Nayland Blake’s concept horny work through dungeons and studios

I have two things about Nayland Blake’s work. First, although it has a brain, conceptual dimension, there is still something emotional, sexual or inner. Another thing is that there is usually a weird game, but it has nothing to do with “representation”. These two qualities are based on other ways. Concept, but also horny; horny, but to be abstract. You can see yourself in person at the Mathew Marks Gallery in New York until the Mathew Marks Gallery in October 2025 My Studio Is a Dungeon Is a Studio: Books and Interviews 1983-2024,next month.

Blake is my age. We both started out in the 1980s. It’s exciting and well done to see artists negotiate through artistic and intellectual tendencies over the past four decades. They always seem to be on the edge between the inside and the outside between any given cultural or aesthetic moment. Never attracted to something new, but no claim to the purity of an outsider. This is the collage method applied to history itself.

They are always looking for diagonal movements, a way to blend momentary habits. Taking the grandeur and enduring obsession of psychoanalysis as an example, it IdéeFixe “gender”. In a 1989 article My studio is a dungeon is a studio And in installation Schreber SuiteBlake followed Floyd and Lacan through Schreber’s case. My Memoirs of Mental Illness (1903).

Blake: “Schreber was forced not only to be a woman, but to be a woman who engages in sexual acts with herself in order to double the wonder of God’s wonder. Duchamp’s women exist without orifices, and the existence of virginity is a satirical criticism of the penis. Neither of these women are a spot in both senses. The homosexuality and meanings I see in homosexuality. For Blake, “these structures are not equivalent, but variations of the same myth, which is a potential myth of redemption.” I’m trying to build another variation of this myth at work…. ”

I like this. Read another suggestion from Schreber, a connection to the weird Duchamp femininity and hint at what the real queer wing of queer culture might be. I learned a lot from how Blake sees other artists and writers. The way they sympathize with inhabit the subject. Blake believes that Jack Smith, for example, is more religious than an outsider in art, always in opposition to the decay of form, against the power of the cultural industry.

Blake: “[Smith’s] The work is based on two aesthetic claims: first, this art has been made around us – we arrange something every time – and everyone is always in action; second, the organization that is supposedly dedicated to displaying, preserving and cultivating art is actually an endless attempt to eliminate it and bury it under plaster and crust. ”

Blake has to think and feel like he’s rid of some lasting metaphors of gay culture in order to get elsewhere. For example, a queer aesthetic, for example, is not defined (or fully defined) by Jack Smith’s campsite Burning creatures (1963) Probably deified.

Blake: “Camp is a tricky theme, a cultural gesture that subverts and strengthens conventions, but one thing is right: Camp has become impossible today.

There are no more inappropriate topics. The forensic practice of art, which incorporates all content into its materials, and coupled with the Internet’s continuous gains of the last culture of each culture, has left nothing outside its economy. Even the camp itself becomes the interior of high-rise and low-cultural machines.

As for drag, that draws Blake’s most cancelable take: “Much of the performing tradition of today’s drag is derived from vaudeville and, ultimately, from minstrelsy: working-class forms of gender and racial anxiety. In the same way that donning blackface allowed whites to illustrate both their desire for and difference from Black bodies and Black cultural expression, most drag allows men the luxury of playing at female identification without losing phalic power.”

Finding ways to avoid penis strength is Blake’s pass. Discovering this potential is always the edge of gay culture (plural). Homosexuality is not transgender either. In the grid of sexual behavior and its representativeness.

“What is liberation like?” This key question appears in the second half of the book, and it turns out it has been going on throughout the inquiry. One dimension of it is a particularly queer liberation problem. Blake: “We can define ourselves by struggling, but our compilation of joy we fly freely.”

Blake: “The civil rights model and representative politics of this country lead us to ask the following questions: Where is my status quo slice? Is it the same size as my neighbors? Is this based on the assumption that I was supposed to be the representative of myself and the social group, an abstract, is it mine?”

Blake doubled down on their most planned people: “The fucking status quo. I don’t want my ignorance, murmur and billionaire worship. I’m not waiting outside the church for my love to be verified. I thought I didn’t think I had to worry about that messy dress.”

Most of Blake’s energy in writing, like their art, comes from a community of kinks and furry. The dungeon meets the studio. Blake: “Let’s talk about the spaces that make sense, the spaces that can happen for my production: one is empty, white, white, full of lighting and possibilities, on top of the extra tall story on five extra stairs. Another studio. One studio. One studio. One studio. A dim tool and toy messed up, full of sound, filled with sound, but can keep the sound from being escaped. Everyone needs something different.

Here are some refreshing ways to play along the boundaries between art, politics and queer sex. I learned a lot from Blake and I found that I could apply to the friction found between writing, carnival culture and transgender. I put a passionate “Hell is” next to this: “The tools developed by quirky people will help in an art world that has an interest in social movements and interactions, but are still naive about how to cultivate trust and security.”

If you are involved in any form of queer Demimonde, you need to constantly ask to consider this contribution to “real” politics. It seems as if what we create through the difficult art of expressing and grid-like desires is no longer the laboratory of another space of life. A kind of aesthetics of life Expressno representation.

Talking about “representation” and “identity” is falling into the old realist aesthetic before politics. One is not for useless, but restricts artists, and may also be limited to politics. Proposing other possible connections between aesthetics and politics is the work of the artist (or the work of the writer), rather than simply adorning the latter with the style that has long been used to.

However, Blake has a teaching dimension. Teaching in a classroom or dungeon is a different approach, but trusting and security features in both ways. It is pleasant to see how such teachings tell each other, especially the scripts written by Blake for the performance. Editor Jarrett Ernest mixes Blake’s interview with brief comments that help lay the foundation for a more expressive work.

Blake: “From early on, I have had a vision of a utopian space: to create art, to show the living spaces of art, and to produce more art. This environment develops and changes through the behavior of its residents. I have spent a lot of time daydreaming in that space, and over the years, I have had the opportunity to work hard to be people of all kinds of dreams and I can do it.

This book itself is a utopia.