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Incongruity and History’s Present: An Interview with Dr. Gabe Beckhurst

Image 1: Dr Gabe Beckhurst, photograph by Philipp Meuser.

You have a background in art practice, theory and history. How have these stops along your journey informed your current approach to research?
I have moved between a studio-based arts practice to a research practice in contemporary art theory and art history. In hindsight it is easy to say my trajectory has felt organic, but I have been guided by the goal of making research an integral part of my professional life. This has led me to teach, as well as to write and curate exhibitions [image 2]. On paper these fields can feel distinct from one another and somewhat impermeable, but in my experience there tends to be a lot of overlap in how projects come to fruition – at their best, academic research and curatorial practice are both highly collaborative. I’ve also long been interested in artistic practice as a conduit for historical and theoretical investigation. This is what brought me to art history, a field in which I could best explore the past as a powerful resource for the present, while being able to ask questions about how the historical past is constituted. Something I carry over from artistic practice is an interest in what happens when we take our lead from artists. I believe artists make better historians of us by exposing us to unorthodox approaches, not only at the point where research is shared, but at earlier formative stages as we try to situate our research within a broader context.Ìý

In pursuing a PhD, you deeply embed yourself in the artistic material you investigate in many ways, from discussing it with other researchers to spending hours looking at a photograph of a performance. What are your biggest takeaways from your postgraduate studies?
The nature of research at PhD level is typically characterised as ‘deep and narrow’. This is for good reason as you’re working towards becoming a specialist in your chosen field of study. As such, PhD study can give rise to a duality of feeling – the elemental pleasures of pouring across a gossipy curatorial note in the archive to the particularity of your investigations that distinguish you from your peers. One of my favourite aspects of research as a historian of modern and contemporary art has been the opportunity to spend time with archives that have been consciously put together by artists. It can be tempting to think of archives as strictly informatic, but such archives can tell us a lot about how artists made sense of their worlds and interpreted biography: a customised leather jacket as testament to their self-stylisation or an adolescent poem evidencing tender ambitions. Not all the textures of this experience will have a place in the PhD thesis but the wider knowledge gained is just as important. My biggest takeaway is to follow your nose and seek out the things that excite you even if they seem trivial because those details and the community you’ll build around them will sustain you for years to come.Ìý

In your PhD thesis, you discuss feelings of incongruity in ecocritical art. Could you tell us a bit more about ways of thinking more affectively and emotionally in history of art?
I came to the topic of incongruity in ecocritical art with the goal of working through the difficult emotions raised in reckoning with our degraded planet. My thesis took the 1970s as a key point of cultural and legislative formation and focused on the social and geopolitical context of the United States. Incongruity offers a useful framework for examining how artists have responded to some of the systemic challenges that emerged in the late 20th century. Rather than view incongruity as a deficit of action or effect with little value either for art history or our present, I am interested in how artists have worked with a range of media and approaches that diverge tonally from what is commonly considered consonant with ecological interests. This has led me to performance works incorporating anachronistic historical guises and to quasi-nature documentaries that use deadpan comedy. I am interested in how some of these contemporary works productively contravene our expectations for art.

My interest in affect and emotion is evidence of my interdisciplinary interests: I work at the hinge of art history and fields including performance studies, cultural studies and queer and trans studies. As such, I’ve been influenced by scholars including José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Cvetkovich in contemplating feelings as shared cultural sensoria shaped by social and political upheaval, or in how sensations raised by visual materials or complex archives become part of that historical processing.Ìý

I'm very interested in learning more about your current investigation of queer and trans visualities in relation to temporal notions. What are the implications of thinking in multitemporal ways when researching artists and subjects which have been historically excluded.
I am in the early stages of a new research project that centres trans and gender-nonconforming visualities in Britain from the 1970s onwards, taking the photographic and printed image as a site of departure for an intergenerational set of artists who work with images in circulation, whether archival or drawn from media sources. I hope to trouble thinking representationally or abstractly about trans and nonbinary subjectivities in British art history by pressing photography’s ties to visibility politics. I’m very interested in how histories are assembled in the reconstitution of ephemera within new visual configurations. While aesthetic histories of collage and montage can be framed in terms of disjuncture, I’m keen to think about how such practices connect and revise the terms of influence and inheritance. I think it is probably too early to review the implications of the ‘multitemporal’ in this project, but I will be thinking about how these approaches put pressure on chronology and periodisation. In that sense I am grateful to lean on pre-existing efforts in trans and queer studies while thinking carefully about how trans- conjoins with (art) history. This circles back to my wider belief of our present involvement with history, as opposed to thinking of history as belonging to and therefore restored from an isolated past. ÌýÌý

As we approach essay deadlines, we forget how important it is to go see art in person. What is an object or performance that you've recently seen which has inspired or moved you?
Having first encountered them during her 2021–22 retrospective at Tate Modern, I recently had a second chance to see a couple of paintings from Lubaina Himid’s series Le Rodeur hanging in The Time Is Always Now, a group show curated by Ekow Eshun at the National Portrait Gallery. I am drawn to the way Himid’s paintings are full of narrative ellipses and hers is a practice I often return to in my teaching so the works feel familiar. But standing in front of them I was struck by their capacity to deal with the presence of the past. It’s always affecting to revisit a work in person and be surprised to find you remembered it differently, like running into an old acquaintance and doing a double take. It was a poignant reminder that there’s always new resonances to be found.
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