Let’s Assume, at Least, That the Big Picture Isn’t a Rectangle

Gently deconstructed against the reflections of Deschenes’ work, it’s hard to tell if Hujar’s images, as they say, “resonate.” Hot pics of gay people, forever, and ruins and Manhattan, and at the same time, they are burdened with traces of a contemporary nostalgia. Many want them, as my friend Sebastjan offers, to teach us something, perhaps about resilience, community, etc., but to an extent, they have always been based on negatives, loss. You may have admired Hujar’s Orgasmic Man on the bookshelf of someone you find mildly annoying, on the cover of A Little Life, one of the many cases in which mainstream middlebrow culture turns to gay love to reinvigorate sentimental notions of romance, and even more broadly, the titular life. Even though the wildly renewed interest in Hujar’s body of work is a very recent phenomenon, it’s as if his photographs have been everywhere for a long time. The longing to “have always been there” makes his entire oeuvre click into place beyond any famous individual images. Their iconic status is, in a way, undeniable, a simple fact. It would be facile, however, to mistake this iconicity for either appropriation or inclusion, for canonisation, when in reality, becoming, being, most crucially, staying an icon is a way of living, surviving, a way of dying. Just look at Candy Darling, gorgeous on her deathbed. A hospital fluorescent tube can be a stage light. She placed the rose there herself. Across Hujar’s frames, terminally cool people, gently stretched out, across New York hotel couches and into landscapes, at a slight remove from their everyday selves. Hujar has ever-so-slightly topped them into form, captured half-way between friendship and iconicity, between stillness and movement, their historicised biographies and a line of flight. Again, Deschenes’ precision cools these photographs, lays bare in them Hujar’s subtle affinities with his contemporaneous minimalism, which is to say, with questions of infrastructures. Take Deschenes’ Retaining, which resembles a support element used in the conversation of ruins – but in Deschenes’ case, is made of glass and itself highly breakable. Retaining supports Hujar’s structures, retains, quite literally, the care that they’re not quite aware of, precisely by being fragile and extra. “Queer history,” or whatever you want to call it, especially post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS, is often thought to be about excess, transgressions, even self-actualisation, etc. But between Hujar’s poses and Deschenes’ infrastructures, it appears as something restrained, formal, precise. You can’t, these works seem to intuit intimately, disentangle poses from their material conditions, or vice versa.  

As we leave, Selin Davasse is a pigeon in the stairways. The pigeon dreams of castrating a man on the street, if I remember correctly, snatching his dick. A German lady in fiercely red tights has a strong reaction to the performance, holding Selin’s pigeon-ed up hands tight in her own.  

Most of us haven’t seen each other in a while. Alarming and cartoonish new symptoms have emerged, twitching eyelids, mysterious STIs that don’t mean anything, obscure sources of money, only partly imagined. K., who has minimised his upper-body wardrobe to hoodies screenprinted with trash bags, is going to leave Berlin for New York, where people have more money for gay trash. There’s a new mayor. It doesn’t have to be the end of an era. S. is going to be a world-famous and her parents text from Beirut as Israeli bombs are falling. L., whose career as an actually good art critic has recently abandoned him is training to become a psychoanalyst but he might be too bitchy for even the most indecent Lacanians. B.’s studies of Grindr-based heterosexuality in the wartimely booming oil fields of West Texas. M.’s reports of the dark room after FLINTA*, where people who are all exes and exes’ exes try to transpose the art of lesbian cruelty to cruising. These are some of the anecdotes, carefully exaggerated, thrown into relief by an ambient lack of perspective. The anecdotes are wrong because they are not disgusting enough. Tomorrow, one of us will snitch a vegan protein bar from a irrelevant hookup’s emergency stash. Defeat, a friend of a friend says, does not prove anything.

For now, for a brief moment, everyone is interesting at the group hang. I look around and individually, everyone is still embarrassing, which is to say, it’s the other way around, for a brief moment, the group hang makes everyone be interesting. From the standpoint of the group hang, in the pristine twilight of friendship’s idealisation, the city bristles with its own over-ness. It’s funny that this is what “over” looks like: Like the suicidal glossy public sculptures in the so-called “Hudson Yards,” just a few blocks from where Hujar photographed some street scenes. Over looks like the psychotically flat and dubiously funded façade of a literal city castle in Berlin. From the standpoint of the group point, as T. checks out her middle part via the front camera of his phone and Z. wants to leave, “we begin to recognise,” as literally Walter Benjamin once advised, “the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” We suspend our doom and gloom, give it form.