1933/1984/2020 is a site-specific commission by Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana. This series of eight 8’x8’ hanging works constitutes a volley of images—half computer-generated, half hand-drawn—designed to link the web of suffering triggered by inadequate pandemic preparedness and the resulting commercial advertising responses reifying the false promise of abundance that is late-capitalism. The installation is centrally articulated through two radically different responses to the economic strife of 1933: Germany’s burning of the Reichstag, and America’s New Deal, represented as a Social Security Number tattooed on an itinerant worker’s arm when the idea of a social safety net was new. The graphite drawing paired with this second image is a text from an Irish poem renamed “Broken Vows” in John Houston’s posthumously released 1987 film, The Dead. My boyfriend asked me to see it with him. He was dead within a month. It was my first pandemic, and this installation is my attempt to come to grips with my second, stated here as a skirmish between fact and frailty, corporeality and memory, commerce and survival, promise and cruelty.
My recent commission for the New York City AIDS Memorial, Dedications, is an installation involving semi-transparent voile drawings that are set in motion with little provocation in a way that signifies the act of witnessing itself, and rendering memory as sculptural, as a “object” that casts a shadow. As a Jewish gay man, fact and frailty, corporeality and memory, commerce and survival, promise and cruelty are essential to my understanding of the world. So the shadow of the Holocaust has provided a framework that undergirds our cultural responses to many forms of social marginalization, as is masterfully articulated in the poem, Bashert, by Irena Klepfisz. This installation forms a conceptual ‘sky’ that floats above the ‘earth’ of the existing memorial, the Walt Whitman texts carved into stone and the infinity pool below. These drawings of clear and stormy cloud formations are layered with the alternating texts of the two main themes in Bashert, “These words are dedicated to those who died,” and “These words are dedicated to those who survived.” The panels are intended to be seen through one another, and constitute a dialogue with the site, its emotional intentionality, and its uses of shadow and light.
