Hey Boy, Hey Girl

What are you doing for lunch? If a sarnie at your desk is the answer, your plans are about to improve dramatically. Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender & Identity is Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery's latest big-thinking opening, and for the conversations is starts as much as for any particular work or artist, it's brilliant. Side note: it does actually include a Warhol, an Emin and a Hockney, if you're asking. 

Boy, Girl, ? (1994) — Hadrian Pigott 
The reinforcement of gender through commercialisation is an issue that's been talked about a lot this year, but artist Hadrian Pigott created this simple, powerful piece back when D:Ream were topping them charts (that's 1994 quizzers). Gendered products often suggest that everyone can be divided into one of two genders but Boy, Girl, ?opens up the possibility of an alternative way. The question mark might also prompt you to ask: in a world where the choice is often limited to ‘boy’ or ‘girl’, how do people who don’t identify with either term buy a product as simple as soap?

Self-Portrait Series (1990-98) — Sarah Lucas
As part of the more than 80 pieces in Coming Out there's a seriously strong set of feminist artists, offering different representations of what being a woman might mean. Seven works from Sarah Lucas’ iconic Self-Portrait Series (1990-98) are featured, as well as Willy (2000), the satirical sculpture for which Lucas is probably best known: essentially a plastic garden gnome covered in Marlboro Lights. Linder (full title) is also a huge part of this conversation, and her collages, like Untitled 1977 (pictured top), combine images from pornographic magazines and women's mainstream titles, making a point about the cultural expectations of women and the treatment of the female form as a commodity.

Bear (1993) — Steve McQueen 
It's not immediately obvious where to find this continuous 10-minute projection. But absolutely do. The piece that stayed with us the most, Bear begins with two naked men (artist Steve McQueen and actor Vernon Douglas) standing apart from each other. Their exchanges move from knowing, to flirtatious, to aggressive as they wrestle and wink and dart around the HUUUGE screen. In order to feature the work, BMAG have had to recreate the fully immersive experience as originally designed by McQueen — entrance, screen size and light. And in one of our looser segues, painters including Francis Bacon have used imagery of men wrestling as a way to explore same-sex desire in their art, including ‘Figures in a Landscape’ (1956) which is on display at the exhibition.

PICTURES: BMAG — 1 Untitled 1977 by Linder. Copyright the artist and courtesy Stuart ShaveModern Art, London; 2 – Boy, ?, Girl by Pigott, Hadrian. Copyright the artist; 3 — Self-Portrait Series (1990-98) by Sarah Lucas, copyright the artist; 4 – Steve McQueen, Bear, 1993. Image courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery London, and Marian Goodman Gallery New York, Paris and London. Still image from film; 5 – Sunil Gupta, India Gate from the series ‘Exiles’, 1986-1987. Text with image "Even if you have a lover you should get married and have children. Who would look after you in your old age." © Sunil Gupta courtesy sepia.