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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Workman 1

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Review

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

k.g. Guttman was a student when she first met her friend Nancy Ring. Years later, in 2009, she asked the professor, art historian and writer the same seven questions every day for seven days. From their conversation emanates a complex, constellational rapport, surpassing the likes of even a strong professional mentorship (which itself is rare, particularly among women). They talk as if in past lives they’d taken long trips together, shared clothes, lovers, losses, and were kept awake at night by questions of a similar character.

Ring had cancer when they spoke and she passed away six months later. Guttman sat with the 120-page transcript for years before its release as _It’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it_ in late 2016.

Beyond Guttman’s interest in, first, Ring and second, the outcomes of replicated questioning in a concentrated period, the project feels like an effort to stock up on something before it’s gone. A framework to capture a cross-section of a woman, a life of the mind. It’s clear that the project – or more broadly, “art” – became an excuse to undertake something that otherwise might just have been too much to ask. Hence the lack of any specific, tangible end in these means. (Says Guttman: “Like when does this become anything but us, fucking spending time together.”) The dialogues were a pre-emptive defense against memory, with the wisdom that nothing moves grief along like the decomposition of details. The cooling embers of grief edge the deceased further out of those who outlive them, too near extinction.

_What questions does one ask at the end of a life_? Guttman asks Ring about having once said, “I have no reaction outside of language,” and about the folding and fluidity between life and teaching. She asks what things Ring returns to, and if that’s what she does with what she loves. There’s one question that involves a dictionary and another wherein a recording of Duchamp from 1968 is played. But at a certain point, The Questions become indistinguishable from whatever was borne of circumstance. Guttman and Ring routinely break the fourth wall. They veer into the meta, following suit with the project’s dubiousness about interviews. They’re playfully combative. They contradict themselves and take up the contradictions with earnest curiosity, as if they were sweet, cake-y little UFOs that had just floated in through the window.

Five days in, Ring says, “I think we are talking really, really personally.” Guttman responds saying that she doesn’t know how that happened; she remembers that Ring agreed to participate as long as she wouldn’t have to talk about herself. And then, as if reflecting on measures she took to respect that boundary, Guttman says, “My questions to you were about professionalism in a certain way.” While it’s not entirely untrue, this intention stationed at this point in the book, though well-meaning, is kind of charmingly null. They’re not trying to decide who is to blame, nor is Ring reprimanding Guttman for going back on her word. Rather, they seem to be marvelling together at the inverse question of my own: _How does one respond to questions at the end of one’s life_? The subjective, come hell or high water, is what’s at stake.

“Whether we are talking about ourselves or not, we are showing up in an intimate way, as much as we are showing up in an intellectual way… I don’t think that really happens in interviews,” Ring adds.

Furthermore, it’s Guttman’s decision to confront the fraught nature of her relationship to the resulting document– or, more broadly, the material leftovers of a life – that gives the book its conceptual heft. The book is not bound but instead is a folio of folios. Each day’s conversation is printed on 8.5 × 11-inch printer paper, laid out in a standard Q&A format, and tucked into a larger, folded paper of slightly heavier coloured stock. Five days in five shades of yellow. A yellow light makes people feel more comfortable than a white one does and, in many languages, words like “brilliant” and “bright” refer not only to a quality of light but also to an exceptional mind, grounded and sound. The two other days are two shades of grey: an overcast day, a colour without colour, a space between two things, a no-man’s-land, ashes. These seven yellow and grey folios rest in a larger folio of a yet heavier stock.

There’s something seductively unpolished about this book, its loose printer paper giving it an iterative quality, like one attempt in a realm of many. Guttman’s redactions are excessive. While the markings of each speaker’s turn are maintained throughout, the transcript drops off without warning. Blank tracts, a sentence, a paragraph, some paragraphs, or several pages long, omitted according to an esoteric criterion reserved for the bereaved.

There’s a tendency for writers who write about grief to decry the text _in_ the text, disavowing their own effort to force language through, just as they’re letting it be read. In Barthes’ _Mourning Diary_, wherein he writes about his mother’s death and his resulting condition, he writes, “I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it – or without being sure of not doing so – although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.” Although it’s a complete published work, this book is tenuous, like a case that can never feasibly be closed. Like a person who paces the room. It denies the primacy of a final draft.

The reader’s frustration and impatience with Guttman’s redactions are tuned precisely with the frustrations and impatience we have with our own memory, especially after a death. The omissions are so glaring, so deeply disruptive that it’s questionable sometimes whether this could even be called a process of sharing, of externalizing. Anne Carson, in _NOX_, a book-length eulogy for her brother, offers one translation of the Latin word _mutum_ that reads, “likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.” This thoughtful contradiction is reflected in Guttman’s way of articulating the simultaneous speechlessness and need to speak that characterizes profound loss.

I give the last word to Ring, who says: “You know, I have these memories, I have very fragmentary memories of certain things, that I equate to bliss, but they are very evanescent, and if I put them into speech, the bubble would pop… you know, it’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it…”

Writer

Time

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In this book review, Jaclyn Bruneau visits k.g. Guttman’s accumulative interview project with Nancy Ring entitled “It’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it” (2016).

It’s like hammering into nothing when I speak it by k.g. Guttman

**D.J. Fraser** is a critical and creative writer, instructor and doctoral student at Concordia University in the art history department. They work in between Montréal and New York.

The 2017 edition of Day With(out) Art was the 28th annual Visual AIDS event marking World AIDS Day. Over the course of the last three decades, the New York-based organization has used art to raise AIDS awareness. Initially, they marked the public crisis of HIV/AIDS with the temporary disappearance of meaningful works from museum collections. Day Without Art was meant to symbolize the death of many people in the New York community. But as the cultural community dealing with HIV/AIDS changes and transforms, the understanding of Day Without Art has changed as well: in 1998, for its tenth anniversary, Day Without Art became Day With(out) Art, and the focus shifted from those lost to the enduring community of artists living and dealing with HIV/AIDS.

The most recent showcase built upon the 2014 theme, _ALTERNATE ENDINGS_. This focus on continuation and reiteration stressed the dire need to remember and recognize HIV/AIDS as an epidemic that is persistent, despite numerous treatments that manage it effectively and new PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) strategies. Advances in HIV treatments over the past 20 years have lessened the impact of grief, have eased somewhat the death toll in North America, but it still must be acknowledged that whiteness and wealth often dominate the ability of those who have contracted HIV to receive adequate care and management.

The program for _ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS_ – curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett – reflected this reality with biting commentary and a desire to overwrite past and present through art. Visual AIDS’ mandate for this Day With(out) Art explicitly focused on the work of Black artists living and contextualizing the ongoing health crisis in the United States. It is in this particular vein that Christovale and Crockett’s work is not only timely, but also recognizable as part of an effort that asserts and repositions the work of Black artists affected by HIV/ AIDS. Christovale and Crockett commissioned seven new short video works from artists Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye & Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia LaBeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Brontez Purnell. The resulting program was screened on World AIDS Day by more than 100 partnering institutions around the world. In their works, the artists performed and employed multiplicity, remixes and surrealisms, seemingly with a profound desire to dig into radical reminiscences of the past and possible new beginnings that are only now being acknowledged by institutional mainstream audiences.

Reina Gossett’s work, _Atlantic is a Sea of Bones_ (2017), begins in a biopic style, but the film soon shifts to capture a past and present dream about Egyptt Labeija – her histories and self-realization, hauntings and desires coalesce into a dark palimpsest of what could be the AIDS crisis in the ’80s alongside the current criminalization of people living with AIDS. Spirits collide with images to reimagine pasts, alter egos and strategies of self-actualization.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s greyscale _The Labyrinth 1.0_ (2017) is an elegy to Brad Johnson and part of her trilogy dedicated to Black gay men producing art at the height of the American epidemic. McClodden documents a part of gay life in the United States that led to the moral and epidemiological aspects of the crisis following the discovery that HIV was transmitted sexually: tea rooms and bathhouses. Using a mix of racialized and explicit poetry, with the analogue workings of video as material, McClodden’s work is a trip back to the era of Johnson’s life and death, tracing the trajectory of the sexuality of the masculine Black body.

Other works in the program similarly re-work or remix past work, conversations and materials. Cheryl Dunye and Ellen Spiro’s _DiAna’s Hair Ego Remix_ (2017) references Spiro’s 1989 work _DiAna’s Hair Ego_. Travelling to South Carolina, Cheryl – the head investigator – enters the long-standing hair salon of DiAna, a veteran and self-styled HIV/AIDS activist. Dunye and Spiro intersplice old footage with new conversations under the hair dryers. And Thomas Allen Harris’ _About Face: The Evolution of a Black Producer_ (2017) uses his personal archive from his early days as a producer working at the height of the American AIDS epidemic in New York. The short film uses humour and chronology to demonstrate his progression from novice Black gay producer in New York to veteran artist working on his own path in visual arts and filmmaking. In Kia Labeija’s _Goodnight Kia_ (2017), the artist repurposes her family’s archival footage from a record of the past into transformative material through which she can grapple with personal loss, with her childhood recorded on camera.

Brontez Purnell’s _100 Boyfriends Mixtape (The Demo)_ from 2017 is part of a longer, ongoing oeuvre developed from a dance piece at Counterpulse in 2013\. This black-and-white “demo” is anchored in the ’90s’ New Queer Cinema’s interest in DIY, lo-fi, low-budget film and video work (see _Go Fish_ and _The Watermelon Woman_ for a sister aesthetic). The entire film is shot in a bathtub while Purnell’s character DeShawn is shrink-fitting the jeans he’s just shoplifted and talking on the phone. The monologue is an index of ex-boyfriends whose spirits are long dead, even as their ghost bodies walk the streets. If the emphasis on past, present and future in the 2017 Day With(out) Art program emphasizes long duration, Mykki Blanco’s _Stones and Water Weight_ (2017) appropriately explores the concepts of endurance and appearance as coterminous but also profoundly disjointed. In this performance, he lays conventionally gendered slips and frocks on a rocky foreground, and then proceeds to lift and hold a large rock for an extended duration. Blanco’s attempt to test and record his physical presence imagines representational role models of HIV\+ people working through quotidian struggles and health obstacles, set against outward projections of wellness, fitness and self-advocacy.

The work for 2017’s iteration of Day With(out) Art takes the material archive and mines it for resistance and ruptures; through it, we can trace a history of AIDS art and activism that has been largely out of public view. In the U.S., African Americans are reporting a higher incidence of HIV and this is also reflected in Canada – marginalized populations across borders are affected more than white counterparts. Indigenous communities are also experiencing HIV at a rate greater than white communities, and as Lindsay Nixon noted recently, an entire generation of Indigenous artists was lost to HIV. Although we understand this generally, the narrative given through accessible media doesn’t give depth to the lived realities of marginalized communities dealing with HIV, nor to the artworks created from these stories.

The commonalities between experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS across national lines becomes clear when class, race and gender are counted. Artists in Canada living with HIV are producing works that riff along similar lines as those in the States, with an ongoing interest in the archive, whether it’s in the online group collaboration work that arose from Paul Lang’s _BigRedDice_ (2005); projets hybris’ second work documenting the complex relationships to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Québec, _(MORE) PROPOSITIONS FOR THE AIDS MUSEUM_ (2017); or the AIDS ACTION NOW affinity group art initiative _Poster/VIRUS_ (2011–2016). These projects all put the past in dialogue with the present. Rather than consigning HIV/AIDS art and activism to a historical and ghostly past of (white) bodies represented in absentia or memorial, the work happening in the contemporary moment brings together the growing – _and living_ – archive of performance and media practices together to confront the shifting place of HIV/AIDS discourse in art.

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Activism

Illness

D.J. Fraser reviews “ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS” presented by Visual AIDS for the 28th edition of their annual video art program “Day With(out) Art” which took place on December 1, 2017.

Day With(out) Art 2017: ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS