Dear

Joshua,
All
My
Love
Josh T Franco
Dear Joshua,
My study is pocked with your work, ap-
ertures that open to your studio. Our spaces
are nominally distinct, but the veil seems thin.
Just a couple of letters at the end constitute
the difference: Study; Studio. For years now,
we have responded to one another through this
disciplinary membrane: artist and art histori-
an, scholar and maker, observer and observed.
That is the architecture in which we frst en-
countered one another. We have perverted the
interior over the years however. I fnally think
there might be worth in exposing our play.
I am heading to this conference, where
I am on a panel entitled Colour Me Queer.
A leading question from the organizers:
If art history has been largely resistant
to exploring queer visualities, what are the
tools necessary to dismantle the conven-
tions of knowledge production around art?
I am proposing to them two tools that we seem
to have found out organically. I am recogniz-
ing them in retrospect, as I am also taking this
opportunity to take stock of our relationship,
your practice, and my writing. The frst is to
foreground that relationship, forthrightly
permitting it to be imbedded in the viewing of
art. This is in response to a frustration Ive felt
as a researcher, uncovering such relationships
in the archive that are not readily available to
invested viewers, but that have signifcant im-
pacts on how art might be viewed. I want our
relationship to be my thesis, rather than an an-
ecdote. So there is another queer undercurrent
to this performance: I dont much value priva-
cy, and I think theres a lot to be said for mak-
ing intimacy a public and shared experience.
It makes sense that the artists of the period I
study were reading and considering the bodily
politics of Herbert Marcuses Eros and Civiliza-
tion. At the same time, I do not take lightly
the privileges and risks inherent in doing so.
The second tool I am proposing is this epis-
tolary mode. I hope this counteracts a frequent
symptom of conventions of knowledge around
production of art, that is, the artist-art histo-
rian relationship left behind in favor of iconol-
ogy, historicizing, specifying. The letter is both
neater and messier. Probably, many here use
these tools as well. The point is not their novel-
ty, but the novelty in this setting, me up at this
table alongside and facing peers in our shared
discipline addressing a letter to you. The letter
safeguards this art historian from leaving be-
hind the artist as I take up his work. Your work.

We met within certain architectures that
we then took to reconfguring rather fervent-
ly, an activity I can only see as a project
retrospectively. I mentioned the disciplinary
one. I also brought my Woman of Color and
Chicana Feminisms scaffolding, on which it is
diffcult and fascinating to mount your trou-
blesome work. The 2010 assemblage sculp-
ture Pocket Gucci, has been a productive site
of thinking through race and representation
in the context of art produced in the very re-
cent past. Its also been the center of some of
our most frustrating conversations. We never
really fnished the conversation, by the way,
at least not to my mind. In an interviewour
frst, which now raises some serious nostal-
giaI segued to talking about Pocket Gucci
with this artifcial hinge: So, Pocket Gucci.
I work with a philosopher, Mara Lugones,
whos responsible for this idea of the colo-
niality of gender and so [when] I saw pock-
et Gucci [I thought] immediately [that] the
collusion of historically constructed race and
global market capitalism all at once get sort of
swatted at, like backslapped I now want to
fesh out what constitutes this gesture I read
in the piece. I wonder how distant the ges-
ture I read is from the gesture you intended.
In her essay Heterosexualism and the
Colonial / Modern Gender System Lugones
argues that gender itself is a colonial intro-
duction, a violent introduction consistently
and contemporarily used to destroy peoples,
cosmologies, and communities, as the building
ground of the civilized West. I hope to fol-
low Lugoness shifting of the terms of het-
erosexualism itself, to see if it offers a method
by which I might read Pocket Gucci, and much
of your work, against the conventions on
which it relies for its most surface meanings.

The stakes are deeply personal as well. Im
asking you to join me in a diffcult task. I have
not been so overt before in this asking, though
I have needled you with it to some degree over
the years. In the essay, Lugones calls out the
indifference men, but particularly men who
have been racialized, exhibit to the system-
atic violences inficted upon women of color.
fg. 1
Does Pocket Gucci uphold this indifference?
Two men, one white and thus unmarked, and
one marked as Mexican-American, renegotiat-
ed as Chicano, revel over the image the former
created and the latter describes. Half of the as-
semblage is cheap and synthetic, meant for the
simulation of vaginal penetration by whoever
might purchase it. This object not only simu-
lates the sensation, which might be achieved by
almost limitless artifcial means, but invokes
through synechdoche and verisimilitude an
actual body. Synechdoche is too polite a word
for the violence suggested; a feshy, textured,
detailed vagina dehumanized through isolat-
ing, surgical commodifcation. The fabrica-
tors attention to detail is most striking when
observing the corroboration between skin
tone and hair texture. In its pornograph-
ic, unintentional way, it teaches lessons peo-
ple of color have considered towards healing.
Sandra Cisneross Hairs / Pelitos (fg. 2)
comes to mind. In this illustrated childrens
story, Cisneros and artist Terry Ybaez com-
bine their efforts in order to address an ev-
er-present facet of communities of color. That
is, how we deploy racialized body discours-
es to evaluate one another and the self. Hair
is a central site of these negotiations, along
with skin color. Hairs/Pelitos focuses on the
diversity of hair and skin in a single family,
revaluating these negotiations for younger
audiences, attempting to head off the damag-
es. Four years in, the question still lies open:
can Pocket Gucci and your practice more
broadly share in this critical project? Is it
my task to take it there? Does it matter if I
bring you along? Do you want to be brought?

In this vein, we have talked quite a bit
about masculinity, mens bodies, and race. Re-
member the Men and Nipples exhibition? I told
you about the racialized body discrimination
in my own family, the kind combatted in Hair/
Pelitos. Remember that day one winter when
we sat on the foor of your studio? We collaged,
played with photography, gossiped about oth-
er artists works and lives and our own. We
fantasized future collaborations. One, which
stays with me, deals with mestizaje, nipples,
and masculinity (and their interplay in the
aesthetic feld of colonial modernity). I re-
counted to you a recurrent intimacy between
me and my brother in which he pinches my
nipples and laughs at their broad darkness and
bumpiness (their Mexicanness as he calls it).
They contrast his small and pink and smooth
oneshis whiteboy nipples. And you and I
faced up to our positions within the logic that
dictates mine and my brothers exchange. We
pondered from our different locations; what
makes it possible for my brother to mock the
appearance of my body and not the other way
around? What are the historical, still present
conditions for the desires and violences, cov-
fg. 2
ered by humor, involved in the exchange?
Immediately, we began to think in practice:
What can we do aesthetically to deal with
these conditions? We conceived an exhibi-
tion where men are invited to come and re-
produce their nipples in clay. We would pro-
vide a large range of feshtones, and perhaps
some day-glo (to see what would happen).
The nipple reproductions would then be at-
tached to the gallery wall in a grid forma-
tion. The space of production and display
might provide a space for unpacking the hi-
erarchies of nipples, race, and masculinities.

How else might such conversations be
unpacked with your work? In a review of
your 2012 solo show Crip/Blood (fg. 2), a re-
viewer for the Austin Chronicle called it a
reductive and stultifying project one that
uses the names of warring gangs detached
from any kind of social context. Remem-
ber, he compared you to the suburban mid-
dle-class boy who is proud of himself for
knowing how to spell blood with his fn-
gers? (fg. 3) That fgure is ignorant of the
violence and the location from which Crip
and Blood originate. You are acutely not.
Clearly, the reviewer was not considering
the shows wall text, written by me from
our conversation about the work, in which
that Californian context is explicitly ad-
dressed. Re-reading that text, it is also clear
that the social phenomenon the show cri-
tiques is precisely what the reviewer faults
it for: mass medias commodifcation of a
specifc local history into a product for mass
consumption, an empty signifer of style.
What we see as critique, the review saw
as complicity. Perhaps theres no use argu-
ing. But again, theres a background silenced
fg. 3
in the public exchange of art writing. You and
I know that reviewer, in different levels of
intimacy, and I have to wonder if that know-
ing is a specter in his reception. And I want
to get to a point where wondering that out
loud can be a serious consideration in address-
ing art, rather than a salacious line-crossing.

You pushed the entertainment industrys
reduction of the Crip/Blood relationship to its
extreme in what I thought was a successful
critique of that operation. But I clearly under-
stand reduction differently from the Chronicle
reviewer. Reduction and stultifcation are not
as easily aligned in my understanding of art
production. Rather, I think reduction can be
rather productive. This likely has to do with
my immersion in that art of the 1960s called
minimal. I am only now realizing the con-
nection. I have been questioned on this before:
why am I so committed to your work when
everything else I am invested in as a schol-
ar, namely minimalism and Donald Judds
practice in particular, seems to oppose it on
grounds of abstraction and fguration, allu-
sion and insularity, seriousness and humor?
In its day, and still, the works of artists
like Judd, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken and all
those now canonized as minimalist received
similarly scathing critiquestheres nothing
to look at! (minimalists) and Its petty ju-
venilia! (you)most notably from Clement
Greenberg and Michael Fried. Much more re-
cently, minimalist scholar Hal Foster wrote in
The Art-Architecture Complex, this initial re-
duction [to basic geometries] is performed only
in order to prepare a sustained complexity, in
which any ideality of formis challenged by
the contingency of perception (which occurs
in particular bodies in specifc spaces for var-
ious durations). In hindsight, it is clear that
what Foster writes is accurate. We now live
with not only those canonical works, but with
gallons of ink spilled to unpack the complex-
ities of ideation they spurred. If minimalism
reduces form to basic geometries, you reduce
contemporary culture to social clichs. This
reduction calls upon the critic to muscle up
and meet your output with verve. Stultifca-
tion (as the Chronicle review claimed) resides
in a viewers unwillingness to do so, and not
in the reductions your work often performs.
And something about the sheer labor hours
of your work supports this. Your ideation-
al reductions cost immense amounts of hand
crafting on your part. I know; I have sat there
on the foor of your studio often, sifting dis-
tractedly through day-glo foor trash and eat-
ing burgers while you go at paper vehemently
with your scissors, die cutter, and magnifying
lens. I have yet to see a digital image fully cap-
ture the fastidiousness of your collage work.
How much those hours have meant to me.

I understand the work in this most recent
show, Kind of Blue, to be an investigation of legi-
bility and illegibility. The operating clich here
might be: no one understands me, the most
canned version of ennui. Much of the work
stems from found vocabulary cards, obsolete
cardstock, blown up in scale so that they be-
come sinister and present. Rather than trying
to make yourself legible to the viewer through
more expressive means, you present her with
mid-century tools for making sense of the ev-
eryday. Childhood education and learning En-
glish as a second language are simultaneously
invoked. They put me back in the classroom. It
occurs to me that I have never left. And it oc-
curs to me that if disciplinarity has long been
mangledso Art History is really my straw
man for practicing a politics of epistemologies
and aestheticsthe classroom remains intact.
It is still where we meet, still where this work
gets done. Again, youve pointed me via reduc-
tion to the site where real work remains to
be done. This work is not against disciplinary
bounds in the academic sense, but in the per-
formative sense as we allow architecture to
prescribe our behaviors. Shifting the artist-art
historian relationship is a mere shadea cli-
chof much larger desires. Reconsidering
learning and language can be a component
of these, but still not big enough. What I re-
ally want to do is enact new modes of loving.
I look closer at the boys wrestling in your
2009 collage Violence Attracts Women. (fg. 4)
We have surprised one another frequently
with how our practices keep up with one an-
other. We have found sparring partners in one
another. I think you would agree with that? I
struggle to fnd language for sparring. When I
am forced to think about the coming-to-be of
bromance, I cringe. It is usually deployed as a
safeguard against fuidity, fuidity that threat-
ens a homophobic constitution of self. It is a
tool forged in the heat of heteronormativity to
keep up with queer threats. But then I think
about us, and I remember a night we traded
dick pics and I thought maybe this is bro-
mance, and maybe Im ok with this I have
never known you to balk at queerness in your-
self or others. Our bromance was consummat-
ed through the scopophilia we boys suffer for
the sight of each others junk. Like many of our
exchanges, this transaction took place through
pictures. It did not feel like we were evading
actually whipping them out. The pictures were
not substitutes (like wrestling often is for
fucking). Rather, it impresses me in hindsight
as our intuitive, drunken act of sharing in the
fg. 4
visual mode that is so fundamental to our par-
ticular being together. How artists and writers
make love. Is sexting a mode of visual exchange
we art folk should be taking more seriously?

The making of love is an undertaking with
revolutionary potential. So thinks Chela San-
doval, a key architect of my Chicana Feminist
framework. In her book Methodology Of the
Oppressed, Sandoval revives Roland Barthes
from the perspective Walter Mignolo might
identify as the underside of modernity. Or,
she identifes at length how this perspective
is quite at work in Barthess thinking already.
No matter how I might frame it for you, what
I fnd relevant here lives succinctly in this pas-
sage (the internal quotes are Barthess words):
Revolutionary Love Occurs outside Ideology
To fall in love means that one must submit, how-
ever temporarily, to what is intractable, to
a state of being not subject to control or gov-
ernance. It is at this point that the drifting be-
ing is able to pass into another kind of erotics,
to the amplitude of Barthess abyss. It is only
in the no-place of the abyss that subjectivity
can become freed from ideology as it binds and
ties reality; here is where political weapons of
consciousness are available in a constant tu-
mult of possibility. But the process of falling
in love is not the only entry into this realm, for
the true site of originality and strength is nei-
ther the lover nor the self. Rather, it is the orig-
inality of the relation between the two actors
that inspires these new powers, while provid-
ing passage to that which I call the differential.

Once one recognizes this abyss beyond dual-
isms, Barthes insists that any injury created by
a love relationship can only arise from ones own
stereotypes that one lives out as citizen-subject.
Once subjectifed, I become obliged, to make
myself a lover, like everyone else; to be jealous,
neglected, frustratedlike everyone else. But
when the relation enters the realm of the abyss
of the originalthen stereotypes are shaken,
transcended, evacuated. And jealousy, aban-
donment, and frustration, for instance, have
no more room in this relation without a site,
without topos, without discourse. This form of
love is not the narrative of love as encoded in the
West: it is another kind of love, a synchronic pro-
cess that punctures through traditional, older
narratives of love, that ruptures everyday being.
In this commitment, excess and madness be-
come, Barthes writes, my truth, my strength.
In this formulation, indeed, they are his acess to
somewhere else; for through this love, insofar as
it acts as a punctum, as a coatlicue state, Bar-
thes is transported into an original realm that
is beyond jealousy, he insists, beyond language,
i.e. beyond the mediocre, beyond the generic.

So Ill let Sandovals passage end me
where I began; reminiscing on how we surprise
one another in the excessive spaces that over-
whelm discourse. This might be where queer-
ness lies. In any case, I know that when I count
those who accompany me into coatlicue states,
those I love, you are certainly amongst them.
The province we share there is a day-glo feld.
All My Love,
Josh
Josh T Franco is a native West Texan. He is doing a PhD in
Art History at Binghamton University. His dissertation is
about Marfa, Texas. He is a Pre-doctoral Diversity Fellow at
Ithaca College and an Imagining America PAGE (Publicly
Active Graduate Education) Fellow. He is a regular contrib-
utor to zingmagazine.