This spring, the American artist duo confirmed an enchanting exhibition at Paris’s Marian Goodman Gallery, the event for Numéro artwork to meet up with them to debate the key themes that inform their oeuvre, from their positioning with respect to structure, artwork historical past, and the physique to the significance of exercising a queer sensibility.
Interview by Thibaut Wychowanok.
Printed on Might 29, 2025. Up to date on July 29, 2025.
Numéro artwork: What’s the importance of Bardo, the title of your latest exhibition on the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris?
Brennan Gerard: The title comes from Tibetan Buddhism and refers back to the transitional state between loss of life and rebirth throughout which our consciousness undergoes profound modifications. Within the exhibition, we evoke three brazenly or symbolically queer historic figures who lengthy remained within the shadows. These three figures belong to the Bardo as a result of, although they’re useless, they’re nonetheless very current in our lives. There’s Eileen Grey [1878-1976], the designer and architect, famend for a serious work of architectural Modernism, the Villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. That is the place we shot the video proven within the exhibition.
Then, within the vaulted gallery area, we centered on Francesco di Stefano, often called Pesellino [1422-1457]. A prolific painter, he labored for the Medici in Florence and collaborated with the foremost artists of his time. He died younger, aged 35, from the plague. The sculpture Glory Gap [2025], impressed by the clubbing scene and Pesellino’s St Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, which he painted on a predella that’s now within the Louvre, turns the area right into a form of Postmodern sanctuary. Then there’s Julius Eastman [1940-1990], a homosexual Black composer who lived and labored in New York within the Nineteen Seventies and 80s. In our Glyphs monotype collection, we printed fragments of his musical notations onto pictures of our dancers.
Ryan Kelly: Eastman was a dancer and singer, however he additionally wrote classical music. Our monotype collection combines pictures from our performances, glyphs, and gold leaf. The glyphs come from the rating of Homosexual Guerilla, which he wrote to commemorate the Stonewall riots ten years earlier. He additionally did jazz concert events and a disco album. He was undefinable. These are the kinds of people that curiosity us – free, fluid beings who refuse to be decreased to an id.
“Each of us had been born throughout the AIDS epidemic. Our subjectivity was formed by loss of life.” – Brennan Gerard.
B.G.: By way of this exhibition, we’re attempting to discover these people’ subjectivity in all its complexity with out limiting them to a single id. In a sure method, we see them as gods. Each of us had been born throughout the AIDS epidemic. Our subjectivity was formed by loss of life. And our work is strongly influenced by artists like Félix González-Torres [who died of AIDS in 1996]. The identical query retains arising: “What ought to we do with our useless?” Furthermore, I typically hyperlink the query of loss of life to sexuality…
R.Ok.: In all probability as a result of we each grew up in very Catholic households.
Is sexuality linked to questions of sin and guilt?
B.G.: Sure, it’s an thought that may be discovered within the stigmata of St Francis. The queer motion has taught us to show stigmas into pleasure and energy. To make use of insults to empower ourselves. Stigmas additionally give us entry to the Bardo, to a power that lies elsewhere.
R.Ok.: And to an expertise of transcendence that’s harmful and disturbing. Like a foul journey.
B.G.:Sure, the Bardo may be very disturbing. In Tibet, it causes hallucinations. Like a nightmare that by no means ends.
“There’s a memento mori on the planet of disco too. It’s a form of liminal temporality.” – Brennan Gerard.
You employ disco in your work, a sort of music through which joyful, energetic beats are typically paired with profoundly unhappy lyrics.
R.Ok.: It’s someplace between mourning and militancy. For me, golf equipment are a spot for mixing. You set your id apart and immerse your self locally. With disco, it’s not nearly my rights or your rights, it’s about embracing collective freedom.
That makes me consider medieval danses macabres, these wild celebrations of life in periods of disaster, like a memento mori…
B.G.: There’s a memento mori on the planet of disco too. It’s a form of liminal temporality. Your physique turns into a machine. You dance to the purpose of exhaustion. The beat itself comes from the machine. Every part is on the very fringe of life, on the restrict of one thing, to the purpose of transcendence. The Bardo and the membership scene go collectively. The Bardo is the second when the physique turns into one thing else. I feel that if you’re on the dance ground, there’s the identical concept that your physique and your id bear the expertise of changing into one thing else. There’s a similarity between these two space-times.
Presumably in your work, as in González-Torres’s, the physique is very political? This dissolution of the physique within the Bardo or on the disco ground can also be a type of empowerment.
B.G.: In our performances, we work with the very precarious physique. Even when it is extremely tangible. We work on this dialectic between a extremely tangible and transcendent determine.
R.Ok.: That is one more reason why St Francis pursuits us. He’s additionally related to this idea of precarity.
You created a filmed efficiency inside Tadao Ando’s structure on the Bourse de Commerce. Structure can also be a recurring theme in your work, as in your E-1027 video.
R.Ok.: Structure is a form of automobile for us. Initially, it was a method for us to satisfy, to have an area to share and reside in collectively once we had been a pair. So we began learning architectural designs, wanting on the trendy period and Modernist homes constructed with the notice that it was essential to create particular relationships between women and men in society. Extra trendy, extra egalitarian, extra linked with nature. The vast majority of these makes an attempt failed, or succeeded just for a time. Our strategy is in the end about testing the best way to reside in a spot…
What connection do you make between Eileen Grey and the E-1027 villa?
B.G.: The movie is a piece of speculative fiction. We observe Grey on her final day and evening in the home. She left it by no means to return. On the finish of the movie, Eileen burns all her papers after which leaves. This raises the query of letting go. Ought to we burn all of it? For me, there’s one thing of a religious quest right here, just like the Bardo.
R.Ok.: Like a method of disappearing. It’s on this that we establish Eileen Grey with queerness, even when, as soon as once more, it’s speculative. Queerness that isn’t within the constructive illustration of an id or lifestyle, however somewhat within the radical concept that we are able to go in opposition to the very thought of id. At any second, we are able to abandon our id and attachments. That’s the queer undertaking we’re dedicated to. The idea of queer because it emerged within the 90s was a spot of liberation – in opposition to nation, gender, essentialisation, and for the destruction of the category system.
B.G.: Dissolution is a really highly effective factor to pursue. It isn’t the tip of existence. Working towards dissolution throughout your life with out ready for loss of life. Or, in a method, the best way to die higher.
