Resumen de Dada's Mama: Richard Hamilton's Queer Pop
Richard Hamilton’s work of the 1950s at once anticipated and diagnosed what so much dissident art seems to have missed: that representation promotes fetishism, thereby defl ecting desire away from social liberation and towards consumption, spectacularization, and exchange. Hamilton’s response was the production of a series of works that sought to unsettle fetishism through estranging its stimulus and queering its terms. Inhabiting the post-war era’s ‘feminized’ consumer without guilt or shame, Hamilton gleefully abandoned any critical position removed from what he sought to describe. Instead he celebrated his imbrication with a series of visual metaphors that made the male body, long inviolate, open and penetrable, especially by other males.
This queer masculinity, severed from homosexual desire, but aping its terms, would become the hugely infl uential major key of pop art. This essay traces its development in Hamilton’s early oeuvre.
