↳ Exhibitions

Ingo Swann at Stadtgalerie Bern

November 2, 2022

Artist: Ingo Swann

Exhibition title: Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome

Venue: Stadtgalerie Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Date: September 23 – October 29, 2022

Photography: Studio Mussano / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Stadtgalerie, Bern

Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome. is an exhibition of pornographic collages by the psychic and artist Ingo Swann that were unseen during his lifetime. Aside from Swann’s work on psychic espionage during the Cold War, he was a painter, briefly a secretary at the UN, and had published several works of erotic fiction under a number of pseudonyms in the late 1960s. The exhibition combines the collages with a new sound installation that brings together an unpublished manuscript of queer erotic fiction by Swann and incorporates other elements from his life and work.

The exhibition is structured around two bodies of work by Swann that could be said to bookend his research in the psychic field, both of which were unseen during his lifetime and have subsequently been divided across different archives after his death in 2013. Having not been made public, and seemingly referring to Swann’s private life and desire, this staging of the material also confronts Swann’s own efforts to separate it through pseudonyms. It contends with the challenges of being homosexual pre-Stonewall and during the Cold War, especially Swann’s connection to military espionage, given historic suspicions around the ‘homosexual threat’ propagated during McCarthyism.

Critically confronting the administrative and moralistic siloing of Swann’s archive, the exhibition is a subjective, non-museological attempt to bring together several elements; the first comprises the pornographic collages, kept at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York; the second element, relating to his research in parapsychology, preserved at the University of Georgia; the third set of materials incorporated here were deposited at the One Archives of the USC in Los Angeles, gathers Swann’s largely queer erotic literary writings and explorations from the late 1960s.

Excerpts from unpublished or unfinished manuscripts such as Pink Neon—part one of the Neon Trilogy—and Confessions of an Astrology Addict, as well as preparatory notes for the epic poem Expergere, are included among the sources of the sound that plays through the different spaces of the gallery (floor plan: 1 (part 1); 16 (part 2); 19 (part 3)). This presentation of Swann’s collages is contextualised through sound and stages an affective encounter, foregrounding sensation, and proposing ambivalence as a way of asking theoretical and political questions. If our search for gayness within archives is often filled with political and personal yearning, how do we use affect to guide our encounters? What do we do with feelings such as an ambivalence around Swann and his work? How do we present these ‘overlooked’ works without resorting to hyperbole?

The Publik Universal Frxnd discovered Swann and his collage works in 2015, when they organised an unprecedented talks programme at the New York Porn Film Festival. The talks programme addressed pornography as a documentary object, and how its place in the archive or library is determined by library science and Victorian moralism. The combination of these two elements determine the form of the pornographic archive—cataloguing and preservation—and is the key to its categorisation, preventing thematic links it might have with documentary, literature, fine arts etc. because of the particular images it depicts.

The exhibition is curated by Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca Beeler, Publik Universal Frxnd, and Nina Wakeford.

The sound work Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome. (by Gianmaria Andreetta, Publik Universal Frxnd, and Nina Wakeford, 2022) is read by Angharad Williams and recorded and edited by Martin Clarke.

Ingo Swann, Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Ingo Swann, An Alternative, n. d., collage, 45.5 x 61 cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.40)

Ingo Swann, Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Gianmaria Andreetta, Publik Universal Frxnd and Nina Wakeford, Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome., part 3, 2022, read by Angharad Williams Recorded and edited by Martin Clarke, single channel audio, 12 mins

Ingo Swann, Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Ingo Swann, After Dark, Vol. 6, No. 10, p. 52, February 1974, magazine, 20.3 x 28 cm, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York

Ingo Swann, Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Gianmaria Andreetta, Publik Universal Frxnd and Nina Wakeford, Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome., part 2, 2022, read by Angharad Williams Recorded and edited by Martin Clarke, single channel audio, 3 mins

Photos of Ingo Swann, n. d., contact sheet, 2 x (5 x 5 cm), The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York

Ingo Swann, Being a faggot-spaceman I am awesome, 2022, exhibition view, Stadtgalerie Bern

Ingo Swann, An Alternative, n. d., collage, 45.5 x 61 cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.40)

Ingo Swann, Our Society Wants Cock – In Secret – Out Behind the Cafe, n. d., collage, 35.5 x 19.5 cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.82)

Ingo Swann, Oh! God! – Social Comment Series, n.d., collage, 45.5 x 61 cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.47)

Ingo Swann, Labors, n. d., collage, 28x21cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.52)

Ingo Swann, Tourists Arriving to Seek the Mineotaur in his Towering Maze – Erotic Beyond Series, n. d., collage, 45.5x61cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.68)

Ingo Swann, There’s nothing like a great work of art, 1994, collage, 40.5 x 30.5 cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.1)

Ingo Swann, All Subjects are not Equal – Social Comment Series, n. d., collage, 61×45.5cm, courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Gift of the Ingo Swann Estate (2014.20.39)