Emily LaBarge
Attentiveness is an ongoing journey in the artist’s moving exhibition.
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, installation view. Courtesy Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker. Pictured, center left background, on monitor: Portraits of People Living with HIV, 1993.
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, Camden Art Centre, Arkwright Road, London, through March 23, 2025
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I did not expect, despite the title, to be moved to tears in There: a Feeling, the first UK institutional solo show by Gregg Bordowitz, the American artist, writer, activist (I want to say, too . . . visionary? As in seer, sage, mystic, theologian, teacher—but more on that later). Bordowitz is perhaps best known for his work with ACT UP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, NYC; his tender, reverently irreverent 1993 television documentary–style Portraits of People Living with HIV plays on a monitor in one gallery. But this exhibition, which unfolds through the rambling late-Victorian rooms of Camden Art Centre, originally a public library, foregrounds the poetry, and the poiesis, of his wide-ranging oeuvre: the extent to which making art of any kind is an act of faith, a journey with no final destination.
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, installation view. Courtesy Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker. Pictured: Continuous Red Line, 2002–ongoing.
Around and around the exhibition areas, including an otherwise vacant, vaulted sunlit room and a long, tiled central hallway, runs a red, red line: a narrow ticker tape evenly adhered three inches above the floor—straight, precise, undisturbed over wires and electrical conduits, under radiators and door hinges, contouring cornices, baseboards, brass kickplates. Continuous Red Line (2002–ongoing) it literally is, but it also serves as a connecting thread, a channel, a conductor, an enclosure, a reminder that everywhere, everything present—including the empty spaces, including you—is part of the show. “Poetics is nothing less than how you put stuff together,” says Bordowitz in an accompanying (online) video, and here we are, walking, pausing, reading, looking, watching, waiting, in his enigmatic composition. Which is to say, in a way, that we become relational objects, too.
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, installation view. Courtesy Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker. Pictured, on left, back, and right walls: Debris Fields, 2025.
Which is to say, in a way, that we search for meaning amidst a vast wreckage. Debris Fields (2025), a poem in twenty-four parts, elapses across the four walls of the hallway. Neatly applied in black vinyl letters, ALL CAPS and serif typeface, each text (except for the twenty-fourth) is thirty-two lines; each line is ten syllables, all nouns. Each stanza is eighty by one hundred centimeters, even and regular, but inside this visual rigor the language toils and teems, funny and weird, associative and clear, errant and painful, moving and memorious, always surprising. (I was reminded of Jenny Holzer’s 1979–82 Inflammatory Wall, whose likewise formal clarity, which nods to dry conceptualism, is unsettled by its feverish content; and Robert Smithson’s 1966 drawing A heap of Language, in which his curving script erects a gently sloped pyramid of words.) Person, place, thing—the noun is virtually inexhaustible. In Debris Fields, the chosen ones tell us as much about language in general as language in particular, how it speaks to one’s exterior and interior—a world in every word—alike. But which are the fields and which is the debris?
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, installation view. Courtesy Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker. Pictured: Debris Fields, 2025 (detail).
We move from the ordinary, WINE APPETIZER DINNER DESSERT CHECK, to the sublime, ANGELS DEMONS LAST DANCE LAST CHANCE ROMANCE; from the bodily, SPOTS SCORES SORES SURGERY SARCOPHAGI, to the political, PINKO FAGGOT JEW INTELLECTUAL; from the literary, QUOTATION BEAUTY TRUTH ROMANTICISM, to the religious, RABBI COUNSELLOR CONGREGATION MURMUR. These are the strings of language I have chosen, but you would be drawn to different selections, find different connections, feel moved or roused or implicated by different combinations, notice different rhymes, etymologies, chains of association, feel sometimes, as I did, that you glimpse Bordowitz himself, flickering furtively between the lines. What is life, so often, but repetition and routine? WRITING CHURCH WRITING HOME WRITING WRITING, one verse comes to a close.
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, installation view. Courtesy Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker. Pictured, foreground: Tetragrammaton (Camden), No.1-12, 2021.
“Texts can change the reader’s body. They alter the affects, produce unfamiliar sensations, and open up the mind to novelty,” the artist writes in his essay “More Operative Assumptions” (2003). “I have faith in the capacity of writing to amplify the reader’s ability to think and act for the better.” In Tetragrammaton (Camden), No.1-12 (2021), language and image converse, become one, seen but unspoken, or unspeakable. Monotypes of varied hues kaleidoscope around the room, mounted on bare wooden structures that resemble the tree guards of Bordowitz’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Pink, brown, yellow, black, murky mauve, each print offers a unique abstraction of the tetragrammaton—“an ineffable, unpronounceable four-letter Hebrew word, the name of G-d in Judaism that spells creation into existence daily,” as Bordowitz describes it in the exhibition booklet.
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, installation view. Courtesy Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker. Pictured, upper wall: Baroque Clouds, 2018–ongoing.
Is language a spell? Is an image? Is art? (Yes, and no? Why not both?) When we make art, what do we want to believe? What do we have faith in? What does it bring into being, what does it create into existence daily? (WRITING WRITING.) Baroque Clouds (2018–ongoing) do not so much billow and swell as bubble and bounce, a little lame, on the walls around the twelve tetragrammatons on their crude supports. The plaster casts do not purport to be clouds, but versions of versions of versions of clouds, à la Baroque painting and architecture—sometimes lumpen and not quite right, but readable enough as symbols, intention, aspiration. Pared down, comically pathetic, the meaning of the symbol exceeds the symbol. (“And I feel / ‘I’ / is too small for me. / Some other body is bursting out,” writes Vladimir Mayakovsky in “A Cloud in Trousers,” a poem that inspired Bordowitz’s 1995 film—not on display—of the same title.)
Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling, installation view. Courtesy Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker. Pictured: Before and After (Still In Progress), 2023–ongoing.
I wandered into Before and After (Still In Progress) (2023–ongoing), the newest installment in a trilogy of what Bordowitz calls autobiographical documentaries, during a scene in which the artist was giving a Yom Kippur sermon to his New York synagogue congregation. I didn’t get the jokes (alas, truly, I was raised Catholic), but when he stumbled and choked up, “I ask you to help me forgive myself, and seek forgiveness,” so did I. I did again, during a later segment (the seventy-three-minute video combines varied modes, including stand-up comedy, lecture, song, poetry reading, etc.) in which Bordowitz talks through his relationship to art and activism—what art can and cannot do—which is a conversation about faith, as in belief, as much as politics. In this manner, but not only in this manner, political art is profound.
“Spirituality is a class of ideas, all bound together by the contention that there is something larger than the self governing the order of existence,” the artist has written. “One can reject all matters of religious belief and practice yet still experience the yearning to be part of something large and meaningful that eludes description.” In Before and After, the only repeated sequence is a short video of an elderly man sleeping in a hospital bed, his breath slow and rasping. By the end, we notice more and more about this man we will never know. How he holds his hand. The curve of his cheek. How close the cameraperson must be standing. How part of the green tie at the back of his gown sticks up at the nape of his neck. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” writes Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace (published posthumously in 1952). “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” This is a show of immense gravity and grace, faith and belief.
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, frieze, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. Excerpts appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Granta and the autumn 2023 issue of Mousse.