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AU_PASSAGE is a new contemporary art space created by Dani Issler in a nineteenth-century arcade in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement, not too far (though a world away) from the Louvre. On a recent trip to Paris, I had a chance to see the gallery’s group show, CorresponDANCE, curated by Tavia Nyong’o. The show is personal, bringing together works by Nyong’o’s friends around the theme of correspondence and the ghostly figure of José Esteban Muñoz, queer theorist and author of Cruising Utopia, who died in 2013 at the age of forty-six. Muñoz was a central figure in queer theory, Nyong’o’s mentor, and a beloved fixture of the expanded New York City queer performance scene.
The gallery’s title is fitting: during my visit to the show, dozens of people passed through, on their way from rue Sainte-Anne to rue Monsigny, which the arcade connects. Conceived as a double vitrine display in this in-between space, the exhibition attracted only some passing glances—a reception in distraction that recalls Benjamin’s theorization of the urbanizing sensorium in The Arcades Project, a text he worked on for years at the nearby Bibliothèque Nationale, leaving it incomplete at the time of his own tragic death at the age of forty-eight. An architectural structure that evokes a moment of incipient but also failed modernity, the arcade, for Benjamin, offers a strange fusion of public and private, interior and exterior space, and embodies the movement of the flâneur. In its tethering together of Benjamin’s analysis of the arcade with Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, Nyong’o’s exhibition amplifies the latent queer charge of the flâneur in his movement through urban spaces and resonated with another exhibition I saw in Amsterdam a few days later, Cruising Amsterdam: Public Sex in the City. It seems that public sex is back on the agenda in the peripheral spaces of the artworld—and of renewed interest to a young generation of queers rapidly tiring of apps that ruthlessly monetize all connections.
But the libidinal history of the arcade is itself imbricated, of course, with an earlier moment of capital’s consolidation of its hold over the private world of fantasy. The now abandoned window displays of the passage Sainte-Anne, repurposed as an exhibition space, evoke the lure of an emergent commodity culture that invests objects with a charge that lies in the tension between the historical residues they carry in their physical being (traces of their production process and use value) and their capacity for abstraction as fungible value. CorresponDANCE is nostalgic in the way it foregrounds social and erotic bonds that take place outside those circuits of commercial exchange, bonds that developed through analog technologies of art-making: an envelope sent by mail; a vinyl single offered as a gift; a care package delivered during a COVID convalescence; hand-drawn doodles mailed or gifted; Nyong’o’s own watercolors, which carry the bodily trace (and thus the concrete historicity) of the hand and eye that produced them. These works, somewhere between personal ephemera and aesthetic objects, recall a less manic and accumulative mode of friendship, before the advent of social media—a mode that depended on the punctuated time of exchange through the transmission of physical objects.
As such, the exhibition is an altar of sorts to the communicative and care acts out of which friendship is forged beyond the extractive networks of commodity or platform capitalism. The participants are Nyong’o’s friends, living and dead; boyfriends of friends, students who became friends and colleagues; artists who are at once collaborators and friends or maybe lovers. In this sense, the show documents the personal bonds that sustain art practice, blending the patronage of commission with the disinterested ethics of friendship. For example, the show includes Joshua Rains’s doodles and designs for tattoos that both document and constitute the material of a years-long exchange, as well as drawings Nyong’o commissioned from Berlin-based artist Vaginal Davis for a special issue of Social Text honoring Muñoz—Davis sent a sketch of Freddie Herko with an erection, whose suicidal “jeté out the window” was the object of one of the chapters of Cruising Utopia. Muñoz’s own last email to Nyong’o, from 2013, also forms part of the show, printed out in hard copy on now-tattered paper. Friendship here is a medium, a practice of making and gifting art and writing.
The exhibition centerpiece, in the left window, is a new work by Waseem Nafisi, “Paris in Peaces (Rue Denfert),” which also thematizes exchange through an iterative structure that recreates and reprises an earlier work by Nafisi, which itself takes up an instruction piece by Yoko Ono as well as images from Ono and John Lennon’s “War is Over! If you want it” campaign. Nafisi’s work carries the traces of images he has earlier copied, distributed, and then received back and reincorporated; as well as the political histories embedded in the rue Denfert it depicts—a gathering place for numerous iterations of revolutionary and collectivist desires. Like the show itself, this work reminds us of the friendship networks and communicative exchanges that make political action possible and different political futures realizable. But the practice of image reproduction, division, dispersal and return also performs a complex operation of abstraction on the concrete political history of the pictured place, translating history into a series of reproduced and exchanged images, in a manner that resonates with the commodity culture (an incipient society of the spectacle) the arcade represents. This new work sits across from and in counterpoint to the other works that emerge from deeper histories of friendship in networks of queer theory, including those by Kyla Wazana Tomkins, Nao Bustamante, and Lauren Berlant. That many of these works honor forebears who have passed and friendships that have ended through death amplifies the bittersweetness of the exhibition and the nostalgic quality of the space itself.
For me, two of the most moving pieces are Nyong’o’s own: a watercolor rendering of Beauford Delaney’s 1941 portrait of his friend James Baldwin, which translates Delaney’s painterly homage to his friend into the register of Nyong’o’s own painterly subjectivity; and another rendering of Nyong’o’s final text exchange with Lauren Berlant—the last line of which is a GIF of a heart with outstretched arms saying “Hugs.” It was a surprisingly moving last gesture, given that the GIF is an image form that belongs exclusively to the network and channels categories of sentiment in ways that render us typological. But the personal selection of the typological image (the heart saying “Hugs”) is a form of communication whose phatic nature exceeds its content. It is an act of attention and care; that is the nearly wordless place where Tavia’s correspondence with Lauren was interrupted. By painting the exchange, Nyong’o pays tribute to Berlant again, and to whatever care and love managed to circulate through the devices on which Berlant, by that time, was spending a lot of time. In their last years, Berlant did not shy away from social media, always seeking the best and richest possibilities within any social form, including the degraded ones—melodrama, “women’s culture,” or Facebook, text messages—that would be easy to read as mere symptoms. Though Berlant is famous for their concept of “cruel optimism”—the neoliberal condition in which our dearest attachments are also what obstruct our flourishing—this simple watercolor made me think about the concept differently. Indeed, what Berlant’s brilliant attention to the world evinced was precisely an optimism that persists even in spite of its cruelty—an optimism embodied in their very critical attention. Nyong’o’s tribute here repays that gift in a powerfully simple manner, as an act of attention in visual form.
In CorresponDANCE, histories of blackness, brownness, and queerness converge with a relentless creativity, a hopeless commitment to making art or theory instead of making money. The “network” rejoins its earlier meaning as an infrastructure of exchange that precedes and exceeds its vulgarization as platform capitalism. The exhibition doesn’t include much text—it’s about looking, and sending things that can be held and looked at—but ultimately what it documents is the life and afterlife of theory, queer theory specifically, as that still great and utopian venture that Nyong’o, Muñoz, and Berlant embarked on and that so many of us remain (so to speak) invested in. The exhibition rightly includes Baldwin within this lineage of thought, just as it transforms queer theory into an art practice as much as a project of critical philosophy.
And of course, the show also reminds us that au passage describes not only how physical infrastructures—like forms of social and economic organization—are historical and impermanent, but also that the nature of our own existence is similarly finite: we are only here for a while, strolling through the arcade of life, holding onto each other sometimes, sending care packages, or text messages. Or circulating in the realm of missed encounters like everyone who didn’t realize or didn’t care what they were passing by, didn’t stop to think or look at these fragile monuments to a utopian project. That project is one shared by art and theory: that we might encounter the world not only in the mode of anxious navigation or in an attempt to strategically optimize our position in relation to it, but in the manner of an invitation to reveal something of its noise in words and images; to unearth the sedimented histories of spaces and the affects that saturate them; to hold, without resolving, the longing of loss, the tragedy of history, the sad repetitions of our past mistakes, the stuff of life.
