
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990, wall clocks, 14 x 28 x 2 ¾ inches overall 2 parts: 14 inches diameter each, Image by Peter Muscato, ©The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
2010, or as so many of my friends have dubbed it, 20-femme, is shaping up to be a beautiful year.
I rang in the new decade with a huge house party on New Years Eve where I unwittingly forgot to put on music, so basically from 9 pm until 6 am hundreds of people were engaged in conversation in my loft. It was heavenly. We are living through such difficult and uncertain times economically and even for some, spiritually, that people are being forced to look at their lives and their ways of addressing things in new, hopefully inspired ways. How do we move forward? I think the first thing we have to do is to start talking with each other. We aren’t going to find answers by turning to the TV or even the internet, but by discovering solutions and alternative ways of thriving within our own communities. We need to spend time feeding each other, drinking together, playing and getting to know each other in more intimate, meaningful ways.
I am meditating on the idea of 20-femme as the return to intimacy.
These past two weeks I’ve seen amazing work presented by my fellow artists here in the Big Apple. The creative output is amazing right now. The Coil Festival at PS 122 is currently giving us the remarkable Edgar Oliver in his mesmerizing one-person show, East 10th St. Last week I was blown away by Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People in their latest piece, “Last Meadow” at The Abrons Atrs Center, Big Art Group presented an amazing installation at The New Museum last night and Emily Nepon aka “Killer Sideburns” and friends were truly “under the radar” in a warehouse space in Brooklyn last weekend in a piece entitled “Between Two Worlds or, Who Loved You Before You Were Mine” (A show about yearning for ancestors, the empty spaces left by AIDS deaths & the ways the next generation is called to fill them. A show about community, memory, consensual possession, desire, gender, sexuality, heteronormativity, glitter and tchotchkes. In a culture of chosen families, which desires are inherited? -taken from the show’s flyer) based on The Dybbuk.
Queer culture is thriving and growing and being supported by an increasingly mixed audience while “cis” culture appears to be increasingly irrelevant and shallow.
Today I decided to revisit one of the more beautiful gallery shows I saw last year.
FLOATING A BOULDER:
WORKS BY FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES AND JIM HODGES
currently on view through JANUARY 27 at the Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea.
If you have a chance go and see it.
Earlier this Fall Jim Hodges asked me to write an essay for the catalogue. I thought I’d put it on my blog in hopes of encouraging you to go and see this remarkable exhibition.
Here it is:
One of the luxuries of living for an extended period of time is that you get to be a “witness to history”, to get a feeling for the ebbs and flows, the repetitions, the constant tug of war between opposing forces. You get the opportunity to discover that, if Benjamin Franklin’s theory that insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results, mankind is completely bonkers. Hopefully, in spite of this discovery, you’ll be able to find a place of comfort or a glimmer of inspiration that will keep your heart and mind in an aspirational mode.
In an essay entitled 1990: L.A., “The Gold Field Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a witness to history, recounts a series of disheartening statistics about the state of the US economy and the choices being made by the government on behalf of “the people”, the savings and loan bailout, trickle down economics, the stalemate on healthcare, the destruction of the environment… He also discusses the trivialities “the people” decide to focus on: the funding of “immoral” art, Ketchup as a vegetable, two men kissing… The “strategy employed by the right of deflecting meaning by using charged symbolic images”.
As we survey the cultural landscape we have carved out for ourselves in the 19 years since it can be a most disheartening exercise. We have just spent billions of dollars to bail out the savings and loan industry, more americans are uninsured than ever before, we are at war in the middle east, global warming continues unchecked, there is still no substantive federal funding for art and there is no cure for AIDS.
It would seem that problem solving ain’t our forté.
And yet, there are insistent and unrelenting strands of gold that are inextricably woven through the fabric of our culture deflecting and rejecting the shit our society chooses to invest it’s energy, time and resources maintaining. Within the mire there remains a core of belief in the possibilities of a stronger nature, a fiercer heart. The power of beauty -or of candy- resonates through time.
Art and resistence are a hand-me-down game. Soldiers fall, witches tire, color fades, blood dries up and turns to dust until along comes a new imperative for creation and that blood is mixed with water and becomes vital once again.
I’ve been a witness to history too. So has Jim Hodges. So have you.
Those of us who lived through the 80s and early 90s (a time when it seemed the world would surely end), those of us who lived through the 80s and early 90s ( a time we discovered that heartbreak doesn’t kill), those of us who lived through the 80s and early 90s (when two men loving was still not only an act of love but of defiance of time and logic), those of us who lived through the 80s and early 90s (trumped the body and the system).
Funny how romance, once so deadly has now proven itself to be, in a certain sense, immortal. The act of loving killed, the art of loving remains pristine and wrapped in plastic on gallery floors, time keeps ticking, perfectly synched between the hearts of the living and the dead. Flowers and mirrors, words and numbers call out to each other through space. Myriad angels are resurfacing, opening their throats and gently blowing their songs. Across the threatened landscapes they are floating a boulder and on the wind we hear change… change… change…
Justin Bond
October 7, 2009
For those of you living in Los Angeles I will be appearing at The Upright Cabaret for two shows only -Jan 30 and Feb 6th. It will be a intimate show with Thomas Bartlett aka Doveman as my musical director. Please tell your friends and buy tickets soon because the venue only holds 80 people!