黑料不打烊

Gregg Bordowitz is many things: artist, activist, writer, teacher, all in equal measure. This Is Not A Love Song features a mix of new and ongoing series of works in a variety of media including video, text, prints, and sculpture, which date back to the early 1990s. The works鈥� central themes are identity, illness, activism, and agency.

For over 30 years, Bordowitz has lived with HIV. Born in Brooklyn in 1964, Bordowitz began his studies in art in 1982 at The School of Visual Arts in New York. As a student, he had already begun investigating the relationship between art and politics when the AIDS pandemic began. The crisis transformed his practice as painting and sculpture gave way to video, performance, and eventually writing. Unable to separate art from activism, Bordowitz documented and participated in New York鈥檚 ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and co-founded the video collectives DIVA TV and Testing the Limits.

Intellectually, Bordowitz is squarely a child of the 1980s, a heady period that gave rise to theory, a catchall academic genre using philosophy, Marxism and psychoanalysis to critique the self, society, and the relationship between the two. Class, race, gender and, last but not least, sexuality were mainstays of the critical theory in which Bordowitz would immerse himself. Since the publication of his first article in a 1987 issue of the journal October, Bordowitz has gone on to publish scores of essays and to become an accomplished poet.

Tellingly, at its center, This Is Not A Love Song features Bougainvillea Calliope, an epic, ten-part poem from his 鈥淒ebris Field鈥� series. These poems consist of ten-syllable lines of only nouns. In addition to the ten-syllable structure of iambic pentameter, Bordowitz also cites Kabbalist thought (ten emanations of God) and the metric system as amongst the reasons why the number ten 鈥渕ade a kind of elegant and/or rational and spiritual sense鈥� to him.