“afterlife”

Julie Ault’s mutable exhibition as archive, “afterlife,” 2014–15, first shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, continues loosening—or “queering”—the straightened seams of narrative by bringing together objects, homages, and conversations from cult protagonists: Liberace, Martin Wong, Ted Kaczynski, and David Wojnarowicz, among others. These personalities linger in the space of the gallery while inhabiting another, active moment of historicization: the 1980s. Rather than showing only artwork, Ault presents ephemera, such as agendas, sketches, memory boxes, and transcripts, bits of lives that occupy and inflect all of this carefully arranged stuff. For instance, near Martin Wong’s detailed painting of a manhole cover, FDNY, 1998, Ault tucks in an ugly gray Tupperware container of Wong’s fetish collection of firefighter gear, gifted to him by the FDNY. She pairs three of Wojnarowicz’s surrealist photographs with his 1989 calendar, open to June. “Go see Zoe and Judy’s pieces in Center Show at PPOW on June 2,” it instructs us in red grease pencil, and “Mike Kuchar on June 8” in blue pen. There’s a conversation between Ault and Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales Library at NYU and founder of its Downtown Collection, from which much of the show’s material is pulled. And Robert Kinmont’s pine chest of drawers is open to reveal delicate contents: wings, feathers, and paper.

Ault’s praxis makes slippery the bonds between artifact and artwork. Through retrieval, she teaches the language of the past and, via these multifarious “keepsakes,” offers up a miasmic yet brilliant future. She makes us imagine the sighs of Arthur Russell and the songs played by David Mancuso. Children of the ’80s: Make your pilgrimage, follow the incandescent trace.