Rubbish and Dreams:
The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble

Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York
29 September 2018 to 27 January 2019

Stephen Varble (1946–1984) became both notorious and legendary for his “gutter art” in which he performed wordless mockeries of gender and class wearing costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects.  He led uninvited tours through the galleries of SoHo, performed in Fifth Avenue gutters, and burst into banks and boutiques in his gender-confounding ensembles.  These public disruptions were only one part of a larger history of costume performance that included theater, drawing, collaborations with queer artists.

Across these different phases, Varble made the recombination of signs for gender a central theme in his increasingly outrageous costumes and performances.  While maintaining he/him as his pronoun, Varble performed gender as an open question in both his life and his work, sometimes identifying as a female persona, Marie Debris, and sometimes playing up his appearance as a gay man.  Only later would the term “genderqueer” emerge to describe the kind of self-made, non-binary gender options that Varble adopted throughout his life and in his disruptions of the 1970s art world.

This exhibition is the first survey of Varble’s work, from his Fluxus collaborations to the surviving drawings and unfinished videos of the early 1980s.  He created performance art and costume sculptures that challenged the expectations of “fine art” and that took genderqueer presentations to the public. The street was his stage, and he believed in making work that did not require the authorization of an institution. He remade himself as the prophet of possibility, showing others how to take rubbish and turn it into dreams. 

Made possible with exhibition support grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

A book based on the research for the exhibition is under contract with Intellect Books, UK.

Reviews and press
Holland Cotter, “Stephen Varble: The Street Was His Stage, Dress Was His Weapon,” New York Times (11 January 2019), C15, C20. [download in PDF format]
Hilary Moss, “A ‘70s Performance Artist Finds a New Audience,” New York Times T Magazine (26 September 2018) and excerpted as “Shock Prophet,” New York Times (30 September 2018): ST3. 
Janet Werther, “Discovering Stephen Varble,” PAJ: Performing Arts Journal 123 (September 2019): 17-27.
Bob Nickas, “Stephen Varble: Now More Than Ever,” Affidavit (22 October 2018).  
Emily Colucci, “A New Exhibition Resurrects One of New York’s Most Subversive Queer Performance Artists,” [interview] THEM magazine (3 October 2018)
Tyler Maxim, “Video by Stephen Varble,” Screen Slate (29 October 2018) 
Jenna Adrian-Diaz, “The Rediscovered Legacy of SoHo’s Most Outrageous Genderqueer Performance Artist,” Vulture/New York Magazine (26 September 2018) 
Cassidy Dawn Graves, “This New Exhibition Spotlights the ‘Prophet’ of Queer Performance Art,” Garage (4 December 2018) 
Angela Skujins, “The 1970s Genderqueer Performance Artist That Turned Trash Into Treasure,” Dazed & Confused Digital (16 January 2019)
Didier Morelli, “Rubbish and Dreams,” esse arts + opinions (11 December 2018)
Fernanda Eberstadt, “I Bite My Friends,” Granta 144 (August 2018). Republished open access at lithub.com
Preview essay by David Getsy published in The Archive [of the Leslie-Lohman Museum] 62 (Winter 2017), 3-7. 

Research symposium
”Queer New York and Urban Performance,” co-organized by Ricardo Montez and David Getsy for the Department of Performance Studies, New York University

Satellite exhibitions
The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day, ONE Archives Gallery & Museum, West Hollywood, California, 2019; The Horse Hospital, London, 2019; and Iceberg Projects, Chicago, 2021
”An Antidote to Nature’s Ruin on This Heavenly Globe”: Stephen Varble Prints and Video from the Early 1980s, Institute 193, Lexington, Kentucky, 2018

Archives
The extant video work of Stephen Varble has been digitally archived by the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The VDB is now distributor of these works for teachers, museums, and other institutions.

Installation photographs of Rubbish and Dreams at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, 2018-2019
(all photos by Kristine Eudey, 2018)

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