In 1998, twenty years after production began on William Friedkin’s 1980 notorious, gay leather underground crime thriller, Cruising, I reversed it scene by scene. The 'from behind' approach was suggested by the logic of the film itself. The narrative dissonance of the original film is amplified in Back to Front, the reciprocity of law and desire patent. Moving in reverse, outcome cruises cause, with often queer effects. For instance, straight intercourse isn’t an anodyne for gay sex, but a push towards it, and heteronormativity yearns for sexual lawlessness. The event that haunts my intervention is the one that incites it: Karen Allen donning Pacino’s S&M leather gear and lurking, 'dragging', up behind him on the soundtrack. Upshot: The Other sex, not-all, non-localizable, betrays the underlying, real, phobia in Friedkin’s erotic thriller. “How would you like to disappear?”
Daniel Chapman, a web developer, and I broke ground on the site June 8, 2015 and constructed and reconstructed it as our schedules allowed. My ambition was to create a comprehensive space to house my art and corresponding activities, which include writing, teaching, screenings and studio visits. The site also encompasses my work in the field of contemporary psychoanalysis, and includes links to other places of interest. Images of works from and installation views of exhibitions in most cases represent a portion of what was shown. Titles and details for individual works will be posted subsequently. The site will be updated on an ongoing basis. As the earth of the art world continues to slide, and we rise and fall via our devices, it's here we come to be.
Technical specifications for the site are as follows: for back-end development, we used Rails with a Postgres database with rspec for testing; AWS and Heroku for hosting of the files and site. For the front-end work, traditional javascript and jQuery work, with Sass for design.
I’m grateful to Daniel for his expertise, creativity, and commitment. For more information about Daniel and his work, click here.