IS IT BY MISTAKE OR DESIGN?
Lyrics from "Born to Die" by Lana Del Rey.
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David Wojnarowicz, "The Sex Series," 1988-1989, courtesy PPOW.
“I’m still a piece of meat like something in the Fourteenth Street markets swinging from stinking hooks in the blurry drag queen dusk. Maybe a hundred dollars to my name, no place to live, and I can’t hustle anymore. I’m trying to keep my body beyond the deathly fingers of my past but I’m fucked up bad never learned shit, how to create structures other than chaos. I’m attracted to chaos because of all the possibilities and I don’t have to choose any of them or die frozen inside one but right now all I know is that I’m tired. I woke up in this guy’s bed in the middle of the night and realized not a whole lot had changed since I got off the streets.”
(David Wojnarowicz, “From the Diaries of a Wolf Boy,” The Waterfront Journals)
General Idea. "AIDS (A Project for the Public Art Fund, Inc.)," 1989.
“Did love lead to AIDS? Of course not. There are no causal links, only resemblances and inferences. Certainly, AIDS, with its erotic components, enfolds love and its complexity. And certainly, by choosing [Robert] Indiana’s LOVE, General Idea dragged along an entire art-historical genealogy that included Duchamp, Demuth, and others.”
(Gregg Bordowitz, General Idea: Imagevirus, 2010)
At the Dinner Table…
Nicole Eisenman. "Seder," 2010. Courtesy Leo Koenig Gallery.
This is Nicole Eisenman’s Seder: a painting about differences coming together at the dinner table.
On the right, there’s an orange-skinned man, rendered flat against the picture plane by the intensity of his color; he calls to mind an R.B. Kitaj character in his dark suit and strange appearance. In fact, all of the sitters seem strange if taken out of the context of the picture:
A pink Gustonesque diner, heavy on the nostrils, sits right next to a cherubim girl, who harkens back to many a Renoir painting.
On the left, a pastel green-pink wine-drinker casts a beady, tipsy glance; he or she (the gender is ambiguous) seems to have been cut-and-pasted from a James Ensor canvas.
An acid-yellow lady recalls the lithe women from the gloomy world of Edvard Munch.
There’s a boy in a baby-blue sweater, waiting sleepily for dinner to be served; he reminds me, too, of an Ensor character, or maybe a George Bellows street urchin.
The two women at the far side of the table are harder to place in style. Perhaps sisters, these earth-mothers look Picassoid and Munchian at the same time; the one directly across from the viewer’s gaze has a hint of Paul Cadmus in the way she is modeled.
Notes on Silence: A Collage
ACT UP, "Let the Record Show...," 1987. Courtesy New Museum Photo credit: Fred Scrutin.
As queer artists and writers, we must negotiate between many kinds of silence and many kinds of speech.
“Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are integral parts of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.”
Michel Foucault talkin’ about talkin’ about sexuality in the History of Sexuality: An Introduction.
What happens when something or someone is called out; when a word is latched onto an image? What is gained? What is lost?
(“What’s in a name?”)
Gregg Bordowitz: “But words are also images, and both are constituent parts of a larger picture registered and held by sensory experience.”
Queer Past/Queer Future: In Conversation
Ted Kerr. Questions for a Revolution, 2011. Courtesy the artist.
I first met the artist, writer, and activist Ted Kerr during the summer of 2008 when we were both interns at Visual AIDS. He was standing outside the West 26th Street building with the executive director, Amy Sadao. My memory of the day is a sweltering bleached blue; Ted was wearing bright red pants and a striped shirt. I think he was smiling and waving, or the grin on his face registered as a giddy wave. I bring up my very first impression of Ted because he is perhaps the most hopeful person I know and, for me, that sunny image somehow encapsulates his hopefulness.
His writing and collages strongly reflect this hopefulness not only in their optimism, but also in the way he poses questions about everyday things and events in light of queerness, AIDS, and collectivity. They’re not easy questions to consider, but in posing them, Ted is inviting others to ask more questions, to bring seemingly disparate ideas together, out of which some new space for thinking, art-making, and collective action might arise. Ted’s always looking to have a conversation. His collages are like snippets of dialog between images and text he has gleaned from television, museum exhibitions, and song lyrics. Rihanna’s We Found Love, a portrait of a snowy Walt Whitman, and Occupy Wall Street all make their way into his pictures and reveal their connectedness.
