On the opening night of his exhibition at Bonner Kunstverein, Gregg Bordowitz (*1964) took to a platform at the edge of the large, open space to give one of his signature speech performances, seemingly improvised in charming freeform. “The question has priority over the answer,” was one of the keys he provided to a practice that, since the mid 1980s, has woven together teaching, activism, film, and poetry, playing at the edge of what can be known, or even be said to exist. Towards the end, Bordowitz admitted to “feeling the danger of the stage … I am wanting to say something that I cannot say,” his utterance followed by a long silence. That absence of words – both political and existential, almost material in its weight – comes close to defining what “Dort: ein Gefühl” (There: A Feeling) might be said to be “about.”
The outcome of a long-standing conversation between Bordowitz and curator Fatima Hellberg, the exhibition is framed by a red line running along the bottom of the entire inside wall of the Kunstverein: the galleries, the lobby, even the toilets. The line takes the institution’s measure, pointing to a clear inside where art supposedly exists. In an exhibition that feels almost empty, or at least made up of a sort of presence that must be continuously tested and verified, the red line is crucial – it draws the there of the exhibition’s title. And yet, since entering means first finding ourselves on one side, here necessarily bleeds into there, and the line becomes not a demarcation, but its opposite: a marker of instability.
Left to right: Säule I and Baroque Clouds, both 2024. Installation view, Bonner Kunstverein, 2024
Poem Painted on a Wall, 2024, acrylic paint, dimensions variable. Photos: Mareike Tocha
Beside the vacated platform, the main space features a blank advertising pillar, Säule I (Column I, 2024), and some plaster clouds hung high on the wall, opposite Paul Celan’s poem “Heimkehr” (Homecoming, 1955), printed at a slant in its German original. “There: a feeling, / blown over here by the icewind, / fastening its dove-, / its snow-colored flagcloth.” To plant the flag of feeling, in Celan, is to defy the weather, that is, to persist, much in spite of the fatal ephemerality evoked by “snowfall, as if you were asleep even now,” “the sledtracks of the lost,” “an I that slid into muteness[.]” Bordowitz’s takes this dove-, snow-colored palette for his exhibition, along with the poem’s quite unmetaphorical insistence on the continued reality of what has been lost: life as what is leftover from survival.
Shown in a black-box projection room, Before and After (Still in Progress) (2023) is a seventy-three-minute-long medley of previous speech performances (the artist always impeccably dressed), poetry, and a Yom Kippur address at temple, each segment followed by the same harrowing clip of Bordowitz’s stepfather breathing heavily in a hospital bed. Bordowitz, who has lived with HIV for thirty years, is acutely aware of the precise texture of aliveness, its snow-like quality. In a poem published in the exhibition booklet, he writes: “you walk into a room / and you know / he is gone / what is he’s gone? / is absence the evidence?”
Still from Before and After (Still In Progress), 2023, color, sound, 73:15 min. Photo: Mareike Tocha
Elsewhere in the idiosyncratic architecture, mindfully left over from a previous exhibition, a TV monitor screens one of Bordowitz’s best-known works, Portraits of People living with HIV (1993). One chapter follows a group of friends on holiday on a sailing boat. In a rare instance, we hear the artist say, from behind the camera, that he wanted to record the trip because he thought there might be some truth at its center contains a portrait of Bordowitz himself, faith might just be its leitmotif.
Another of the Portraits shows a young man who keeps an aviary of budgies all named Sweet as Pie, so that the birds may easily be replaced as they die. Each one is mesmerizing in its mundanity, showcasing the dual commitment professed in Before and After to simple “observation and feeling.” Many recent exhibitions that have touched on gay culture and the AIDS crisis have not been able to resist a museological impulse to sentimentalize and politicize, often out-sounding or plainly ignoring an artist’s own language (in Berlin, the KW’s Martin Wong retrospective comes to mind, as does, more acutely, the Neue Nationalgalerie’s show of Andy Warhol’s “quest for beauty”). The strength of “Dort: ein Gefühl” is its minimal curatorial framework – that red line – which allows us not just to hear what is being said, but to register Bordowitz’s true medium: not performance, poetry, or film, but presence itself, with language and, ultimately, art as its faulty witnesses.
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“Dort: ein Gefühl“
Bonner Kunstverein
21 Sep 24 – 2 Feb 25