All But The Obvious and Transformations in Lesbian Documentary

All But The Obvious, an exhibition mounted at Los Angeles independent art space LACE in 1990, insisted on the importance of bringing together an all-lesbian cohort of emerging artists. These artists felt lesbian identity to be under pressure from interrelated forces including the AIDS crisis, the emerging field of queer theory, and homophobic political discourses. The show did not seek to define a particular “lesbian aesthetic,” instead preferring to bring visibility to a heterogenous array of new practices. But in retrospect, one major commonality connects the included works: a shared commitment to the documentary mode. In the early 1990s works of Laura Aguilar and Nancy Rosenblum, for example, traditional documentary photography is used to depict the artists’ local lesbian communities. Their photographs give visibility to particular social bonds and work to strengthen those connections. However, the return to documentary was not limited to photography: even the representational paintings of Monica Majoli were theorized by the artist under the rubric of “document.” The exhibition’s emphasis on documenting the body shows how lesbian artists were already balancing notions of the social construction of queer identity with the emphasis on materiality that has come to the fore in recent years. Even as it registered a certain ambivalence towards the category of lesbian art, All But the Obvious offered a way out of this impasse by fusing the notion of documentary with an exploration of the mutability of flesh, a project with increased visibility as one of its goals.