Contemporary Expressions
Purusha’s cultural status is encapsulated in Mark Thompson’s Leatherfolk: “Regarded as a sexual metaphysician ahead of his time by some,” he was “dismissed as a kinky California crazy man by others.” The sweetly reverent, even wistful Sanctuary falls into the former camp. But Ashby masterfully avoids the potential pitfalls of such an approach—such as reiterating generations-old clichés about the afterlives of pre-AIDS sexual utopianism, or didactically confronting the knottily “problematic” elements of Purusha’s pre-queer-theory ideas—by grounding the film’s visuals in the environments of its present-day speakers.
No longer are we in Hong Kong, but somewhere in Tây Nguyên, located within the Southeast Asian Massif known as Zomia, its complex textures expressed by a chorus of sculptures, installations, and instruments created by Art Labor—founded in 2012 by artists Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung, and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran—and collaborators from the Indigenous Jarai community, with whom Art Labor have been working since 2016, alongside invited artists.
The causes of the 2011 unrest—police brutality, defunded social services, staggering inequality—were quickly forgotten amidst outrage at theft and “destruction of property” by those quickly labeled as rioters and looters. The current prime minister, Keir Starmer, was at that time head of the Crown Prosecution Service, overseeing 24-hour courts that handed out summary justice. Starmer’s government was elected just a few months ago on a slogan of “change”; he followed the same judicial playbook when dealing with the far-right, anti-immigration protests and riots that swept the country this summer.
Gregg Bordowitz has been writing, publishing, performing, and teaching consistently and prolifically since the early nineties in New York, making “agitprop” videos as an AIDS activist and member of ACT UP. Though his material output is slim, his wordcount is substantial. Rather than focus on the early activist works for which he is best known, this exhibition concentrates on writing as the core of his artistic practice, but also as a daily habit that becomes material testament to his ongoing presence, as a long-time survivor of HIV.
Just beneath Bliss’s heavily ironic skewering of the art world’s inflated, but insecure, sense of importance—easy fodder, I know—lurk signs of a fiscal bubble about to burst. […] the outside world seeps into the drama: Van Haas is described as “a phoenix rising from the ashes of 9/11”; her collages of embattled teen idols are dotted with magazine headlines, including “How to sell a war”; and everyone knows the entire operation is a glorified money-laundering exercise. As if foreshadowing the forthcoming economic collapse, the artist has an expletive-laced breakdown.
One of the fiercest critiques Baer elaborated in her break-up with abstraction and New York was toward her previous peers, the pioneers of minimalist sculpture, men whose names we know. By paring down and taking apart objects, they equated the mundanity of objects with objectivity, which in their reductive reasoning proposed to “contain the real.” This mix of purity and reality echoes as counterpoint to the also-well-known male critics of that time who proposed that the further art gets from an attachment to reference, the closer to perfection in form it could become.