2. The absent

Arts institutions are full of ghosts. There are always many more interested and capable artists than it seems there is space in the programme. The brutal structures of this field are hostile to those without alternative sources of income or generational wealth, those with disabilities, and those with caring responsibilities. There are the outsiders and the undesirables: those who directly suffer the erasure and murderous violence of racism, classism, transphobia, ableism and sexism. The foundations of all public and civic institutions in the UK are steeped in the mass displacement, enslavement, looting and genocide of British imperialism, and its ongoing neocolonial legacies today. 

Some participants came to Ghosting to work in relation to their own experiences of exclusion, but we know that we – the alive, the present, the insiders – could never speak for, or as, these absent figures. Rather than seeking to represent any particular individuals, we think of the Ghosts as amplifying absence itself. Ghosting offers a void: a crude and intangible encounter with whatever unforgettable absences still haunt us.

We can’t reduce these absences to being unfortunate and ultimately dismissable tragedies that are locked in the past. They are still present and active. Ishmael Houston-Jones speaks of the persisting and cascading loss of a generation decimated by AIDS:

“There’s a missing link of queer artists, of queer elders. I am a survivor of that, but there’s also this whole bunch of, particularly men, but men and women, of that era who never made mature work. They never were able to mentor, to pass on their mistakes, wisdom, whatever. So many people in the arts — again, all communities, just we’re talking about the arts community — just disappeared.”

Sarah Schulman argues that the absence of these (predominantly queer and POC) artists was necessery for cultural institutions (particularly in the USA) to develop into the neat and violent shape they take today:

“They did not live long enough to be able to object to the professionalization of the arts, which might not have been so thorough had they lived. [...] When they died, their practice of creating new paradigms outside of institutional structures was removed from sight.”

However, we have to be careful to not cast the absent solely as passive victims. Many have refused the indignity of continued participation in a system designed to frustrate them at every small step; and as Schulman writes, chose to commit themselves to something else entirely. There is a legacy of deliberately pulling away from existing institutional structures. José Estaban Muñoz writes:

“We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. [...] To be lost is not to hide in a closet or to perform a simple (ontological) disappearing act; it is to veer away from heterosexuality's path. [...] Being lost, in this particular queer sense, is to relinquish one's role (and subsequent privilege) in the heteronormative order.”

One Ghosting participant spoke of their slow and seemingly inevitable retreat from the art world. They described Ghosting as a way to think about what writing to leave on the wall.

***

- Ishmael Houston-Jones (2017) ‘Our Own AIDS Time: Keith Hennessy and Ishmael Houston-Jones in Conversation’, SFMOMA Open Space. Available at: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2017/02/our-own-aids-time-keith-hennessy-and-ishmael-houston-jones-in-conversation/)

- Sarah Schulman (2013) The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a lost imagination. London: University of California Press.

- José Estaban Muñoz (2009) Cruising Utopia. New York and London: New York University Press.