are often damaging

to their sense of self as desiring subjects; the resulting ‘tainted’ subjectivity places

LGBT youth at increased risk of self-harm and even suicide (see http://www.youth-

suicide.com/gay-bisexual/ for a range of evidence). Consequently LGBT students and

staff experience school as a homophobic space in which legitimate desire is

symbolised through the reproductive union of man and woman, a complementarity

that is replicated as an ideal through the sanctified union of marriage and, by

extension, all events that prefigure it, from socially sanctioned match-making, through

teenage romance to the impassioned encounter. This assumption establishes a

heteronormative climate in which an inevitable compulsion to heterosexual relations

is understood as both natural and good. Nevertheless, heteronormative regimes are not

all uniform; a variety of aims and principles are propounded as a means to pathologise

and prohibit non-hetrosexual relations. For example, within religious communities

conformity to the law leads to holiness whereas within secular societies it leads to

health and well-being. Where the heterosexual matrix holds, any sexual orientation or

identity that falls outside its laws is designated perverse and relegated to the margins

where unclean matter is swept. The anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) determines

that ‘if uncleanliness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order.

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Uncleanliness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be

maintained.’ (Douglas 1991, 41). Heteronormativity is therefore the pattern (that is

ordered space) of social interactions, representations, denials and prohibitions that,

duplicated and repeated, reinforces the natural status of heterosexuality.

However, within the super-regulated spaces of secondary schooling there are

pockets of heterogeneity, at least nominally, in which difference is almost an

expectation, and art and design, as the ‘other’ to the logocentric and athletic

curriculums, offers the promise of a site where ‘self-expression’ is encouraged. In this

respect students ostensibly have the opportunity to explore a ‘sense of self’, a process

that might and can include an exploration of their emerging sexual orientations and

identities.

Here, I take a look at one instance in which a lesbian student attempts to

imagine where she might be positioned in relation to the heterosexual matrix. In this

sense I shall be deploying ‘space’ as a metaphor for social relations (particularly

notions of centre/periphery, belonging/exclusion, border/inbetween) but also as a

means to discuss space as an organising principle, as a key semiotic resource for the

making of art and other multimodal texts, both in the sense of the orchestration of

elements/signs and in respect of dialogue and interpretation, the relationship between

the artwork and the viewing subject. I therefore intend to ask: what does the spectator

have to do, somatically and psychically, to engage with the work? How does the

maker attempt to position the spectator through the work’s spatial configurations? (In

3D works the viewer is mobile and thus tends to have choice). It is composition and

interaction that form the focus for my analysis although I also explore the theme of

the fallen angel as a site of sedimented myth.

Questioning the heteronormativity

The school student who lies at the centre of this article, ‘Rachel’ (a

pseudonym), chose to question prevailing moral codes by exposing the network of

symbolic and social relations deployed to produce and sustain heternormativity. She

was able to do so partly because she worked in a department where the head of art

was an out gay man, but also in an academic school where a critical engagement with

aspects of identity was perceived as a valid study (in this sense the context in which

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she worked was atypical). I wrote an article some years ago (Addison 2005) in which

I analysed Rachel’s GCSE ‘expressive study’ (final piece, figure 1: 2001) where a

same sex couple joins a grid of heterosexual couples, albeit at the margins.

Figure 1. final design: ‘grid of couples’

Rachel deployed the global signage used to represent ‘men’ and ‘women’ in

order to present a familiar image in which any interruption or difference might at first

be overlooked. In her sketchbook she argued that she made this decision:

… to provoke people’s unconscious opinions and thoughts… Previously in my book, I have used the symbolism of couples… All my symbols will be of a boy and girl holding hands, except for one, which will show two girls holding hands… by making them all the same colour I am showing that the two girls are no different from the other couples, and hopefully those viewing my work will see this. It will lead people to think whether they do have inner prejudices when they realize there is a lesbian couple in my piece, and this may show them that having these prejudices inside them is unnecessary, and they are only there to comply with out dated conventions. (Anon 2001)

At this stage in her understanding of the ways in which queer sexualities are normally

received, Rachel demonstrated a desire for integration, an acceptance within the

symbolic order through a normalisation of lesbian relationships. Her graphic

expression is not one of assertive difference but of negation, a saying no to exclusion,

a rational response to a perceived injustice. However, the work she produced two

years later (2003) for her ‘AS’ examination (the first year within the ‘A’ level) (figure

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2) suggests that she had come to realise that her initial hopes had been somewhat

naïve, that her marginal intervention, once noticed, might just as easily act as a spur

for prejudice. In her installation ‘Fallen Angel’, Rachel is more confrontational,

producing a work that exposes something of the legacy and complexity of

heteronormativity and the violence that the queer can expect when trying to navigate

its terrain and borders.

Figure 2. Fallen Angel 2003 (oblique)

It is important at this juncture to make clear that at no time did I talk with

Rachel; my description of her motivations and thinking are therefore speculative

albeit based on semiotic analysis of her writing and image making. But the difference

between the two artworks (figures 1 and 2) invites me to attend to a change in

identification and in artistic strategy and I surmise that this change was the result of

her experience of being out within a heteronormative culture. But before examining

this identification and strategy it is important to define more clearly the structures and

practices of heternormativity so as to understand why Rachel chose to represent and

possibly identify with a gay male.

Questioning the legitimacy of the law

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In her seminal work ‘Gender Trouble’, Butler (1990) provocatively asks her

readers to upset the naturalised status of gender difference and the inequalities and

iniquities that it has effected. In this way she is primarily concerned to map the way

gender, not sexuality, is produced and inscribed upon the body. But as she points out

the two are intimately connected for it is the taboos against homosexuality and incest

that she argues, from a psychoanalytic position, generate ‘gender identity, the

prohibitions that produce identity along the culturally intelligible grids of an idealized

and compulsory heterosexuality’ (Butler 1999, 172). In agreement with Foucault,

Butler makes the radical conclusion that the process of identification that produces

gender dimorphism (the either/or duality: male/female) and its resolution within

heterosexuality, far from being the natural disposition of people, is the result of

repressive laws, ‘this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent

application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with

discrete categories of sex, but in the production and “disposition” of sexual desire’

(Butler 1999, 81). She goes on to conclude: ‘Hence, the dispositions that Freud

assumes to be primary or constitutive facts of sexual life are effects of a law which,

internalized, produces and regulates discrete gender identity and heterosexuality’

(Butler 1999, 82). These prohibitions, embedded within the law (of the father) and

played out through the Oedipal complex, are internalised and subjected to self-

surveillance through the workings of the ‘super ego’ (or ‘over-ego’ in a literal

translation from the German) (Freud 1923), which is often understood to constitute a

child’s moral sense and conscience.

In short, Butler argues that the binary structure of gender is a type of fiction

reproduced through the accumulated repetition of a sedimented script: a set of

attitudes and practices around the body that congeal into culturally specific

conventions or norms. These ritualised performances are excused (falsely) on the

foundational premise of biological sex and are thus understood as natural rather than

constructed. In the guise of expected behaviours these ‘practices of signification’ are

performed, usually inadequately, in imitation of a phantasmagoric ideal, man/woman,

an opposition that is reinforced as much by acts of transgression as by mimetic

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accomplishments2 (in this way homosexuality becomes heterosexuality’s necessary

transgressor, the other to its norm). But because it is difficult or impossible to perform

male or female identities adequately, their continuous rehearsal is constantly under

surveillance, an insistent policing, both by others and by self, producing perpetual

anxiety and the likelihood of failure and panic. Those people who ultimately fail to

conform to hegemonic norms (the templates of male and female behaviours) are

thereby positioned as transgressive and marginal, a position that intensifies the

melancholic subjectivity already produced through the process of gender

identification (thus the ‘invert’ of classical psychoanalysis). And yet these norms, in

being phantasmagoric, are always unstable, easily eroded at the boundaries and thus

liable to subversion and reconfiguration. Butler therefore incites the reader ‘not to

celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those

possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as

culturally unintelligible and impossible’ (Butler 1999, 189). The work discussed in

this paper is an instance of the ways in which school students may choose to resist

heternormativity; through the process of making and presenting artwork Rachel

enacts Butler’s call for counter-hegemonic, cultural reconfigurations.

Fallen Angel

In her design for the expressive module of an Art and Design GCSE (figure 1)

Rachel’s sense of injustice at the pathologisation of her desire motivated her to

produce a work that would enable viewers to question their assumptions and

prejudices. As suggested above, at this stage she evidently believed that homophobic

viewers would thereby come to see the error of their ways. In contradistinction,

‘Fallen Angel’ was produced after the experience of ‘coming out’ and the realisation

that neither empathetic nor reasoned arguments necessarily persuade people to rethink

their beliefs (even a liberal position is to say: ‘you live your life the way you wish to

just so long as it does not affect the material well-being of others; but don’t expect me

to agree with you’).

Rachel thus decided to shift her attention away from the semi-confessional

route of her first design to one in which she distanced herself by representing a young, 2  Georges Batailles (1957) argues that to transgress a taboo is not to oppose it so much as to complete it; in other words, a taboo can only be reinforced if there are attempts to break it.  

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gay man. She chose the metaphor of the angel both to suggest a ‘fall from grace’, but

also as a means to feminise the male actor, for, as she makes clear in her

accompanying statement, Rachel associates the iconography of the angel as gender

ambivalent. She was able to do this, despite the male names and messenger/warrior

roles of Biblical angels, because a verse from Mark, 12: 253 is often understood to

mean that angels are asexual because they do not marry. Additionally, and more

significantly for Rachel, in post-Renaissance art, but particularly in English, Victorian

painting, the angel is imaged as a winged, beardless, long-haired (hu)man, robed in

such a way that the physiognomy of his sex is veiled. Rachel takes as read that gender

ambivalence is a sign for homosexuality (within heteronormative culture, for a man to

desire another man, or a woman another woman there is an assumption that the

homosexual dynamic will mirror heterosexual dimorphism so that one of the two

[supposing a couple] will either possess or adopt the physical and psychic attributes of

the opposite sex, whether from a genetic or performative perspective) and thus she

notices a disjunction between Christian law with its sexual prohibitions and Christian

iconography, specifically the way it visually represents an ideal masculinity.

Like many in the UK, Rachel’s school was, and still is, a liberal, secular

institution only nominally attached to a faith. Having experienced the intransigence of

belief, she therefore felt able to ridicule rather than explicitly question prejudice:

This piece is intended to mock the irresponsible attitudes which the church often promotes in relation to homosexuality, and show how the church contradicts these attitudes through imagery of angels, supposedly male but traditionally extremely effeminate, and the effects this has had on society in the form of stereotyping, prejudice and abuse (Anon 2003).

Fallen Angel: the installation

In order to realise this mocking Rachel appropriated a range of semiotic

vehicles, display genres if you like, which she drew together to produce an

‘installation’. As will become clear, one of these genres is based on a Christian

tradition while the other two have more secular roots. Each is typified by a distinct

3  The apostle claims in respect to the resurrection of the faithful on the day of judgment ‘For when they [seven brothers who serially marry the same spouse on their subsequent deaths] shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven’ (King James version).  

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spatial organisation: first, taped against the wall and thus on the vertical plane, is the

religiously inflected triptych comprising three photographs; second, appropriating a

domestic or commercial mode of display, the horizontal shelf with its books and

candles. Taken together, these two domains comprise a right-angled ensemble

positioned on the wall at eye level immediately above a used sink. This last

juxtaposition increases the domain of the installation to a third expanded environment

including the horizontal plane of the sink which acts as a barrier between the viewer

and the more concentrated ensemble above. In this way the white expanse of the wall

frames the artwork while simultaneously dissipating into its usual function. This

choice of position, asymmetrical and isolated towards the corner of the wall, is

atypical for a school exhibition where such a position would normally only be used if

space were tight; yet no other students presented work on this wall, which leads to the

conclusion that this placement was deliberate and meaningful.

The triptych is a pictorial convention within the Christian tradition in which a

central panel is appended by two subsidiary but associated ones. This formation

enables the painter or sculptor to produce an extended narrative crossing

spatial/temporal boundaries, an intertextuality through which a complex and

contrapuntal symbolism emerges. Subsequently the triptych form has been

appropriated by a number of twentieth century painters: notably Beckman and Bacon

and more recently Rego and the video artist Viola, as a site for sacred, albeit non-

theistic, allegory for, as Bataille (2006, 63-70) elucidates, the sacred is a space in

which taboos can be transgressed legitimately (in sacrifice the priest may kill). The

shelf and its objects references a more recent (anti-) convention, although instigated

by Duchamp before the First World War, in which objects from everyday life (found

objects) are appropriated and commandeered to serve the artist’s intentions, whether

these be anti-aesthetic, indexical and/or dialogical (Waldeman 1992). The way Rachel

combines these two conventions and positions the ensemble so as to draw in its

proximate spaces recalls an increasingly dominant method in contemporary practice

called site-specific sculpture (Kwon 2002). This term denotes a process in which a

chosen or given site (within or without a gallery space) sets up constraints and

possibilities with which the artist works in dialogue.

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I want to look at these three domains as discrete elements, their spatial and

textual connotations, before considering their inter-relationships.

Figure 3. Fallen Angel 2003

As viewers, visitors to the exhibition arrive at Rachel’s installation and are

immediately confronted by the three photographs at about eye level (Figures 2 and 3).

As a sequence of ‘pictures’ they conform to expectations about what an artwork

should consist of, especially in the context of a school exhibition, and it is likely that

they will be given most attention in the first instance. Within the tradition of the

triptych the central panel is always the primary image, thus the title ‘Fallen Angel’.

But, if viewers re-enter the sequence from the left (following Kress and Leeuwen’s

theory, 2006, 4), the angel turns his back on them, potentially a gesture of defiance

but a spatial placement that puts viewers in the position of voyeur, as if surveying the

angel unbeknownst to him from above. In the central image viewers find the angel

collapsed, his open and lifeless, left hand reaching out to them and his legs actually

penetrating their space to reach beyond them, albeit outside the frame. In this way

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viewers once again look down on the angel but simultaneously enter his space and are

thus intimated, if only as witnesses, within the narrative that has led to this (possibly

self-destructive) event. The image to the right shows the angel’s expressionless face

front-on, a young almost child-like face, subtly made-up to emphasise moist eyes and

glistening lips; he returns the viewers’ stare thus witnessing their witness, an

inversion of the image on the left.

Intrigued by the triptych and its ambiguous narrative it may be a little time before

viewers scrutinize the shelf beneath the photographs which is positioned above a sink

(figure 3).

Figure 4. Fallen Angel 2003 (from above)

By leaning over this viewers can see two texts: one a Bible, opened at

Deuteronomy chapters 21, 22 and 23, the other a ‘pornographic magazine’ (although

in the reproduction in Figure 4 there is a muscle magazine, the pornographic one

possibly having been censored by the school). It is important to stress that viewers

have to lean over to read the potentially illicit, ‘top shelf’ matter. In this way Rachel

invites viewers to make sense of her juxtapositions by adjusting their own position, if

they so choose, thereby drawing them into the narrative as active participants.

Fallen Angel: intentions

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In her accompanying statement pasted on the wall to the right of the

installation (somewhat like a museum text) Rachel draws viewers’ attention to ‘the

section of the Bible actively rejecting the allowance of men in women’s clothes’

(Anon 2003)

Deuteronomy 22: 5 The woman shall not wear what pertaineth to the man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the LORD thy God. (King James version)

Rachel adds: ‘and many other statements which have created strong prejudice towards

the gay world’ (Anon 2003) statements that she does not however locate. Here Rachel

appears to adopt an erroneous supposition that transvestites must necessarily be

homosexual, although this is often not the case (Hirschfeld 1910; Bullough and

Bullough 1997). It may be that when Deuteronomy was written homosexuality was

implied by such cross-dressing within Jewish culture (this was not the case in Greco-

Roman culture, see Lindheim 1998), but within the context of the other laws, both

here and in Leviticus, this connection would seem unlikely for on sexual matters the

writers tend to be explicit. Douglas (1991) argues that the key to understanding these

laws is to recognise their basis in the fear of impurity, of hybrids, in any mixing of

discrete, categorial elements. For example in Leviticus there is an explicit law against

bestiality:

18: 23 And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it neither shall any woman give herself to a beast to lie with it, it is a perversion.

As Douglas notes:

The word ‘perversion’ is a significant mistranslation from the rare Hebrew word tebhal, which has as its meaning mixing or confusion. The same is taken up in Leviticus XIX, 19. …You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff. All these injunctions are prefaced by the general command: Be holy, for I am holy. We can conclude that holiness is exemplified by completeness. (Douglas 1991, 54)

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Completeness here signifies as a categorical system of order, of sameness, of matter

being in its place.

But to be fair to Rachel, Biblical law is not her direct concern for she writes in

her supporting statement that it is the disjunctions between the attitudes the Church

promotes and its iconography that have led ‘society’ to despise homosexuality and so

to produce ‘stereotypes, prejudice and abuse’. Perhaps she chose the particular

passage from Deuteronomy because, although distanced from her own life through

the male (if celestial) gender of the representation, the angel is in a sense, Rachel

herself.

Rachel locates the moment for representation within adolescence, nominally

the biological period of puberty, but also the period that marks the social and legal

transition from child to adult (in the UK, sixteen year old ‘children’ may legally

participate in consensual sex and marry with parental permission although, in law,

they remain children until their eighteenth birthday, see e.g. Children’s Act, 2004).

The chosen age was a further act of identification on Rachel’s part, possibly of

displacement, as ‘Fallen Angel’ was produced when she was seventeen. Her choice of

model and appropriation of the term ‘angel’ signals the way she not only wished to

index the body as gender ambivalent but also to invoke the ideological construct,

‘childhood innocence’ (Higonnet 1998) (as exemplified in the phrase ‘little angel’).

The model retains the hairless and smooth skin of a child and the attenuated limbs of

the young adult. It is the various gender and moral signifiers surrounding the

photographic portraits: hyper-masculine, muscle magazine and Biblical and

specifically gendered law, that suggest the carnal nature of the angel’s sin and that his

desire, and thus his ‘inner-essence’, is homosexual (his status as ‘fallen’ follows).

Only the make up on his face in the portrait signifies the potential for gender

misidentification. Butler (1999, 171-172), drawing on Foucault, argues that a person’s

‘inner essence’, or in religious terms her/his ‘soul’, is that which is not the body but

that is nonetheless contained within it. And yet, despite this internalisation, the soul,

whether deviant or pure, is somehow inscribed on the body either through the

physiological effects borne of the actions for which it is responsible, or from the

bodily inscriptions society deems appropriate as signifiers of its sins or virtues and

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thus imposes. But the fallen angel, too young for the sin to be inscribed upon his

body, displaces the route to his transgression onto props: alcohol, drugs and the debris

of excessive partying (central photograph), and make up (right photograph). Why then

fallen angel? What is the significance of this term for a young person today?

Fallen Angel: significance

In popular culture the fallen angel has become a ubiquitous motif within a

hybrid genre which crosses science fiction and gothic. If one googles ‘fallen angel’

within image search, thousands of winged figures appear, either female and

voluptuous or androgynous and emaciated (it should be noted that Rachel’s angel is

wingless; the image of his back asserts this lack from the very start). Fallen angels

figure in novels, films, rock songs (particularly heavy metal), as a name for wrestlers

(currently there are two notable fallen angels) and more recently in computer games

(Sacred 2: Fallen Angel). Before this genre-specific proliferation fallen angel stood as

a trope for performers who had fallen from a state of artistic perfection (especially of

a ‘demotic’ kind), whether willfully or unwittingly, to take on a tragic significance:

Billie Holiday, James Dean, Edith Piaf, Brian Jones. More recently the term has been

associated with media ‘victims’, where the hyper-surveillance of celebrity

relationships, particularly that of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, offer up instances of

transgressive, self-destructive acts for consumption, a ‘lifestyle’ with which many

young people seem to identify. The nature of this intensive media exposure produces

an ‘illusion of intimacy’ (Gamson 2001) which may provide a sort of ‘surrogate

parent’ for estranged adolescents who thus model behaviour on their idols. However,

Rachel makes it clear in her statement that the visual sources for her triptych are not

from the popular media, rather they are drawn from contemporary art photographers:

Duane Michals, Juergen Teller, Nan Goldin and more distantly Diane Arbus. The

latter is particularly known for her 1960s representations of people deemed marginal

(giants, prostitutes, transvestites) while Goldin recorded the post-punk music and

post-Stonewell gay scene in New York of the 1970s and beyond; in effect Goldin’s

semi-documentary way of recording this ‘demi-monde’, ‘warts and all’, has been

appropriated by photo-journalists to become the house-style for the media. Juergen

Teller crosses the art/fashion world constructing a manner that has been dubbed

‘heroin chic’, whereas Duane Michals, who began as a fashion photographer,

produces anti-descriptive, semi-allegorical works in which he attempts to represent

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the extremes of life, particularly as experienced by the gay community. What is clear

in this mix is the way in which the art world and the popular media are deeply

imbricated, the one feeding off the other to form an interdependent relationship. But

perhaps what draws Rachel to these sources is that most of these photographers

portray people who are considered ‘other’, a designation in each instance caused by a

fall from grace. Nevertheless, this imbrication has more complex layers, sedimented

stories of mythical and historical falls, from Icarus to Adam and Eve, that further

colour Rachel’s appropriation of the term. Indeed the story most associated with the

fallen angel, the one from which it is understood to derive, is that of Lucifer, the most

beautiful of God’s angels who sinned and was thus cast down.

The figure of Lucifer is often understood as biblical in origin and he is

sometimes identified with Satan himself. Yet fallen angels are rarely mentioned in the

Bible although they are central to the first section of the Book of Enoch, a collection

of texts dating from about 300 BC to 1st century AD4, which tells of the visionary

knowledge of Enoch (great-grandfather of Noah). Despite these credentials, its status

is apocryphal within the Jewish canon and most Christian theologies although it

remains canonic in the Ethiopian Church. Nonetheless, Enoch is mentioned in the

New Testament in the book of Jude and was undoubtedly influential on the early

Church fathers.5 It is an apocalyptic work that provides an alternative to the origins of

human sin. Within the first text, ‘The Book of the Watchers’, the story of the fallen

angels is given particular significance, whereas in the Old Testament they appear only

twice: in Issiah 14: 3-20 under the guise of ‘Lucifer’ (a Latin name for the bringer of

light which also refers to the morning star or planet Venus) where his actions are used

as a metaphor for those of the King of Babylon, whose hubris, like Lucifer’s, results

in his fall. A similar story of hubris is given more detail in Ezekial 28: 11-19,

although here the protagonist is named the King of Tyre, ‘the model of perfection’

whose fall is thus particularly salutary, although the story is recounted without

explicitly referencing an angel. In the New Testament the fallen angels nominally 4  A copy of the Book of Enoch was discovered amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls  5 Tertullian (160-230) defends it, in fact uses it to inveigh against women and their use of adornment (http://www.piney.com/FathEnochTertu.html#P292_58954 accessed 2.2.09) and even St. Augustine (354-430) mentions it in the The City of God Chapter 23, refuting the possibility of angels mating with humans, but not so ‘sylvans and fauns’ (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120115.htm accessed 2.2.09).  

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appear in Jude 1: 6 where they are self-imposed exiles rather than fallen as such, and

in Matthew 25: 41 and 2 Peter 2: 4, angels join Satan in the hell fire especially

prepared for them, and are thus fallen in terms of their trajectory.

The Book of the Watchers, rather than reference the verses from Issiah or

Ezekiel (both written prior to its authorship) expands on even earlier verses from

Genesis 6:

1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2 that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. 3 And the LORD said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. 4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. 5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (King James version)

Through various exegetic readings ‘sons of God’ here translates as angels whose

leader in ‘The Book of the Watchers’, Semihazah, with one of his cohort, Asael, are

responsible for bringing knowledge to humankind respectively of ‘spell-binding’, and

of ‘unrighteousness’ and ‘the eternal mysteries prepared in heaven’ (such as

metallurgy). But they also ‘cohabited and were defiled by human women’; as a result

‘the Giants were born, and the earth was filled with violence’ (from Enoch in Reed

2005, 33). This becomes known only after the archangels are sent to earth to report on

the machinations of their absent cousins. God’s punishment is to send the flood to rid

the earth of such abominations (save Noah and his kin) while the transgressing angels

are interned.6

6 Indeed according to Enoch the angels are banished after:

(12) …their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is (13) for ever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and (14) to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined for ever. And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them to the end of all (15) generation (Book Enoch VI-XI).

 

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It is evident from Enoch that fallen angels are not only sinful in themselves

but that they corrupt humans (particularly women, who are at once susceptible and

provocative). Rachel is therefore aware, in her choice of title, that such nomenclature

suggests not only the transgression of a taboo but the potential contamination of

others. As Douglas (1966) is at pains to explain, it is as a result of the fear of impurity

and the hybrids resulting from carnal transgression that the most forceful taboos are

generated; whatever sin Rachel’s angel has transgressed results not only in self-

destruction but also the possibility of insidious replication due to the irresistibility of

his allure. Despite the innocence of his look, this allure is enhanced by cosmetics, a

sign of effeminacy and seduction, 7 the very mask that the sons of god had first taught

to women in order to excite their own lust.

A sense of the dirtiness of the sin is reinforced by the way in which Rachel

juxtaposes the constructed ensemble with the sink. Once the viewer has lent across

the work’s surface to see the books, the once incidental sink comes into view. Drawn

into the field of vision from below it no longer acts as a barrier but signals the

inevitable destiny of the fallen. Rather than the hell fire of Enoch, Rachel appropriates

the gutters and sluices of Bataille’s abbatoirs (Cox 2006) and, more directly, the series

of ‘Sinks’ that US artist Robert Gober produced, partly as a commentary on the AIDS

pandemic of the 1980s. As Gober developed these works he gradually reduced the

sink-as-motif to the drain, the plug-hole itself (Joselit 1997). He took these metal

junctions and plumbed them into cast fragments of the human body to form additional

orifices which, by implication, drew in rather then expelled abject substances (a

scapegoat for society’s ills). By drawing on this connected if diverse set of references

Rachel condenses the sedimented images and stories that have attached themselves to

fallen angel to produce an allegory for our time.

Conclusion

With the installation ‘Fallen Angel’, Rachel rearticulates her assertion that a

designated role outside the natural is not acceptable. Rather she claims an identity 7  The inevitability of this disposition in the male homosexual, that of the corrupter/seducer, has been much used to defend homophobia even eugenics: for extreme examples of these views [but not unrepresentative] see Kraepelin and Hoche in Mildenberger (2007) and Saxon (2007).  

19

based on resistance to the hegemonic structures that sustain the rightness of

heterosexuality, the network of symbolic and social relations that collectively fashion

heteronormativity and compel queer subjects to hide or risk hurt. As the focal point

for her resistance she chooses spaces in which change is configured, a series of

borders subject to continuous breach and readjustment despite attempts to police

them. In this sense Rachel’s points of reference might be characterized as thresholds,

spatial/temporal nodes of transition, a place and time where a person moves from one

identity to another: child to adult; innocent to fallen; recognition to non-recognition;

subject to object; object to abject. But she tends to choose situations in-between: the

not-male/not-female (the hermaphroditic portrait), falling, not-fallen, (the lit candle in

the central photograph indexes life despite the unconscious or newly dead pose,

although the extinguished candles on the shelf intimate otherwise).

The domain of the photographs identifies the private and social spaces in

which the angel navigates heteronormative borders, the extremes of which,

proscription and incitement, are represented on the shelf beneath. In this instance,

Rachel’s narrative is a tragic one, one in which she distances herself from the event by

representing a male peer. At the same time she draws in the viewer through a

succession of invitations to shift attention and position. She does so quite specifically

by carefully sequencing and structuring the installation’s spatial configurations, its

shared signs and ambiguities. In this way, as viewers traverse and read its various

spaces, Rachel sets up a succession of questions: Is this young man’s (child’s) fall the

result of a self-destructive act and, if so, who is responsible for that action? Are you

attracted to this angel? If so, why? If not, why not? Do you sympathise/empathise

with his situation, or is his act justified because of the nature of his sin? In choosing to

examine a young gay male undergoing a catastrophic, possibly suicidal, event, she

performs an act of empathy and alliance, but also one of identification.

In the context of school art Rachel’s act is a brave and exceptional one

although, given the rhetoric of freedom within art education, it ought not to be. More

widely, in the context of an inclusive education that aims to dismantle forms of

exclusion, Rachel’s act is also exceptional. Epstein (1997), in the first ever volume of

this journal, demonstrates the ways in which heterosexuality is constantly being

‘performed’ within schools from the earliest years. But to perform differently is to be

20

marked out and potentially to incite bullying (Warwick et. al. 2004). The ever-present

threat of violence within heteronormative cultures can only ever be overturned

through continuously voicing difference, a process of small stories that cumulatively,

as Atkinson (2007) argues, leads to ‘voicing commonality’, ‘so the act of daring to

speak opens the door to an acknowledgement of what the speaker and the listeners

have in common’ (p. 27). Rachel’s shift from a consideration of audiences’ views on

queer sexualities in her GCSE design (implicitly confessional within a heternormative

community) to the distancing mechanism of the ‘Fallen Angel’, marks out her

recognition of the threat of heteronormative sanctions. Rachel’s narrative, nominally

the common story of a queer teenager’s suicidal fall from grace (see

http://www.youth-suicide.com/gay-bisexual/news/england-scotland-ireland.htm)

becomes the big story of allegory. Her example suggests that in addition to the

strategy in which day-to-day bigotry is challenged by stating the everyday presence of

queer lives, a further strategy should be added, one where young people are given

opportunities to investigate the ways historical and cultural myths become naturalised

as truths. Such investigation demands a critical education, a questioning of the

network of stories that helps to reinforce the heterosexual matrix, including both

religious and common sense knowledge. As Rachel discovered, this is not a

comfortable quest, but if discussion around artworks can provide young people with

the space to question dominant discourses about sexuality and desire, her example

could be built upon. Such investigative and interpretative strategies allow participants

to go beyond ‘tolerance’ to construct expressions and ‘ways of being human’ that

begin to move towards a fuller definition of what it means to be inclusive.

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Keywords

art education, art installation, queer theory, semiotics, sexuality.

Name: Dr Nicholas Addison

Position: Senior Lecturer, Art, Design & Museology

Institution: Institute of Education, University of London

Email: n.addison@ioe.ac.uk