In 1999, an annual series of commissioned writings on contemporary art to be published in these pages was inaugurated. The following letter continues this tradition.
Let’s Walk Right Up to the Sun, Hand-in-Hand (Imagine That) [1]
It goes without saying, as we have all learned, time is not a line.
For the last six years—through the previous administration, which unleashed violent, overdue public anxiety and exposed our suffering in what Scot Nakagawa identifies on his blog, The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook[2], as “the tension between us and them,” while also naming the crucial role of what he calls Protectors: “those bridge crossers, making understanding of what constitutes protection very important;” and alongside an ongoing global pandemic that joins the many other pandemics, including climate, air pollution, hunger, and HIV—it is hard to place where we are, who we are, when things happened, what has been shifting when we have been riding a violent necessity for mobility as we adjust, rebel, re-constitute, re-schedule, resume—all on repeat. Resilience, in my view, is both over- and underrated—but more importantly, distributed unevenly among us as we negotiate our survival, our ability to analyze and be part of the world, to protect ourselves and each other in the face of fragile mental health and ableist-oriented social supports with all that rages in the surround—with and without insurance and backups.
What and who has brought me to this paper microphone? To be invited, to be asked to come to the page with my name attached to it. I share in the dilemma of trying to make sense while necessarily babbling, rambling on and proposing discursive recollections, bringing forward people and places—the only ways I know to learn, and to make anything possible. So, not in chronology, but touching into the folds of the last few years:
2019
In an Archive in Dirt—I contributed a gifted-to-me[3] succulent clipping from Harvey Milk’s archive plus a rambling, Siri-dictated text filled with her typos for the catalog to the Visual AIDS exhibition Altered After. As part of an archiving project, I shared a clipping with the curator, Conrad Ventur, with artist Kang Seung Lee, and with Commonwealth & Council in Los Angeles. These clippings have survived plane flights, car rides, re-plantings, various containers, weather, and caretaking inconsistencies (mostly my own). I have noticed, too, that we do not ask about the clippings—perhaps it is that sometimes, what we don’t know…
The clippings have moved through times and spaces; one entered Kang’s work as a kind of “archiving of an archive” project, accompanying his visits to Derek Jarman’s garden and cottage—which also inspired my tiny, dark-toned desert house—only to land back in NYC in 2021 in a downtown eastside museum. The original Archive in Dirt, which we fondly call “Harvey,” sits on our foggy porch in Northern California, approximately seven miles from its original San Francisco home. Young Chung, who tends “Harvey” in LA, recently texted us an image of a full-bloom, very tall, and bursting hot pink “Harvey” flower.
1958 to 1963
(not quite a time-fit, but we might agree that Milk’s history is, and remains, a kind of generational “endowment” to all)
Did you know that Harvey Milk, iconic beloved, known as the first openly gay official in California, lived in NYC from 1958 to 1963 at 360 Central Park West.[4] In 1965, before moving to San Francisco, he played the Sugar Plum Fairy in Warhol’s film, My Hustler (1965).
2020
In early March 2020, I walked into Danspace at St. Mark’s, welcomed by Charmaine Warren, a fellow ex-dancer in David Roussève’s company from 1989-2002. As host to Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s Sitting on a Man’s Head[5], she led me into a cloth covered “room” with slowly pacing, singing dancers and audience participants, where I found myself held in the lateral, prismatic, slow shifting to come into step, to rustle with, be led by, or join apace—albeit not without interior awareness or exterior peripheral breaths, approaches, and uneven willingness-es. It offered invisibility and recognition, making space for the impact of difference and a “moving-collectively towards,” similar to a demo. Molecules in bodies recalibrated into a complex, bigger-than-us insistence, a collective momentum.
(It churned with my ancestral and material past, and still does now in 2022.)
2018
A call came from Stacy Stark. I cried, slipped onto the kitchen floor.
2021
In 2021, my desert and NYC friend, the exquisite former “downtown” dancer Conor McTeague, committed suicide—to the shock of many who had not seen him through his transition West, marriage and divorce, proud nurse-excellence, and love of solitary, queer life alongside his dogs. His last day coincided with my return to the desert, as he promised to take me to get my first COVID vaccine, while signaling his readiness to work on our collection of clay pots, the shared desert garden of our trotting out mid-life, flanked by the Mojave horizon-line. (We were not sure if it was to be “pokey” cactus or cholla, or to try and germinate our local micro-climate rhizome plants—efforts to bridge the 19.3 miles and—often solo—time between us.) I did not know he would become the earth in which we all now plant.
2019
I created REPEATER,[6] which aimed to collapse the notion of an exhibition with its 108 hours of performance-as-requiem marked by 108 cuts onto my body, with mirrors on wheels, latex gloves, pulleys, smokey herbs. Along with THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME—my 2006 provocation shared with Debra Levine, reconsidering the body as a disintegrating archive of relation—I continue learning to dig into how the ephemeral and the material might be held, not just captured.
Plus. We lost Alessandro Codagnone of Lovett/Codagnone this same year—the year that we reconstituted the Clit Club for one night, only because Kia LaBeija asked me to.
About Alessandro, I still cannot deal.
2018
I was sitting on a panel of artists and activists, discussing our contributions to the Visual AIDS / Smithsonian AIDS Oral History Project at a major West Side museum. In a Q&A not included in the public YouTube video of the event, a passionate woman pointed at me, identifying herself as an activist, three decades HIV positive, and asked, “how can I do what you are doing?” A week later, there we were, sitting at Ivy Kwan Arce’s kitchen table. I asked, with “affinity group energy”: what can we do? – with gender, race, HIV status, sexuality, slow-formed creativity, blanched dreams, lost beloveds, tireless and exhausted activism, and stranger-to-each-other-ness in tow.
Visual AIDS reconceptualizes American art by drawing on history from and by “regular” people: artists, survivors, positive and not, ambitious and ambivalent, some academe-experienced and some known art-world-infused folks. I recall how Theodore (Ted) Kerr identified the limit to art’s ability to intervene and make movement in the social. The Oral History interviewees’ responses, mine included, affirm a capacity to share the everyday churning, artmaking’s failing and hope, and the opaque space of slow relation with its complex terroir of culture and representation.
Sentiments point to what our generation’s uneven experience offers – the sense of obligation, of being underneath and active, perhaps not always seen, but that being very much to the point. Robert Vázquez-Pacheco, Gran Fury member and friend, pointed to his sense of responsibility: “I am now in the archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, in the Archive of American artists. I am a working-class Puerto Rican from the South Bronx who grew up in housing projects and who did not finish college. For me I realize that it is very important for me to have my presence there… I am not going to wait for another Puerto Rican that I can speak Spanglish to—that is not going to happen. But I realize that unless I take this opportunity to be able to push forward what I believe and to talk about what I believe… and my community, then I am going to talk to whoever the fuck it is.”[7]
2018 to 2020
For reasons that will prove inadequate, I decided to pursue a terminal degree, despite the fact that I didn't finish college, either. Somehow, I got in, due to advocacy from artists already in the academy. Two years later, I would leave for spring break, right before my last school semester, never to return. Pigpen, aka Stosh Fila, and I pulled my sister Rita out of her assisted living home to live with us as we all worked through various stages of the pandemic, the uprisings, and sporadic, uninsured freelance teaching with the MFA.
2020
I begin to wonder if the apparatus of my process can support what Ivy envisions as art and change, while bursting with the impact of very personal, local, and collective global losses. A constellation, a collaboration, and a vulnerability holds us—and fails us too, at times.
2021
The world lost artist Fred Weston.
At that Visual AIDS panel, three years earlier, he recalled how he “rubbed some of his friends’ feet” yet “did not have to witness the pornography of death and dying.” He remembered being in and from those little, tiny rooms where a lot of things happened, but instead of being in the center of the room, his view was from the corner, witnessing the Center—and “all of those from that center who were no longer here.”
He ends: “I am completely confused with a microphone, but it is a blessing to be able to come talk and tell my story.”
He also talks about the bounty, restlessness—and realness—of (excessive) (re)collection.
[1] Nas ft. Lauryn Hill, “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That),” It Was Written, Columbia Records, 1996.
[2] scotnakagawa.substack.com
[3] Thank you, Kelly Besser (friend, archivist)
[4] nyclgbtsites.org/site/harvey-milk-joe-campbell-residence
[5] danspaceproject.org/calendar/?event-month=02&event-year=2020
[6] commonwealthandcouncil.com/exhibitions/repeater/press
[7] youtube.com/watch?v=Zi2c2PrU8ro @ 4:18:16
Julie Tolentino is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer based in Joshua Tree, CA. She received a Grants to Artists award in 2019.