BONN.- Each day presents us with fresh assaults on the senses. What do we feel as we witness atrocities that cast us as the atomised elements of a whole constantly in a state of collapse? What do we feel as we are revealed to be the particulate elements of a whole constantly exhausting; a whole that encompasses all as an imperfect holding environment that nonetheless coheres our very existence... until it ultimately fails?
Witness the AIDS crisis through the eyes of an activist and artist. Gregg Bordowitz's powerful essays offer a raw and essential perspective.
These are the opening lines of Notes on Knowing and Unknowing, an excerpt from the daily writing practice of Gregg Bordowitz. The notes take the shape of a furious, strange and sincere essay – they grapple with care, obligation and the efforts to keep on writing.
As the first large-scale exhibition of Gregg Bordowitz’ work in Europe, Dort: ein Gefühl centres on the artist’s enduring commitment to writing as an activity of thought. Realised across two chapters, at Bonner Kunstverein and Camden Art Centre, London, Bordowitz approaches writing across a number of modalities and formats, including video, installation, performance, poetry and prints. Words are gestures, are images, are letters, are forms of witnessing in a transdisciplinary project shaped by Bordowitz’ experiences as a long-time survivor of HIV.
In exploring the connections between writing and survival, Bordowitz deploys editing, collage and compositing as applied forms of thinking: writing is expanded until it becomes drawing, realism is pushed until it necessitates abstraction. Dort: ein Gefühl is thus conceived as a total work, yet one which is an assembly of parts and deliberately moves between registers, spanning installations, videos, poems and sculptural works. Some of them have been assembled from Bordowitz’ prolific output as an artist, writer, filmmaker and activist from the early 1990s until the present. Others have been realised as new propositions in response to this specific context.
This attitude also translates into the space of Bordowitz’ own voice and agency as a writer. Much of his work has been made in the context of exchanges with his collaborators, friends and communities. Several of the key conversation partners and contributors to the artworks are no longer there – as in the video portraits of People Living with HIV (1993). Others were always absent in the sense of being what poet Stephen Spender once termed ‘spirit ancestors’ – sources of influence, affinity and fandom across time, who serve as aides or even ‘healers’. For Dort: ein Gefühl, these sources include poet Paul Celan, philosopher and political activist Simone Weil, writer and poet Edmond Jabès and artist Ben Shahn. Their practices navigated spaces of writing and the complexities of surviving, while the intensity of their work often stemmed from how their private lives were impacted by historical catastrophes.
In the poem There: a feeling, Bordowitz describes the encounter with these absences as a key moment of recognition in grappling with aliveness and what it is not:
you walk into a room
and you know
he is gone
what is he’s gone?
is absence the evidence?
To write every day might be a way to test the evidence of presence. Its repetition as habit also moves the writing into the mundane, with the possibility that the daily practice could render and hold something epic too – a permission to be both. This is a spirit carried out across scales, which involves a certain faith, or even joy connected with the making and experiencing of art. Of an enduring commitment and active production of the conditions that make such acts possible, necessary, even pleasurable.
Gregg Bordowitz is a renowned filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, Artists Space, MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Tate Modern, among others. His work is the subject of Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well – first organised by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College in 2018 and subsequently presented at MoMA PS1 and the Art Institute of Chicago.
In the 1980s, he focused his creative practice on responding to the AIDS crisis. As a member of the groundbreaking activist group ACT UP, he organised and documented a number of protests against government inaction, advocated for health education and harm reduction. He was also a founding member of the 1980s video collectives Testing the Limits and Diva TV.
Bordowitz is the author of The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003 (2004), General Idea: Imagevirus (2010), Volition (2010), and Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018).
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