Klumme
Queer Homage in New York City
For queerpersoner kan hjem være mere et sted, man finder sig selv, end et sted, man kommer fra. Gennem kunst og fællesskab skabes der nye forbindelser til fortiden og til hinanden.
When we return to our hometown, we notice what has changed. We pass places that used to be our favorite record store or our best friend’s apartment, places that now belong to someone else. We remember we can never recapture a particular rhythm of a place again. For queer folks, the concept of home may not be the place one grew up, but rather the place one grew into oneself. Family and ancestry exist as a matrix in my mind, bringing together Grandma at the kitchen table with Audre Lorde, who chats with Christopher Isherwood, who flirts with my favorite cousin. When queer artists engage with the legacy of who came before, we call this homage, a concept as complex as home.
This summer I visited my hometown, which happens to be New York City. I know it’s strange that I had to leave the city to grow into my truest self, but being queer means disregarding expectations of how one should arrive. Returning to the city’s queer culture as an adult helps me reconcile my irresolute youth and brings me to the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University for their exhibit, ”Homage: Queer Lineages on Video”. The Wallach Gallery–and this entire section of campus–didn’t exist when I went to school here, and I tried to recall what this landscape used to be as I step into the dark gallery, flickering with projections. Curator Rattanamol Singh Johal selected art that paid homage to a previous generation of queer artists, many of whom died of AIDS. Among videos from Carolyn Lazard and P. Staff, South Korean artist Kang Seung Lee’s work, ”The Heart of a Hand”, stands out in its scale and ambition. The video plays on the largest wall in the gallery, a dedication to the Singaporean-American choreographer Goh Choo San (1947-87), who also died from AIDS. The performance reimagines Goh’s ballet ”Configurations” (1981) with Joshua Serafin dancing to music by trans composer KIRARA. All of the textures and elements of this video exist because of queer artists. Without them, the wall would be empty, just the blank blue light of a projector, waiting.
Video art resonates deeply with queer history. The advent of handheld camera technology empowered ACT-UP activists to record the protests against silence during the height of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s. One activist, Jean Carlomusto, created a weekly television show, ”Living with AIDS”, that gave the public a glimpse into what others were trying to erase about HIV. Simultaneously, queer artists such as Stephen Varble, Barbara Hammer, David Wojnarowicz, and Vaginal Davis picked up cameras to experiment. They had the awareness to record their lives and integrate their art practice with everyday/everynight life in their community. New York City is a living archive to this history. Consider Keith Haring’s bathroom mural at the LGBTQ community center in the West Village, Samuel Delany’s Times Square writings, and Nan Goldin’s slideshows. Against the economic greed of developers erasing signs of queer history, places such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives and Bluestockings Cooperative survive, and the Stonewall Inn becomes commemorated as a national monument. They fight for their location among high-end boutiques and luxury apartments.
But it’s not just real estate developers that threaten to erase us in this country. As the act of documenting queer and trans lives becomes more dangerous, how will we record our existence for the next generation? What new technologies will we develop to preserve our presence in this era of hyper surveillance? With the fears these questions bring, I find solace in homage, where through our art, we transform into living archives for our chosen ancestors.