Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

After Jackson visits New York and sees a Felix Gonzalez-Torres retrospective there, I buy the next cheap flight and make sure to catch it before the close. It’s just a weekend trip for me, a short flight from Chicago to sleep at Cyd’s apartment and then back. Before I go Jackson gives me a pink padlock with Love me go away engraved on one side, and we lock it on the railing of the pier by our house, so it will be there when I’m not. I cry when he gives it to me and then I say “babe” and keep kissing his cheek when we hang it. Being so quickly in Chicago and then New York and then Chicago again, right away, feels like too much to me. I’m used to the long approach, of strangers I found on Craigslist driving me over a long night, and then days of settling into the rhythms of a different city. Another way it confuses: having a little money like this job is giving me, and then every single thing being different because of it.

  I ask Cyd to come to the show with me. First I get really high and talk about aliens with Avory for a couple of hours, and then I go to the gallery, and then Cyd meets me there. He and I recently stopped hooking up, not like a breakup because there is no breaking, just like a very nice connection that can be many things and remain a very nice connection. Most all the work in the exhibit is stuff that I’ve seen before but it’s still nice to encounter it again and touch it, and also nice to encounter it with someone like Cyd, who hasn’t already bogged the work down with his own thinking. “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) is there. The platform is empty when I first arrive at the gallery, and unpopulated also after I go to get coffee and come back with Cyd. We sit for a bit in case we can catch the dancer, but we both eventually lose patience. Instead, I just tell him that a go-go dancer will come out eventually, and I remember the picture Jackson sent me the week before, where he’s breaking all the rules and looking very happy, up on that platform and dancing, how he usually looks when he’s doing something nice for me, but this time with light bulbs in a square around him.

  There is a really nice piece, a VHS tape that plays on a loop, that I haven’t seen before. I’m taken by VHS tapes in that obnoxious way people favor the aesthetics of older media. The pleasure I get from them isn’t a recall of my childhood, but a reminder of the way VHS rentals offered a portal out of my childhood, into other realities and timelines—the hope that with a remove into ephemera, that maybe I’d be gone soon, too, slipped right into that return slot. VHS also reminds me of Simon and the first nights I spent in his bed watching the same tapes he’d been watching for his entire life, Party Girl and Gregg Araki movies and The Client as he recovered from a motorcycle having run him over. He also had a modest collection of gay porn tapes, Fred Halsted and other directors who made masculinity arty in an easy way. There’s something erotic about lying in bed watching a VHS—the sense that you’re there until the end, that whatever tensions are present are going to mount with the film’s progress, like a VHS is somehow harder to pause, and has to be finished.

  The video is “Untitled” (A Portrait) 1991–1995 and it is five minutes that loop for an hour, four years cut down to a quick sequence of light. There are a couple of chairs in front of it so Cyd and I sit and watch. Whenever we’re together I want to hear what Cyd has to say and then end up talking more than him and feeling annoyed with myself later. The video is just white text on a black background, phrases in all lowercase that fade in, stay for a few seconds, and then fade out again so that another bit of text can appear somewhere else on the screen. Most of the phrases are on the bottom but some of them are on the top or in the middle. They’re like that other text portrait, the typed-out one, but without years listed alongside the phrases. I try to search a few phrases on my phone to see if the text is available anywhere online and when it’s not, I decide to record it, setting my phone fake-discreetly on my lap as I continue chatting with Cyd. I don’t start recording at the beginning of the tape but somewhere in the middle, and my phone slips at some point so I don’t catch a couple of the phrases at the top of the screen. I don’t take any of it in while it’s scrolling past because instead I’m talking the whole time with Cyd about a friend of ours neither of us has seen in a while and also about how the longevity of interest in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work relates to the artist’s death, which Cyd asks about.

  My own video is pretty awful to revisit because I hate listening to my voice, and also the way I try to explain Gonzalez-Torres stumbles into generalities and half-truths. Sometimes there are moments of silence when the language floats on the screen, a night sweat and silver ocean given space away from my stuttering voiceover, and later, after the tape has come back to the front, a found black cat and long love letters get one long silence, one phrase immediately following the other. When I talk about the possibility of having an erotic and embodied encounter with the work without realizing the encounter is erotic and embodied, like how I think a lot of people eat the candy, the screen says, an environmental disaster. The pause between phrases on screen takes a second, too, so when I say, “I hope to do that,” there aren’t any words, just the blank screen. I say “like” during a view to remember, a simple ocean, a bounced check, and a wet lick on his face, and Cyd “ums” and “yeahs” during a wet lick on his face and many possible landscapes, and then during a possible landscape.

  There might be something to the way I hate hearing my own voice but love the sound of my friends’ voices. The beauty in a voice is how it fills space, how it can move an idea through your body and then out into the room, away from you. Like when I am in a room filled with people I love and everyone is talking to each other, the voices all sounding together, dissonant dissidents. Cyd’s voice is soft, like a trill, and I’m delighted when I hear it. I’m not sure how my voice today sounds in relation to the faggy, nasally pep my Midwest youth gifted me. It doesn’t feel like there were any choices in it, or maybe, rather, the choice was to tune it on the page, where I can hear what I’m saying without the sound getting in the way.

  I appreciate that “Untitled” (A Portrait) 1991–1995 doesn’t tell me what it’s a portrait of. It’s a portrait of what it’s a portrait of, I’d say, if someone asked me about it. The order of it means that sometimes the broader cultural and political problems align with the personal exigencies they create, like a bounced check followed by a rise in unemployment, but more often there’s an uneven rhythm to those connections, a white blood cell count and then silver ocean and then a distant war. Like I grew up thinking I was singular, but the world kept revealing itself to me, until I understood that I was not. The VHS is one hour of the same repeating five-minute progression. I wonder if someone is going to come out and switch it every hour, and how that timing aligns with the go-go dancer, if they see each other sometimes or never, then I remember that most VHS players flip the tape on their own, and continue.

  Cyd takes off—“Bye honey,” he always says when he leaves, and “Hi honey,” he always says when he arrives—and so I have some time to kill in Manhattan. I start walking toward the piers and call Simon. I like to call him when I’m in New York so that we can talk about the city together and toss around variations of why we do or do not miss it. Simon and Cyd were friends way back too, in a city where I’ve never spent much time and from which most people I know have been priced out, so a lot of things around me feel embedded in the past as I talk to him, walking and wishing I still smoked cigarettes. I do not miss New York this time, already thinking of my return to a teaching life and an apartment by the beach, and Simon is conflicted, recalling what he enjoys of the city—the smell of trash, the anonymity—but not desiring to center his life there, either. We talk about our drunken nights as the water laps the piers and I miss him.

  Anyway, you never get there, you just keep going. Things are repeated, and sometimes we mistake the fact of their repetition for their value. It can make it seem like we aren’t supposed to change, or like our love has to be just so. It can make it seem as though what we know is best, which it only sometimes is. But maybe that’s okay. Even when imagining takes us away, it still
begins with what’s already here.

  Maybe that’s why I’m always catching myself in a daydream,

  where Simon and I are holding hands, and going exactly

  where we should be.

  Because that’s what I dream of, places like that.

  Where Simon likes holding hands,

  and everyone recognizes our collective beauty,

  a thing that is here now but also very far from what we know.

  Like a mirror with my face pressed up flat against it, pressing against my own story. The most horrible things pressed up close to the most wonderful, the most wonderful things pressed up close to my cheek. Flat, stubbly, porous, like the moon battered to mares. A pale body with a penis hanging limp, a beautiful image of me that I cannot own. This always was a very erotic exercise.

  If the aliens do show up, I hope they’ll see people they want to save. Friends and magnificent sluts, smashing the walls of the prisons and burning all the money, running around with signs that declare our liberation. Our hands up in the air and then down again, like some people in love. Our hands taking from two stacks of paper, “Nowhere better than this place” and “Somewhere better than this place.” Just a small part of the relentlessness of people in love, finding ways to make pleasure through all time. With losses that are shared and that no one else knows. I guess that’s what the story is. A story of bodies that are different, of people who fuck up and make each other happy and then die. Where everything is impossible and so we try to make it real. Where it’s spring, and the season of ice has passed.

  … Ice is not a pellucid thing, but a disarray of fissures and air. Is not something that is cold but is something that is frozen and feels cold when your hand presses down upon it, then later seems warm to your hand. Is not quiet but is loud and is not a color but is several colors at once. Is not vulnerable nor dangerous, but might be one day a flood after sunlight, or a weight so heavy it moves itself, and carves smaller the earth …

  … Ice on old wood makes me want to lick it, to feel the grainy stuck part of the wood and the smooth part of the ice. Tongue might stick. Wood grain swirls into itself like ice freezes into its water, and when the dew of morning settles in the dented weaves of wood the dew freezes to little crystals. Cedar has that shimmer, too, when it is first cut and sappy purple. A big old building as big as a barn in the center of a cold town gets covered in ice crystals every winter morning, months on end, and you would need to scrape at its wood with your fingernail to break …

  … that move directly from solid to gas that results in frost spicules, in fine and stiff white spikes, in two kinds of cold that are cold enough for advection and for the crystalline prickle across the plane …

  … fracture. Split through, split apart, split into and out of blue. Split so the split is black and the ice is white. Split with tendrils of crack. And where it is still whole and hard, there beside the split it is whitest, although the whitest whites are just smaller splits, cracking the fractured ice into itself and out of its blue. A fog of small splits about each break and a hard dark split so there is no whole, just a clear ice and a clear ice. Because I lifted the block, wetting my hands on the white, dropped it onto the gray slate of creek rock. Because my hands ache from touching the ice. Because I can now put the two whole ices one atop the other, the white splits and dark crack splits each finding a fracture to match. And because the ice melted to water by my hands can find the static hum of the splits and fill and quiet them. Tonight it will grow colder and colder still and grow still in the colder, and the mends will become rends, and it will restore a clear hum. And maybe then I will have a block of ice again, to break …

  … or the sheen of ice screeches. The sheen of ice screeches white ice screeches. The white sheen of silver ice screeches. The silver screech of ice has a sheen. The sheen of ice screeches, screech screech, and it was a sheen. It had a sheen, the silver ice. The silver ice has a sheen. Let’s sing …

  NOTES

  Page 4: Information about Felix Gonzalez-Torres comes from a range of sources. I’m grateful to the staff at the MoMA library, who made it easy for me to access their resources. I am also appreciative of the two books I first used to orient my thinking—Nancy Spector’s Felix Gonzalez-Torres, published for the Guggenheim in 1995, and Julie Ault’s 2006 edited collection for Steidl Publishers, also called Felix Gonzalez-Torres. I also thank Visual AIDS and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, who allowed me to spend time with the correspondences and ephemera donated by Carl George, and to Alex Fialho in particular for assistance in arranging that visit.

  I don’t want to claim any expertise on the artist, and hope to engage with his work horizontally—if anything, opening up space for further meaning rather than exerting any sort of authority. But it really helped me to think—encountering his work did—and I am appreciative of that, and hope to share some of it.

  Page 23: My favorite writing about this kind of relationship, like with Cyd, also comes from Delany. In his 2017 essay “Ash Wednesday,” published by the Boston Review, he offers, “It is very easy to divide the world into binary groups and then a supplementary group is postulated as a mediator: friendship, affection, sex, celibacy. Raw, cooked, boiled, burnt. Hell, purgatory, paradise. Conscious, unconscious, dreaming.”

  Page 27: The book Simon and I pass back and forth is Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (Viking, 2006), which I used for much of the information on Thule in this section.

  Pages 31–32: Gonzalez-Torres quotes in the section that falls across these pages are from “1990: L.A., ‘The Gold Field,’” in the catalog for Roni Horns’s Earths Grow Thick (Wexner Center for the Arts, 1996).

  Page 32 (bottom): Quote is from an interview with Gonzalez-Torres by Ross Bleckner in the April 1995 issue of BOMB.

  Page 33: The detail of hunters returning to find the Thule Air Base under construction comes from Mike Davis’s In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2007).

  Page 34: Quote is from a 1995 interview with Gonzalez-Torres by Robert Storr, originally in Art Press, and reprinted in Ault’s book.

  Page 35: Quote is from a conversation between Gonzalez-Torres and Joseph Kosuth in A. Reinhardt, J. Kosuth, F. Gonzalez-Torres: Symptoms of Interference, Conditions of Possibility (Academy Edition, 1994).

  Page 36: The Gonzalez-Torres quote is from “1990: L.A., ‘The Gold Field.’” The Roni Horn quote is from an interview by Mimi Thompson for BOMB in 1989.

  Page 39: The quote from Agnes Martin appears in a 1976 interview with John Gruen, collected in The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists (A Capella, 1991).

  Page 43: The conference I attended was Queer Circuits in Archival Times.

  Page 51: The conversation with Tim Rollins was originally printed in Felix Gonzalez-Torres (A.R.T. Press, 1993).

  Page 60: Post-Scarcity was created in collaboration with Benjy Russell and is included with permission.

  Page 63: This excerpt is also taken from the conversation with Tim Rollins in Felix Gonzalez-Torres (A.R.T. Press, 1993).

  Page 71: I primarily used two books to gather information about Publick, The Public Universal Friend by Paul B. Moyer (Cornell University Press, 2015) and Pioneer Prophetess by Herbert A. Wisbey Jr. (also Cornell, 1964). I am also appreciative of Scott Larson’s “Indescribable Being” in the journal Early American Studies (fall 2014), which was the first thing I read about Publick that understood their gender, and also the first writing that meaningfully engaged them as a settler.

  For information on the Treaty of Canandaigua, I relied on Treaty of Canandaigua 1794, edited by G. Peter Jemison and Anna M. Schein (Clear Light Books, 2000). I am grateful to those editors, and to the writers in the collection.

  Page 100: Postcard quote is from the Carl George archive.

  Page 106: The Pasolini quote comes from a 1950 letter to Silvana Mauri, available in his collected letters, which were edited by Nico Naldini and published by Quart
et. I came to the press release mentioned later on this page when I purchased a bag the artist Dean Sameshima had screen-printed it onto. The translation is by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente.

  Page 114: Information about Pomp Kersey is from Cannon County, part of the Tennessee County History Series (Memphis State University Press, 1982).

  Page 136: I found the information about the first Ms. Leather contest on the website Leatherati and the series Black n Leather, written by Tyesha Best. The interview with Tyler McCormick is by Oscar Raymundo, from Queerty in 2011.

  Page 137: If you’re a white person who hasn’t started paying reparations, you can do it in many ways, including direct monthly payments to individuals and monthly recurring donations to black-led organizations, similar to how you might dedicate a monthly share of your housing expenses to the indigenous people whose land you occupy. You can google “black-led organizations” right now to get started.

  Page 139: This was the retrospective of the artist’s work by the David Zwirner and Andrea Rosen galleries.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to those who appear in this book. I changed names or identifying information when appropriate, but most appear as they do in my life. For the generosity of letting me render you in this project, thank you. This is especially the case for Simon, and for Jackson.

  And to Benjy Russell, Cyd Nova, Vicente Ugartechea, Maya Victoria, Finn Oakes, Christopher Soto, Avory Agony, Mev Luna, Otelia Lundberg, Calvin Burnap, Louise Fleischmann, Ryan Greenlee, Benjamin Haber, Torrey Peters, Jackie Wang, Kate Zambreno, May, Bee, Talka Wiszczur, Stevie Hanley, Sterling, and Elyza Touzeau. Ideas in conversation with these friends helped me greatly in thinking about this project.

  I have been fortunate to work in the classroom with uncommonly insightful students and writers. I thank them for sharing their work with me.