Peter Hujar – The Piers (198X)

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.”
—Jose Muñoz

I apologize in advance: this will be scattered. But by attempting to get at something I don’t really have any idea how to say, I’m fighting against my default setting of shying away from the prospect of saying things poorly and making a cluster fuck of everything.

The above quote came to my attention a little over a month ago when Andy Wachowski came out as Lilly. (The statement she released is exceptional and very much worth the read.)

Like any truly revelatory insight, Muñoz admonition has never really drifted much further than the periphery of my thoughts since then. I’ve thought about it as Republican controlled state legislatures enact hateful and hypocritical legislation against LGBTQ folk–or, as I think of them: my people.

A good number of these laws are couched with a simple premise–protecting religious liberty. Nevermind the fact that religious freedom is firmly and irrevocably protected by the first damn amendment of the constitution. Nevermind that these strictures are specifically designed to protect those who would chose to pervert their religious beliefs as a means of justifying indecency and bigoted hatefulness towards those with whom they disagree.

If one examines this impetus from the standpoint of armchair psychology, it’s easy to dismiss hate as a defense mechanism against engaging with difficult questions regarding individual agency, institutional sexism/homophobia, what the fuck notions of gender and sexuality actually entail in theory and/or practice.

I don’t buy this perspective. If nothing else that famous study that Chomsky was involved in where he suggested that with the depth and complexity of the ability of your average everyman to engage with sports statistics suggests that the galling lack of familiarity with world politics among the average citizen has less to do with any inherent ability and more to do with a lack of engagement.

This is something I encounter frequently with my family–who are all very conservative if not also fervently religious.

For example: my mom and I argue all the time about this or that consideration. Invariably, she adopts the stance that the end of the world is nearing and there’s nothing to do but get right with ‘God’.

I think that’s really the larger problem. The focus of so many people is on the destination–instead of the journey. So many folks are innured with this belief that a life of piety leads to eternal reward.

It’s not that I don’t buy that–being raised in an Evangelical Xtian milieu really programmed some fucked up shit into my head that I’ve had a hard time completely shaking; no, it’s more that I object to the lack of personal agency and responsibly this perspective seems to very nearly universally foster.

But what does any of this have to do with Hujar’s photography?

I think it’s easy to dismiss his work as hedonistic and transgressive for the sake of transgression (not that the later is necessarily a bad thing in and of itself). Yet to do so, seems to be to miss an opportunity to study the world through someone else’s eyes.

There’s an unflinching, non-judgmental immediacy to Hujar’s work. The ugly, the beautiful, the graphic, the mundane–and always a reverential quality to the gaze, employed with rigorous consistency across the work.

Hujar always manages to find the few glowing embers scattered among the ashes–not unlike the mythical phoenix.

…

Finally–on a personal note: I’m extremely interested in the way both Hujar and Tress use doors, apertures and other openings as a means of interrogating notions of participation vs voyeurism. Additionally, I find their impetus for exploring abandoned, ruinous locations to be starkly different from folks nowadays who seek to document similar scenes as a means of projecting an internal state externally or as a means of serving a particular tonal ambiance or aesthetic.

As someone who dabbles in urbex activities, I feel a resonance with the queer use of neglected spaces far more than I do with the glut of shooters making highly stylized nudes in empty warehouses, asylums, etc.

To me there’s something extremely gratifying about people seeking out liminal spaces to not shrug off or externalize their feelings of marginalization but to feel connection in spite of them. I may be projecting but there is something thrilling about embracing what it is to be alive and free and to stage that in an environment which so clearly exemplifies death and decay so perfectly resonates with the little death some of us pursue as a means of coming to terms with the on big death towards which we inextricably slip.