This publication offers a brief description of each work in the exhibition "Homage: Queer lineages on video" authored by Lynton Talbot.
GALLERY GUIDE
Lynton Talbot is a writer, educator, and independent curator living and working in London. He has curated exhibitions in public institutions and galleries internationally and written extensively on contemporary art. In 2021 he co-edited Intertitles: an anthology at the intersection of writing and visual art, published by Prototype Press. He is the founding Director of TINA, a commercial gallery in London.
GALLERY GUIDE
TEXTS BY LYNTON TALBOT
04
DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE
34
TONY COKES
30
CAROLYN LAZARD
8,16 KANG SEUNG LEE
22
P. STAFF
12
RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA
26
APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL
a love supreme , 2005–6 Single-channel video, sound 7 minutes, 51 seconds Edition of 3 + 1 AP
In Dineo Seshee Bopape’s short video work, John Coltrane’s seminal 1964 recording of “A Love Supreme” plays in the background as the artist licks chocolate from a pane of glass. Seen head-on, as a mediating layer between the viewer and the performer, the opaque image field is sensuously removed to reveal the artist behind. Arriving from a postmodernist tradition of “video performance,” the work intensifies a sense of alienation. As much as it is a strike at the tired tropes of its genre of artmaking, it is also an upending of the tired tropes that have been used to describe the Black body. The destruction of the very thing that conceals and obscures is not an act of violence but an act of love, care, nourishment, and pleasure. The consumption of the chocolate—the substance that the image field is made of— may be a metaphor for tending
wounds, but the revelation of the sensual body behind it is celebratory and triumphant. The action is sensuous and almost auto-erotic. The artist literally eats away at the obstacle to reveal herself in an act of self- care and a proclamation of visibility. Through this sensual yet laborious process of unmasking, Bopape is consciously countering the erasure of the lives and work of Black women, yet, in the process, she is uncovering the actual self behind what is initially visible in the video.
Garden , 2018 Three-channel video installation, color, sound Varied lengths ( Seoul : 10 minutes, 46 seconds; Dungeness : 7 minutes, 45 seconds) Edition of 1
In Garden , a sense of historical lineage is disrupted across time and space. When encountering this multi-channel video installa- tion, we see how the histories, lives, work, and activism of two cultural figures are brought together across different geogra- phies and timeframes: English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–94) and Korean writer and activist Oh Joon-soo
(1964–98), both of whom died in the mid-1990s due to AIDS- related complications. The two were also involved in gay rights movements in their own lifetimes and kept journals of their experi- ences. Both artists fought oppression and stigmatization in their own way; Oh Joon-soo used multiple pen names to counter the prejudice of Korean society, and Jarman, instead of building an easy paradise, chose the infertile, barren landscape of Dungeness on the East Coast of England to labor and struggle
against the elements in a personal and existential fight against normative values. In the film, across multiple screens, Kang Seung Lee is seen breaking ground in each of their coveted and poignantly charged gardens. Drawings on sheepskin parch- ment, made at each site, are carefully torn and buried under soil taken from the corre- sponding garden in a gesture of posthumous exchange and kinship. Traces from each now exist as a physical embodiment of the others’ struggle, offering the possibility of sprouting seeds and cross-contamination as an act of solidarity and ongoing resistance. There is an ephemer- ality to the work that belies the strength of the gesture; in time, the parchment will compost down and disappear, but it will in turn enrich the soil, producing the conditions of growth and renewal as it does, taking with it, in any new growth, the companionship of a transnational, transtemporal ally. This somatic gesture steers commemoration away from historical telling and toward an embodied, continual being.
Untitled (John Giorno reads) , 2008 Black-and-white 16mm film with sound, 17 reels, transferred to video
10 hours, 6 minutes Edition of 3 + 2 APs
During the summer of 2008, Rirkrit Tiravanija, along with a small film crew, arrived at Giorno Poetry Systems, an artist collective, record label, and non-profit organization founded by poet and performance artist John Giorno. Giorno Poetry Systems has the direct aim of connecting poetry and related art forms to a larger audience using innovative ideas, such as communication technology, audio-visual materials, and other techniques. What transpired for Rirkrit Tiravanija was a film document of John Giorno’s poems, memoirs, and music works performed by Giorno himself for the camera. With a duration of roughly 10 hours, Untitled (John Giorno reads) spans five decades of work, creating a portrait of one of New York’s seminal bohemian figures and, by extension, a record of a New York that now exists only
as an idea or, for some, as a memory. Using 17 reels of 16mm, black-and-white film with sound, the artist has captured a living monument, not only contingent on time or place, but on intimacy and feeling—a recapture of the political charge of John Giorno’s work, life, and commitment to his communities. In this film (transferred to video), Giorno’s works—so inscribed into the histories of their own time and the context of their immediate environment—not only live on as
documents or archival artifacts but thrust the viewer back into the moment of their becoming. This is a hand of solidarity, reaching through time to reinvigorate the work’s affective charge, foregrounding Giorno’s ongoing importance today.
The Heart of A Hand , 2022 Single-channel 4K video, color, sound 13 minutes, 13 seconds Edition of 5 + 2 APs
The Heart of A Hand pays tribute to Goh Choo San (1948–87), a pioneering Singaporean-born choreographer who died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of thirty-nine. Despite a prolific career, Goh Choo San’s legacy remains largely absent from queer, cultural, and dance histories in the United States. In an act of radical archiving, Kang Seung Lee redresses this history by manifesting a queer lineage as an homage across different relations and histories of solidarity. The single-channel video, created in collaboration with Joshua Serafin and Nathan Mercury Kim, is a choreographed dance, loosely based on Goh’s neo- classical ballet Configurations , commissioned by American Ballet Theatre in 1981. In the work, we see Serafin, a Filipino dancer and choreographer based in Belgium who embodies an exuberant spectrum of emotions reflected in the intensity of the dance. KIRARA, a transgender composer and musician based in Seoul, takes inspiration from the original score for Goh’s Configurations , to create a revitalized soundtrack for
contemporary queer life. The Heart of A Hand derives its name from a poem by Mexican writer Xavier Villaurrutia (1903– 50). And in a final element of this trans-disciplinary project, several passages by Villaurrutia and other artists of Goh’s generation appear alongside other various artifacts. Each text is transcribed into a font inspired by the paintings of hands by the queer Chinese American artist Martin Wong (1946–99). In this work we see a willful “politics of citation”—
Images courtesy of the artist, Vincent Price Art Museum and Commonwealth and Council
the construction of a particular lineage through history that foregrounds queer kinship and solidarity. It is a polyvocal approach that lends a remedial quality to normative histories— histories that almost certainly overlooked marginalized perspectives and personal experiences that were crucial to the historic struggles for change. The Heart of A Hand challenges dominant narratives and their conventional construction.
The Foundation , 2015 Single-channel HD video, color, sound 28 minutes, 20 seconds Edition of 5 + 2 APs
Continuing the thematic signifi- cance of anachronistic gestures, formal affinities, and archival adjacencies in reframing relation- ships between artists and their chosen ancestors, The Foundation holds intergenerational and historic confluences in relation. The film takes its title from the Tom of Finland Foundation, set up by Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen (1920–91), better known as Tom of Finland, in 1984 to preserve his vast catalogue. The film combines footage shot at the Foundation in Los Angeles with choreographic sequences staged within a specially constructed set that draws on the aesthetics of experimental theatre. This allows P. Staff to introduce us to a discourse of identity formation that spans time and place and locate it in the context of historically important struggles within the queer community. Tom of Finland made a considerable impact on masculine representation in post- war gay culture, and the film becomes a portrait of this site, as a home to the archive of the artist and gay icon, as well as the community of people that care for
it. Rather than focusing on Tom of Finland’s work as a documentary might, in offering a reflection on the communities that it hosts and promotes, Staff’s film works through the social relations that such a place produces. In its exploration of archival material and its caretakers, the film ruminates on the more human aspects of archives and the communities
that can be built when such an approach to institutional working is considered. Much like this exhibition itself, the film asks: how is a community formed and constituted? What kinds of communities can a body of work produce? We are invited to think through the performance, construction, and decon- struction of physical attributes and gender identifications.
For Bruce ( 致布魯斯 ) , 2022 Two-channel video installation with two synchronized
4K videos, stereo, color 18 minutes, 46 seconds Edition of 5 + 2 APs
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s For Bruce is a two-channel video installation made as a dedication to Bruce Baillie, the West Coast, United States filmmaker who died in 2020. Bruce Baillie was the foremost experimental filmmaker of the Bay Area and typified the experimental art scene of the 1960s. A catalytic artist, of huge inspiration to
Images courtesy of the artist and Kiang Malingue
so many that followed, he was known for his lyrical landscape films, sometimes just composed of single panning shots. For Bruce not only cites Baille by name, but also offers a delicate, nuanced, yet purposeful response to his entire oeuvre that venerates his impact on a generation of younger artists. The film installation reads as a visual symbiosis between nature and the spiritual essence of things; on two screens, we are invited to watch closely, carefully, conscientiously, and without distraction, the ecosystems and rhythms of a stream and its banks. We see abundant life in the tadpoles and butterflies, we
hear the cacophony of the forest, and our attention is attuned to nature in ways that may even surpass how we could if outside. This quiet act of gratitude and citation foregrounds an interest in fusing the mystical and mundane, cosmic and personal, mythological and biographical. This close looking at the world, and its ability to inscribe us, as a viewer, in the moment of contemplation—of nature, of ancestral connections, of affinities and generational ties within life and culture—is a testament to the power of such slow, yet visionary filmmaking.
Red , 2021 Two-channel video installation 10 minutes, 15 seconds Edition of 5 + 2 APs
Red (2021) bathes the viewer in red light. The screen flickers and changes color. A corner of white is occasionally revealed. The artist achieved a strobe effect by placing their thumb over the iPhone camera. Integral to the work is a trigger warning for the fluctuating light levels inside the room, deliberately placed on a wall outside it. The work responds to the historical legacy of avant-garde and structuralist filmmaking that deconstructed the material aspects of film. Here, however, Lazard considers the “crip” sensibility within such histories and practices that were perhaps always integral but undefined, unacknowledged, and ill-articulated. Red responds quite specifically to a legacy of experimental film by artists like Tony Conrad, Peter Kubelka, and Paul Sharits. Lazard has noted that Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966) included a note
advising that a doctor be on hand when the film was shown because it could trigger photosensitive epilepsy. It appears that access, perhaps in less well-intentioned ways, was built into these traditions as an exercise in posturing. Lazard, however, reads these ideas in good faith but lends a remedial edge to the practice and thinks through infra- structures of access as aesthetics. Red was made during the COVID-19 pandemic and is very much informed by the technologies and environments that were available to work with at the time. The structural proclivity of this work speaks to that moment when the social constrictions that were placed on everyone were all too familiar to those already living with chronic conditions or immuno- compromised status. As with much of Lazard’s work, Red foregrounds access as an embedded condition of making and not an accommodation to normative experience. In this sense it looks to the past, and to a generation of visionary artists who offer continual inspiration, but reflects a better understanding of who culture and the arts are for. Hers is a gesture of intergenerational kinship, constitutive of more equitable futures.
SM BNGRZ 1 + 2 , 2021 Two-channel HD video, color, sound 45 minutes, 48 seconds
Tony Cokes’ SM BNGRZ 1 + 2 is a two-channel video installation, where the juxtaposition of text, music, color, and font offers a mesmerizing effect. The work interrogates the importance and value of communal spaces of resistance and liberation in the
form of club culture and raves. In the context of a continual decimation of the nightlife economy, Cokes’ SM BNGRZ 1 + 2 ultimately leads to new questions about the potential loss of these liberating spaces. In their absence,how do we build and ensure collectivity as a force of resistance and pleasure? Central to the work are citations of Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson’s academic work charting dance music’s transatlantic evolution and its origins in the history of social oppression. Cokes offers a parallel reading of Rainald Goetz’s Rave —a 2020 translation of the novel that captures the
debauchery and aura of resis- tance within techno music’s sensory pleasures. Through his selection of music—dance tracks spanning 1988 to 2021—Cokes intentionally undermines Gilbert and Pearson’s heteronormative critiques of disco, revealing the dance music to be at odds with the now-dated text and its moralizing impulse. The emphasis on queer politics, and particularly the solidarity engen- dered between Latinx and Black communities inside this culture, becomes a rallying cry for sonic liberation and hope for a future of collectivity once again.
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