"Time Is A Thing The Body Moves Through" by T Fleischmann. Coffee House Press. 2019. 157pp.
I write this in June of 2019. The framing of this Pride month is largely premised on the idea of an after. We are fifty years after the Stonewall Riots now, an origin story of sorts. This offers a moment to question where we find ourselves in queer culture now. Are we at a point where identitarian politics or ‘labels’ have ceased to matter, are we post-queer, or still before starting to realize our identities or what queerness could be? Are we post-AIDS crisis, really? Maybe the temporality we exist in within queerness is never as simple as a before and after. This line of thinking about time came up frequently as I read T Fleischmann’s "Time Is A Thing The Body Moves Through.” In this essay-book, Fleischmann takes as their central focus of examination, wonderfully, the installation artwork of Félix González-Torres.
To look at González-Torres’ work now, 23 years after the artist’s death due to AIDS, is to see any idea of linear progression of time altered or queered. Take González-Torres’ portraits, made up of candies assembled to the weight of the beloved subjects, for instance his “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA), and read Fleischmann on stepping up to take a candy,
I selected one wrapped in bright yellow foil.
I knelt, lifted it, and fingered it for a moment before unwrapping.
I sucked at the candy as I continued to look at the pile, slightly diminished.
I felt for a moment an acute sense of loss and beauty, each indistinguishable from the other.
The candy was very sweet, and it was melting.
González-Torres’s loss of his lover Ross to AIDS is experienced in a present tense by Fleischmann, as acutely vivid as the author’s own affairs and losses also chronicled here. When ideas about “temporality” are invoked, at least to me, they can frequently seem vague and hard to feel. Fleischmann, in turning to González-Torres’s work, lets the mixing of the times we inhabit become something we can touch and taste. The conceptual becomes physical.
Fleischmann’s book, despite this opening framing, is not strictly an extended exegesis on González-Torres’s artwork. This book intermingles the narratives of two of Fleischmann’s love affair: one is remembered from the past and one fresh, one in lines and one in prose. Also included are meditations on ice, the agender historical figure of the Publick Universal Friend—leader of a religious sect in the late 1700s—and art making. As well, the book rejects binary structure even at this level of subjects and form. The two main narratives interweave, largely through González-Torres’s own artwork. The linear progression of time is disrupted.
Fleischmann turns to González-Torres and his work from a contemporary non-binary perspective while not trying to erase the space between them. While, as José Esteban Muñoz theorized, González-Torres had a ‘disidentication’ with direct representation of gay male bodies and moved toward abstraction, his work still largely responded to a gay male community amid the AIDS crisis. Fleischmann’s intimacy with González-Torres’s work here breaks out of the expected or singular meaning, opening up new questions and ripples for his work outside of the time of its making. What Fleischmann finds here are possibilities for making and living away from the “reification of identity” through González-Torres’s art, searching out what the artist had described as “the uninscribed.”
Where "Time Is A Thing The Body Moves Through” most interested me as a reader (and writer) was at the level of language. How do we write while resisting simplistic categories? As well, how do we write personally while conscious of our responsibility to others? This is in many ways an astonishingly intimate book, full of disclosure and sexuality. The reader is brought into Fleischmann’s embodied experiences, with art and with others. Fleischmann describes the disclosure of González-Torres’s work as offering “an occasion to honor that part of the artist’s life that I’ll never know,” a reminder to “just love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve chosen to keep away from you.” This seems to offer a possible ethics, one which is carried to the rest of the text.
The revelation of the book for me came, as well, with language. Within my time studying art history and as a museum-goer, I have encountered González-Torres’s work and interpretations of it in many different iterations. What startled me most was a moment in Fleischmann’s text, describing González-Torres’s Untitled (“Water”), a blue bead curtain. They write, “like many of the candy piles, some strings of light bulbs, the curtain begins not as a set object, but as text, instructions for installation—/…I have not seen this curtain in person but imagine the feel of the beads against my body, the movement of the beads (waves), and the plastic clatter of their collisions./Like just softly, all of me is touched, and I hear it.” In a sense, González-Torres’s work, as much as Fleischmann’s book, is a text, consistently re-read and re-written for display. González-Torres’s art is in a present, past and future tense, still effecting viewers and being remade of new materials.
Fleischmann also writes, “I just want language to generate more touch.” In this book, I was reminded of the physical and embodied possibilities made through words. It is language that can bring us the future in the present, pace C. L. R. James, with multiple times touching one another and generating the world anew.