'A Class Act', essay, catalogue: Philiip Timischil, Artworks for All Age Groups, Secession, Vienna, 16th November 2018

An exhibition catalogue essay situating the work of Philip Timischil alongside other contemporary queer artists looking at tensions between Marxism and identity politics. Building from Didier Eribon’s argument that working class queers who enter the arts experience a sense of ‘split habitus’, the essay relates this to Pierre Bourdeiu’s Brechtian concept of consumer alienation, before claiming that Timischil’s images of dispossessed taste show that images of alienation no longer carry such potency, having been recuperated by luxury brands. The image of the dispossessed ‘split habitus’ marks both a point of identification within for working class queers in the arts and a reminder that contemporary art is itself bound by class and thus limited in its political reach.