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Here's Not Here: Terry Myers Visits Jim Hodge' Studio in New York
by Terry Myers

The last time I actually visited Jim Hodges in his studio - in1993 - he had recently made a piece called What's Left. In it, an identifiably gay "uniform" - jeans with a black silver-studded belt, black shirt, black shoes, and white underwear - is deposited on the floor in a compositional arrangement not unlike that casually created by, let's say, an "unexpected" late-night house guest. Completing the piece, a web of inexpensive silver-plated necklace chains had been spun from the ceiling above, landing upon what has become in all senses of the term a still life: "catching" it, holding on. One of the most meaningful aspects of this bargain-basement web is its absolute certainty as a formal device no less effective than Jasper Johns's or Frank Stella's stripes (although, truth be told, the look and ideology of Daniel Buren's are much more germane here!), a structure which not only frames the visual conditions of the work (the emphatic - not to mention empathic - "linearity" of this sexy web outlining a certain directional "thrust" to the piece), but also generates the most productive narrative values to be ascertained from the work: stories connected to the people in the artist's life, in our lives, not to mention some of the details of my own life. In the three years since my last studio visit, Hodges's work has been given a much more "public" life of its own in terms of its popularity and success, and it now participates in a fully lived experience which embodies the complicated, tangible absence often contradictorily found in the oppositional, resistant presence of things, of material.

If I find myself here overemphasizing the formal integrity of Hodges's art, it is not without good reason. More and more it seems to me that it is precisely in its formal relationships where his work (like many of the most worthwhile artists of our time) fundamentally speaks to the currently exceptional manner in which many of us now "stay" when we leave, a state of existence informed by the way in which almost any move on the part of any subcultural group to the "center" heightens the level at which each marginalized life functions not only in, but more importantly as public discourse during a time period in which too many have gone away too soon. Unfortunately these premature departures too often leave behind a (false?) memory that has been contrived and maintained by the oppressive circumstances of what passes for public discourse in the real world.

Obviously Hodges's works "place" us where there is something to be looked at, talked about, and remembered: I would like to suggest that the work is powerful because it presents sites doubly fabricated by the moral strength of camp. Consider the words of Scott Long, who in his 1989 essay "Useful Laughter: Camp and Seriousness" (aptly and poignantly renamed in 1993 as "The Loneliness of Camp"), expresses his concerns about the devalued nature of human exchange: "Camp - even at its most pessimistically conceived - still asseverates a kind of hope: It is a system of signs by which those who understand certain ironies will recognize each other and endure. It is a private language for some who intuit that public language has gone wrong." (1) Given the deficiencies of public discourse in terms of both politics and sentiment, Hodges makes sure time and time again that the things he uses to make his work not only signify what is a necessarily calm camp sensibility (as opposed to what would be labeled flamboyant, I suppose), but also provide materially for their own formal well-being. As Long says, "Camp does not consist merely in a disproportion between form and content, but also in the creation of an attitude by which the whole relationship of form and content within a cultural setting can be seen with new eyes." (2)

Stay Close (1995)is an example of what may be Hodges's most pointed articulation of this meaningful reworking of just such a relationship. A transitional architectural space constructed of standardized primed canvases, it literally collapses content into form without minimizing the necessary social conditions of the experience. Picking up where Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 White Paintings left off, this piece supports the "presence" of our shadows in a situation that begins with the pictorial, builds upon it in physical terms, and results in a much more productive realization of Michael Fried's infamous formalist dictum: "Presentness is grace."(3) The piece is productive and graceful, I would suggest, predominately due to our being included in it in terms of both our presence and our absence.

No Betweens (1996), the most recent version of Hodges's series of ephemeral yet utterly tangible hangings of countless silk flowers meticulously sewn together, has a content that poignantly (as in campily) contradicts its title. Meaning is found quite literally here in those betweens, in the tiny gaps amid aggressively fey accouterments held together by an interstitial determination at the level of a Pollock (not to mention a Monet). I'll admit that it took me some time to appreciate the power of these pieces, a hesitation due primarily to my initial discomfort with what I took as an excessive borrowing on the part of Hodges's from the equally important work of Ava Gerber, who has for some time been using some of the same images and materials as Hodges: from ephemeral cloud imageries to seemingly ubiquitous silk flowers.(4) Ava in fact introduced me to Jim in 1991, and she even went with me to the studio that day in 1993. It is critical for me that Ava figures prominently into this story - as Jim's friend, at the very least - not only because she went to school with him in the mid-eighties; and not only because, in my view at least, she has for some time been one of the major influences upon his practice, as he surely has been upon hers; but also and most importantly because her practice helps keep my eye on those things I remain determined to fight against.

It is now clear to me that Jim's and Ava's work is as fundamentally different in conceptual terms as it is similar in material conditions. Bluntly put, their respective practices most convincingly are distinguished by camp: Jim's is campy, Ava's is not. Making it very clear that I have no interest whatsoever in taking anything at all away from the tremendous oppositional value of Hodges's work, we must inevitably recognize that in many ways camp "asseverates a kind of hope" because of what may very well be perverse, but clearly not negligible support from a patriarchal system which continues to infiltrate and orchestrate what is considered to be "public" discourse. Because of this, uses of camp are to be taken very seriously, as seriously as Jim takes his.

(1) Scott Long, "The Loneliness of Camp," in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 90.
(2) Ibid., p. 79.
(3) Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), p. 147. First published in Artforum, June 1967.
(4) See my recent article on Ava Gerber: "Rites of Passage," World Art 3 (1996): 70–72.

Terry R. Myers is currently Associate Professor/Critic-in-Residence, Fine Arts & Graduate Studies, at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles.