There: a Feeling at Camden Art Centre presents an artist who has not tried to resist the chaos of life, but to channel it into a self-imposed form
E.M. Forster once described Greek poet C.P. Cavafy as a figure ‘at a slight angle to the universe’, a euphemism for Cavafy’s queerness. Gregg Bordowitz, too, places himself at an angle to certain established literary-poetic forms and art-historical movements. I’ve long been aware of Bordowitz as an AIDS activist, educator and writer, but I was for the most part unfamiliar with his artmaking. There: a Feeling, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK, introduced me to his many guises, among them a self-described ‘failed comedian’, a practitioner of ‘sloppy minimalism’ and a proponent of awkwardness.
At the beginning of There: a Feeling, we encounter Bordowitz, the poet. The 24 verses of Debris Fields (2025) wrap around the walls like a monument, one product of Bordowitz’s daily writing practice, created under a specific set of constraints: 10 syllables a line, all nouns and as many lines as the artist can write in roughly 15 minutes. ‘LIST GRIEVANCES DEATHS SLIGHTS ANNOYANCE COUNT’, reads one line in verse XVIII. The verses form a litany of items and ideas, a psychic pileup in the aftermath of emotional upheaval. (Bordowitz began working in this format in the period following his mother’s death.) Although born from a modest ritual, it’s an epic work, but without a central subject and no narrative to speak of. Or perhaps it’s more apt to say Debris Fields presents endless narrative possibilities; the poem is, as Bordowitz put it during an exhibition tour, “exhausting but never exhausted”.
There: a Feeling is marked by obliqueness, things aslant and off-kilter. In the main gallery, a line of bulbous sculptures titled Baroque Clouds (2018–) is installed around the walls of the gallery, tilted as if in motion, their gauzy plaster surfaces evoking the body, its fragility and the means by which we care for it. The Clouds surround seven large, wonkily constructed boxlike wooden frames, akin to streetside treeguards, set out across the room. These provide the supports for 12 monotype prints (Tetragrammaton (Camden), No. 1–12, 2021), which shift between abstraction and figuration, text and image. It’s as close as we get to Bordowitz the painter – a role he gave up many years ago.
The series derives its title from the four letters of the unpronounceable name of God in the Hebrew Bible. Bordowitz has interlocked the letters to make varying combinations of colours and densities: a graphic, blocky sketch on white; thickets of interwoven lines against a mottled pink background; a yellow-white-purple-black ombré scarified with sgraffito lines that reveal the underlying white paper. These reward slow, repeated viewing, works best returned to, as I did, to punctuate time spent with other parts of the exhibition. In an adjoining room we encounter another product of Bordowitz’s daily practice: a series of 99 notebook pages bearing similar Tetragrammaton-based marks, two to three pages at a time, producing radiant webs of line with pen and coloured markers. The temperance implied by these quotidian rituals gives a sense of an artist who has not tried to resist the chaos of life but to channel it into a self-imposed form.
There: a Feeling is marked by absences; the friends, lovers, peers lost to the AIDS crisis. Against the anonymous casualties too often cited as statistics, a work like Portraits of People Living with HIV (1993) zeroes in on the personal. Shot on 16mm film and transferred to digital, it affords an intimate glimpse into the lives of people with HIV when few treatments were available. In his own video segment, we see a young Bordowitz through his reflection in the mirror, shaving. He gives an account of the liver-swelling and hand-numbing side effects of failed trials with antiretroviral drugs. A procession of acronyms – AZT, DDC, DDI – pulls us from the intimate casualness, a reminder of how the survival of millions was, and still is, left to the private interests of pharmaceutical behemoths.
The exhibition concludes on a somewhat uneven note: a 73-minute, five-act compilation. Across the many parts of Before and After (Still in Progress) (2023–), Bordowitz, the performer and expert raconteur, variously reflects on his queerness and Jewishness, lectures, recites poetry, sings and delivers a Yom Kippur sermon. Before and After is the third part of a trilogy that includes the sardonic experimental documentary Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993), his best-known work, and HABIT (2001). What Before and After lacks by way of formal brio in contrast to its predecessors, the artist’s personae make up for – not least Bordowitz, the deadpan standup comedian who, among other things, likes to create awkwardness. It’s an extension of his interest in the odd, the errant and the slightly off-kilter as witnessed all throughout There: a Feeling, a hint of the antiauthoritarian gadfly who has always toyed with convention.
There: a Feeling at Camden Art Centre, London, through 23 March
