To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

This review of To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life at Enjoy Public Art Gallery was originally published in Art News Aotearoa (No, 200, Summer 2023).

The length of your visit to this group show at Enjoy may mean that you miss Laura Langer’s moving image work, Can the camera tell that I’m dying? (2023), which plays intermittently on the bright gallery wall. It would be a pity to miss the work because it’s great. Langer took the footage when she visited Iguazu Falls with her niece on a trip to her home in Buenos Aires (she lives in Berlin). It’s a familiar, shaky, smartphone video of a tourist trip. Langer’s niece turns to the camera and asks, her voice barely audible over the roar of the water, “When is it going to stop?” And then, “Can the camera tell that I’m dying?”

Langer was attuned to the potency of this question, asked, as it was, next to the sublime natural phenomena of Iguazu. The unending, sculptural avalanche of water is impossible to capture by a camera, not least because of the obscuring clouds of spray that surround it. The omniscient camera of our contemporary lives is also limited, the work suggests, in its ability to record the human body and, ultimately, its mortality.

As the discontinuous display of Langer’s work shows, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life isn’t static in the ways we might expect of a gallery exhibition. Works are switched out midway through and there’s a busy public programme that isn’t an addendum to the in-gallery works, but features artists who are central to this show’s thesis. There are artists from different parts of the world, different generations, at different stages of their careers, working in different media, but who all reference bodies: their limits, their politics, their desires, their leaky awkwardness and their inevitable end dates.

Questions of mortality are introduced by the show’s title, which is also that of a 1991 novel by French writer Hervé Guibert (1955­–1991) that documents the author’s death from AIDS. Guibert’s work is increasing in prominence in the English-speaking world, as more of his writing appears in translation (Semiotext(e) reissued this book in 2020). To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life records Guibert’s own experience with AIDS and his close friend, Michel Foucault’s, death by the disease, through the thinly-veiled fictional character of Muzil.

Curator Jess Clifford’s use of this title highlights the exhibition’s queer politics—how are queer bodies policed and how is queer desire shown?—and positions Guibert as a significant writer who examined these questions in his work.

It does the same with American filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939–2019), who wrote in 2010, “As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations.” Strident, sexy, and funny, I loved the introduction to Hammer’s moving image practice that this show offered by way of a one-off film screening (though the event was so popular Enjoy had to put on several consecutive sessions; future generations, as Hammer hoped, are clearly interested in her record of lesbian life). Her work combines a Len Lye-esque energy and humour with political activism. Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS (1986) is a montage of the mainstream media’s frenzied and stigmatising headlines about the AIDS crisis. The work is a document of the disinformation and hyperbolic narrative that Guibert had countered with his book, which was controversial because of its raw honesty about the physical and emotional experience of AIDS.

If Guibert’s novel is a physically absent guiding light for this show, Dayle Palfreyman and Tobias Allen’s taut sculpture, Where an open eye, cloaked in the shadow of a dead flower (2019–2023), is its very-present centre. A bench strapped down tight with metal wire with softly scented beeswax sandwiched between layers of wood; the whole object dusted with lavender ash in a precise, painting-like rectangle. The ash means I can’t sit on this bench and the wires fixed to the concrete ground heighten the tension about how I might walk around this elegant, threatening object. The body in this work is mine, and I don’t know quite what to do with it.

Because of the deadline for this review, I can’t include an account of Tobias Allen’s performance that will accompany this sculpture. They propose to eat four kilograms of ash over an unspecified period of time, and people can go to Enjoy to watch them during the show’s last day. This consumption of such a sombre, funereal material reads like an act of mourning, or perhaps an act of penitence, and will bring the many threads of this show back, as it concludes, to the limits of this artist’s body.