BERLIN — Ruins of Rooms, a fresh take on the multimedia practices of Jimmy DeSana and Paul P., explores what it means to make and curate queer art at a moment in which the word “queer” — as an adjective, verb, identity — is assigned to a vast, heterogenous, even contradictory constellation of objects, people, and concepts.
Drawing together the work of two artists born a quarter of a century apart, curators Krist Gruijthuijsen and Linda Franken explore not just the relationship between their work but the conceptual echoes between their generations. P. and DeSana each made a single film after graduating from art school, and the exhibition opens with those remarkably similar works. In DeSana’s “Double Feature” (1979), a nude figure, shown from thighs to rib cage, vigorously massages flaccid, soapy genitals in an otherwise dry shower stall. In Paul P.’s two-decade-later “Snapping Off” (1997), a subject in what looks like an adolescent bedroom repeatedly snaps the elastic of boxers and athletic socks against his skin. Both films take up interdependencies of pain and pleasure without being properly sexual — an interrogation that still feels timely nearly three decades later, at a moment in which the concept of queerness is frequently and stridently asserted, yet far less clearly defined.
In Ruins of Rooms, queerness is a methodology, a way of destabilizing or denaturalizing accepted conventions in ways both mundane — as in two nude people together in bed in A. A. Bronson’s “Nest (Paul and Scott)” (2004), also included in the show — and seductively absurd: a body clothed in only a tank top, cantilevered out from a countertop, seemingly urinating blood into an open dishwasher in DeSana’s “Dishwasher” (1979). This methodological approach extends to the inclusion of P.’s meticulously made furniture. Scaled slightly too small for most conventionally sized adult bodies yet milled too finely to seem intended for most children, the furniture de-familiarizes its own category by calling into question the conventions of both curation and domesticity in much the same way that queerness calls into question not just the naturalization of one particular way of being in the world, but also the very categories of natural and not.
An understanding of queerness as a form of nearly imperceptible destabilizing is refracted through the curatorial strategy of the show in the curators’ decision to leave off many of the best-known works by both artists, and enlivened by the multimediality of the objects. Intermingled with a range of DeSana’s lesser-known photographs are a series of small oil portraits by P. that are unmistakably figurative yet impossible to fully resolve. The pairing of these two artists is part of that destabilization, too; this is a show less of identicality than of homology. To return to the videos with which the show opens is to realize that though there is nothing overtly queer to them, a diffuse set of distinctly queer filmic, physical, and spatial tendencies obliquely mark them as such. Ruins of Rooms might thus be understood as a catalog of ways of thinking about queerness by interrogating distinctions within that category so often lost in the efflorescence of both the term and the kinds of lives to which it points. It is also through this line of inquiry that the show takes up the mantle of reaching across generations; spanning five decades, it resists pressures of positivism and progressivism, to focus instead on how little has changed.
Jimmy DeSana & Paul P.: Ruins of Rooms continues at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Auguststraße 69, 10117, Berlin, Germany) through October 20. The exhibition was organized by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Linda Franken.
