Marking Time and the Critical Reading of Space | Mark Robbins
TellTale was a temporary, site-specific installation commissioned for the Adelaide Festival in Australia. It comprised a series of interventions located on a riverfront esplanade that had a long history of recreational use as well as cruising and violence against gay men. The installation altered the activity in a section of the park and gave greater visibility to a range of social and sexual encounters. It marked the seam between authorized and unauthorized activity, highlighting the complexity of uses of public space. As George Chauncey observed in Gay New York, gay men “appropriate for themselves spaces that were not marked as gay, and construct a gay city in the midst of, yet invisible to the dominant city.” This article describes the TellTale installation in the context of artists’ and architects’ explorations of Queer Space in the 1990s. It seeks to reflect critically on ephemeral and overlooked parts of cultural heritage and reveal more substantial accounts of these histories.
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