Reinterpreting a Textile Tradition: David McDiarmid's Ecstatic and Utopian Klub Kwilt

Abstract

Appropriating traditional American quilting patterns, and the homely communal ambience of the quilt, self-proclaimed queer artist David McDiarmid proposes in his work, Klub Kwilt (1979), an inter-racial, queer 'community' with its own uniquely appropriate community artefacts. Klub Kwilt is a shiny, reflective art work made in what was then a new synthetic material — laser-etched Mylar. The artist's intention was to materialize and affirm in this work the utopian and ecstatic impulses of the New York gay male, black and Hispanic, underground dance club, Paradise Garage. The utopian world McDiarmid evokes — in a knowing, camp embrace of the synthetic, the showy and the excessive — is one of sexual and musical ecstasy, inter-racial resonance and visual and aural opulence.