The Things That We Came too Late For: On Images and Gay Communes
Andria Nyberg Forshage
Works with trans/queer art and aesthetics, poetry and experimental writing, curating, criticism, dramaturgy and political and feminist theory.
[Excerpt from the catalogue, I Kiss Your Eyes
The lateness that animates Fleischmann’s desire touches on a significant structure of feeling in the current moment. Time itself appears perpetually late. It is late on Earth under late capitalism. No city is what it used to be. Rents are many times what they used to be. Real wages keep falling, costs keep rising. Financial houses of cards keep piling up. Global warming has likely already passed the point of no return. In the wake of multiple fallen empires, conflicts compound and worsen. The future is behind us. Further crises loom ahead. There is an anxious sense of mourning, half belated and half in advance. In this context, queer desire increasingly appears as an orientation toward the past. A past—to quote an old, odd fairy tale—yet to be invented, “imprinted in the bodies of the faggots where the men cannot go”.
More than a decade separates two of Conny Karlsson Lundgren’s video installations, I Am Other (Candy & Me) (2007–2008), made in collaboration with writer and trans activist Andy Candy, and Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes) (2021). The two works could almost form a couple. I use the term not without irony, keeping in mind the normativity, hetero- as well as homo-, that the couple-form entails. Both works in fact share an implicit antagonism to the couple, figuring instead either a lone individual or a collectivity, a group. Across the age gap in their relationship, both works contend with a similar question seen from different vantage points and in different times: the problem of identity, or, inversely, the problem of separation. Which are perhaps one and the same: the problem of alienation. The way each work approaches this problem says something about the different conditions of struggle for trans women and gay men (even or especially as the categories are not always neatly separated), as well as the changing concerns of queer art and activism.
In late aughts, well past the point when gay had entered the mainstream but still prior to the increase in media visibility for trans people that saw Time Magazine proclaim 2014 as a ”transgender tipping point,” struggles often appeared to be around representation. For instance, how to break with images and their framing. In the present, after a decade of emancipatory and antiracist uprisings, Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes) forms part of an broader tendency: an ongoing rediscovery of the radical heritage and buried revolutionary potentials of earlier gay liberation movements. What both works share is an attempt to inhabit and re-activate the past as counterhistories. Rather than remaining static, they set active imagination in motion. A movement out of separation from others, as well as from one’s own self, and toward a life in common.
While tender, Peter Hujar’s 1974 photograph Candy Darling on Her Deathbed almost appears less like a portrait than a still life. Surrounded by flowers, her skin as white as her bedsheets, Darling’s monochrome likeness comes to resemble a marble statue on top of a grave. Vanity of vanities. It is as if her death, having already arrived through the camera, would complete a transfiguration which occurs every now and again at the heart—but never in the provinces—of the culture industry. Through its machinery, the very occasional marginalised trans girl, queer, junkie, or sex worker might elevate herself into a superstar, a singular icon of beauty. Or a work of art, or at least an object of sensational scandal, where the parametres of hyper- and in-visibility are modulated through racialisation. Then as now there is surplus value to be extracted through the image-commodity circulation of trans feminine death.
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